I miss the other direction, being able to put shortcuts (aliases) in your Apple menu. When OS X was still young there used to be a "haxes" called Fruit Menu that let you do that, but I think that has been gone for a while.
There are probably some menu bar items that I do not know about, but I really miss that functionality.
I have not found it especially useful on my MBP, but it is a huge improvement for me on the iPad with keyboard and mouse. It feels much more natural now to have two windows open and quickly switch between apps. I used my iPad for about 80% of my work now, up from 10-15%.
This is so completely random, and not really code related, but it was huge at the time (circa 1990). I was compiling large bibliographies of research documents for NSF that eventually had to be read into Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS for printing. We had written a very complex system of WP macros to search for tags that we programmatically put in the file, but they took forever to run and would often crash. My colleague and I found that we could only use search/replace to send begin/end pairs of tags for any formatting code (e.g. bold, italics). However, if we replaced the closing tags first, then the opening one, WP would notice that there were pairs of empty tags and get rid of the extra closing tag so that the underlying text would be formatted properly.
We were doing this everyday, so it cut the processing time from many hours to seconds. We swore each other to secrecy about this development and marched off to Dunkin’ Donuts with our giant ice coffee belt-loop holsters to celebrate.
Tremendous! One of my first tasks with QuickBasic 4.5 was writing an AKAC-874 code generator (for training purposes only) for some Marines at the embassy where I was stationed. It seemed the least that I could do considering they kept me fed with Grade A burgers direct from the States.
Hah, awesome! That’s exactly the kind of thing I would’ve written if you and I had swapped places.
In my crowd, it was well known that you wanted to spend your duty evening inspecting the ship’s kitchens. Make sure the officers’ mess cooks didn’t have too rough of a time and they’d make sure you didn’t leave hungry.
I gave this a try but still ran into issues. First it was a missing file, description.text, so I created a temporary one, but have not been able to figure it out after going through all of the different possibilities on the web site and github.
I am going to keep an eye on this project because I would really like to be able to work on this. Hopefully updates in a month or so will get things in sync.
Hi, sorry for the delay, I wanted to do a clean install of sbcl and quicklisp just to double check. I was having trouble getting the plotting code to work, so I cloned Lisp-Stat/plot and tried to follow the instructions:
* (asdf:clear-source-registry)
* (asdf:load-system :plot/vglt)
The error message was:
debugger invoked on a LOAD-SYSTEM-DEFINITION-ERROR in thread #<THREAD "main thread" RUNNING {1004BF80A3}>: Error while trying to load definition for system plot from pathname /Users/bobochan/common-lisp/plot/plot.asd: READ error during LOAD: The file #P"/Users/bobochan/common-lisp/plot/description.text" does not exist: No such file or directory(in form starting at line: 4, column: 0, position: 147)
'plot/vglt' is from version 1 plotting. Version 2 uses 'plot/vega'. If you're seeing VGLT in the ASDF file it means that it's the old version, and you'll need to pull in the source for a manual install from github until Quicklisp gets updated. The systems you'll need are:
- alexandria+
- data-frame
- dfio
- lisp-stat
- plot
- numerical-utilities
- select
- sqldf
It may be easier to get help from one of the community resources [1] (StackOverflow, github issue/discussion, mailing list) than HN, as those are always monitored.
For me it was strictly personal use. For example, I made a series of maps for stadiums for teams in the EFL Championship to use as wallpaper when my club has away matches. I also made some for my hometown and for the universities where my kids are studying.
One of my favorite sports memories was going to my son's first big cross-country running meet. There were hundreds of kids lined up for the race and parents lined the course to cheer them on. The crowds clapped loudly for the leaders, it died down for the long stretch of mid-pack runners, and then grew to a roar for the kids working their hardest at the back of the pack. Everyone there seemed to understand how hard it is to get started in endurance sports, but also how transformative they can be to a kid's confidence, especially if they have not felt welcome or successful in team sports.
If you are open to a broader score of university work then you might consider connecting with the Research Software Engineer Associations in the countries that you would consider working in. They have a lot of networking discussions over Slack. In the US the URL is:
I have been at a university for 25 years and absolutely love it. I have a staff position as a research software engineer, but also a non-tenure faculty appointment where I teach classes and work with students. It has really been a best of all worlds combination where I love the work and avoid a lot of the stress and committee work.
There are probably some menu bar items that I do not know about, but I really miss that functionality.