The Lisp journey continues, although I’m starting to get the itch to build something silly with the newfound knowledge. For now I’m going to keep it to simple programs until I can at least finish one of the books I’m reading :-P

The Year of Lisp continues, one chapter at a time. I thought I’d clarify a bit how I’m going to read these books (and how I generally go about reading so many darn textbooks in the first place).

It’s been a while since I’ve written, but now’s as good time as any to check in a bit. Chatting with one of my co-workers has got me looking once again at Lisp.

Is 2019 the year I finally grok Lisp? Man, I hope so. I feel like a lot of it is getting the built-in functions in my head, so it might make sense to do a function-a-day kind of thing. I’m reading Paul Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp, which has been good so far, but I’m thinking if I get stranded I might jump in on Peter Siebel’s Practical Common Lisp. I’ve found that I need some footing in “real” applications to appreciate the more nuanced stuff.

“How does a deadline slip?”

“One day at a time.”

If I recall correctly, that gem is from Fred Brooks in Mythical Man Month. I took the weekend off for some badly needed rest, and then yesterday and today got largely soaked by work. Still, made a bit of progress with the cold boot. I looked into why the file server wasn’t working for the build process. I attached to screen, and saw that I needed to add lfp.h. “No problem!” So I started looking around for it in the Fedora repos, and could not find it. That header file is part of libfixposix which fortunately built on the first go. After I added an entry to /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ ldconfig found the new libraries. Now that I’ve got file-server loading, next step is to figure out why the image is timing out trying to connect to it (I suspect I may have to play with QEMU and tcpdump in the morning).