Breaking Radio Silence

Long time, no blog.

I've been offline for a while. I burned out last July and only really started hacking on my lisp projects again in March. So what's changed in the last two months? Actually, kind of a lot.

Coleslaw 0.9.4

Coleslaw 0.9.4 is hereby released. I apologize that 0.9.3 which went out in the last quicklisp release had an embarrassing escaping bug.

The most fun part of Coleslaw is trying my hand at API design. Lisp is a great tool for writing extensible software and Coleslaw has been a good proving ground for that since everyone has a slightly different set of requirements for their blogware.

I've been reading Sonya Keene's Object Oriented Programming in CL lately which led to a large refactoring around the new Document Protocol. I'm not prepared to say anything intelligent about protocols yet, but thankfully plenty of people have done so elsewhere. This blog post by sykopomp isn't a bad place to start.

In addition to the document protocol and the usual litany of bugfixes, Coleslaw now has a new theme based on bootswatch readable, user-defined routing, support for static pages, and greatly expanded docs.

The main things to tackle before 1.0 are a plugin to support incremental compilation for very large sites and a twitter/tumblr cross-posting plugin.

cl-6502 0.9.7

Additionally, someone actually found a use for my Readable CPU emulator! Dustin Long was working on a homebrew Nintendo game and wanted a way to unit test his code, so he's been using cl-6502 to get cycle counts and otherwise check behavior. Naturally, the very basic assembler got on his nerves so he sent me a nice pull request adding support for labels, compile-time expressions, and decimal, hex, and binary literals. Thanks, Dustin!

I also rewrote the addressing modes again, reduced consing, and made debugging easier by using Alexandria's named-lambda for all the opcodes. The cl-6502 book has been updated, of course.

Upcoming

With any luck, I'll get back to work on famiclom or tools for analyzing old NES games like Super Mario Bros and Mega Man 2. It's good to be back.