Leopard sandboxes are flexible and interesting. They’re apparently compiled from Scheme programs (sandbox-compilerd embeds TinyScheme) that live in /usr/share/sandbox. You can break sandbox-compilerd open in TextEdit and read the compiled-in Scheme code; they’ve got a lot of the bases covered, including obscure stuff like SYSV IPC, the BSD sysctl interface, and signals.Â
http://www.matasano.com/log/981/a-roundup-of-leopard-security-features/
Well, that would have been nice: amazon.ca held something of a fire sale, offering two very good books for 4 Dollars each. As did many others, I ordered “Lisp in Small Pieces” and Jaynes’s book on probability theory. Additionally, since I was paying for shipping anyway, I ordered a full-price book as well. But, as John Philpott’s order vahished, so did mine – almost: of course, Amazon was prepared to send me the full-price book anyway, with the overseas shipping and handling charges.
I’m not angry that I will not get the books, of course – if I had not heard about that special offer at all, I would not have anything to be angry about either. But when I said “vanished”, I mean it: Amazon dropped two out of three books from my order, without notifying me, and would have sent me a full-price book overseas; I would have paid at least twice the store price. And since I did not save their order confirmation email, I cannot even prove that the entire thing happened …
[Update] Well, better late than never – I got a notification email explaining that it was all a dream that the books had been displayed with an incorrect price. I guess they simply ran out of stock, since the people who ordered before the madness started did get their LiSP at Small Prices. Still, a notification email plus 10$ gift certificate is close to the right thing.
Hmm…Seems to be a Smalltalk-in-Flash, implemented using Strange Alien Technology, and having the eye candy. Just when I didn’t need another toy…[Update]The above wasn’t very clear – it’s a Smalltalk-on-Lisp-in-Flash-and-.Net – fun stuff.
Aquamacs continues to be my emacs distribution of choice, mostly because it manages to behave both like an OS X application and like emacs.
The only inconsistency I discovered was with Undo: Aquamacs uses redo.el, which removes the emacs undo function and installs more familiar, but less powerful undo/redo functions in its place. Since redo.el clobbers the original undo function, I couldn’t adjust the keybindings myself without hacking Aquamacs distributed files, so I sent a whiney bug report.
24 hours and a short email back-and-forth later (choice quote: “You are the first to complain, but that doesn’t mean you’re not right.”), the nightly builds don’t clobber undo any more, C-/ and C-_ use emacs undo and undo/redo is available via Cmd-Z/Cmd-S-Z and the pull-down menu.
This is a good example of what I understand to be the general design philosophy of Aquamacs: offer emacs functions where an emacs user expects to find them, offer Mac-like functionality where a Mac user looks. And its developer, David Reitter, is very responsive and friendly indeed.
This article by Bruce Schneier struck a nerve – specifically (he’s quoting this article by Daniel Gilbert):
We over-react to intentional actions, and under-react to accidents, abstract events, and natural phenomena.
I consider it a personal success that (only on sunny days, etc) I perceive intentional acts and accidents in the same way. This very distinct shift in my perception occurred on a memorable day, while I was reading one of the Daoist stories of Liezi.
ACAP aims to be another way to provide machine-readable metadata information. This time the initiative comes from publishers who want to tell search engines what the allowed uses of the content on the page being spidered are (in essence, Google News vs the newspapers). Creative Commons solved this problem (machine-readable rights information, not eager search engines); let’s see how the ACAP approach compares, once they have something to show.
Portable AllegroServe is still in hibernation, but I have at least updated the asdf-installable version to current cvs so it compiles under sbcl again.
William Gibson is posting snippets of his upcoming novel on his blog. This one’s interesting because a friend of mine is also learning Systema (although I haven’t seen her climbing walls yet).
