My sister said I needed to update my web page, so here you go, Regina!
Friday we had our first LUG meeting. It was a little obvious that nobody really knew what to expect, but hopefully once we get rolling we'll find some activities that everyone can get involved in. I particularly liked the idea of distributing (or maybe selling for a fundraiser) CDs with open source software compiled for Windows (GIMP, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird, etc.) -- it definitely sounds like a good way to get people interested in Free Software. Another interesting project might be trying to implement Tom's idea for how to create 21,780 new free software jobs (2,530 in R&D) .
I got Pika's prototype macro expander and evaluator working earlier today, but there are a lot of things that I can do to simplify and/or clean up the source code (not to mention add optimizations). I'm getting rather sick of Riastradh (Taylor Campbell)'s constant antagonization about how I should implement this: most of the spec is written by Tom and I don't fully understand the advantages, but so far his plan has held together pretty well and anytime I've found something wrong he's corrected it. He thinks we'll have an approximate implementation of R5RS soon and then interest in Pika will hopefully pick up (though I actually like having a rather significant role in it's implementation. :-).
Where to start...
Just the other day I finished rewriting my website in SXML rather than XHTML to make it easier to maintain for me. A couple of templates and some functions to generate the indexes at the left combined with mzscheme , and now I have a single file of Scheme code to maintain to build my whole website -- pretty cool in my mind (I used to do something similar with XML and XSLT, but that was too difficult and too verbose to maintain). I'm not certain about how a blog will fit into the layout I've already chosen for the site, so I'll probably have to tweak that a little bit in the future, and I'd also like to make a more user friendly interface to posting new blogs so that I won't get lazy and fall behind. Anyways, I think this is enough filler text for a first post.