jlf

When I was in school this article[0] was required reading. Your life and safety depend on software engineers every time you dial 911, ride an airplane, etc. Not everyone is writing Facebook applications :)

[0] http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf

Comment · 19 years ago

I'd agree with this, and even take it a bit farther. Many of the graduate level courses have lecture notes online and these can often give insight into current research. Here's a page with links to EE/CS courses: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/classes-eecs.html

Another thing to watch for, besides talks specifically open to the public, is lecture series taken for credit, such as {EE,CS}{198,298} in the above page. I took EE298.2 last semester for example, a communications/networking/DSP seminar, which had visiting scholars presenting their current research at almost every meeting. Nobody would have cared or probably even noticed if a random person showed up to listen.

Comment · 19 years ago

I was lurking on #lisp for most of today and it seems to me you're being a bit oversensitive. You asked about packages at 14:23. Several people tried to figure out exactly what you were asking, including gigamonkey (the author of PCL!). At 14:26 rahul mentioned "asdf" which is probably what you are looking for. If you had at that point Googled 'asdf lisp' and felt lucky, you would have gone straight to this page: http://www.cliki.net/asdf , which contains a script to automatically generate packages as well as some other Windows-specific information that you were asking about. Otherwise, at 14:39 in the complete log, jamesjb pointed you to a tarball containing an example system. Not too shabby IMHO.

Incidentally, http://www.cliki.net/IRC mentions #cl-gardeners and #lispcafe as more novice-friendly than #lisp, though I've never been too troubled by my own experiences there as a newcomer to Lisp.

Lastly, you might want to check out http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=012679172708151972086%3Aeg1jtvm_dlk (hopefully the link did not break) -- it's a custom Google search that searches a set of 20 Common Lisp resources. It's pretty useful.

Good luck.

Comment · 19 years ago

There's certainly a lot of interest and activity around entrepreneurship at Berkeley. This URL gives a sense of some of what's happening here: http://cet.berkeley.edu/curriculum.htm

Comment · 19 years ago

It's definitely worthwhile watching the Slime movie. You can find links to it at http://bc.tech.coop/blog/050728.html