Scheme from the Florida Keys

2012-07-29T18:55:00.000-04:00

Hello from the Florida Keys, I'm Kyle Smith, your host on this blog. I've been otherwise occupied with life, and had left this blog dormant. I have recently returned to writing code in Racket, which is the language brought to you by the same folks that used to produce PLT Scheme. I'll be updating my list of websites, to purge any broken links, and update the PLT Scheme links with their

I'd like to say that I've been distracted by my three year old son

2010-03-24T01:40:00.000-04:00

To my valued readers, please excuse my lack of puplication. My energy has been devoted to my young son, and watching his mind expand in it's capacity for creative and abstract thought. It is truly a miracle I have had the pleasure of watching every day. The language Scheme pales in comparison to the expressivity of a young human mind as it begins it's exponential growth in the uniquely human

Steering Committee Replacement

2009-01-28T12:16:00.003-05:00

An election to choose the next Scheme Steering Committee is at hand.Registration has already begun. Goto http://www.r6rs.org/steering-committee/election/announcement.html to get the facts. I've reproduced the schedule found at that site. Schedule Voter registration and nominations start: 12:00 GMT on 5 January 2009. Voter registration and nominations end: 12:00 GMT on 2 February 2009.

Answers to a prayer and some comments

2008-06-17T03:32:00.004-04:00

Having been online for a few days in a row seems to good to be true; but then my father always told me, "be careful what you pray for." I have this odd feeling of being naked and exposed when I'm using a browser. Being inside a simple http session, without any hint of encryption disturbs me. I'm afraid I 've lost my innocence as a web traveler. I have to keep a streaming view of traffic close

Absent, but not dead!

2008-05-09T21:21:00.002-04:00

In a rare moment of tranquility I'm able to jot down a note. Readers, if I have any left, are aware of unusually difficult gaining access to the internet without having my system hacked into oblivion. I think I may re-title this blog, "Shifting Sands Scheme." Actually, I rarely get to enjoy the beauty of an aesthetic language such as Scheme, with the exception of some fiddling around with

What a wonderful feeling!

2007-11-18T01:09:00.000-05:00

Dare I say it, but I believe I may have finally been granted my freedom on the Internet. It would be pointless for me to describe any details of my ordeal over these last few months. Let's just say that I kept on fighting back; but ultimately it was not my doing that has given me a voice again. I'm surrounded by cables going in all directions, supporting what is left of my computer lab.

To whom it may concern:

2007-11-13T07:32:00.000-05:00

Excuse me readers, as I write a personal note: TWIMC: By your actions yesterday it appears that you were less predictable than I thought, and you never got my message. Let me come to the point. If I'm correct, then you have nothing to fear; if I'm wrong, then God help us all. Give me back my freedom. --kyle

The Calling Card of a Cyber Attack

2007-09-06T05:24:00.000-04:00

The Assailant Left Behind Some Clues In my last article I told you about my system being compromised. Since then, I have been by and large offline, because every time I plug my computer into my router, which stays disconnected on the wan side, there are literally dozens of processes using very odd port numbers, and there all listening for a reply from one of the two DNS servers I have configured

Thanks to Blogger.com

2007-09-01T08:00:00.000-04:00

My Apologies On or about Aug 28, 2007, my system was compromised. This resulted in what I understand was offensive content either directly posted on my blog, or perhaps sent to persons in my contacts list. As I had shut down my Internet exposure after discovering that my system had been compromised, I do not know what happened specifically, other than that yesterday, Aug 31, 2007, I learned that

Quantum Random Bit Generator Service

2007-07-22T01:22:00.000-04:00

Random Bits from Zagreb, Croatia Once in a while, something worthy of being called a Web Service comes on the scene, that makes the internet a better place. Radomir Stevanović, B.Sc., a Research assistant, PhD student, at the Ruder Boskovic Institute, Centre for Informatics and Computing, located in Zagreb, Croatia has put up a wonderful resource to aid researchers all over the world. It is

The Flatten Benchmark Results

2007-06-25T18:25:00.000-04:00

Four Flatten Scheme Functions Benchmarked Finally, the results are in, and the graphs are ready to present. After my last article, I received two (2) new excellent functions from two different readers, and they both do very well, beating my own version of flatten when benchmarked on a favorable Scheme implementation and given a favorable range of list complexity. What I show in todays article

A Better Flatten

2007-06-03T01:40:00.000-04:00

A Better Flatten Algorithm in SchemeAfter a little nudging from my friend Robby Findler to clean up my algorithmic act, I hunkered down with DrScheme to come up with the best list flattening function that I could dream up. For the last few days I've been doing some serious benchmarking between various functions that all do the same job, they decompose a list. It turns out that their are a

