I’ve recently done a week-long hike in the Umbria-Marche region of the Italian Apennines (the vicinity of Monte Catria, near Cantiano, to be more precise), and here are some tips I’d like to share.

• The Umbria-Marche Apennine doesn’t seem to be frequented by a lot of tourists, especially in mid-March. The information offices, although helpful, are often closed (this is not only the case with the mountain region: contrary to information available on the Web, the tourist information at Forlì airport was closed on Sunday morning), and most of the Italians we’ve met didn’t speak English.
• The tourist trails in the region are not well marked. Direction marks are nowhere to be found, nor are the signs visible on junctions. We had to ask the locals when leaving Cantiano for Monte Tenetra (and ended up on M. Alto instead anyway).
• There are a lot of rifugi (mountain huts), but most of them are closed at this time of year. We passed by six or seven, out of which only one was available for sleep: Rifugio Fonte del Faggio (depicted), merely a small bothy with one worm-eaten bunk bed. Another one, Cupa delle Cotaline, with restaurant facilities and situated by a station of a local skilift, opened in the morning, but was closed for the night.

A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to acquainting myself with [Leiningen][1], one of the most popular build tools for Clojure. The thing that stopped me the most was that Leiningen uses [Maven][2] under the hood, which seemed a scary beast at first sight — but once I’ve overcome the initial fear, it turned out to be a quite simple and useful tool.

I just needed to convert a big (around 200 MB) text file, encoded in UTF-8 and containing Polish characters, all into lowercase. tr to the rescue, right? Well, not quite.

$ echo ŻŹŚÓŃŁĘĆĄ | tr A-ZĄĆĘŁŃÓŚŹŻ a-ząćęłńóśźż
żźśóńłęćą

I’ve just taken a short breath off work to put some code on GitHub that I had written over one night some two months ago. It is an implementation of the Set game in Clojure, using Swing for GUI.

I do not have time to clean up or comment the code, so I’m leaving it as is for now; however, I hope that even in its current state it can be of interest, especially for Clojure learners.

This blog has not seen content updates in more than a year. Plenty of things can happen in such a long period, and in fact many aspect of my life have seen major changes over this time. I’m not, however, going to write a lengthy post about all that right now. Instead, I just would like to announce the reactivation of the blog.

Yesterday, upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over a renowned volume of the olden lore (and specifically, upon one of the problems contained in the Polish translation of the first edition), I suddenly felt a need to consult the original version, to check whether there are no mistranslations or unincluded corrections for my copy. So I headed for Google Book Search, and apart from finding what I needed, I followed a link that sounded interesting. Quoth the link, “Groundbreaking Agreement”.

Fighting procrastination has been my major concern these days. I’ve devised a number of experimental tools to help me with that. One of them is called snafu and can generate reports of your activity throughout the whole day of work. It’s in a preliminary state, but works (at least since I’ve found and fixed a long-standing bug in it which would cause it to barf every now and then), and I already have a number of ideas for its further expansion.

A pen and a sheet of paper are simple utilities; but there lies vast and sheer power in them that I was not aware of. Up until now. So what can they be used for that one might possibly not realize?

Short answer: serializing the stream of consciousness.

So, how much disk space does your average CL image eat up? A hundred megs? Fifty? Twenty? Five, perhaps, if you’re using LispWorks with a tree-shaker? Well then, how about this?

[nathell@chamsin salza2-2.0.4]$ ./cl-gzip closures.lisp test.gz
[nathell@chamsin salza2-2.0.4]$ gunzip test
[nathell@chamsin salza2-2.0.4]$ diff closures.lisp test
[nathell@chamsin salza2-2.0.4]$ ls -l cl-gzip
-rwxr-xr-x 1 nathell nathell 386356 2008-08-09 11:08 cl-gzip

After my shameful performance in the previous tournament, this weekend saw my greatest achievement in tournament Scrabble to date: that of advancing to the quarterfinals of the Cup of Poland. For the record, here are the final standings. In the quarterfinal, I lost both games to Tomasz Zwoliński (the former Champion of Poland), who went on to win the Cup.