Quicksort Performance: Comparing Some Lisps And Perl
A few days ago, I wrote a simple Quicksort implementation in Common Lisp. After that, I started to wonder how other lisps and Perl compared for sorting numbers.read more
View ArticleRE: Querying s-expressions in Common Lisp
I just found an article titled Querying s-expressions in Common Lisp that Slava Akhmechet posted to defmacro.org last year. (Yes, I know--old news. I have a lot of catching up to do.) The article got...
View Article6 Tips for Optimizing a Native XML Database
IBM DeveloperWorks just published an article of mine: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-optxmldb/index.html
View ArticleMP4 Video to MP3 File Using ffmpeg (Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala)
Here's how you can use ffmpeg to convert a video (an MP4 video, for example) to an MP3 that you can load on your MP3 player: ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -f mp3 -ab 192000 -vn music.mp3 But there's a catch: You...
View ArticleHacking XQuery Into Emacs With Berkeley DB XML
I often need to query an XML document without having to load it into a native XML database. In a perfect world, I would simply load the document into my editor, sprinkle some XQuery into the document,...
View ArticleMagit, HDIELWT, and Dot Emacs On Steroids
Everyone has experienced the feeling of familiarizing oneself with a technology over a period of a few weeks or months and arriving at the "How did I ever live without this?" moment (hereto forth...
View ArticleCommon Plisp: List Processing in Perl
I was recently talking on the phone with a person who lives at least 2,200 miles away and whom I'd never met or spoken to before. This is a surprisingly common occurrence in this day and age. I was...
View ArticleGit and Subversion
I'm not a revision control guru, but I've been using Git a lot more than Subversion in the last couple of years. Recently I found myself having to deal with a Subversion repository again. Stubbornly, I...
View ArticleValentines for Nina and Lola
Nina and Lola, Whenever I'm away from you and I spend a lot of time writing computer code, I think about the pretty patterns that your names make in binary code. Your names, Nina and Lola, are...
View ArticleIn The Snow, At 10,000 feet, In A Suit And Tie!
When I first arrived in California, I was a little uncomfortable because everyone seemed so insane. Unfortunately, this insanity may be somewhat contagious.read more
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