Allegro CL General / Technical Announcements: February 2016

Tech Corner News

March, 2016

In this issue

Allegro CL Application: Fast-Square's Coil Cut Optimizer (CCO)

Coil Cut Optimizer (CCO) is an Optimization software application for Steel Service Centers, which helps human programmers generate Optimized Cutting Patterns for Slitting and Cut-To-Length machines, minimizing Trim-Loss (Scrap) and Set-up time.

The Optimization algorithm used in CCO has received the IAAI award from the American Association for Artificial Intelligence as best Industrial Application of Artificial Intelligence: E.Bertolotti, E.Castaldo, G.Giannone "Near Optimal Objects Packing Through Dimensional Unfolding", in "Proceedings of the Eight Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence" (pg. 1433-1442); The MIT Press.

To read the full article, see here.

Edi Weitz's New Book: Common Lisp Recipes

This book is a collection of solutions to problems and answers to questions you are likely to encounter when writing real-world applications in Common Lisp. Written by an author who has used Common Lisp in many successful commercial projects over more than a decade, this book covers areas as diverse as web programming, databases, graphical user interfaces, integration with other programming languages, multi-threading, and mobile devices as well as debugging techniques and optimization, to name just a few. It is also the first Common Lisp book to tackle such advanced topics as environment access, logical pathnames, Gray streams, delivery of executables, pretty printing, setf expansions, or changing the syntax of Common Lisp.

For further information about this book, including how to buy it, see here

The 9th European Lisp Symposium, May 9-10, Krakow, Poland

The purpose of the European Lisp Symposium is to provide a forum for the discussion and dissemination of all aspects of design, implementationand application of any of the Lisp and Lisp-inspired dialects, including Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, AutoLisp, ISLISP, Dylan, Clojure, ACL2, ECMAScript, Racket, SKILL, Hop and so on. We encourage everyone interested in Lisp to participate.

The conference will be held at the Department of Computer Science, AGH University of Science and Technology, in Krakow, Poland.

For additional information about the conference, see here.

Tech Corner Article: 32-bit Lisp on Ubuntu

Ubuntu Linux ceased supporting 32-bit libraries and as a result, we believed that 32-bit Allegro CL would not work reliably on that operating system. (64-bit Allegro CL was not affected.) So we documented that 32-bit Allegro CL was no longer supported on Ubuntu. However, one of our intrepid users figured out how to get 32-bit Allegro to work and we verified his procedure.

Read the full Tech Corner article here.

Tech Corner Article: New Express avoids 'cannot reserve aclmalloc' problem

Particular with Windows 10, but also on other OS's, users have reported problems when Allegro CL attempts to start: an error with a message similar to "Could not restore the image file" or "Aclmalloc heap has to be relocated" is signaled and Lisp fails to start.

Allegro CL has to map several areas when it starts, two being the Lisp heap and the Aclmalloc heap. The location of the Lisp heap is flexible but the Aclmalloc heap must be mapped to the location specified when it was built. Historically, there has been no problem doing this, but, particularly in 64-bit OS's, more of the area used by 32-bit Lisp is being used by the OS (mapping libraries and such). As a result, it is more common for there to be mapping problems on startup, with messages like the ones listed.

If this happens to you, you can try restarting your computer (which may change where things are mapped) but beyond that, there are no easy solutions. To address this problem, we have created a new version of Allegro CL Express with heap locations more carefully chosen.

Express users should replace their current 10.0 version with the new one, available from http://franz.com/downloads/clp/survey.

Gruff v6.1 Now Available

New Features Include:

CONSTRUCT queries are now handled (though not with SPARQL endpoints). The constructed triples will be browsable as part of an ad hoc federation with the currently open store, and so the store is not modified.
On Windows, SPARQL queries in the query view can now be canceled (though not for SPARQL endpoints or on Agraph 3.3). The "Run Query" button turns into a "Cancel Query" button to indicate this.
The new command "Help | Activity Logging" can be used to generate debugging information to send to Franz, especially for actions that take too long or if a bad state arises in the graph view.
When using "Display | Display a Class Node by Class Hierarchy" or "Display | Display an Instance Node by Class Hierarchy", you can now select multiple classes to display them all or an instance of each one.
The command "Link | Display Linked Nodes for the Current Predicates" is now more interruptible (with Escape or Q as usual).
Fixed: A few commands could sometimes take a long time due to accidentally not limiting the number of triples that they fetch from the server. These commands include "Display | Display an Instance Node by Class Hierarchy", "Edit | Edit Node by Type" and selecting a predicate according to domain and range specifications. (This was discovered by using the new activity logging.) You can also cancel Edit Node by Type as usual with Escape or Q if it's still taking too long.
Fixed: The background pixmap in the graph view could get lost and no longer displayed because it pointed to a file in an earlier version of Gruff that you deleted.
The table view will now indicate when the displayed set of triples is incomplete due to "Global Options | General Triple-Fetching Limit".
Miscellaneous refinements to the new lisp evaluation view. You can also now change the fonts on the Evaluation Options menu.
Still more tweaks to the new tree layout algorithm for neatness and reduced link lengths.
Other small efficiency improvements.

For additional information, see the Gruff Documentation

Franz awarded Corporate America's Best in Semantic Web Technology - USA & Leader in Graph Database Products

Franz Inc., an early innovator in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and leading supplier of Semantic Graph Database technology has been recognized As "Best in Semantic Web Technology - USA & Leader in Graph Database Products" by Corporate America Software and Technology.

"At Corporate America, it's our priority to showcase prominent professionals who are excelling in their industry and outperforming their competitors," said Hannah Stevenson, Managing Group Editor, AI Global Media. "Franz Inc. have a reputation for innovation, utilizing their expert knowledge to create complex and exciting Graph Database solutions. Franz's unique platforms offer highly scalable technologies for solving complex Big Data challenges."

Allegro CL General / Technical Announcements

Monday, February 22, 2016

Franz Inc. (+ Lisp Graph) Tech Corner - March 2016

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