Will's blog

Between the end of 2003 and mid-2007, I played in a D&D campaign that was really fantastic. The campaign ran its course and our stalwart crew of awesomeness saved the world and then we went our separate ways.

During that period of time, I kept copious notes in a MoinMoin wiki of our adventures. It was always a hope that I'd take these notes and do something with them.

I played in another campaign in 2007 and used InkScape to do a comic of the first session or two of that campaign in the style of Order of the Stick. It was a lot of fun, but took forever to do each panel. I decided it'd take me a long time to do 4 years worth of sessions in comic form.

So I started a book version. I wrote a Python script (which I've since lost) that converted MoinMoin format into restructured text. Then I threw the whole thing together with Sphinx. This allowed me to edit in restructured text, compile a LaTeX document, and then generate a PDF from that. Plus I got to spend some quality time with Sphinx to see how well it generates manuals.

That worked really well except for some minor issues.

First, I needed to set the paper size in the resulting PDF. To do that, I set the latex_preamble in the conf.py file to:

latex_preamble = '\\usepackage[papersize={6in,9in}]{geometry}\n' \
                 '\\setcounter{tocdepth}{1}'

That creates the PDF in the size I needed: 6in x 9in.

Second, I needed to fix some images so they were in a table with text. I ended up writing the LaTeX for that by hand.

Third, I didn't think the chapter headings really fit with what I wanted to build, so I changed the fncychap style to Lenny.

While I was editing the LaTeX directly, I ended up changing some of the front matter and removed the index (didn't need an index to a novel).

It took me a year to put the book together. It's around 240 pages or so. Today I finished it up, created a Lulu project for the book and had a bunch of copies printed for the others in the group. Feels good to have that done. I'm looking forward to getting a copy in the mail.

I had an eye doctor appointment a few weeks ago and discovered my prescription had changed. It wasn't a huge big change like last time (I was in grad school), but it was big enough to warrant new glasses. Not to mention that my current glasses were really scratched up and "well-used".

I have a very limited budget these days. A couple of years ago I read Adventures in $40 eyeglasses. I decided to try buying a pair online this time around.

I bought my pair from 39dollarglasses.com. I got the Polermo frames ($39) and figured I might as well get the anti-reflective coating ($24). Add on shipping ($5 or something) and an extra charge because my prescription is screwy ($20) and the whole thing was around $90. I had paid $310 for my previous pair. I think $90 is a good step in the right direction. Next time, I'll probably wait for a special which would have reduced the cost further.

I got them in the mail today. They fit great, they're just as strong and feel as good as the previous $310 glasses and I had completely forgotten I was wearing new glasses a couple of hours after slipping them on.

The work we were having done to the new house is done, we moved in, and we're settling down now. S wanted a couple of rooms painted, so I and a handful of awesome people did that over the weekend. The living room is set up (we can finally sit on the couches) and I've started bootstrapping the office. That means I can finally get some serious work done.

We're up in Chelmsford, MA, USA now. If you're in the area and want to hang out, I'm definitely game. I haven't done any research to see what groups are in the area yet, so if you know Linux, Python, Miro, FSF, or other kinds of groups, I'd be interested.

I'm moving this week. That's why I haven't been online much or doing any work on Miro, PyBlosxom or other things I usually work on.

It gets better! After I'm done moving, I'm heading up to my parents' place while we have work done on the house. I'll be there for a couple of weeks. I'll have Internet access and will be working, but my cell phone doesn't get reception up there, so I'll be out of touch in a different way.

Assuming all goes well, I'll be back home and everything will be totally groovy in September.

For the last month, I've been going through the house-buying process. Today we found out we were approved for a mortgage and so now we're all set.

Thus, it's official: PCF-Boston will be moving and will become PCF-Chelmsford.

I plan to continue co-working, but I'll be doing it in the Chelmsford/Lowell area. ^[1]

There are a few ramifications. The first is that it'll be harder to take me out for a cup of coffee if you're in the Boston area. The second is that I probably won't be going into the FSF offices to help with mailings anymore. The third is that there will likely be a period of a few days in the middle of August when the build boxes will be down and there won't be any nightlies.

One of the big boons is that my office will double in space which should make it easier to get more things done since I'll have room for additional equipment, monitors, and such. And I'll have more space to produce podcasts and screencasts and such.

As a sidenote, the house-buying process is fricking insane. And not in a good way. Thank goodness for gscan2pdf, Gimp, Thunderbird, Postfix, Debian, Ubuntu, and the dozen smaller bits that made my side of the paper-pushing much much easier.

[1] Where "continue" is defined as "start coworking again which I haven't done in a long time because I just haven't had time to organize things".

I was at OSCON last week and met many people some of whom I've known for several years (Ted, Steve, ...). I also met a bunch of people who I've followed for many years and some people I've worked with when doing the Firefox 3 work I did. It was really exciting to be there. I didn't attend any keynotes or sessions, but the conversations I had were well worth trekking all the way to Portland, OR and back. I also got to spend a week with my sister who lives in Portland.

On the flight there and back, I worked on PyBlosxom. I mostly concentrated getting better acquainted with nose and using nose and coverage to help guide my testing efforts. The results were phenomenal. I increased the test count from 53 or so to 207, I increased coverage from some low number to 57% and I discovered and fixed a bunch of bugs. Because I switched to git over svn, I was able to commit locally and manage the work I was doing. All very exciting.

Miro is coming along very nicely. We took the plunge to ditch the previous frontend for a new one that has fewer layers of indirection. The results so far are encouraging--I think it was absolutely the right thing to do. Incidentally, I blogged about OSCON on my Miro devblog.

In the last few months, I've thrown together several web-sites using werkzeug, sqlalchemy, and mako. I really like this stack since it doesn't involve a lot of infrastructure and the number of files and "things" involved is pretty small. I think this is going to be my preferred stack for webapps going forward.

Just before OSCON, I signed up with identi.ca. It's my first micro-blogging account. Mostly I wanted to see what micro-blogging was like and follow other OSCON attendees. OSCON had a _lot_ of back-channel conversations going on.

Just before signing up for an identi.ca account, I met Jack, who lives around the corner from where I live. I wish I had made the effort to contact him years ago.

I think that's about it. It's been an interesting few months.

I spent the better part of my youth doing Oddessey of the Mind (which has gone through some difficulties and splintered as near as I can tell), programming, bicycling, and playing D&D.

D&D was both entertaining and also wildly educational. I was in a bunch of campaigns and we were studying architecture, history, military campaigns, meteorology, the middle ages, math, economics, sociology, philosophy and a variety of other topics to create worlds that were fresh, inventive and believable. As such, I, too, salute Gary Gygax on his way to the other planes.

As a side note, it's interesting to see the overlap between programmers and related people around my age and D&D players.

I got married last May and changed my name to my wife's name. This had two interesting consequences. First, it surprises many people when they find out and I have to have my memorized explanation ready to go. Second, changing your name is really scary. I've been waiting for a period of time where I'm not involved in any governmental anything including flying because I don't want to confuse someone because I'm half-way through a name change and get labeled a terrorist for the rest of my life.

