fidzu : LISP

 "Returns a [[some-terrible-github-link-to-html][MAT]] object."

 "Returns a MAT object."

 (document (list mgl-mat:@mat-manual mgl:@mgl-manual))

25 Jan 2015 11:00pm GMT

I uploaded a new release of Clasp today (January 25th, 2015) that brings a lot of stability improvements, improved performance, improved compatibility with the Common Lisp standard and ASDF, SLIME and Quicklisp support.

It requires a reinstallation of externals-clasp. We are working on eliminating the need for externals-clasp.

Features include:

1. ASDF support has been added - it can be accessed using (require :asdf)
2. SLIME support has been added and the changes to SLIME have been uploaded to the standard SLIME repository. You should be able to access it the standard way you install and upgrade slime.
3. Quicklisp support has been added. I've submitted the changes to quicklisp to Zach Bean (the developer of quicklisp) and they should be available soon.
4. Improvements in performance of the compiled code (Linux code is at least 2x faster).
5. Improvements in stability.
6. Almost all Common Lisp symbols have been implemented (18 left, you can see them using (core:calculate-missing-common-lisp-symbols).
7. Example code for Clasp/C++ interoperation is available.
8. Weak-key-hash-tables, weak-pointer, weak-key-mapping types have been implemented in both garbage collectors.

This release focused on getting SLIME working because I want to incorporate a new compiler front end for Clasp and I want to do it in this extremely powerful programming environment.

25 Jan 2015 4:19pm GMT

Before bed last night, I was trying to sort out in my head the lineage and historical inter-relations between BKNR, TBNL, HTML-TEMPLATES, CL-WHO, and Hunchentoot. When my alarm went off this morning, I was having a dream about the Lisp community.

In my dream, there were about 50 Lispers on a prison plane. It was pretty much a commercial 737, but all of the passengers were wearing prison jumpsuits and the plane would never land. We were all just on the plane. We refueled in flight. (The dream had nothing to say about how we restocked with food or emptied the septic tanks. *shrug*)

There was a cage around/over the last three rows of the left side of the plane. The door to the cage was not locked, but everyone knew that you were only allowed to go into the cage if Edi let you. Edi Weitz was the top dog in this prison. The only reason the rest of us were still alive is because Edi hadn't seen a reason to have us taken care of yet.

Didier Verna was the only person who was allowed to approach the cage if Edi were in it.

There wasn't much turbulence, but we were flying through a thunderstorm. This had Nick Levine sitting at a window seat, looking out over the wing, nervously bobbing back and forth, and sipping whiskey with ice from a plastic cup.

The storm had Zach Beane pacing back and forth in the aisle.

Cyrus Harmon was sitting doing a crossword puzzle from the in-flight magazines, giggling to himself about Faré.

Faré was standing near the front of the plane throwing little packets of peanuts at everyone. He wasn't trying to hurt people with them, but he was delighting in watching them bounce of the heads of people who weren't expecting them (especially the back of Zach's head when he was fifteen or twenty rows away).

Robert Goldman was trying to get some sleep, but was unable to do so because of the lack of leg-room, the bright cabin lights, and all of the packets of peanuts careening past.

There were a number of other Lisp-folk in this dream. For some of them, I don't recall exactly what they were up to. For a few, it would probably be impolitic of me to say.

22 Jan 2015 2:21pm GMT

Thanks to the Postgres Weekly issue #89 and a post to Hacker News front page (see Pgloader: A High-speed PostgreSQL Swiss Army Knife, Written in Lisp it well seems that I just had my first Slashdot effect...

So please consider using the new mirror http://dimitri.github.io/pgloader/ and maybe voting on Hacker News for either tooling around your favorite database system, PostgreSQL or your favorite programming language, Common Lisp...

It all happens at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8924270.

Coming to FOSDEM?

If you want to know more about pgloader and are visiting FOSDEM PGDAY or plain FOSDEM I'll be there talking about Migrating to PostgreSQL, the new story (that's pgloader) and about some more reasons why You'd better have tested backups...

If you're not there on the Friday but still want to talk about pgloader, join us at the PostgreSQL devroom and booth!

22 Jan 2015 12:48am GMT

Server-side Developer: Herzliya, Israel

We are coding commandos with strong product sense. Most of the code we write is operative in hours to days. We insist that you write something operational in your first two days. We decide and move fast, and iterate faster. If you are ready to write production code in Clojure, If you are ready to write the most exciting code of your life - If you are ready to jump on stage and let your code play - come and join us.

