Annoyances

Two things ticking me off just now. Firstly, I wanted to listen to my friend's band, Jecano*, on TotalRock.com tonight. Unfortunately, it looks like I missed them — must have been on just before I got home and tuned in. Blast.

Secondly, I just checked my bank statement online, and I've been paid £255.92 by the University. All well and good, except I'm owed nearly £600, as well as £70 in surplus tax. Either there's a strange cut-off date going on, or they've forgotten something! No payslip yet either, and it's been a few days. Bastards. The thing about companies and money is that if they make a mistake, they'll sort it out next month. If they overpaid, you can guarantee they'd want it back!

Still, life is otherwise going quite well. I have to give a presentation on our new Wiki tomorrow, though — bound to be exciting!

* Don't try jecano.com — it looks like it's been hijacked. Google's description is accurate, but the content sure isn't!

Posted at 2004-03-01 15:40:21 by Richard • Link to Annoyances

Bastard proxies

I'm trying to get the RACER inference system/knowledge base to actually do something useful. After redefining a function in the Lisp interface myself, and struggling through, I invariably either get completely ignored (nil? Why are you giving me nil?) or get a WWW-UTILS:CONNECTION-ERROR spat out at me.

Even with the http_proxy environment variable set, and mirror calls made for remote ontologies, somewhere it's still trying to access something on the net without going through my local proxy workaround. Stupid, stupid, ignorant program.

I don't know what my alternatives are: I'd rather avoid Java, and I can't do all of my work at home.

Perhaps I should leave this until later, and work on some other aspect of the project.

As a side note: blimey, commercial Lisp environments are expensive. Well, not by some standards, but $500 as a student price is still too much (particularly as it doesn't include redistribution!).

Posted at 2004-03-01 06:43:59 by Richard • Link to Bastard proxies