Tuesday 16 July 2024


Fourth day of the Old Computer Challenge 2024
=============================================

This is the fourth day of the 2024 edition of the Old Computer
Challenge.

Lisp development
----------------
Curious if the old laptop can be used for Lisp development, I
installed CCL, Quicklisp, and SLIME on the Acer Aspire One, my laptop
for the Old Computer Challenge.

As I wrote before [1], I have done some things in SBCL and build my
static site builder in Clisp, but haven't worked wit CCL.

Currently, my only experience with CCL is compiling my static suite
builder.

For starters, I copied the sources for my website, a Vimwiki directory,
to the Acer Aspire One, and the Lisp code for the static site builder.

In Emacs, SLIME took quite some time to start. I loaded ASDF, loaded
the project of the static site builder and let it compile.

Again, I timed the building of the website with

    time ./static-site-builder

This reported that the building took 103 seconds.

For comparison, in the jail on my FreeBSD jail, the same took 12 seconds.

During this build process, CPU temperature went from just over 50
degrees Celsius to 72 degrees Celsius.

The FreeBSD jail server runs on an Intel Core i5-6500 @ 3.20GHz
and is equipped with 8 GB RAM,
This Acer Aspire One 522 laptop on a AMD C-60 APU and 720 MB RAM.

The Acer Aspire One 522 has an old fashioned spinning disk. The writing
to the disk of the HTML files could be a cause for the longer build
time. To test this out, I created a 5Mb ramdisk, mounted it and let
the script write the HTML files to the ramdisk.

This didn't change much, time reports now 102 seconds.

Developing in Lisp on this laptop is an option, albeit it requires
some patience.

Photo of the Acer
-----------------
I have made a photo of the Acer Aspire One laptop, next to the X201,
for comparison [2].

Both have the same stuff opened in Emacs, an RSS feed provided by the
RSS-to-nntp service of gwene.org on the left, and the web page one
of the RSS items points to, opened on the right.

Daily stuff
-----------
I ran `toot', and again didn't feel engaged, Mastodon without
being able to view images isn't that great.

Other activities are the usual suspects:

* I went through the normal steps with Gnus: read email, follow some
  mailinglists, and some RSS feeds.
* Used my jumplist to read phlogs, go to Antenna and read some
  Gemtexts. Also I read some of the phlogs and gemtexts from the other
  participants.
* Opened IRC and Jabber.

[1]: gopher://box.matto.nl/0/execution-time-ccl-between-clisp-and-sbcl.txt
[2]: gopher://box.matto.nl/I/i/aspire-one-522-thinkpad-x201.jpg



Last edited: $Date: 2024/07/16 18:08:01 $