What is this about

This blog is a simple experiment for now, to understand what is available for a "scratchpad on the Web."

I have a picture which is something more like a lab notebook for my various hacking projects. The requirements are roughly
  • access from various places where hacking might happen; an idea for a project can happen at work, but I don't want my personal laptop with me at all times.
  • some kind of permanence, as suits a lab notebook. Various things this might mean:
    • version control with timestamping
    • no revisions allowed at all (this seems extreme: one wants to separate a polished presentation view from the underlying archival lab notebook. One can revise slides for a talk without altering the historical record of the lab notebook)
    • ability to archive into a big .tgz for burning to disk as necessary
  • flexible project documentation
    • easy way to archive associated files; diffs, error messages, screen shots, sketches, links, data sheets downloaded for the web.
    • perhaps I need to wait for my copy of Kanare's Writing the Laboratory Notebook (as seen on Lispmeister) to arrive to understand what should be required here.

Some projects to comment on here
  • work on CADR emulator and MIT-released Lisp machine code
    • make it work on Mac OS X/PPC for my laptop
    • make Chaos emulation work on Mac OS X
    • fix some Y2K-type issues, site configuration
    • create Chaos layer in OpenMCL or more portable Common Lisp, to develop gateways to things like
      • AIM/Jabber
      • regular e-mail
      • other retro people running Chaos emulation
      • support versioning file system semantics (e.g. blah.type~version~) on a UNIX FILE host.
      • build a world from the MIT-provided code, alllowing bootstrap
  • Apple II file transfer (extend ADT = Apple Disk Transfer) to include 140k, 800k ProDOS and Macintosh HFS floppy formats
  • Possibly, an Apple II compatible USB peripheral interface, to allow easy transfers to a Mac/PC with USB connection
  • Mac OS X support for foot-pedal shift & mouse-click operations

Interesting that [for Wordpress] Netscape 7 on Windows gives me little editing widgets on my post that Safari on Mac OS 10.4 didn't give me (as I recall.) Perhaps I should check, try to add that capability.

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