I started the name-changing process a couple of weeks ago. I'm now William Kahn-Greene. I kept Guaraldi as my "maiden name"--I have no idea what the equivalent term is for men. I've spent the greater part of the last two weeks without "proper documentation"--that's been scary. Thank goodness for telecommuting!

As an aside, I can't wait for my idiot government to get over this terrorist panic. I can't imagine the next fear-craze to sweep the nation. I secretly hope it's global warming or something similar that has more useful consequences like energy usage overhaul and fewer consequences like transforming into a police state and war-mongering.

I mothered the Miro 1.1 release earlier today. Then I decided to push out PyBlosxom 1.4.3 which I have been sitting on for a month. Then after talking with "paulproteus", I decided to go for the hat-trick and released Lyntin 4.2 as well.

w00t for releasing three software thingies in one day! Boo for sitting on two of them for extended periods of time.

It was a pretty wild year for me. I had a massive health crisis at the beginning of the year, wrote an almost-working compiler for a functional language using SML targetting SPIM, finished up grad school, got married, landed a job at Participatory Culture Foundation, made a lot of new friends, mentored a GSoC project, helped out with GHOP, started the big push for PyBlosxom 2.0, released a new version of Bee Careful, Marvin under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and submitted my first patch for Firefox 3.0.

I started the Nomadic Telecommuting Herd which has regular meetings, but hasn't extended beyond Chris and I, yet. I'll push this more at some point in the spring when it's more fun to go outside.

I also joined a few projects that I haven't been able to get to yet like the Python docs project and Geyser. I'm interested in helping out both of them, but haven't found the time yet.

This year I want to tame the firehose, get some good work done, participate more in other projects, possibly learn C++ and reach out to other people in the area (Somerville, MA, USA) to get together and hack more. I'd also like to get a new laptop, but the longer I wait, the better the possibilities become.

Went out to lunch with Chris, John and Dean (who I don't think has a blog). That was pretty cool. We talked about a bunch of stuff and the hamburgers at Christopher's in Porter Square (Cambridge, MA, USA) are really good.

I continued working on adding enclosure viewing support to the subscribe preview page in Firefox 3.0. I've almost got Yahoo MRSS support in. Mental note: one wastes less time if one double-checks the tests to make sure they're testing correctly. Oops.

I'm doing some minor mentoring for GHOP mostly on PyBlosxom related tasks. I'm on both of the mailing lists for GHOP-PSF and it's hard to keep in mind that the people working on these tasks are students in high school and early undergrad. It's like an army of really able, but not very experienced, bodies hungrily munching large bites out of project todo items. PyBlosxom had 4 tasks in last week and 4 in this week. It's great because the help is fantastic and it's forcing me to get around to work on organizing the project and development for PyBlosxom 2.0.

If you're in high school or college and want to do some Python-related work, definitely take a look at GHOP! If you're a Pythonista or Pythoneer and have some spare cycles, definitely come help us mentor. If you have a Python project and need help with screencasts, documentation, testing and other small tasks, take a look at GHOP. Titus has more on his blog.

PyBlosxom 2.0 is going to be a huge overhaul from PyBlosxom 1.4. I'm getting lots of help from the people who hang out on #pyblosxom on IRC, Ryan, Michael and various other people who pop on, ask questions and help identify issues. Progress is excellent so far.

In PCF land, I have a blog focused on PCF work and Miro development. It's at http://pculture.org/devblogs/wguaraldi. I figured I'd keep it separate. It runs on WordPress so that's giving me some WordPress experience.

Whoever fixed NetworkManager for Ubuntu Gutsy should get a gold star. I did an update on 12/4 and picked up a new set of packages and my perpetual wireless networking problems all went away. Bless you!

Also, if you've got young children in your life, definitely take a look at Bee Careful Marvin. It's geared towards children up to around 6 or so. You can get a professionally printed version at Lulu, but you can also download a PDF for free. It's released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and "the source" is all at that link. Print it out, copy it, give it to your young friends, translate it, rewrite it with Star Wars dialogue, ....

S and I decided to assign tables for our guests during the wedding reception. There were a bunch of good reasons for doing this which I'm not going to go into here. However, assigning 100 or so guests to 10 or so tables while maximizing "goodness" and minimizing "badness" isn't trivial to do on paper by hand. At some point during wedding planning, I decided we could do table layout with a modified register allocation algorithm. This is a quick summary of translating register allocation into table layout along with some commentary on how this works nicely and also where it doesn't quite work.

More after the jump....

Read more...

I've been married for a little over a week and it's really great!

Our wedding went off fantastically! The photobooks I made using Tabblo evoked amazement from most people who looked at them. The cakes we made came out great with little sugar bees flying around on top. Creative Catering, our caterer, was amazing and the food was some of the best food I've ever had at a wedding. During the reception we had New England style contra-dancing. Even though it was very warm, many guests participated and it was a lot of fun!

It was really great to see people, but ... I didn't have enough time to get to talk with everyone. I don't think S did either. I think that's my only regret--we'll have to throw another big party next year.

The day after the wedding, S and I went to S' parents' house for a brunch then off to Cape Code where we bumped around for a few days amidst glorious weather.

I'm still fiddling with my ring. I think that'll take a bit of getting used to because it gets sticky and then feels weird.

Wedding planning was crazy and while there are a zillion guides and articles filled with pictures of blushing brides and cakes that are built like a Scottish castle none of the ones I saw use project management techniques. I figured while it's all fresh in my mind, I'll sketch something out and at least hit all the big issues that, had we known earlier, would have made it a lot easier and more straight-forward.

Two years of classes and work are over¹and I have a Masters in Computer Science². They asked me what I focused in, but I'm not entirely sure. The classes I took fall into the Software Engineering category and also in the Programming Languages category. I think I ended up with a Masters in CS focusing on Programming Languages.

It was a fantastic experience and I'm twice as able as I used to be. I learned Scheme and SML, Adaptive programming and aspect-oriented programming, XML Schema and XPath 2.0 (to some degree), structure-shy development and compiler technology, operational semantics and denotational semantics (though I'm still kind of iffy on the denotational kind), functional programming and LaTeX, and I was able to go to a bunch of really neat seminars and hang out with a group of exceptional people.

I'm really glad I took the two years off to go back to school. I didn't expect it to pay off so greatly.

[1] - Technically I don't have it yet, but I will this weekend assuming all goes well which I no reason to believe that it won't.

[2] - While I'm done with everything that is to be graded, I'm still working on finishing up two papers for my research project. I imagine that'll take me a while longer to do.

Today I was inducted into Upsilon Pi Epsilon which is the "international honor society for the computing and information disciplines". The induction ceremony was a little weird, but I'm not sure I've been to an induction ceremony that wasn't a little weird.

In undergrad I graduated with Honors from the university and Honors from the Computer Science department, too. As far as I know, no one has ever treated me differently. I think the only people who have expressed any excitement one way or another are my parents and my fiance.