Responsibilities:

Write good, robust, simple, fast and meaningful code that can handle billions of hits
Qualifications:

Strong web experience (at least 5 years)
Strong coding ability and architecture familiarity combined with product sense
Experience with Linux (Ubuntu), AWS / EC2, Continuous Deployment (SaltStack, Chef, Puppet)
Experience with Python, Redis, ZeroMQ, CouchDB, MongoDB
Experience with distributed systems
Experience with monitoring tools (Nagios, Graphite)
Product management understanding
Experience working with clients - an advantage
Mobile experience (iOS, Android) - an advantage
Digital advertising experience - an advantage

Contact: Adi Shacham-Shavit <adi@appsflyer.com>

Dev Team Leader: Herzliya, Israel

We are looking for a technologies in hart, with passionate to distributed production systems and excellent development abilities to join our team.

Responsibilities:
Lead a small development team to write good, robust, simple, fast and meaningful code that can handle billions of hits
Qualifications:

Strong web experience (at least 5 years)
Strong coding ability and architecture familiarity combined with product sense
Experience with Linux (Ubuntu), AWS / EC2, Continuous Deployment (Chef etc.)
Experience with NoSQL databases, like Redis, Couchbase, MongoDB
Manage team of 2-3 developers (at least 1 year)
Exceptionally self-motivated, have a "get things done" mentality
Experience working with clients - an advantage
Mobile experience (iOS, Android) - an advantage
Digital advertising experience - an advantage

Contact: Adi Shacham-Shavit <adi@appsflyer.com>

20 Jan 2015 6:52am GMT

Exceptional opportunity to join one of the fastest growing Australian technology start-ups
- Well-funded
- High growth phase

The Positions
ROKT is seeking a number of functional programmers (ideally with experience in Clojure) at all levels of seniority. The positions involve the continued development and maintenance of established production Clojure code (principally related to data transformation, analysis and predictive optimisation) as well as the development of new products and services.

Successful candidates will join a growing team of ~10 engineers, predominantly developing on a Microsoft/AWS stack at present - we're looking at considerable expansion of our engineering capability this year, a significant part of which includes broadening and accelerating our adoption of the Clojure ecosystem.

The Company
ROKT is a rapidly growing innovative technology company. At ROKT you will have the opportunity to work in a fast paced environment with very smart and talented people.

Recognised as one of the hottest companies in our field, ROKT is in a unique position to continue to lead the market with data driven technology solutions that deliver innovation to publishers, ecommerce platforms and advertisers. With a proven technology platform, an established and growing partner portfolio, and outstanding growth, this is a unique opportunity to join a fast paced Australian technology start-up.

Benefits
- Competitive packages based on qualifications and experience
- Employee share scheme
- Health and wellness initiatives
- Staff awards program; generous staff referral program
- Office snacks & fruit
- Global company gathering and celebration 3 times a year
- Get paid to write Clojure!

Skills, Experience and Education
- A bachelor's degree in Computer Science or similar discipline
- Previous experience (commercial or demonstrable personal experience) with functional programming in Clojure, or Common Lisp.
- A level of experience that demonstrates competency in a spectrum of development skills, from our chosen development methodology (Agile XP/Scrum) through to discipline in testing, documentation etc.
- Strong SQL skills, "big data" experience, and familiarity with AWS is considered highly desirable
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Location
North Sydney, NSW, Australia

Join us
Interested candidates should submit CVs to Claudio Natoli - claudio@rokt.com

20 Jan 2015 12:47am GMT

The programme committee members for this year's European Lisp Symposium has just been announced. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, on the keyboards...

• Sacha Chua - Toronto, Canada
• Edmund Weitz - University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, Germany
• Rainer Joswig - Hamburg, Germany
• Henry Lieberman - MIT, USA
• Matthew Flatt - University of Utah, USA
• Christian Queinnec - University Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris 6, France
• Giuseppe Attardi - University of Pisa, Italy
• Marc Feeley - University of Montreal, Canada
• Stephen Eglen - University of Cambridge, UK
• Robert Strandh - University of Bordeaux, France
• Nick Levine - RavenPack, Spain

19 Jan 2015 12:00am GMT

 (build-fnn (:class 'digit-fnn)
   (input (->input :size *n-inputs*))
   (hidden-activation (->activation :inputs (list input)
                                    :size n-hiddens))
   (hidden (->rectified :x hidden-activation))
   (output-activation (->activation :inputs (list hidden)
                                    :size *n-outputs*))
   (output (->softmax-xe-loss :x output-activation)))

 (build-rnn ()
   (build-fnn (:class 'sum-sign-fnn)
     (input (->input :size 1))
     (h (->lstm :name 'h :inputs (list input) :n-cells n-hiddens))
     (prediction (->softmax-xe-loss
                  :x (->activation :name 'prediction
                                   :size *n-outputs*
                                   :inputs (list h))))))

18 Jan 2015 11:00pm GMT

PostgreSQL comes with an awesome bulk copy protocol and tooling best known as the COPY and \copy commands. Being a transactional system, PostgreSQL COPY implementation will ROLLBACK any work done if a single error is found in the data set you're importing. That's the reason why pgloader got started: it provides with error handling for the COPY protocol.

