Well, of course already back then this was a lie. But, this week it became clear that how far we have come. No one is to leave their home, no one is allowed to get within 1.5 meter of each other. Last week-end, some would not listen and as the weather was nice, the beaches were full. This was not to be allowed, so no you will be fined if they see you in a group. And, zero protest. Today the last active KLM boeing 747 landed at Schiphol. People who went to see it land where fined². But that's OK as they were warned. The news is full of heroes of the people³. It looks exactly what we were taught about so many years ago.

O, and let's not talk how we halved the number of beds in hospitals in the past 40 years. Well, we will see what the future brings.

1. if they were able too they would never return or so the logic went
2. This makes no sense, the wind is very strong today most of your exhaled air will immediately disperse into nothing. Plus, these people usually look from their cars and keep their distance
3. The supermarket employees are heroes. The teachers who sit at home and make a video for the kids are heroes. The bus drivers of empty buses are heroes. The list goes on

At a previous job I made the asked for product but also 2 Integrated Development Environments out of parts laying around. Including a parser framework, a web based UI, a structural editor, an automatic test executor. When the first one became functioning for a while and my production level improved because of it, I decided it needed a rewrite. I was doing my required job and to the outer world productive (and I seemed to be sought out for what I did) but, I could have spent all that time to pull myself out of software engineering.

This past year, I've tried to get better. Not better as in improving myself, but get better as recovering from an illness. So, no engineering, but figuring out what we need to do and then deciding how to do it and making sure someone does it. Plus, communicate to all involved, committing to goals, setting goals. In short "management". I've loved it and this and will continue, but I still have engineering sickness. I wanted to make a package to make box diagrams. I did not communicate in the logs or at work, when the outcome would be too much unknown. I started to learn 2 programming languages; Lisp and Erlang. All off these, flight into save and known activities. Relapses into engineering.

So more convalescent therapy this year.

1. In our effort to build a working production machine we have a todo list per sub-project. This todo list contains for at least a year a work-item to figure our all the ways some system might faile. With the tool almost done we have still not made this list of "failure modes".

Some casual observations. The whole country is low maintenance, as in they will not do any maintenance¹. It's so visible that you can guess the age of any building or road by the state it is in. For example, looking at the new pathways at the park in Kiev; "This looks so good, only minimal damage, must be about a year old". Indeed, at the gate / walk in point of the park a plate with some text and "2018". Another instance, we walked over a nice piece of green in between two driving lanes in one city. These pieces were rebuilt in different ages. The most recent already had grass growing between the tiles and some minor breakage. As we walked along, the breakage, grass and all around state went down. It was something to see. Now that I'm back, I've also started to notice lack of maintenance here, so what now?

Playing chess in the park. I hope this is still here when I'm that old.

hmm

As for restaurants. They provide many, the current hype seems to be sushi². As with any hype, plenty of pizza restaurants also providing sushi. We did not try, I wanted to try the local food. Which was harder to get then "foreign" shit. Another observation; Queues at the McD, apparently this is a luxury item.

Meat market in Vinnitsa, just the smell of fresh meat. We ate some raw bacon here that was very nice. In reference to the market in Kiev to seen on trilema.

Way too cheap food. This restaurant turned out to be a hole in the wall for alcoholics. The salad was fine, the meatball too much bread.

We went to Lviv for a couple of days. This city is way different from the other cities I've seen so far in Ukraine. The whole city has a feel of an Italian city about 25 years ago. Traffic is a mess. Buildings need to be renovated (and some are). A lot of tourists³. We asked at the Hotel, where can we eat some good vareniki? we were directed to the worst restaurant on whole trip. You would start to hate the local cuisine based on this restaurant alone⁴.

Next we went to the Carpathians, we went by train to Mykulychyn⁵.

A view

The hotel was next to a mountain spring. The water from the faucet was directly from this spring. Can you image the great taste? The food in the hotel was homemade, in the end we spent more on the food than the stay in this hotel.

Building a house. No plan, just how your father did it.

After a week of swimming and hiking we went to Kiev to catch our plane. Here we had made a mistake of taking the sleep train back to Kiev. As we got no sleep and the whole experience was overall terrible. The two days in Kiev were nice, this city is simply on another scale.

The clouds on the way home.

1. I found two exceptions to this rule; schools and trains. The schools are well maintained. These get a fresh coat of paint every year, are clean and have well kept grounds. The difference is so striking that you can easily spot a school. Some bit of conversation;

   Me: That must be school

   Wife (from ukr): What?, no!  it's too big for this area.

   Me: It must be.

   Wife (to cab driver): What's that building?

   TD: School
   

2. We visited about 3/4 years ago ((a) I should have made a report then. (b) I did not see any sushi restaurants then.
3. mostly Polish
4. Ofcourse, now I cannot find it on google maps.
5. Train stops at a strip of stones that could be called a station

Guess where?

Advise to future travellers, never book a flight with a transfer in Munich. The Airport seems to consist of about 3 different sub-airports.  You'll land at the furthest end of one of the sub-airports and then have to transport yourself to the furthest other sub-airport. This is over these moving bands / flat escalators plus also a shuttle. Note that your transfer will include an extra baggage check, in which they will merrily do an extra swap for bomb residuals on the children. And, of course we need to go through customs, these Germans have 2 boots out of 20 or so open just to produce nice queue. We try to go through the automated machine, this only works for the adults. I ask the customs officer if we can skip the line, turns out it's OK to just push your children through the automated machine at the same time you are going through it. So, some extra running and shuttles later we arrive just on time as the next flight is delayed. And an uneventual 2 hours later we find ourselfs here;

By the time we were ready to go through customs, the queue had dissolved and all went very smooth. As you can see the walkways to the planes have advertisements these days and the in Kiev looks a lot worse than the one in Schiphol. This turns out to be true for the whole country, but that will be another post. That post will most probably be how these people have money to build something but then immediately forget about it and let it rot. To finish up; the food is good.