The real bummer is that I'm realizing that my grad school days are very close to over and I'll be going back to work again. Hopefully I'll find a job where my peers are as wildly excited about the technology as I am.

On a side note, there are some really great Wikibooks on computer science topics.

My compilers class is using the Appel book Modern Compiler Implementation in ML. Chapters 1 through 12 have a programming exercise that walks you through building a compiler in ML for a language called Tiger targetting the MIPS processor. It's pretty neat--Tiger has some funky things in it that make some of the pieces non-trivial.

After a week of programming straight (i.e. I get up in the morning, eat something, put on sweat pants, work on the compiler... go to bed) we got register allocation working using graph coloring. It does spills and coalescing but not coalescing of spills--that'd be really cool.

I'm really psyched! I think all we have left is some minor bits here and there and then it's done and we'll have a compiler for Tiger. I'm tossing around adding a random number generator to the runtime.c file so that I can implement a Dwarven name generator using Markov chains.

A friend of mine gave me his new album Digital Analog Heart and Soul a couple of weeks ago. I had it ripped on my hard drive and so that's what I listened to for the last 7 days of register allocator programming. The song The Fall is pretty cool--he's done it in concerts a lot.

Now I need to get back to my research project....

This was floating around on programming.reddit.com and I finally decided to see what it was all about because I wasn't getting very far with register allocation and needed a break. I click on the link, start reading about guns and ammo and then... I see Olin.Shivers@h... Gah! That's my professor!

Then I broke into a sweat and went back to work on register allocation and graph coloring ¹.

[1] - Actually, what really happened is that I took a break, read that page, exclaimed, "Gah! That's my professor!", then broke into a sweat, then wrote a blog entry about it, and now I'm going back to working on register allocation.

I think most people have stories about their undergrad days in Computer Science where they were hooked up to an intervenous drip of caffeine and staying up all hours of the night wrangling with assembler on a robot that had lasers for eyes and could do backflips down the hall and land on both feet while juggling C pointers and doing remote garbage collection ... And most of the stories from these days are eseentially myths and the characters of those stories are the CS equivalent of Greek gods.

One of those people from my undergrad days was Window Snyder. She was just the awesome of the awesome. She had a VAX machine for a coffee table. As I recall, she dropped out because she was involved in some clandestine project somewhere that involved all kinds of stuff that so boggled my mind at the time that I don't even remember a hint of it.

Gary (another Greek god from my undergrad days) told me that she's now the head of security strategy at Mozilla. Sure enough, she even has her own wiki page. Craziness!

It was so freaking cold last night that the pipes for our shower froze (again). Unlike the previous two times, this time they're totally frozen as opposed to just mostly frozen where the hot water works but the cold water doesn't.

The pipes go from the water tank all the way across the basement getting smaller and smaller until they go up an outside wall in the corner of the house to our shower. That corner of the house gets no sunlight and it's exposed to the wind. The house has terrible, no-good, very-bad insulation, too.

The last couple of times I was able to unfreeze the pipes by sitting in the basement with a hair dryer in the hole that the bath tub drain pipe comes down from. This time that didn't seem to work.

On top of that, our heating bill for last month was $400. Our landlord says that's normal, but I looked through all the heating bills for all the apartments I've rented over the lat 6 years and I've never used that many therms before. This apartment isn't any bigger than previous apartments--it's actually smaller! I think S and I are going to move when our lease is up.

I think the moral of this story is that having alcohol wipes, an extension cord, and a hair dryer on hand is really handy.

Life: I had a really rough January, but I'm not going to get into the details. The kitchen sink drain is working again, the pipes are unfrozen, and our cell phones work [1].

School: My compilers class is going really well. My research project needs a lot more attention.

PyBlosxom: I've been doing some PyBlosxom work again as Ryan gets ready to do a contributed plugins pack release that has all the changes to the comments plugin and all its friends. He's done some really great work pulling things together.

I started hanging out on freenode on #pyblosxom after Asheesh mentioned it on the pyblosxom-users mailing list. That's been pretty cool, but the channel has been pretty quiet most of the time.

Wedding planning is ... coming along. I figure a wedding has 10,000 decisions to make of which maybe 5% of them are "big decisions" (venue, church?, food, ...) and the rest don't really affect the big picture, but they need to be made and it's way harder to make them and there are thousands (silverwear, colors, flowers, flower arrangements, music, favors, text for the invitations, the border on the invitations, the pictures on the stamps for the invitation envelopes, color of the envelopes...). It's been interesting. S has taken on most of the planning lately since I've been sick and working on school work.

Things are moving along pretty quickly. In a few months I'll be graduated, married, and (hopefully) employed!

[1] - S and I get our cell phone service from Working Assets and they have the best customer support of any cell phone company I've been with. You call, you talk to someone immediately, they ask you questions trying to isolate the nuances of your problem, and then they work with you to fix the problem. No hold music, no tedious chit-chat, no scripts, no wasted time, ... And they call you back later to make sure the problem is resolved and that you're satisfied. It's just awesome.

A few days ago, we discovered that the kitchen sink drain is blocked. Not only that, but it's blocked below the point where the drain for the upstairs neighbors' kitchen sink meets ours. So when they use their sink (for example, when they clean pots from the spaghetti with clam sauce), it backflows into our sink and then our sink overflows. Ewwww!

An "excavation" guy showed up at 7:45 in the morning to unblock the sink. While he was working, I learned that garbage disposals, while convenient, are the devil's tool and were probably invented by an evil plumber looking for a steady flow of business. I had no idea.

Anyhow, he couldn't excavate it enough and it looks like we're going to have to have the section of pipe replaced. Craziness!

Today is the start of the new year. I went through my web-site and updated a bunch of stuff to reflect changes in status, direction, and what's coming up. I also spent some time updating my resume.

Writing resumes is a pain in the ass. I've done a lot of stuff and it's hard to prove that I did it and that I did it well since most of it is locked behind NDAs and Confidentiality agreements and all that. Even if it wasn't, it's a lot of stuff and I only remember bits and pieces of it and I don't remember all the gory details. The whole thing feels like marketing: "Hire me because it'll be AWESOME!"

I threw in a section of technology smorgasbord--acronyms, "technologies", applications, ... blah blah blah. Most people have all that stuff on their resume regardless of whether they have much experience with it. It's hard to know how to get across my experience/knowledge level in those things--am I an expert or just an advanced user? If I under-rate myself to err on the side of accuracy, will a company skip over me because their HR department is looking for people with 25 years of Java experience?

It's hard to get across in a resume that I work pretty hard, I work pretty smart, and I get along with other people pretty well. It's hard to get across that I'm somewhat quiet but I work hard at communicating comprehensively and accurately without overloading someone with lots of stuff. It's hard to get across that the people I've worked with over the years really liked working with me and that together we've done a lot of really great stuff, but for some reason it doesn't seem as great when I look at the things other people my age have accomplished. It's hard to get across that over the last 10 years, I've grown a lot and so far I keep growing--I am not a stick in the mud. It's easy to get across that I really love this stuff and that I practically dream about it because I can say that in a single sentence.

