I woke up in the wee hours of the morning for no good reason (argh!), and screwed around with majordomo for a few hours. Talk about "stepping in a pile of Unix"--majordomo takes far too much time to install and configure. We need something in RPM format with a nice GUI. Maybe a Linuxconf front end to majordomo, or another mailing list manager entirely?

In any event, the linux-robotics mailing list in now online! Send mail to majordomo@randomhacks.com with the body "subscribe linux-robotics".

Here's another MathMap hack:

xspread = 50.0;
yspread = 50.0;

xshift = (1-t)*(xspread*curve(rand(0, 1)) - xspread/2);
yshift = (1-t)*(yspread*curve(rand(0, 1)) - yspread/2);
origValXY(x+xshift, y+yshift)

This is a parameterized version of the standard spread filter. You can control the X and Y values at the top of the script. The curve function allows you to bias the random distribution using the standard MathMap curve widget--try making a two-step curve for an interesting effect. To see your image reassemble itself, turn on MathMap animation. Just remember that undo doesn't seem to work with MathMap animation, for better or worse.

I download RPMS for Guile (thanks to the Gnome folks) and have started unlearning my Common LISP habits in preparation for a jump back into Scheme.