Currently I'm stuck on this reversing the original logs from the output at btcbase.org because of two problems;

1. The new format using block quotes [link][text] sometimes produces links  that are ambiguous and cannot be distinguished from the old way (for example [link][link] or [absolute btcbase link][text] vs [relative btcbase link][text]).
2. Sometime the conversion to html went wrong, for example in http://btcbase.org/log/2016-12-29#1592569. I could make some exceptions for these.
3. It seems that the btcbase.org html output code puts special tokens at the end into the description of the link; i.e. (comma's and dots and closing brackets etc are all eaten and put in the description of the link).

Here are my scripts, to preserve the current status;

The scraper: http://ave1.org/tarpit/log/scrape_log.py

To do all: http://ave1.org/tarpit/log/scrape_all.py

Mircea Popescu

For years, I have wanted to break free of the tools of the Inca; Python, Matlab, Octave. These go-to languages to quickly and easily make something sort of work. I'm now working in a position where another set of tools is used, Word, Outlook, Excel. These are a step worse. Each time, I trade short term gains for long term costs. And those costs are mounting. This cannot stand. So, I want to work towards some sort of solid ground (learn Ada, pin down gnat,  read ffa). And also, use Common Lisp for those cases where I would normally go for Python and friends.

Next part of the why, I want to make diagrams like so. I've found no tools to help me with this on the long term;

1. GUI Based diagram editors; Every editor comes with handy ways to make boxes with text,  support to put links between these boxes  and to make a sort of layout. But, for every change you will have to work on the entire diagram. Plus I do not want to become a proficient mouse worker.
2. Graphviz; It sort of works, diagrams can be entered but to layout a diagram you I'll need to perform a feedback loop (change a parameter (like the order of the links), make graph, look at result, change another parameter, ...). The problem is that this loop is needed for every change, or simply give up on layout and then why are you doing it?.

(defun strcat (a b) (concatenate 'string a b))
(defun spacedstrcat (a b) (concatenate 'string a " " b))

(defun strlistcat (list)(reduce (lambda (a b) (concatenate 'string a b)) alist))

(defun xmlresttag (tag content)
  (if (and content (> (length content) 0))
      (strcat content (strcat (strcat "</" tag) ">"))
      "/>"))

(defun xmlbegintag (tag) (strcat "<" tag))
(defun xmlattribute (attribute) )
(defun xmlattibutes (attributes &key id class)
  (strlistcat (map xmlattribute attributes))

(defun xmlelement (tag content attributes &key id class)
  (spacedstrcat(spacedstrcat (begintag tag) (xmlattributes attributes :id id :class class))
               (xmlresttag (tag content))))

(defun rectangle (x y width height &key (content "") id class)
  ())

(defun assert-equals (a b)
  (if (string= a b) ()
      (progn (pprint `("not equals" ,a ,b) )
             (cerror "assertion failed" "abort"))))

(defun test$strcat ()
  (assert-equals (strcat "a" "b") "ab")
  (assert-equals (strcat "this" " is a test") "this is a test"))

(defun test$spacedstrcat ()
  (assert-equals (spacedstrcat "a" "b") "a b")
  (assert-equals (spacedstrcat "this" "is a test") "this is a test"))

(defun test$xmlresttag ()
  (assert-equals (xmlresttag "first" "") "/>")
  (assert-equals (xmlresttag "second" NIL) "/>")
  (assert-equals (xmlresttag "hello" "world") "world</hello>"))

(defun test$xmlbegintag ()
  (assert-equals (xmlbegintag "first") "<first"))

(defun run-tests ()
  (test$strcat)
  (test$spacedstrcat)
  (test$xmlresttag)
  (test$xmlbegintag))

The whole artifact is resting on the weak shoulders of concatenate and the wrong concept of  merging pieces of text into bigger pieces of text. I am thinking that constructing lists of strings will be a big improvement and then have a function whereby the whole list is output as svg text.

1. I'm  avoiding the terms string and sentence

(concatenate 'string "no" "not" "a fixed" "list," "fuck" "it")

But this;

(somefunction alist)

Where alist is;

(list "yes" "just" "a" "list")

The answers I found so far are;

1. Many many examples of concatenate, which does not fit in this case.
2. Using format. I reject this because this is a different sub-language. Something like this should be doable in lisp, not a special format language.
3. Complex functions using loop or doiterate. Really?

(apply #'concatenate 'string list)

But is this really the way to go? or should I make something based on reduce?

Like this;

(reduce (lambda (a b) (concatenate 'string a b)) (list "why" "no" "sharp-quote" "for" "the"  "lambda?"))

1. I must not be thinking very lispy yet or something

Returns t if object is the empty list; otherwise, returns nil.

Luckily, in Common LISP the "empty list" and "nil" are one and the same, so this sentence can be written as is¹.

And the examples;

 (null '()) =>  T
 (null nil) =>  T
 (null t) =>  NIL
 (null 1) =>  NIL

Also fine, the four cases you would expect here.

But then, the last line of the notes;

 (null object) ==  (typep object 'null) ==  (eq object '())

Now, how does help? the author could not be bothered to add some text here? Is "==" somehow part of the syntax?

1. Try this; Returns t if object is nil; otherwise, returns nil.

   Or this; Returns t if object is the empty list; otherwise, returns the empty list.

   I seem to also getting infected with this LISP virus to look for the edge cases