The only evidence I have that's publicly available is the work I've done on Lyntin and PyBlosxom. I cut a lot of teeth on Lyntin, but I'm really happy with where I left it. I'm not as happy with PyBlosxom, but I think that's mostly just a function of how much work I wanted to do versus how much time I actually spent on it.

My resume is here. I'm Will Guaraldi and I'm looking for a job in May 2007.

A couple of weeks ago, I started a family account at Working Assets and switched S over from Verizon and me over from Sprint PCS. The switch-over was a little dicey partially because there were so many numbers involved and I think they had set us up a little wonky. I switched us over one at a time because I figured we'd have issues, so we were sufficiently prepared to have a phone out of service for a few days. I tried calling Sprint PCS to cancel my account and make sure everything was ok, but all the numbers I could find required a valid Sprint PCS number to get through to someone. Regardless, everything's great now, we have two new phones, we're saving about $20 because we have a family plan, and S can call me whenever she wants for free. w00t!

Today I got a bill from Sprint PCS with a $150 termination fee. I tried calling the telephone number on the bill and couldn't get through to anyone because you need a valid Sprint PCS number. I finally called 1-800-SPRINT-1 (their telesales number), got through to someone who was really annoyed because I called the wrong number, but she patched me through to Customer Service. Then I talked to a really patient and wonderful person who's name I don't recall. We worked through the timing of events and it turns out that my 2-year contract started on the next billing cycle and not (as the Sprint PCS representative at the store told me) when I paid for the new phone and switched over. Anyhow, bottom line is that I cancelled a couple of days too early. She put me on hold for 10 minutes or so and then when she came back she happily told me that they waived the cancellation fee after noting that I had been a good customer for 6 years or so.

From this I note the following things:

• It's good to have copies of the paperwork in front of you so that you can tell them all the specifics: bills, credit card bills, receipts, things you've signed, promotions you took advantage of, .... Sure they have stuff in their system, but I think the line-items in their system are somewhat open to interpretation.
• It's good to be polite and courteous. The person on the other end of the phone isn't responsible for the mix-up--they're helping you to sort it out within the bounds of the wonky system they're in.
• It's good to allocate lots of time for working through issues with big companies because it often requires talking to multiple people (keep logs of all chats and who said what), sitting on hold, and explaining the details again and again.

At the end of the day, everything seems kosher and I've completed one of the major tasks for "winter break". w00t!

I've finished my third (out of four) semester of grad school on the way to get my Masters in Computer Science. This semester was really tough, partially because I didn't have the experience and knowledge coming into my classes that I needed. Even so, I learned a huge amount of stuff, much of it immediately applicable, and ended up with an A and a B+.

I'm taking a compilers course next semester with Olin Shivers which should be really exciting and I'm going to do a project on DAJ input specification stuff (I still have to work out the project statement).

Between now and next semester, I've got a boatload of stuff to do. I'm going to catch up on PyBlosxom, help Ryan with the contributed plugins (and comments), work with Lance to get the documentation updated, and hopefully release a version of PyBlosxom that is a radical improvement in the maturity of the project code, infrastructure, and process.

It'll be a busy month....

I had my last class of Semantics in Programming Languages today. We finished up with proving adequacy between the denotational semantics of the Untyped Lambda Calculus (the P-omega semantics from Scott) with the operational semantics. It was pretty wild stuff... Most of it a little over my head but mostly because we zipped through it due to the impending termination of class (class turns out not to be bottom--it does in fact terminate).

I have a bit more to do on a project for my Advanced Software Development class and I think I'm going to write up a case-study for using DAJ to build a unit tester with test cases described by a DSL. DAJ has all the pieces to make this very easy to design, build, maintain, and modify.

I'm going to be doing a research project related to DAJ next semester which I'm excited about. But... that's a month away at least. For now I'm going to prioritize and cruise through my backlog of stuff I've been sitting on. Like finishing up the work I was doing on PyBlosxom over the summer.

It's been a few weeks since my last blog entry. My classes are really hard. This semester I'm taking Semantics in Programming Languages (covering operational and denotational semantics and a bunch of other stuff) and Advanced Software Development (covering structure-shy adaptive programming, AspectJ, DemeterJ, DAJ, DJ, and various techniques) and it's been a wild semester so far.

I've put everything else I normally do on hold until the end of the semester when I get some downtime.

Interestingly, I wrote a very similar blog entry last year.

I'm back in classes for my Fall 2006 semester of grad school at NEU CCIS. I'm taking two classes this semester: Semantics in Programming Languages with Professor Wand and Advanced Software Development ith Professor Lieberherr.

I've had two sessions of the Semantics in Programming Languages class and it's been really educational so far. I'm in the process of learning LaTeX so I can type up my notes and do my homework. I picked up docbook a year ago or so to do the PyBlosxom manual and some other work--I like LaTeX a lot more than I liked docbook.

While searching the Internet for LaTeX tutorial/manual resources, I bumped into Getting to grips with Latex. It's been a great tutorial so far--I've picked up almost enough to type up the first two days of notes. The issue I have now is that I need to code some math symbols but I don't really know what the name of the symbol is so it's difficult to find.

I just found out that Stargate SG-1 was cancelled and this is its final season. That really bums me out. I thoroughly enjoyed the series and it's one of two shows that S and I keep up with (the other being Stargate Atlantis--though I also watch Battlestar Galactica).

I realize that all things end eventually, but I've spent a good part of the last 4 or 5 years watching SG-1 episodes and thinking about the various predicaments they've been in. It's a great science fiction show on at a time when most shows are sitcoms and reality tv shows.

Anyhow, I'm bummed. It's irritating when companies cancel good shows because of results that are as likely to be results of poor business decisions than a poor show no one is interested in. I very much look forward to the time when more "tv shows" are less like they are now and more like vlogs which I can enjoy during downtime when it fits my schedule.

I dislike doing my taxes because I'm paranoid that I'm going to do them wrong and the government is going to assume I'm an evil person is going to beat the crap out of me. So the first days of spring are tainted with that foul wind of tax season.

This year I received an immense amount of immensely useful help from my brother who seems to really have a handle on the tax thing. Also I switched from using TurboTax to Tax-Engine. Tax-Engine is easier on my browser, but I'm not sure it really helped me much in the long run.

Regardless, it's done and I can move on.

I just finished the midterm for my Principles of Programming Languages class with Professor Mitch Wand and it was an absolutely exciting experience. So exciting that when I got home I wrote an email to Professor Wand telling him that it was the most exciting exam I've had at Northeastern. It was filled with all these exciting mind-bending puzzles complete with subtle nuances and all kinds of exciting stuff!

So then I told S that I just wrote my professor to tell him that the exam was really awesome. Then it occurred to me that I'm a nerd--the evidence is clear on that note. Then I said, "Gosh--I should just follow it up with an entry on my blog!" At that point, S burst out laughing and said, "You know you're a nerd when you come home from a midterm, write to the professor telling him it was really great, and then write a blog entry about the whole thing complete with introspection of the entire event." Well, she didn't say that whole thing, but she was definitely thinking it.