DivaScheme Being Played by the Master

2007-05-09T20:59:00.000-04:00

Danny Yoo on Keyboards In the last post I was remiss in not mentioning a DrScheme Keybinding alternative that I have been religously using since it was first available. A fantastic programmer by the name of Daniel Yoo is in charge of maintaining DivaScheme and of course was instrumental in its development. I've included a YouTube embeded video of Danny at the keyboard using DivaScheme. It's

Keybinding in DrScheme Explained

2007-05-08T21:43:00.000-04:00

Keybinding 101 in DrScheme Ever since I can remember during my days with DrScheme, it has always annoyed me that I couldn't comment out a block of code with an easy to use keyboard shortcut. The default short cut for the comment-out command is either `ESC;c:semicolon' or `m:c:semicolon'. Now see here we go, I have to immediately explain this little language for expressing keystrokes, or you

Format4Blog

2007-01-28T00:52:00.000-05:00

This utility, Format4Blog, has been after me to be written almost since the day I started to learn Scheme. It is starting to show signs of maturity, being that I've now used it on one of my blog articles as the main formatting tool. Still, there are some gaps in what it can do and what I would like it to do. What it can do is format a Scheme source file for use on a blog, or any web page for

Odd and Ends

2007-01-25T12:52:00.000-05:00

Delimited Continuations in MzScheme A Tour - Part 1 Prompts Prompts - their interaction with Dynamic Wind An Introduction to the Primitives Going further with the Primitives Odds and Ends We almost left the primitives without demonstrating their interaction with dynamic-wind, which dates back to the first post in this series. I also have a fun little function to share before we move on.

Going Further with the Primitives

2007-01-05T21:44:00.000-05:00

#| Delimited Continuations in MzScheme A Tour - Part 1 Prompts Going further with the Primitives Our journey continues into the deep waters of delimited continuations. The last time we talked on this matter we saw some interesting behavior exhibited from the code of our very last example. You may remember that I mentioned at the time that this behavior came about because we had put our

Priorities for a New Year

2006-12-23T14:49:00.000-05:00

Priorities for a New Year Sorting out projects in the fire form projects on fire Happy Holidays to everyone! I hope you are all able to spend some time with your families. and have that singular joy of watching a kid's face as he opens a present that knocks their socks off. If that doesn't put a smile on your face, then I afraid nothing will. When I was a kid it was all about whether the

An Introduction to the Prompt Primitives

2006-12-14T15:27:00.000-05:00

Delimited Continuations in MzScheme A Tour - Part 1 Prompts An Introduction to the Primitives ;In this installment of our tour we're going to digress from dynamic wind to take a long look at the primitive functions available to mzscheme programmers for delimited continuation. It will tuck nicely in when we take up their interaction with dynamic wind in a future post, so no effort will

2006-12-03T15:49:00.000-05:00

Epilog to Active Comments Jumping back for a moment, I' ld like to finish, for the time being, the story on Active Comments. I had made great progress in the area of raising all Active Comments to first class comments, in that they could nest one within the other, arbitrarily deep, just as you would want from an XML document with no schema to govern the order of entries, nor to say who can be a

Prompts - Their Interaction with Dynamic Wind

2006-11-29T10:03:00.000-05:00

Delimited Continuations in MzScheme A Tour - Part 1 Prompts Their Interaction with dynamic-wind What does dynamic-wind protect and how? This is the beginning of a series of posts on the new delimited continuation operators offered by PLT MzScheme v360. We are going to discuss prompts first, but before we get to prompts I thought it best that we all have a firm foundation in

Control Delimiters and Their Hierarchies

2006-11-22T22:21:00.000-05:00

If you haven't heard, PLT has released DrScheme version 360. See Jens Axel Søgaard's recent post for an exhaustive overview. One of the exciting new features is that of prompts (or runs) and marks for call-with-continuation. To get a good introduction to these terms and what it brings to the table of your desktop DrScheme, please read Sitaram and Felleisen ( Lisp and

In search of robust Scheme comments

2006-11-13T14:52:00.000-05:00

Ever since I got bitten by the Scheme bug, I've been trying out different styles of documentation within the comments of the code. Currently I use block style comments #| .. comment .. |#, within which I place XML code. A typical source file of mine starts off like this: #| <header> <name>source.scm</name> <author>Kyle Smith</author> <created date="2006-11-13"/> <description> Source.scm is