Frank Buss posted a review of Practical Common Lisp on slashdot. That might give a nice boost to sales of Lisp titles at Amazon.com. I'm now tracking sales rank data for PCL, ACL and SL. The graph of sales rank data for the last two weeks can be viewed here. The tracker pulls data from Amazon.com every 60 minutes and creates a new graph.

Source code:
track-lisp-books.rb, plot.rb

I spent an exciting and eventful weekend in Amsterdam at the ECLM. Edi Weitz and Arthur Lemmens organized this wonderful conference. Great speakers, a wonderful venue and perfect organization. Thank you again!

I had a great time talking to:

• Edi Weitz about a possible timeline for the publication of the Common Lisp Cookbook.
• Jans Aasman about AllegroCache, FramerD, Clustra and the art of programming.
• Samir Sekkat (knowledgetools.de) about the diagnostic assistant tool they built to help doctors to structure the diagnostic process
• Jim E. Newton about the software tools for chip designers created by cadence.
• Pascal Costanza about his ideas regarding publishing a collection of classic Lisp papers in book form and about the 2nd European Lisp and Scheme Workshop in Glasgow, co-located with ECOOP 2005 he organizes. His Layers idea, programmable context for software modules, could be a new metaphor for creating self-configuring systems.
• Marc Battyani about his amazing Fractal Framework written in Common Lisp that doesn't use or need continuations. His live demo was breathtaking.
• Rudi Schlatte about SBCL and his work on text classifiers
• Fred Seibel about the passion of programming Lisp
• Dave Fox about new developments regarding LispWorks
• Antonio Menezes Leitao about his idea to open source Linj
• Manuel Odendahl about the optical mouse adapter for my Symbolics Workstation
• Ralf Mattes about his work on keyword extraction from articles in newspaper archives and about a new paper that uses compression to implement robust text clustering

and many many others.

I collected and authenticated GPG key-signatures from the following individuals: Robert Strandh, Marc Battyani, Rudi Schlatte, Juho Snellman, Daniel Barlow, Andreas Fuchs and Max-Gerd Retzlaff.

I sold some t-shirts, but demand outstripped my supply. If you would like to buy a t-shirt please make sure you use the right shop depending on your geographic location: [US shop] [EU shop]

I'm hooked! Love it.

EarthCore is the world's first podcast-only novel: you can't find it in stores, you can't download the full audio, and the only way to find out what happens is to subscribe to the podcast. This novel is a cross between episodic modern-action fare like "24" and classic sci-fi movies like Predator and Starship Troopers.

The whole plot circles around a remote location in the Wah Wah mountains in Utah. Something terribly evil lives deep inside the core of this mountain.

As you can see above, my old sales rank tracker got confused by the always changing layout of the Amazon.com HTML pages. I decided to switch to the AWS (Amazon Web Services) instead of screen scraping . Turns out it's really not that hard. I tried various packages and finally settled for ruby-amazon, which is a really nice Ruby wrapper for the AWS. To use the library you need an Associate account and a developer token. Both are free with registration. The script below runs once an hour and extracts the sales rank of Successful Lisp. Data storage and graphing is done with RRDtool.

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby -w
require 'amazon/search'
include Amazon::Search
DEV_TOKEN  = "---Your Amazon.com Token----"    # your development token
req = Request.new(DEV_TOKEN)
search = ['asin_search', '3937526005', HEAVY, 'ASIN']
# parse the results of the search
response = req.send(*search)
# Print current sales rank
print( response.products.first.instance_variable_get("@sales_rank"))

Ever since I read The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins I've been wondering when someone would create memetic engineering. Recently I finished reading The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore and I was amazed. Though this is not a text book on memetic engineering, she paints a clear picture of the biological-psychological-philosophical landscape which a science of memetic engineering would have to conquer. While reading it I caught myself thinking "So that's why counseling sometimes works!" and "So an AI would probably need a shrink too!". If you liked The Mind's I and Goedel, Escher, Bach, you'll enjoy this book.