Effing awesome.

Xronos is a DLR-based Lisp variant. It is a Clojure-like language for .NET. Xronos shares the same syntax and base library as Clojure (but not any source code).

I usually bitch mostly about software and services that suck. However there's a large amount of suckage to be found in the physical world as well, and every so often I find it worth mentioning in case someone who cares stumbles across it.

About a year ago I purchased a new sink for the kitchen, and while I was at it, decided to replace the faucet as well. I found a nice Peerless brand faucet for around $70 at True Value. It was absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately, time has proven that this beauty was chrome-deep.

First of all, once it was installed, I noticed that the spout itself was a bit... wiggly. This hasn't caused any problems to date, but was my first indication that the quality was perhaps a bit sub-par. The second indication came about 6 months ago when my girlfriend accidentally hit the side of the spout with a pan. It left a visible dent in the side of the spout. Now, I imagine it's possible to dent almost anything metal given enough force, but it turns out that this faucet is paper-thin. The next indicator of poor quality came about two weeks ago when the hand-sprayer started leaking water from the handle. Better yet, if you actually tried to use the handle, water would literally spray out the back of it, usually all over your shirt and pants. Now, this is only a $10 replacement part, but really, the damn thing is less than a year old and the spray handle only gets used on occasion. There's no way it should have failed already.

In any case, I won't buy Peerless again and if you are doing some home project, I'd look at other brands.

MetaPython provides a macro and code quoting facility for Python. This looks pretty brilliant. I'll have to try it out soon. Project is hosted on Google Code.

If you've got an Intel wireless card (especially 802.11n adapters), I highly recommend using the latest drivers from the kernel wireless project.

I have an Intel 5100 and was experiencing lots of lost connections, especially under any type of load. Not only that, but it would typically max out at 60Mbps. Since updating to the latest stable drivers, I now get around 130Mbps and haven't had a single disconnect, even when pushing a total of 2.4GB at 9.9MB/s to a server on my LAN. It also seems to associate much quicker, but that might just be my new love for the card.

As a note, these same drivers are available in Ubuntu via the backports package, but I don't recommend using this as it includes a lot of other drivers, and for me, I experienced kernel panics when using them. I also note that uninstalling them doesn't remove them from /lib/modules/2.6.x/updates, so you get to have fun figuring that out on your own.

I finally got my issues resolved by completely removing all files from /lib/modules/2.6.x/updates and following the build/install directions for the new drivers.