Blog Without An Important Name

A few years ago, I learnt LISP at university. Just for a semester, write a poetry generator, things like that. All pretty simple. I didn’t get into it much at the time, beyond what I had to, but I do remember thinking that it looked like quite a powerful and fun language.

A while ago, someone on Slashdot mentioned LISP and referred to a book that was online for learning it. So I checked it out, and it seems to be pretty good. I’m about half way through it. It has the large amount of basic instruction in the language, which is always necessary. However, after a while of that, it has a chapter on ‘Practical’ stuff, which involves implementing actual code, which is a good change, and a nice place to read chunks of code, put them into the interpreter, and play with them a bit.

Normally when reading books on programming languages, I get frustrated when they start explaining “This is a variable. You can store values in them. You can also change them. …”, as it’s a concept I’ve seen over and over, and so is quite boring. This isn’t the case here, I don’t know if it’s because LISP is different enough from the languages I usually use that it seems new, or the book just manages to avoid these kinds of problems.

If I see it lying around (or maybe even if I don’t, and I just get paid enough one day), I think I might pick up a dead tree copy.

Oh, and the book itself? Practical Common Lisp.

I heard back a few days after the phone interview that I didn’t get the Google job. Pity, but not too surprising really. I suspect that it was because I lacked the knowledge/experience related with the systems reliability side of things. So for now, things are just going on the way they have. Soon, I’ll have to enact Plan B: build some cool web-base tech, and sell it for millions. I mean, it worked for Trademe!

At Linux.conf.au, which I’ve efficiently failed to finish writing about, Google had a beer bash. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I went because - well, free drink! However, at one point I was sitting talking to some people, and one of the recruiters came by with a list for me to put our email addresses down on, so I did. Can’t hurt, right? A couple of weeks later I get an email asking if I was interested in working for them. So I said sure. So I had a pre-interview about a week after that, and then yesterday had the first phone interview. It was fairly chatty, which was nice. It was just one person, who was a programmer, so it wasn’t an HR person reading from a script or anything like that. Asked a bunch of questions about computer science stuff: stacks, sorting, etc. A note to anyone doing something similar: the stuff taught in second year computer science (at Otago, anyway) is invaluable, it turns out. That and a few thoughts about how to apply them.

I’m applying for the SRE (Systems Reliability Engineering (I think)) group, which is the one that manages the servers for search and ads. They do things like failure management, resource planning (like “we’re going to need a new datacentre in a few months”), software deployment, monitoring, and so forth. The impression I get is that it’d be a nice mix of systems and software stuff.

So anyway, if they liked me from this interview (I won’t find out for a week or so), I get another one or two phone interviews, and if I’m still in the running, I think they’d then fly me over there for something in person. That would be pretty cool.

I’ve had a couple of requests from people for a 64-bit version of eMusic/J. So I made one. It’s theoretically just a matter of substituting the appropriate SWT libraries with the 64-bit versions, but I have no way of testing it. I have heard that it worked, but required a bit of finagling with system libraries (freetype, in particular), so I’d like feedback from anyone with a machine that can run this as to how it works for them. The alternative, of course, would be for someone to buy me a machine to test it on myself

It can be found on the download page.