• Key Puller: Remove key caps with ease.
• Extra Key Caps: Extra Control and Alt key caps that are sloped to fit different rows. Replace the Caps Lock key cap with a Ctrl key cap. Now the "Ctrl key is where god intended it to be, on the left hand side of A", as Jerry Pournelle wrote some years ago.

Update: Øystein Grøvlen posted a correction: The ClustRa Telecom Database: High Availability, High Throughput, and Real-Time Response is the correct Clustra paper.

• Micrographia by Robert Hooke; CD-ROM with hires scans of the original octavo edition. One of the most beautiful books ever created by the original mad hunchbacked scientist. [1]
• Longitude by Charles Sturridge (director), a DVD production adapting the book by Dava Sobel, where she tells the story of how 18th-century scientist and clockmaker William Harrison solved one of the most perplexing problems of history -- determining east-west location at sea..

This was taken at Montana Coffee Shop in Minneapolis where I was playing a set of music today... and since the portrait of John McCarthy is so uncanny, there was no need to explain the shirt to anyone in the audience.

Dave Roberts wrote an excellent article about Random Testing where he mentioned the Common Lisp test suite by Paul Dietz who quotes from a paper by William M. McKeeman in his blog:

Excellent testing can make you unpopular with almost everyone.

[UPDATE] A user sent in an update for the location of the above paper. It is now available here.

T-shirt update: We just made our first online sale! I hope we will get some action shots from customers wearing the t-shirts.

[US shop] [German shop]

All that said - cool! This is great. It's more fun toying with the real thing than watching a video of Alan Kay enjoying it all to himself :) I can't wait to see where this goes in the future.

We are thinking about selling a starter kit containing Successful Lisp, a CD with a working Common Lisp environment and a t-shirt to get people started with a smile. We are also going to do a hard cover edition, but that's mainly for the library market. I've created a beta release of the t-shirts to get some community feedback. Let me know what you think about the idea! [US shop] [German shop]

Lisplets are Java Servlets that forward their requests, and gather their response headers, using s-expressions over sockets. They enable easy integration of Common Lisp or Scheme into a Java-based web environment. Access your Lisp application logic from any servlet container, such as Tomcat, Resin, Jetty, JRun and many others.

Lisplets are released as open source under the Common Public License.

About twentythree years ago I read Brownshoes by Theodore Sturgeon. It's a story about an man who invents an energy generating device. He spends many sleepless nights agonizing about the question what to do with it and finally decides to bite the bullet: get a job, get a degree, get the patents for his Rotor and generally make sure it changes the world by creating a market for the device.

It takes a talent like Ted Sturgeon, to turn this simple plot into a emotionally engrossing story, that inspires young readers.This story isn't about how to build a perpetual motion machine. It's about how to succeed as an agent of change, how to become a hacker.

Brownshoes was part of Sturgeon Is Alive and Well: A Collection of Short Stories