The Fall of the Mighty

There is a season…

There is a limit to the power of positive thinking. At every stage Trump has voiced a rosy scenario about the coronaviurs, only 15 cases, it will be gone by summer. Persistently the negative truth presents itself. The coronavirus is a threat to be reckoned with and not dismissed.

Trump loyalist are contributing to his dysfunction

I believe the loyal Trump supporters in the White house are still presenting him with rosy pictures. Pleasing Trump is more important than factual presenttions. Reality has a very tough way of presenting itself in light of the coronavirus. But the rosy supporters may just move on.

The lockdown

I am in an isolated location with one of my parents. COVID-19 changed all my planing.

It has been a long time since I have blogged.

The routing setup

The router is a WRT54G and there is wired extension to a DLink WBR-1310. I previously used another WRT54G at the extension position but that is in use at my orgininal location, which I and my wife use on weekly basis.

COVID-19 requires me to reloacate

My setup the hardware

• Kodi running on a Raspberry Pi, wired link to a home router
• Kore an App running on an Android phone connected via wireless.

My configuration

• Kodi Remote Server is configure on a local IP address at port 8080, User Name and Password.
• Kore a Remote Client is configured to use the above server address, port, name and pw.

The Kore problem

One moring my Kore remote stopped working due to a crashed home router. The main symptom other than non-function was that the Kore - Media Center (selected from the left hamburger) icon had RED icon. This icon should be GREEN when the client can connect to the server. When connecting the icon may be YELLOW.

I am experimenting with a SBCL compiled for mingw64

I use the Solarian Programmer’s Guide to build SBCL under mingw64. I am building the 2.0.0 from source.

I have MSYS2 installed at C:\devel\msys64 which is /c/devel/msys64 in MSYS2.

I have the binary windows distribution of SBCL 2.0.0 at /c/devel/SBCL_2_0_0-bin and I keep the sources at /c/devel/SBCL_2_0_0-src this includes the source.tar.bz2 the binary msi, as well as the expanded source.

I used these steps at MSYS command line do:

Make mingw64/sbcl run from slime.

In a previous post I created a sbcl which runs from the mingw64 shell. When I run sbcl from the ming64 prompt all works as expected but running it from CMD causes sbcl to complain that the core was built for another runtime.

This problem has two potential solutions:

• 1. Compile sbcl with CMD runtime.
• 2. Start a bash login shell and run sbcl programatically.

Option 1) requires I study the make process and possible build SBCL under MSYS2 by directing make to use mingw64 gcc.

Software is brittle

A change of a single character in the source code can cause a failure. When debugging these type brittle errors are fixes. It is only with testing to address the brittle points that software can become useful.

Software systems can be brittle

The inspiration for this post is the difficulties I am having using SBCL on Windows 10. I have viewed SBCL as a unix product with limited support for the Windows port. Code has been contributed that assumes “the unix way” of thinking (should I say the New Jersey way?)

There is no current Chocolatey package from SBCL!

SBCL 2.0.0 on 12/29/2019 which include a windows installer. There is a homebrew package for SBCL (see https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/sbcl#default ) so MacOS has a current SBCL. When you check for Chocolatey package from SBCL (see https://chocolatey.org/packages/sbcl ) you find a package had a error 5 years ago.

The old chocolatey package is not maintained.

A new chocolatey package should be created and a maintence procedure should be created. The best strategy is to introduce a script chocolatey release script into the SBCL release code in the SBCL build source code.