I switched from Premier Insurance to Amica Insurance a month ago. As I continue to interact with Amica about various things (renter's insurance, billing issues, ...), I'm increasingly happy I made the move. Premier was like a brick wall--any time I wanted to talk to them, I had to go through an agent and they would hem and haw about my problem and then mull over it and offer four thousand excuses and other useless bits of trivia and then finally get around to calling Premier and talking it over with them.

Most of my interactions with Premier involved classic man-in-the-middle-who-doesn't-understand-the-problem issues. Irritating.

I called up Amica, got a dedicated person to help me through switching over, answering my questions, and making sure everything went through ok. Every time I call them I get an intelligent human who knows what I'm talking about and helps me to fix the problem and my longest wait time has been three minutes. On top of that, they send me correspondence that's not written in insurance-speak and my premium is $150 less than it was with Premier.

Figured I'd write this up in case anyone else in the Massachusetts area had Premier and/or was looking to switch. Amica is good so far. At a bare minimum, it seems that if I were to have problems, they have the ability to help me through them.

We have forced-hot-water heat that gets piped through these monster radiators under windows in various rooms of our spacious apartment. In the cold winter months, it's sometimes very pleasant to sip a cup of tea while sitting on a radiator as it's warming up (they're not on all the time) and look out the window at the shabby house next door and count the places that no longer have paint.

However, it is quite a shock when you've made your cup of tea and you're prepared to spend a quiet moment contemplating paint and you sit down on the radiator blissfully forgetting that there is a hole in your pants.

YEOW!

I actually turned 30 a few weeks ago, but I've been super busy and haven't had time to get around to posting about it. Now I have.

Turning 30 doesn't seem really different or exciting or ground-breaking. That pretty much sums it up.

It turns out my internet connection was sucking for a week because evil ninja squirrels ate the cable that goes from the telephone pole to the building my apartment is in and then the cable filled with water. Who knew evil ninja squirrels were such a threat to my bottom line?!

The technician was awesome and replaced the line using an 18' ladder precariously parked in the middle of the semi-busy street in 20 minutes. The frosting on the cake was when he came inside and said, "Yeah, so squirrels chewed on the line and then it filled with water. There's nothing we can do about that because we can't kill all the squirrels."

Over the weekend, I watched the last sunrise of 2005 on a beach in Maine and then asked S to marry me and she said yes. So that was nice--she smiled at me all day long.

I got an email from Carol Spears (http://carol.gimp.org/) that caused me to take a day off to re-organize and relax a bit.

Anyhow, so no work for me today. I'm just going to clean out my email inbox, clean off my desk, figure out where I am with bills, do the dishes, and stuff like that. Maybe if I get really excited, I'll go grocery shopping.

I did spend a couple of minutes to update my blog to the most recent PyBlosxom in CVS. Thus I now have an ATOM 1.0 feed which seems to be working nicely. I'll look into the RSS 2.0 feed next, but that requires some planning because I don't want to hose any of the Planet feeds I'm on when I switch from the rss2renderer plugin to the native RSS 2.0 feed.

It's been a month since my last blog entry. I haven't done any blog updates since I haven't really made any progress with anything. Nonetheless, here's an update of where things are.

My algorithms course is just killing me. I'm doing some 40 hours of homework and studying for it each week and ... there are still some topics that I haven't really wrapped my head around. My computer systems course, however, is pretty easy--for some bizarre reason I'm very familiar with much of the material we've covered so far.

I've been very slowly working through PyBlosxom 1.3. It's going to contains a series of bug fixes (I have to re-organize everything so I know which ones have gone in so far) and also an overhaul of the flavour code allowing for flavour directories, subdirectory handling in the flavourdir, shipped flavours (better ones), ATOM 1.0, RSS 2.0, and hopefully with the changes it'll be much easier for people to build new flavours, package them up, and ship them around in a way that's trivial to install. That's the theory.

I think the ATOM 1.0 flavour is done--I need to do some more testing with it. I think I'll do this by upgrading my blog to the code in CVS and working with it there.

I don't think I've finished with the RSS 2.0 code yet. I don't remember where I am with that.

I'm trying to figure out how to pull images, css files, and other flavour-helper content in a flavour directory and source it through PyBlosxom. I think I may build a handler for it and have the handler kick off before the default blosxom_handler. It would then figure out which flavour is being displayed by looking at the referer and various other things available, check to see if the image/css file is there, and serve it if it is. I'm pretty sure there are corner cases here. It'd be nice if people could turn on and turn off this feature, too, since it could cause issues with other plugins. Though since it's a handler that runs if none of the other handlers ran, maybe it's not a big deal. It still needs thought. (Also, this isn't a comprehensive description.)

Also, I need to put together (or at least start putting together) a TODO list for the web-site. I'm having huge problems wrapping my head around this, though. I'd love to do this as a plugin, but... I think I may end up doing it all by hand. The other possibility is to enter in all the items into the SF bug and feature trackers--but I really dislike them. Tempting thoughts would be to move all development to my server, installing subversion and Trac, and doing the whole thing with those. But... that's a lot of work and it puts me in a position where I can't just throw my hands in the air and walk away.

I started grad school last week. The last few weeks have been pretty work-intensive as I squared away a lot of stuff so I didn't have to worry about it while I'm studying.

Also, bluesock suffered a hard drive failure and that took a few days to sort out.

I haven't finished the things I wanted to finish with PyBlosxom. I have been doing some research on Leonardo to see what sorts of things we can do to make installation, configuration, and extending PyBlosxom easier.

One thing I've been thinking about a lot is the current state of PyBlosxom plugins. I'm not as psyched about splitting plugins off into a separate project anymore. Lyntin had a core set of plugins that came with Lyntin and formed most of the functionality. Then users could add additional plugins if they so desired on a user-by-user basis. I think it's prudent to do the same thing with PyBlosxom. I think this will help the typical PyBlosxom installation. I'm not sure why I didn't think of this 8 months ago or so. I'd like to do this work for PyBlosxom 1.3.

I finally got around to re-doing the backup system on bluesock.org. I'm using arnie this time around. Previously, I was just rolling tarballs of things. arnie allows for incremental backups and it handles some more of the minor inconveniences that I had with my did-it-myself system.

Anyhow, so I decide that my backup script with arnie is working nicely and that I should remove all the test backups I've done so far. Inadvertently, I remove one of the directories that I'm backing up. DOH!

So I got to experience first-hand how difficult it would be to restore from backup. It went pretty smoothly and did what I expected it to do.

This reminds me of a similar situation from a couple of days ago. I had this 8x12 foot carpet in my car and I'm driving up to Chelmsford to deliver it to S's church. I decide it's hot so I roll down the driver-side and passenger-side front windows. After a few minutes, I decide I can't hear the radio, so I'd do AC instead. I roll up the driver-side front window without any problems, but the passenger-side front window just makes clicking noises--it doesn't go up. Ah well, I think to myself--I'll look at it when I'm not driving.

