lisp on OS X

I’ve decided (finally) to learn lisp. I don’t know if it will make me a better programmer but if even half of what Paul Graham says about it is true, it has to be the best programming language ever written. =)

Mac OS X doesn’t ship with a lisp interpreter but there are several free implementations out there. After ruling out the ones that cost money and the ones that have icky IDEs that run in X11 and the ones that depend on things like Fink, you’re really only left with two options.

1. Clozure CL (formerly known as OpenMCL)
2. SBCL (Steele Bank Common Lisp)

I went with SBCL because it works on both PowerPC and intel. Installing it is pretty easy. You do need to have the Developer Tools installed on your computer as the install process makes use of gcc.

1. Download the “binary” for the platform of your choice
2. Uncompress/untar the bz2 file
3. Fire up Terminal.app
4. cd to the directory that you extracted from the tar file
5. Run the following commands:

   INSTALL_ROOT=/usr/local
   sudo sh install.sh

That’s all there is to it. At this point you can run the lisp interpreter (sbcl) or bring up the man page for it.

UPDATE (27 August 2008): Clozure CL now supports both PPC and x86-64. CCL has always had better integration support for Mac OS X so it may now be a better choice for Mac users than SBCL. I haven't used it much but I plan to put it through it's paces.

Sunnis and Shiites

If you pay attention to the news, it’s nearly impossible to go a day without hearing about Sunnis and Shiites. Assuming you start out knowing nothing about them, it only takes a few news stories to figure out the most pertinent facts: they’re Islamic groups that seem to hate each other. But the news outlets never tell you anything about why Sunnis and Shiites don’t get along. If you want to understand that, you have to do a little research of your own.

The best and most succinct description I’ve read comes from Thomas L. Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem

The Muslims of the world have long been divided between Sunnis, who are the majority, and Shiites. In the seventh century, shortly after the death of Islam’s founder, the prophet Muhammad a dispute arose over who should be his successor as spiritual and political leader, known as caliph. One group, the majority, argued that Muhammad’s successor should be appointed through the process of election and consensus by the elders of the community, as was the tradition of the desert. Sunna in Arabic means tradition, and those who held this view became known as the Sunnis.

A minority faction, however, argued that Muhammad’s successors should come exclusively from his own family and their descendants. They insisted, therefore, that his first cousin and son-in-law—Ali—be appointed as leader of the community. Those who held this view became known in Arabic as the Shia or “partisans,” of Ali. The Shiites were clearly influenced by the notion of divine-right monarchy of pre-Islamic Persia (Iran). The Sunnis eventually defeated the supporters of Ali and installed their own chosen caliphs. Nevertheless, the Sunni-Shiite split has continued down through the ages of Islam, and a whole body of theological and even cultural differences developed, distinguishing Shiites from Sunnis. Summarizing these differences, Islam expert Edward Mortimer observed in his book Faith & Power: “Sunni Islam is the doctrine of power and achievement. Shi’ism is the doctrine of opposition. The starting point of Shi’ism is defeat: the defeat of Ali and his house…. Its primary appeal is therefore to the defeated and oppressed. That is why it has so often been the rallying cry for the underdogs in the Muslim world … especially for the poor and dispossessed.”

Iraq happens to be one of only two Islamic countries (Iran is the other) where the Shia constitute a majority of the population (about 60 percent). This does nothing to help explain the Iran-Iraq war but does help illuminate why many other Islamic states seem supportive of the Sunni insurgency.

Mac Pro Optical Drive Door Problem

I recently became the proud new father of a Mac Pro 2xDual Core Xeon. It basically rocks the pants off the machine that it replaced - a poky 533Mgz G4.

But it has developed a slight problem with the little sliding door that protects the optical drive innards. It normally slides down when the tray slides out and then back up again after the tray goes back in. But mine now gets stuck when it's down. Like a depressive alcoholic, it just sits down there and sulks long after the tray has gone back home.

I can trick it back up again by raking my finger over the left side of the door a few times. I can't be the only one having this problem so I thought I'd pass it along.

Update 2007-09-19

I have not had a problem with the door for several months. Not sure what caused the problem to go away.

New Job

I’ve changed jobs. Actually, I changed jobs some time back (April to be specific) but I have more or less forgotten about this blog in the interim.

So I’m no longer with Tagged.com. I don’t want to even get into the reasons why I left. It would just remind me how unhappy I was there.

For the time being, I’m contracting for a company called PodShow. It was co-founded by Adam Curry, who was one of the early VJs at MTV. He’s an interesting guy but he lives with his family in London most of the time so he’s not often in the office. The other co-counder - Ron Bloom - basically runs the company. The two of them got very rich with their first start-up, Think New Ideas, which I believe they sold for $400 million.

Marc Frochtzweig and Stephen Rodriguez were two excellent product designers that I worked with at Tagged and they both moved to PodShow. They in turn brought me in. Ostensibly, I was going to be working on creating some address book importers for the big webmail providers (e.g. gmail, hotmail). I had just spent a lot of time doing similar work for Tagged so I was pretty versed in the way the webmail providers worked.

Before starting however, I took a vacation to Amsterdam and when I came back, they were more interested in having me design an email sending system. From there, I moved on to other administration tools and that’s basically become my domain.

Apparently, PodShow is interested in making me a full-time engineer but so far, they’ve failed to make it happen. They pay me awfully damn well as a contractor though so I’m not really complaining. But I bet I’ll change my tune come April 15th.