MOTD

So, my beautiful <a href="http://www.majink.org/">fiancee</a> is a travel writer. She's really good. And I'm a Text Libre advocate. That's really annoying.

Anyways, we started a site to make a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide. It's like <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a>, only for travel. And it uses the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License</a>, rather than the crufty <a href="http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Wikitravel:Why_Wikitravel_isn%27t_GFDL">GFDL</a>.

It's called <a href="http://www.wikitravel.org/">Wikitravel</a>. It's fun, but it's hard, too. Which I guess the best things in life are like that.

Tony Blair is visiting an Edinburgh hospital. He enters a ward full of patients with no obvious sign of injury or illness and greets one. The patient replies:

Fair fa your honest sonsie face,<br/> Great chieftain o' the puddin race,<br/> Aboon them a you take your place,<br/> Painch, tripe or thairm,<br/> As langs my airm."<br/>

Blair is confused, so he just grins and moves on to the next patient. The patient responds:

Some hae meat and canna eat,<br/> And some wad eat that want it,<br/> But we hae meat and we can eat,<br/> So let the Lord be thankit."<br/>

Even more confused, and his grin now rictus-like, the PM moves on to the next patient, who immediately begins to chant:

Wee sleekit, cowerin, timrous beasty,<br/> Thou needna start awa sae hastie,<br/> Wi bickering brattle."<br/>

Now seriously troubled, Blair turns to the accompanying doctor and asks "What kind of facility is this? A mental ward?"

"No," replies the doctor. "This is the serious Burns unit."

Today at the Hamfest I finally picked up a handheld transceiver a year after taking the test. It's a Yaesu VX-2R. I haven't done much transmitting with it, but I've been playing with the wideband receive. It's convenient that they have presets for weather radio, marine radio, and shortwave, but that just makes me wish they had made presets for TV audio.

Welcome to the land of WikiWords. Now everything in StudlyCaps becomes a GoogleSearch. (Yeah, I upgraded pyblosxom, and grabbed some caching and formatting extensions along the way)

Dude!

That's all I can keep saying! Dude!

It's a set of 6.001 lectures videotaped by HP so that they could have SICP on file for all future students! It's released under the attribution/share-alike creative commons license!

http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/

http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/legal-info.html

It was recorded in 1986! Think of that! It was done for version 1 of SICP, and probably used Common LISP instead of Scheme (though that doesn't really matter).

But it's 1986! The students all have perms, bowl cuts, square-frame glasses, and izod shirts! Sussman actually wears a pocket protector with no irony whatsoever!

Gödel, Escher, Bach had been published only a few years prior to this, so that they were still all giddy about Bach and technology and Wendy Carlos and stuff, so the intro music is Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring played on a synth keyboard. Hell, it's probably a casio!

I was looking at the leather case on Sussman's belt, and realized that there's no way in 1986 that it could be a cellular telephone. that leaves me with a few basic possibilities:

• Mace
• A pocket knife/leatherman
• A slide rule

Man oh man I hope it was a slide rule.

But Dude!

I'm busy mirroring all the divx files (about 9G total), and I'm watching them one by one. So far I'm on section three of day two part a, but I have through day four downloaded. It's amazing how smooth everything flows when it's being written up on the blackboard, and the student questions really are the most pressing ones.

It's fun to note that they have a weird 1980s teleprompter screen for the actual slides they do want to put up (usually images and fully-formed page-long programs). But the real strength of the lectures comes from the fact that Abelson and Sussman have a many-paneled chalkboard on which to write their terse chunks of LISP. There's something about the ability to narrate as you write that gets lost in slide-presentation lectures.

At any rate, this is the last piece I needed to make any sort of lisp hacker initiation club complete. I'm still jazzed about its very existence. Dude!

I just spent two days studying call-with-current-continuation.

I scratched my head trying to figure out what sort of execution-flow magic was going on, trying to see what made this one of the most powerful features of scheme. I spent hours trying to decipher the scheme jargon and heady compsci technobabble.

Today someone explained that I was reading too much into things, that it's really quite simple. A short tutorial reading later and the light bulb went on:

call/cc is just GOTO

The scheme community is so caught up in their own self-important pontifications and pedagogy that they can't just admit that one of the most powerful features in their belovedly pure language is just GOTO.

I'm still picking my jaw up off the floor.

In 1968, the Communications of the ACM published a text of mine under the title "The goto statement considered harmful", which in later years would be most frequently referenced, regrettably, however, often by authors who had seen no more of it than its title, which became a cornerstone of my fame by becoming a template: we would see all sorts of articles under the title "X considered harmful" for almost any X, including one titled "Dijkstra considered harmful". But what had happened? I had submitted a paper under the title "A case against the goto statement", which, in order to speed up its publication, the editor had changed into a "letter to the Editor", and in the process he had given it a new title of his own invention! The editor was Niklaus Wirth.

—Edsger W. Dijkstra