bobochan

I miss the other direction, being able to put shortcuts (aliases) in your Apple menu. When OS X was still young there used to be a "haxes" called Fruit Menu that let you do that, but I think that has been gone for a while.

There are probably some menu bar items that I do not know about, but I really miss that functionality.

I have not found it especially useful on my MBP, but it is a huge improvement for me on the iPad with keyboard and mouse. It feels much more natural now to have two windows open and quickly switch between apps. I used my iPad for about 80% of my work now, up from 10-15%.

This is so completely random, and not really code related, but it was huge at the time (circa 1990). I was compiling large bibliographies of research documents for NSF that eventually had to be read into Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS for printing. We had written a very complex system of WP macros to search for tags that we programmatically put in the file, but they took forever to run and would often crash. My colleague and I found that we could only use search/replace to send begin/end pairs of tags for any formatting code (e.g. bold, italics). However, if we replaced the closing tags first, then the opening one, WP would notice that there were pairs of empty tags and get rid of the extra closing tag so that the underlying text would be formatted properly.

We were doing this everyday, so it cut the processing time from many hours to seconds. We swore each other to secrecy about this development and marched off to Dunkin’ Donuts with our giant ice coffee belt-loop holsters to celebrate.

Tremendous! One of my first tasks with QuickBasic 4.5 was writing an AKAC-874 code generator (for training purposes only) for some Marines at the embassy where I was stationed. It seemed the least that I could do considering they kept me fed with Grade A burgers direct from the States.

Great. Thanks so much for following up. This is a great project and I am definitely looking forward to trying it and learning more.

Hi, sorry for the delay, I wanted to do a clean install of sbcl and quicklisp just to double check. I was having trouble getting the plotting code to work, so I cloned Lisp-Stat/plot and tried to follow the instructions:

* (asdf:clear-source-registry)

* (asdf:load-system :plot/vglt)

The error message was:

debugger invoked on a LOAD-SYSTEM-DEFINITION-ERROR in thread #<THREAD "main thread" RUNNING {1004BF80A3}>: Error while trying to load definition for system plot from pathname /Users/bobochan/common-lisp/plot/plot.asd: READ error during LOAD: The file #P"/Users/bobochan/common-lisp/plot/description.text" does not exist: No such file or directory(in form starting at line: 4, column: 0, position: 147)

The folder contents are:

 ~/common-lisp/plot/ [master] ls -1

CONTRIBUTING.md

docs/

LICENSE

plot.asd

README.md

src/

tests/

I gave this a try but still ran into issues. First it was a missing file, description.text, so I created a temporary one, but have not been able to figure it out after going through all of the different possibilities on the web site and github.

I am going to keep an eye on this project because I would really like to be able to work on this. Hopefully updates in a month or so will get things in sync.

Glad it is not just me. I did a clean install and follow the examples on the web site step by step:

debugger invoked on a QUICKLISP-CLIENT:SYSTEM-NOT-FOUND in thread #<THREAD "main thread" RUNNING {1004BF80A3}>: System "plot/vega" not found

For me it was strictly personal use. For example, I made a series of maps for stadiums for teams in the EFL Championship to use as wallpaper when my club has away matches. I also made some for my hometown and for the universities where my kids are studying.

I played around with this library a few months ago and it is an absolute joy to use if you like maps.

One of my favorite sports memories was going to my son's first big cross-country running meet. There were hundreds of kids lined up for the race and parents lined the course to cheer them on. The crowds clapped loudly for the leaders, it died down for the long stretch of mid-pack runners, and then grew to a roar for the kids working their hardest at the back of the pack. Everyone there seemed to understand how hard it is to get started in endurance sports, but also how transformative they can be to a kid's confidence, especially if they have not felt welcome or successful in team sports.

The most important anecdote that I can tell from the early 1980s is how optimistic we all were. My dad was an engineer and helped take the lead on fundraising to buy Apple ][+ computers for the school classrooms in our town. He used to earnestly tell everyone that he met that my generation would be the last one to go through a curriculum where programming was not a core skill. He imagined a world where everyone would understand how to code.

He passed away before the realization set in that "computer skills" were going to be defined as word processing and spreadsheets rather than programming, and I think he would be very disappointed in our current trajectory.

My memory is that MS laughed because they did not believe the hype. The laughing stopped when they got the first iPhones in house and were able to see how much space Apple was able to dedicate to the battery.