Well, looks like I’ve been tagged for the latest blog fad, the “five things you didn’t know about me” chain letter. Thanks, Edward.

Here we go. Actually, some of these are things which you did know about me, if you are more than a passing acquaintance.

1. The first computer programs I wrote, in BASIC, were little sprite animations on the BBC Micro, when I was in my early teens or maybe even younger than that. A typical scenario for such an animation would go like this: airplane flies over, drops a bomb, little stick-man walks up from the side of the screen and pushes a little trampoline under the bomb, which bounces back and hits the plane, causing it to burst into flames. Good times.
2. Later, I moved on the Atari ST, the Commodore Amiga, and eventually the first PCs. Other machines that found their way into the Wolf household were the Sharp MZ-700, the Philips P2000 (that was before the BBC, actually, but I never programmed on it), a Canon X-07 1983-vintage ultraportable including a portable four-colour pen-plotter, and a Sharp PC-1248 calculator-sized computer. Most of these were bought by my dad and eventually made it into my greedy hands; I still have the Canon and the PC-1248. I also still have the Amiga, which was the first computer I bought for myself.
3. My dad is the one who got me started on the path to computer geekdom. He is, at least in some ways, a bigger geek than I am.
4. I have a pet snake, Billie.
   
5. Although never a Sporty Spice, I used to do quite a bit of swimming and horseback riding as a teenager, and during the summer vacations I have been known to disappear into the French Alps wearing a large backpack and not come back for several days. Since a bit more than a year ago I’ve taken up indoor climbing, which I do quite enthusiastically now one or two days a week.

Well, it’s a chain letter, so let me do unto others as I have been done unto: Mark Dirk-Jan Jeroen Bert

I added an aggregator to my site for some of the low-volume blogs I like to keep track of. It’s on the sidebar, under ‘pages’. Thanks to the BDP aggregator from ozpolitics, with a little help from the Exec-PHP plugin from Bluesome. I’m not quite certain about the latter, though; my site seems to feel slower after I installed it, and of course it’s a bit scary from a security perspective. Maybe I should add a custom page template and stick the PHP code in there.

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Well, I must say I’m quite pleased with Wordpress so far.

I did some customizations, and ran into some minor problems:

Spam Karma

I didn’t want to enable comments and pingbacks before I had some good spam protection. I have that now: Jeroen pointed me to Spam Karma 2. Although the installation and configuration were easy enough, I ran into one snag: it did not display captcha images correctly.

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A few years ago, I was on a train from Eindhoven to Utrecht; this should have been a ride of less than an hour, but thanks to various mishaps (”ladies and gentlemen, it turns out that the replacement engine is also broken, so we’ll be here a little longer”), it took me almost five hours to get home that day.

Fortunately I had my laptop with me, so to while away the time I wrote a very simple Lisp interpreter in Perl. Recently, while looking through some old back-ups, I came across it again.

Here it is: the interpreter and a test file. To run the test program, execute:
perl minilisp.pl test.l

Needless to say, this is a toy. If, for any reason, you need a real Lisp interpreter in Perl, check out perl-lisp on CPAN, by Gisle Aas.

Well, looks like I’ve got Wordpress up and running. That was easy!

My previous blog can be found at the site of my former employer, Info Support.