From time to time, I do something computerese that some people find useful. I help administer the College student webserver, zeus (corny, I know -- my vote went for “spider”).
As a programmer, I reject recent abominations such as Perl for programmes longer than one line; for anything that is more complex, precise expressiveness is much more important than the ability to damage people's brains with random punctuation. So instead I use Common Lisp and Scheme; scheme scripts, for instance, generate the JCMS website, while I have written a numerical integrator in Common Lisp as part of my Ph. D. project; Debian packages are also available.
Apart from this, I have knowledge of TeX and LaTeX for document processing, Lilypond for music typesetting, C and FORTRAN for interfacing with the rest of the scientific community, IDL for drawing pretty graphs and shell script for what is probably the least functional menu programme ever.
I have started packaging up bits and pieces of lisp; common-lisp-controller compatible debian packages of Mark Kantrowitz' infix and metering packages, ilisp and sbcl are available with the following apt.sources lines:
deb http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/ftp/pub/debian local lisp deb-src http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/ftp/pub/debian local lispThe grand plan with these is to package up as much stuff as possible, with a view of forming a Comprehensive Lisp Archive Network (like CTAN for TeX).
There are also experimental builds of various things floating around in:
deb http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/ftp/pub/debian local experimental deb-src http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/ftp/pub/debian local experimentalIf those break something, you get to keep both parts. Currently there seem to be galeon and mozilla packages in there (compiled against the unofficial mozilla 0.8 packages).
© Christophe Rhodes, 2001. Absolutely every single right reserved.