Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

Back in Iceland

2011-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

I'm back in Iceland for the holidays, I'm staying for a few days in Reykjavík before moving on to Akureyri. I haven't been in Reykjavík for more than a couple of days for years.

Observations for the first few hours, in no particular order:

Icelandic customs welcomed me with a search of my luggage. It happens 1/3 times I come here, never happens in Europe. One of the reasons I think this is a somewhat crappy country to live in. "Welcome home, fuck you!"
Nobody told me that wearing vintage 1920 hats and growing a beard was now fashionable among the arty types in 101 Reykjavík, but it now is. What'll they think of next?
A common beer costs ~5 EUR at a pub/restaurant. If you're not getting paid in EUR that's more like 10 EUR. Murder!
You can't get beer in this country at anything but obscene prices except in the government run store. I know this intellectually, but it takes a while to get used to every time.
I had forgotten what an actual shower felt like after living in Amsterdam for a while. The showers here aren't just like a warm version of standing out in the rain. They're hot and the water actually streams out of the showerhead.
Icelandic food, what an oxymoron, at least that burger I had.
It is actually cold over here. It's -2 at the moment.
Nobody is amazed that I'm from Iceland. This happens in every other country in the world, but not here. What gives?
The water here is actually good enough that I'll drink it. I have to start buying bottled water in Amsterdam.
I've been reading Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis on Darren's recommendation. I'm 60% through it. The first 1/4 is about the Icelandic collapse, it also covers Greece & Ireland. It's the best account of those collapses I've read yet. This book really needs an Icelandic translation, but it doesn't appear that one exists.

Using the screen(1) stuff command

2011-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

I use GNU screen a lot to manage pretty much everything I run on my computer, and everything I run on remote systems (well, aside from cron).

When I go into work I spawn a screen which in turns connects to other machines which are also using screen. I didn't know about the stuff command until recently, but now I don't have to manually run e.g. screen -rx to connect to these nested screens, or cd to some directory.

It's really handy.

Moving to Amsterdam

2010-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

I'll be starting work with booking.com on October 18. I'm flying out to Amsterdam tomorrow on October 13.

I'll be in a temporary apartment Booking.com has arranged for me for the first two weeks while I look for my own place. That's one part of their excellent relocation package, they've really got the process of bringing you into Amsterdam nailed down.

I've got everything I need packed into approximately 30L of a single 60L backback. Just cloathing, my laptop and camera. Everything else I'm either going to rent or buy once I get there.

I'll most likely be getting an apartment to share with Steffen Müller. I'm already in contact with housing agents on the ground that have viewings lined up for me once I get there.

Wish me luck.

I'm finally setting up a website & blog

2010-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

I've decided to finally set up a website and blog. My old website had been stale for quite a while, I never updated it.

I'm going to try to change that by setting up something that I can bother to maintain, namely:

A Git-based blog where I can write blog posts as markdown files. I'm using jekyll for this.
Use disqus.com to allow user comments. This way I can keep the site itself static. I.e. I can just use squid + apache, instead of running something like Wordpress.
Link to my perl blog, my OpenStreetMap blog, Twitter account and other places where I write.

To get started with the look I stole the layout from a site in the jekyll site list. I'm probably not going to keep it for long, but design my own simple look. Something based on the Readability project, or the W3C Core Styles.

My non-ELPA Emacs swank-clojure setup

2010-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

I stubbornly refuse to use ELPA. I keep my ~/.emacs and associated libraries in Git, and don't like deviating from that with ELPA by running the clojure code from an unversioned directory that isn't automatically there when I set up my Emacs configuration from Git.

I couldn't find any documentation for setting up Emacs + Clojure + Swank without ELPA. What follows are the steps I had to do to get my setup working so that I can use both SBCL and Clojure with SLIME.

First checkout the needed clojure code into my ~/g/elisp library:

git submodule add git://github.com/technomancy/slime.git slime 
git submodule add git://github.com/technomancy/clojure-mode.git clojure-mode 
git submodule add git://github.com/jochu/swank-clojure.git swank-clojure 
git submodule add git://github.com/richhickey/clojure.git clojure 
git submodule add git://github.com/richhickey/clojure-contrib.git clojure

Build clojure:

cd clojure && ant 
cd clojure-contrib && mvn package

Add this in my ~/.emacs to load the libraries:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/g/elisp/clojure-mode") 
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/g/elisp/swank-clojure") 
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/g/elisp/slime") 
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/g/elisp/slime/contrib")

Add autoloads + massive hack to get all of this to work:

(autoload 'clojure-mode "clojure-mode" nil t) 
(autoload 'clojure-test-mode "clojure-test-mode" nil t) 
(defvar package-activated-list nil "Hack: used in `slime-changelog-date' but not defined anywhere") 
(progn 
  (autoload 'swank-clojure-init "swank-clojure") 
  (autoload 'swank-clojure-slime-mode-hook "swank-clojure") 
  (autoload 'swank-clojure-cmd "swank-clojure") 
  (autoload 'swank-clojure-project "swank-clojure")) 

(setq clojure-src-root (expand-file-name "~/g/elisp")) 

;; Java starves programs by default 
(setq swank-clojure-extra-vm-args (list "-Xmx1024m"))

This part is very suboptimal, it would be nice if swank-clojure had better support for running out-of-Git so I wouldn't have to do this. Maybe it does and I haven't found the relevant bits:

(defun clojure-slime-config (&optional src-root) 
  "Hacky copy of slime-clojure's `clojure-slime-config' to do what I want." 

  (if src-root (setq clojure-src-root src-root)) 

  (add-to-list 'load-path (concat clojure-src-root "/slime")) 
  (add-to-list 'load-path (concat clojure-src-root "/slime/contrib")) 
  (add-to-list 'load-path (concat clojure-src-root "/swank-clojure")) 

  (require 'slime-autoloads) 

  (slime-setup '(slime-fancy)) 

  (setq swank-clojure-classpath 
        (list 
         (concat clojure-src-root "/clojure/clojure.jar") 
         ;; Hack: Expand the name of the .jar with some Emacs glob function 
         (concat clojure-src-root "/clojure-contrib/target/clojure-contrib-1.2.0-SNAPSHOT.jar") 
         (concat clojure-src-root "/swank-clojure/src") 
         (concat clojure-src-root "/clojure/test/clojure/test_clojure"))) 
  (eval-after-load 'slime 
    '(progn (require 'swank-clojure) 
            (setq slime-lisp-implementations 
                  (cons `(clojure ,(swank-clojure-cmd) :init 
                                  swank-clojure-init) 
                        (remove-if #'(lambda (x) (eq (car x) 'clojure)) 
                                   slime-lisp-implementations)))))) 

;;; Setup clojure 
(clojure-slime-config)

Finally set it up to play nice so that I can do M-x run-sbcl or M-x run-clojure to run Common Lisp or Clojure:

;; http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/e70ac373b47d7088 
(eval-after-load 'slime 
  '(progn 
     (add-to-list 'slime-lisp-implementations 
                  '(sbcl ("/usr/bin/sbcl"))))) 

(defun pre-slime () 
  "Stuff to do before SLIME runs" 
  (clojure-slime-config) 
  (slime-setup)) 

(defun run-clojure () 
  "Starts clojure in Slime" 
  (interactive) 
  (pre-slime) 
  (slime 'clojure)) 

(defun run-sbcl () 
  "Starts SBCL in Slime" 
  (interactive) 
  (pre-slime) 
  (slime 'sbcl))

Of course all of this was such a pain that I pretty much stopped there and haven't actually /done/ anything with clojure aside from a Hello World :)