I get off the highway in Chelmsford and pull into a Dunkin Donuts parking lot. I have ... I think you'd call it automatic windows--they're electrically powered--so I leave the key in the ignition so I can power the window up and down. I wander over to the passenger-side front window, open the door, try the button, hear the clicky noises, and then stick my fingers into the door and pull the window up manually. That works out well and the window has enough friction to stay up as long as I don't touch the up/down button.

Smiling, I shut the door. Then I wander over to the driver-side to get my key out of the ignition and discover... that my car has locked itself!

So there I am in Chelmsford with my keys in the ignition and my car locked. I feel really stupid now--a radical contrast to the incredibly smart feeling I was just feeling after doing something incredibly smart. Then it occurs to me that my window is broken so I wander back to the passenger-side, manually pull down the window, grab my keys from the inside, stick my fingers in the door and pull the window back up again.

Then I decided to try a local mechanic rather than the VW dealership in Brighton who, while they have free coffee and they seem very professional about things, tends to be expensive and far away and irritating to schedule appointments with. I looked at the CarTalk web-site and found a well-rated mechanic a mile and a half from me, called them up, and had the window fixed the next day. I thought they added the total up wrong because it was impossibly low--but it turns out they're just cheaper.

Right. So backups are good and we have backups again.

I had the brakes replaced on my car yesterday--that was interesting. The guy said he had to replace the rear brakes because they were pretty dead, but he could try to lube up the front brakes so they wouldn't make the "I'm dying please replace me" scream of mortal anguish they've been making for a week or so. Given that they're brakes and that they were on their last legs, I had the guy replace them all. Curious that he suggested the lube solution, though.

I received a whole bunch of information from NEU--so I'm off to deal with that and get all the things I need to do done today.

Then tonight I'm going to pick up some wood from Home Depot and build a coffee table.

I think next week, I'll start working on PyBlosxom again. I've been following Ian Bicking's blog entries on WSGI and Paste and it's very intriguing.

S and I spend last Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday moving. We had lots of help from many places (thanks!) and overall the move went pretty smoothly. Now we have some minor issues like we own no pots and pans so we can't cook; our stuff is still packed and all over the place; and we don't have much food to eat.

I've done 10 furniture-moves in the last 7 years. I've done a bunch of non-furniture moves (mostly between corporate apartments when I was doing consulting) as well--but those only involved one or two carloads for each move.

If you're waiting on me to get something done, know that it's in the queue but it's going to take me a week or two to get a critical mass of stuff unpacked so I can continue regular activities again.

Due to various miscalculations and misunderstandings, we left the spearmint in its tiny little pot outside during the winter and it appears to have expired.

However, S and I are moving in a couple of weeks and we're going to try again! This time, though, we'll get a plant that has some other uses; we discovered that we have no use for spearmint.

A friend of mine just said:

Some day, you'll have kids... doing tech support is like talking to 5 year olds about anything... you never get a concise answer, nor one that makes sense.

Great. I can't wait.

It's shaping up to be a long, but productive week.

PyBlosxom

We're working through the problems a bunch of problems with the contributed plugins that have been sitting around for some time. This includes assigning licenses to all the plugins, adding version/author information, making sure they have some modicum of documentation, and at some point (hopefully) testing them all out in PyBlosxom 1.2. Hopefully this will put the contributed plugin pack in a much better state of being.

Steven, Bill, Wari, and Doug decided that it was high time we started using various features of CVS to make development better. I've had some growing pains with this and kind of wished people had figured things out and written up a process before making the changes. Even though I'm grumbling about the way it's happened, it is a good thing it is happening and it will make it a lot easier to do some of the things we've been doing for a while now. It'll also help a huge amount now that we've got more than one or two active developers.

I have a lot of plans for the PyBlosxom manual, but haven't had time to execute on any of them yet. The wiki we were storing documentation in was taken down since the jackass ISP that Wari had got all befuddled and confused and terminated his account with them. The problem here is that I had documentation in the wiki I hadn't had time to port to the manual yet. Fortunately, Wari sent me the contents of the wiki. I had documentation in there that I hadn't had time to port to the manual yet.

I'm 90% sure I know how to restructure what we've got right now to allow for Bill's index caching and also other storage systems. Depending on how things go with everyone else's PyBlosxom projects, I'll prototype this, write up a specification, send it round, and then implement the resulting modifications all before the next version of PyBlosxom.

Since Ted's PyBlosxom presentation at PyCon 2005, we've had 10-20x as much PyBlosxom development activity. That's been really exciting but also really daunting. Definitely a lot of growing pains mostly between my style of running things and peoples' vision for how things should be run.

Steven is still working on fixing the PyBlosxom registry to be a bit more user-friendly. We're short on flavour templates and some people really dislike this so I want to spend a week building new flavours at some point in the near future. Maybe I'll toss all the flavours in the contributed plugin pack to replace the existing flavour examples that come with it (I highly doubt anyone uses any of them).

Getting there....

grad school

I was accepted into the masters program at Northeastern University CCS. Starting in September, I'll be a full time grad student. My advisor is Mitch Wand (which is very exciting) and I was awarded a Dean's List Scholarship which reduces the costs assuming I maintain a 3.0 GPA and miscellaneous other things in fine print. All very exciting.

Need to learn Lisp, review all the stuff I learned in college, and attempt to get ahead of the game by covering as many of the things I'm going to be learning as possible.

DarkRifts

I've adjusted the way I'm working on DarkRifts such that I'm limiting myself to one coding goal every week. This will reduce the amount of stuff I'm doing there, but more importantly, it makes it easier to schedule things and gives me time to work on all the other non-DarkRifts stuff out there.

My book(s)

I'm in the process of looking at Lulu to do some self-publishing. S and I wrote a children's book last year which might be a good candidate for Lulu. The problem being that we'd need to redo the layout.

On top of that, I'm novel-izing the D&D campaign that I've been in for a year and a half. That's been going really well so far. I'm done the first couple of chapters. If anyone else plans to do something like this, it helps to take really good session notes and maintain a public set of summaries that other people in the campaign can fix.

On top of that, S and I have some ideas on the next children's book, but we still need to sit down and flesh them out a bit.

Other

Work has been super busy the last couple of weeks on top of everything else.

If you know any of the following people, please let me know--I'm curious to see if they still exist. Don't be shy--feel free to chime in.

• Chris Richwine who I knew in Londonderry
• Chris Stebbins who I also knew in Londonderry
• Ben Agati also from Londonderry (I think I have your number, though--I'll go hunt for it)
• Taylor Johnston (I think there's a t in Johnston--but I forget) also from Londonderry
• Lisa Skinner also from Londonderry
• James "Juice" Newton also from Londonderry
• Aaron Slater also from Londonderry--it'd be nice to know where Alyssa is as well (hope I didn't butcher her name--sorry bout that)
• Chris Rodier who I knew at Boston College
• Gary MacDonald also from Boston College

If you know of these folks (or are one of these folks), drop me a line at willg at bluesock dot org.

(Note: this is really hard to write because I'm thinking in docbook. Someone should write a docbook entryparser for PyBlosxom.)

