NPCT

Ars Technica has a semi-regular feature that seems quite informative and useful: The Ars System Guide, given a cookie-cutter approach to getting the parts to assemble your own machine. I’ve been building my own computers for ten years or so now, but I don’t consider myself an expert at all on the minutia of [...]

In a risky, but gutsy move, Maurice Clarett has turned down $410K in guaranteed contract money with the Broncos in favor of an incentive-driven deal that could yield him as much as $7 million.

“This deal struck gives Maurice the opportunity to be paid like the first-round draft choice he was born to be,” Feldman said.
Specifics [...]

Let’s imagine that I have a set of items represented by a list.

(defparameter items ‘(A B C D))

I would like to take some action with all possible lists of a particular length, composed of members of this set (with replacement). For example, with length five:

‘(A A A A A)
‘(A A A A B)
‘(A A A [...]

I just ordered myself a new lab notebook. That would be an actual paper notebook, not a notebook computer. I’m a little obsessive about this sort of thing and I had finally gotten fed up with the one that I got from the supply cabinet here at the Cavendish. I ordered it [...]

This book examines the 1968 transition of US leadership in Vietnam between two generals, William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams, the change of strategy associated with it and the impact on the remainder of the war. Sorley really beats you to death with the idea that Abrams’ tactics caused the US to start winning the [...]

So I’m a little behind the curve here, but last month BBC News online published this article about musical Neanderthals. The story focuses on claims made by Professor Steven Mithen of Reading University that Neanderthals loved music and dance. “I can see them rapping in my mind,” Mithen says.
Well, I don’t [...]

Hey, support our troops - put a little ribbon on your SUV and vote for Bush. After all, he’s just eliminated Perkins Loan forgiveness for military enlistees (and teachers and Peace Corps volunteers, too, but we didn’t have any qualms about Bush being strong on education, or, you know, peace). His 2006 budget [...]

Despite having been a football fan forever, this season will be my first opportunity to be in a fantasy football league (that’s American football, by the way). Weirdly enough, it’s only been since I’ve been in Cambridge (that’s Cambridge, England) that I’ve met people who are interested in it. Anyway, I’m gearing up, [...]

If the product ain’t selling, just change the slogan. Hey, it worked for Pepsi, why not an ill-conceived military operation?
In case you hadn’t heard about the latest brainchild of the White House propaganda agency, this one’s a winner. I don’t think I could sum things up any better than Fred Kaplan does [...]

My family and I visited Edinburgh, Scotland for a few days. I’ve posted the pictures here.

A while back, I posted an example of how one might use macros to create a tool for iterating through a file, line by line. Someone posted it to paste.lisp.org, to be viewed and commented on in #lisp. So, there’s been a couple of comments that I thought I might go through here. [...]

If World War Two had been an online Real Time Strategy game, the chat room traffic would have gone something like this.

Google Blogoscoped has an Unofficial Gmail FAQ which answers some basic and some not-so-basic questions about Gmail:

How can I create a new folder in Gmail?
In Gmail, you can’t create new folders. Instead you create labels, which you then attach to individual conversations. The good thing about labels is that multiple labels can be tagged on [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union gets a lot of criticism for the various people whose speech they defend. It is a tribute to their integrity of purpose that they defend the most unpopular speech, even as they are faced with criticism across the board, and more recently FBI investigations. The ACLU’s criticism most [...]

Could this be a breakout year for Texas A&M? ESPN has a 2005 preview that looks promising. The Aggies have 8 offensive starters returning and 9 defensive starters returning. Dennis Franchione is going to need to get something going this year after going 7-5 last year, or folks in College Station are [...]

A gentleman named Philip Stewart at that other place has come up with a visually pleasing alternative to the traditional representation of the periodic table. He calls it Chemical Galaxy. Click on the image to see a larger version.

It turns out that I’m not the only one with aspirations to be able to use gnuplot from lisp. A gentleman name Gary King has been thinking about the same thing. In his approach, he seems to generate a gnuplot file that you can then execute, while I open a pipe and send [...]

For you Lisp hackers out there, this came across my inbox today:

Job: Research Programmer, Lisp/AI, CMU
We have an immediate job opening for someone interested
in doing software development and maintenance in a research
setting. We strongly prefer candidates with experience in
Lisp, but will consider people with a good CS background
and little Lisp experience but with a [...]

I know I’m way behind the curve here to go and post a review of a game that came out in, like, spring of 2004, but what the hell. Far Cry is a first-person shooter game where you play the role of Jack Carver, a former “special forces” guy who is now a charter [...]

I like to post code periodically in my blog entries, but I haven’t found a satisfactory way to do it until now. If you use “code” tags, you wind up killing your indentation. I’ve been using “pre” tags, but they’re not really optimal. Luckily, Scott Reilly has solved this problem with a [...]