As soon as we have the capability to load data from unreliable sources, another use case appears on the horizon, and soon enough pgloader grew the capacity to load data from other databases, some having a more liberal notion of what is sane data type input.

To be able to adapt to advanced use cases in database data migration support, pgloader has grown an advanced command language wherein you can define your own load-time data projection and transformations, and your own type casting rules too.

New in version 3.2 is that in simple cases, you don't need that command file any more. Check out the pgloader quick start page to see some examples where you can use pgloader all from your command line!

Here's one such example, migrating a whole MySQL database data set over to PostgreSQL, including automated schema discovery, automated type casting and on-the-fly data cleanup (think about zero dates or booleans in tinyint(1) disguise), support for indexes, primary keys, foreign keys and comments. It's as simple as:

$ createdb sakila
$ pgloader mysql://root@localhost/sakila pgsql:///sakila
2015-01-16T09:49:36.068000+01:00 LOG Main logs in '/private/tmp/pgloader/pgloader.log'
2015-01-16T09:49:36.074000+01:00 LOG Data errors in '/private/tmp/pgloader/'
                    table name       read   imported     errors            time
------------------------------  ---------  ---------  ---------  --------------
               fetch meta data         43         43          0          0.222s
                  create, drop          0         36          0          0.130s
------------------------------  ---------  ---------  ---------  --------------
                         actor        200        200          0          0.133s
                       address        603        603          0          0.035s
                      category         16         16          0          0.027s
                          city        600        600          0          0.018s
                       country        109        109          0          0.017s
                      customer        599        599          0          0.035s
                          film       1000       1000          0          0.075s
                    film_actor       5462       5462          0          0.147s
                 film_category       1000       1000          0          0.035s
                     film_text       1000       1000          0          0.053s
                     inventory       4581       4581          0          0.086s
                      language          6          6          0          0.041s
                       payment      16049      16049          0          0.436s
                        rental      16044      16044          0          0.474s
                         staff          2          2          0          0.170s
                         store          2          2          0          0.010s
        Index Build Completion          0          0          0          0.000s
------------------------------  ---------  ---------  ---------  --------------
                Create Indexes         40         40          0          0.343s
               Reset Sequences          0         13          0          0.026s
                  Primary Keys         16         14          2          0.013s
                  Foreign Keys         22         22          0          0.078s
                      Comments          0          0          0          0.000s
------------------------------  ---------  ---------  ---------  --------------
             Total import time      47273      47273          0          2.261s

Other options are available to support a variety of input file formats, including compressed csv files found on a remote location, as in:

curl http://pgsql.tapoueh.org/temp/2013_Gaz_113CDs_national.txt.gz \
    | gunzip -c                                                        \
    | pgloader --type csv                                              \
               --field "usps,geoid,aland,awater,aland_sqmi,awater_sqmi,intptlat,intptlong" \
               --with "skip header = 1"                                \
               --with "fields terminated by '\t'"                      \
               -                                                       \
               postgresql:///pgloader?districts_longlat

2015-01-16T10:09:06.027000+01:00 LOG Main logs in '/private/tmp/pgloader/pgloader.log'
2015-01-16T10:09:06.032000+01:00 LOG Data errors in '/private/tmp/pgloader/'
                    table name       read   imported     errors            time
------------------------------  ---------  ---------  ---------  --------------
                         fetch          0          0          0          0.010s
------------------------------  ---------  ---------  ---------  --------------
             districts_longlat        440        440          0          0.087s
------------------------------  ---------  ---------  ---------  --------------
             Total import time        440        440          0          0.097s

As usual in unix commands, the - input filename stands for standard input and allows streaming data from a remote compressed file down to PostgreSQL.

So if you have any data loading job, including data migrations from SQLite, MySQL or MS SQL server: have a look at pgloader!

16 Jan 2015 8:35am GMT

I received an email from the Amazon recruiter, and they say they are looking for more Clojure candidates. Please refer to the previous post if you're interested:

https://lispjobs.wordpress.com/2014/11/25/clojure-software-development-engineers-amazon-com/

15 Jan 2015 12:54am GMT