It's sobering to think that this time last year I was dealing with a car that had no headlights because they were stolen. It's really funky to have a car with no headlights. In the winter, it limits the time you have to drive around to like 9 or 10 hours.

I've decided to participate in new year's resolutions this year. Some folks think it's silly to do new year's resolutions since you should follow through on your resolve throughout the year rather than use the new year as an excuse to change your life. I'm in the "whatever works works" boat. My resolutions this year are to floss more and to fix my problems with organizing the things I say I'm going to do around my schedule so that I actually get things done.

The first is easy--I should just floss more. The second is like the hiccups--everyone has their own best super duper way of how to do it and wants to tell you all about it in excrutiating detail.

Some folks spend their entire lives trying to find an answer to that question.

I just want to know where the bruise on my left arm came from. I mean, really--where did it come from? I've thought about this for hours now and now I'm beginning to think it's going to be one of those cosmic mysteries I will never find an answer to. It doesn't hurt a whole lot but it sure is colorful. Right now it's a mix of hues in the sickly-yellow/deep-purple range.

I talked to Sprint Customer Service and got a really great customer service representative who read through my file, listened to what I was saying, and then actually spent the time to work through solving my issue. He hooked me up with a 2 year contract that met my needs and met Sprint's minimum requirements for the rebate.

Anyhow, so then I went down to the Sprint PCS in Harvard Sq and sat around listening to one gal who swore more than a bar full of sailors yell at one of the Sprint PCS guys because she didn't realize that if she's checking her voicemail, gets an incoming call and switches lines (without hanging up on voicemail) she gets billed double minutes (one set for one line and one set for the other line). Finally the guy puts his hands in the air and asks her really politely to stop swearing at him. Then I discovered that the unsupervised 3-year-old running around the store was hers. Interestingly she said she was a student getting a masters degree in psychology.

Then I listened to this other lady who must have a lot of other issues sit there and verify point by point over and over again the things she can and cannot do according to her contract... But she never actually read the contract nor did she actually listen to what her Sprint PCS guy was saying. I'm not really sure what she got out of the exchange. And she kept saying things like, "Ok. When I have a problem, I'm going to tell them that Joe at the Harvard Square Sprint PCS store said it works like this..." But that's not what Joe said at all so then he'd correct her and the whole thing would start over again. Joe isn't his real name.

Anyhow, after waiting 30 or 45 minutes, one of the Sprint PCS folks helped me out. I bought a Nokia 6225, signed the 2-year agreement, and chatted with a Sprint PCS lady who hadn't eaten since that morning when she got called in early because a bunch of the other Sprint PCS folks had called in sick or dead or something like that.

To summarize:

• I'm still with Sprint PCS, got a phone I like, and their Sprint PCS Customer Service was really helpful and solved my problem.
• The Sprint PCS people are _people_ and all the Sprint PCS customers I bumped into that day are self-righteous jerks who seem to honestly believe they're entitled to everything.
• People aren't reading their contracts... or any of the paperwork involved for that matter.
• The folks in the Burlington, MA Sprint PCS store ignored me and then were useless, but the folks in the Harvard Square Sprint PCS store were friendly and helpful (and swamped).

I spent most of the time sitting there waiting trying to figure out to fix these sorts of developer/user relation/communication issues for PyBlosxom while minimizing the crappy experiences and maximizing the good ones.

Anyhow, thanks to everyone who suggested solutions to my plight.

"Getting there..." That's my new motto. It's not "I finished it yesterday", "I'll finish it up tonight" or even "I'm planning to do it this weekend". Now it's "Getting there...". The last year has come with some changes which have totally foobar'd my ability to predict when I'll get to spend time on tasks and how long it'll take me to complete them. It seems a bit demoralizing. I feel like I've got a huge backlog of promises and the rate at which I finish tasks is much much less than the rate at which I acquire new tasks.

Additionally, I think most of the tasks are much larger and more complex now.

So my new approach is to not worry about completing things but rather spend more time focusing on the incremental portions, document stuff, and communicate with the rest of the folks involved. I'm thinking in terms of questions like this:

• Can I spend some time on this to improve it?
• Can I throw time at that to make one person happy?
• Can I do some work on some other thing so that someone else can see what I'm doing and take it from there?
• Can I shed some light on the issue so that someone else can take it from there?

The important message being that we're moving in a positive direction. We're in a game of inches and we're getting them one by one because there are so many things in the backlog that I can't seem to finish entire tasks in one sitting, so to speak. (Note to self--need to buy that movie.) And there's a lot of "us" in "we"--it's not just me. It's important to focus on documentation and communication so other people are equipped to work on things that I can't get to any time soon.

The weekend whizzed by....

• hosted a christmas party--drank lots of eggnog and listened to stories from Mike and Chris D
• cooked eggs a la H
• played D&D (my character is no longer possessed by a demon! w00t!)
• worked on pyblosxom.sourceforge.net
• watched the movie Singles
• christmas cards
• worked some more on pyblosxom.sourceforge.net
• did the first pass at cleaning "my office"
• booked a trip in February to Florida

Then I came into the office and skimmed Planet Debian while our Internet connection was going up and coming down faster than a 5 year old on a pogo stick and bumped into this. It was a good weekend.

1. switching to emacs and getting my configuration issues worked out
2. discovering screen
3. subscribing to the mudos mailing list where the folks are really awesome
4. building the new pyblosxom web-site (not open yet)
5. the amazing amount of activity on the pyblosxom mailing list which has given me a lot of confidence that there are other people who want to help out so I can go work on the things I'm interested in

A month ago, my girlfriend and I wrote a children's book about a bee who gets stuck. It was pretty wild writing it--I had most of the process down before I met her, but she definitely filled in the pieces I hadn't figured my way through yet. It was really great--we were a great team. Anyhow, so last week we finished moving the book over to PDF format, printed a copy on the color printer downstairs, and gave it to my friend to give to his daughter. Turns out she really liked it--which is really great! And she wrote us a thank you note which was really really neat!

We enjoyed writing the book. We especially enjoy the fact that someone enjoyed it.

Things don't seem to click in the early morning. I know they should click because I remember them clicking yesterday. The early morning mental fog needs some time to roll away... to drift off into the corners of my mind so I can get something done today. If it comes again tomorrow, so be it. Such is the way of things.

Anyhow, as my early morning mental fog is doing its early morning mental fog drifting, I usually get a cup of coffee or tea, sit bleary-eyed while reading through email, and then count the number of things in my todo list and divide by 10. I use that number to figure out early on whether I'm going to be measurably productive or whether it's just going to be one of those days where I spin my wheels a lot and don't really get anywhere.

I just finished up my application for graduate school at Northeastern University!

