Paraprogramming Dispatches

It all started with a raid on a long abandoned hosting service. Seen a mention of it in the news, leading to a vague recollection of using it for something. Email address associated with the account was long defunct, and the service itself changed ownership a few times in the past two decades. But incredibly, I could recall login credentials and they worked still.

Amazingly, in a pile of abandoned HTML templates, obsolete software archives and Under Construction GIFs there was a source file for a project I long considered lost. It’s a minimal Lisp bytecode interpreter written in assembly for ZX Spectrum along the lines of MIT AIM-514. Save for address locations and maybe a couple ROM calls for error reporting it’s generic Z-80 code.

It was a part of bigger project that should have included a primitive REPL, but no trace of that was found. Also, am quite sure there is a henious bug lurking in the mark&sweep GC. Should really find time to finally debug that!

After having some issues with microphone input handling in portaudio I took a shortcut and sketched Also ALSA: an interface to Advanced Linux Sound Architecture library. As the name suggests, it’s not the first CL wrapping of it. It is however small, reasonably self-contained and can handle both input and output.

LGPL to comply with alsa-lib.

This week I put together a small NTP client. To keep dependencies at minimum and to avoid forcing a permanently running process onto users, it does not attempt to adjust system RTC clock, compensate jitter or evaluate time server quality. As I see it, much of that behaviour is easy enough to add via mixins with the defined NTP class.

NTP timestamp is two 32-bit values: seconds and fraction of a second. NTP conveniently counts seconds from Jan 1 1900, just like universal time in Common Lisp. There is however no portable Common Lisp representation for fractions of a second. Thus the client sticks to using NTP formatted fraction for that. It is way more precision than any existing CL implementation has in INTERNAL-TIME-UNITS-PER-SECOND, but this makes the value comparable across implemenations. The new GET-ADJUSTED-UNIVERSAL-TIME method then returns a pair of values: universal time and NTP fraction. The fraction can be converted to the implementation’s internal time scale with FRACTION-TO-INTERNAL.

Internally we define no special arithmetic on NTP timestamps but provide two conversion macros for single integer space. BIG-TIME converts NTP stamp into a large integer. We then do all calculations in that domain, and convert back to NTP timestamp using SMALL-TIME when it’s time to send it over the wire. An NTP instance stores adjusted time as an offset from internal real time. The offset is roughly intialized with universal time and then adjusted after each server request.

..there is no shortage of rainy evenings in the rain capital of the world, so I used a few of them to put together this small application that I called (perhaps overly ambitiously) cl-imagenet. It uses a bunch of Lisp libraries: opticl and cl-jpeg for image processing, cxml for extracting bounding boxes from the annotations, cl-fad for filesystem operations, and trivial-channels in combination with clx for streaming to display.

The code tries to detect how many cores the host machine has, then creates the corresponding number of worker units. The workset ImageNet subunits list is built up, which are then assigned to the workunits. Each workunit fetches annotation file, extracts the bounding boxes and image file reference, decodes the corresponding JPEG file, handles processing with OptiCL and sends the result via shared channel to display thread. It is impressive how compact the code can be when leveraging random bits of the ecosystem available through Quicklisp.

In this setup only the luminance component of JPEG is extracted and then thresholded from medium gray. The video is filmed on an old quad i5-2500. On my 8-core i7-6700 box with visualisation off, it averages some 200K processed images per hour.

Tested lightly with SBCL on Linux. One known problem place is the message channel gradually eating up memory with visualization on, but as it’s only used in tests it hasn’t been a pressing need to fix yet.