Brian Mastenbrook: Climbing the abstraction tree

Somewhere noodling around in my brain is a theory of how programmers must practice at a thing (language, domain of programming , etc.) for a while before they can contribute things which are of value to other people. It's been over a two and a half years since my first forays into the world of web programming in Common Lisp, and only recently do I think I'm getting to that point. Nothing documented yet - I'm still climbing the abstraction tree on a number of different projects, but the change has been fairly rapid and what I have now allows me to bang out small programs with ease.

One example of this would be a little task tracking program which I recently moved to run on my public web server instead of locally. It hosts tasks for a few of the personal projects I'm working on, as well as some private projects, which you shouldn't be able to see without logging in. It also (like any good Web 3.0 application) serves its own source. It's obvious that I haven't gotten rid of all the superfluous bits yet, but it's getting really close. I expect solutions to the remaining bits expressed in ways which don't offend my sensibilities can't be far off.

We've gone from the dreaded R-word topic on Planet Lisp to impending political hysteria. In an attempt to flush as much of it as possible, I'll reproduce the following ditty from James Lileks. It cracked me up, not least because I'm still recovering from my own data loss.

Ladies and Gentlemen: Miss Shirley Bassey.

Dumm-dum (wa wah wah wah wah!) DUMM-DUM (wa wah wah wah wah)

Dissssk failure!
It's the thing, the thing that you oft denied
And now you cry
(da da-da, da da)

Such a bliss nailer
(wa wah wah wah wah!)
B-tree's hosed, directory's naught but hash
Magnetic rash

How you shrugged at the long access time
How you thought "disk's just full, all is fine"
Now you know you've many bad sectors -
Killed your data like Mister Lecter, that's the

DISK FAILURE
(wa wah wah wah wah!)
Sys admin, you'd better begin to pray
Last backup: May!

If hard drive crashes were a common occupational hazard circa 1943, this is what they'd sound like.