Dan Weinreb’s blog

Helpful friends and acquaintences often let me know about exciting new software technologies that I absolutely must know about.  I like learning about exciting new technologies.  Unfortunately, the software world is generating them faster than I can learn them.  Here’s my list of things I really must learn.

Programming languges

Dylan: A Lisp-family language developed by my friends.

ML: How can I be a “Lisp expert” and not know ML??

Haskell: Functional programming.  Alan Bawden says this is fundamentally different and I must know it.

Ruby: Up-and-coming popular language.

Subtext: Programming in trees instead of text.  (By Jonathan Edwards, MIT CSAIL.)

Hygenic Macros: A languages feature for doing macros (in the Lisp sense) cleanly.

Groovy: A dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine.

Ron Garret’s paper on a module system for Lisp.

F#: Microsoft’s new function programming language.

LSharp:

Rlisp: A Lisp embedded in Ruby.

Programming tools and libraries

OProfile: The profiling tool for the Lisp implementation that I use.

Krugle:

LispBuilder: Access to SDL from Lisp for game development.

clbuild: An alternative to Lisp’s asdf-install: helps with download, compilation, and invocation of Lisp apps.

Networking

TRILL: New network protocol designed to solve the problems of the spanning tree.

Databases and Caches

Freebase: “Open, shared database of the world’s knowledge.”  From Metaweb, my old friend Danny Hillis.

CouchDB: Highly scalable document-oriented free DBMS written in Erlang.

Chubby: Google’s distributed lock system.

Google Sites: Web page design tool

Kompozer: Web page design tool

GORM:  Grails’s object-relatinal mapping tool, using Hibernate 3.

Terracotta: Clustering/caching tool for Java, making many JVM’s look like one.

Drizzle: Stripped-down MySQL, useful for caching too.

Whirlycache: A very fast cache

cl-prevalance:

Mongo: A grid-aware object-oriented DBMS from 10gen

Cloud computing

RightSize

Elastra

10gen

Web tools

Rails: (Ruby on Rails) Very popular, highly recommended by many people.

Grails: Rails for Groovy.  Built on GORM and Spring.

Google AppEngine:

Other

VMWare: Can I run Linux on my Windows box?

Software repositories: CPAN, http://planet.plt-scheme.org/, etc.

Jango: A Pandora alternative

I’ll get to them, really, I promise…

As soon as I got my new PC, I bought an external disk as large as the provided internal disk, and told Vista to turn on automatic backup to the external disk. That works fine, but what happens if some event causes failure in both the PC and the external drive? Power spikes, fire, and theft are all real possibilities.

Carbonite provides automatic offset backup at a reasonable charge. It’s really automatic; you just turn it on and forget it. The documentation is very good and simple. It runs in the background and I don’t notice it at all. It only costs $4.16/month, or $3.75/month if you sign up for two years. You can get a free 15-day trial.

It’s so easy to put off doing backup; I procrastinated for years. Luckily, I didn’t lose my data, but I’ve had friends who have lost their computer’s disk and it cost them plenty of time to recover, and they lost some data permanently. I recommed both the external disk and Carbonite.

(Full disclosure: Carbonite is funded in part by Common Angels, though I am not an investor. I also like that the CEO is David Friend, who used to run ARP Instruments — I was a music synthesizer hobbyist in the early 70’s and Friend was quite famous in that area.)