Given that it's a lunar eclipse and the Red Sox seem like they're going to sweep the series after decades of borking in the most dramatic possible way, I have made a few predictions about what will happen:

• A meteor (or ordinance from testing advanced government weapons) will hit the stadium causing injury to everyone involved thus post-poning the game indefinitely.
• The Red Sox will win the game, then take off their human masks--turns out they're aliens trying to make the point that they can play baseball, too. Though since they're illegal aliens, they will be sent to Guantanamo indefinitely with no rights and an alien mother ship will come down and wipe out the human race.
• The Earth will pass between the sun and the moon causing strange alien vibes to hit Ortiz' bionic arm. It will proceed to kill everyone on the team a la Maximum Overdrive.

However, I'll have to find out what happened tomorrow since the jackasses at RCN installed cable at the neighbor's place and foobar'd our cable and internet service. Then decided they can't come back and fix it until Thursday. Jackasses.

I'm in the process of the following:

• finishing up my grad school application for NEU
• tweaking my "new" desktop so I can do some programming work on it
• working on pyblosxom 1.1 release
• finishing up a children's book S and I wrote, illustrated, and are publishing ourselves (more on this later [I hope])
• preparing to visit with George this weekend
• watching the Red Sox... (whew--the anxiety in the air is as thick as butter!)
• trying to complete items in my infinite queue at work where the items are progressively more complex and potentially NP-complete--at least, it sure feels that way

The plant is doing fine. I think I'm going to move it next year to a place on our porch that's not in direct sunlight for most of the day. Seems as though the plant and soil dry out too fast when I do that. If I can clean enough of the stuff in the study out, I'll put the plant in there.

I snipped some of the branches off and dried the leaves. I think I have enough spearmint for a couple of cups of tea now. Next year, I'll be more aggressive about clipping and drying.

Other than tea, I can't think of any good uses for mint. We might add another plant next year that's more useful to us. Probably basil.

I had a splendid weekend with S's parents and then bumping around Harvard Square on Sunday. I did some studying for the GRE, but mostly took a couple of days off from doing work.

I also finished up overhauling all the code on DarkRifts to work with the MudOS v.22.2b14 driver. There's a huge amount of code and there were a lot of problems most of which are sorted out now. There are still a few problems, but no one seems to be logging in, so I don't really feel any urgency to work through the last bits.

I'm planning on pushing pyblosxom through to a 1.1 release soon. First, I'm going to package up the flavour files into flavour packs for the registry. Second, I'm going to add documentation to all the contributed plugins and move them all to the registry. Accomplishing those two tasks should give the code in CVS enough time to bake. Then we'll do a 1.1 release and start thinking about 1.2 which will likely involve a minor overhaul to how we pull files from the file system.

The next two weeks will be pretty busy. Already I'm way behind in replying to email.

I'm seriously looking into doing grad school starting Fall of 2005 and getting either a Masters or a PhD in Computer Science. As such, I started reading through the sites of schools in the area that offer that sort of thing. The NEU CCS site is pretty interesting. They list faculty and their research interests of which the following piqued my interest:

• Lieberherr and Lorenz - the Demeter project, Adaptive Programming (and AOP), and dealing with software design issues. This is very much something I'd like to pursue.
• Clinger - compiler optimization for higher-order languages and nonpredictive generational garbage collection. This is really interesting as well.
• Tarasewich - bridging information systems, computer science, engineering, and marketing. It's similar (or at least parallel) to what I've been doing for the last few years and it might be interesting to pursue.
• Wand - programming-language semantics and their application to compiler correctness. This is really fascinating--but I have less a priori knowledge and experience of this than I do for the above faculty and their research interests (though that's a very first-blush analysis).
• Williams - machine learning, a subspecialty of artificial intelligence. This is also really interesting.

When I was talking with the University of Phoenix folks (I tossed around getting an MBA for a brief period of time and bumped into a UoP booth while fetching lunch), they were pretty adamant about me answering the question of why I want to go back to school. I think that's a little weird. I want to go back to school because I want to flesh out my knoweldge and experience in various areas and I think the most effective way to do that especially in regards to Programming Language design and theory is to go back to school. Sure, I can putz around on python-dev and read the articles listed on LtU as I've been doing the last couple of years, but I'd get a lot more out of getting a Masters or PhD. And I think now is a good time in my life to do it.

Yeah. Not only are they popular, but they seem to really resound with the LiveJournal-under-18-years-old crowd. This group (there are several and a few at a couple of other sites) sources the image from my site and use it as the background of their weblogs. I'm going to refrain from issuing my opinion of the content of said weblogs... I will note that they should use the text of those weblogs as a big indicator that there are a lot of kids out there who should be flunking English classes.

Anyhow, I'm kind of flattered that they like it so much. I just wish they weren't causing my bandwidth to go through the roof. It'd be nice if they cited me as the original photographer... but in this wily world, not many seem to really care about that sort of thing.

Sad to say that I'm going to disappoint them all as I rename the file causing lots of 404 mayhem.

I've got one of those GRE study guide prep book things and they have a wordlist of 3500 words that I should know. The breakdown is something like this:

• 50% are words I already know and use in my daily hooplah
• 10% are words I already know but I don't use them
• 10% are words I recognize, but couldn't tell you the definition if you asked

That leaves 30% of the words to learn. Course, that's like 1000 words so I decided to put all the ones I didn't know in a wordlist file and wrote a quick application to pull up a random word from a random wordlist (the 3500 words are broken down into 50 or so wordlists) and give me the word and definition. I figure I'll start using them in emails and other digital correspondence and that way I'll cycle them into my vocabulary.

Feel free to join along in this little game of mine. It's a game I like to call, "I don't want to be studying--I want to be programming".

Over the last 4 or 5 years I've been telling people that I'm looking to get my masters--but I never really found a good break-point in life stuff to actually go get my masters. Thus it is with some excitement that I've now gone and completed the first step: I've signed up to take the GRE General exam.

Where this will go--only time will tell.

On a complete irrelevant side note, it's interesting to note that I can type paragraph tags ( <p> ... </p> ) with my right hand while my left hand aimlessly scratches my back.

I have a cell phone that I bought 3 years ago when I switched over to Sprint PCS. I signed a 2 year contract and when that ran out, they offered be a better plan if I signed another year contract--so I did. Right now my plan is 300 minutes with nights starting at 8pm for $30.00.

There are a couple of problems:

First, my phone's battery is really flakey. I have a Samsung Uproar which weren't particularly popular, so finding a new battery is difficult and I'm not sure it's worth the money.

Second, I'll be having a nice conversation and getting a great signal, then suddenly the signal disappears for 10 seconds causing me to drop the call and then comes back again at full strength. I talked to a guy at Radio Shack the other day and he said this is because my phone uses the old cellular service stuff and when I'm in a dense area and the cell tower needs more bandwidth for a G3 phone, it'll dump all the CDMA phones. I don't really know anything about cellular stuff, so I don't know enough to guess the veracity of his explanation. (Can anyone shed some light on this?)

Third, the Samsung Uproar has an exposed face. Since I've dropped it on parking lots and other gravelly surfaces, I've really scratched up the display making it harder to read. So it'd be nice to get a new phone that I can read.

On Friday, I went to talk to the Sprint PCS folks in Burlington, MA. After standing around in an empty store for 15 minutes someone finally "became available" and walked me through their "great upgrade plan". Turns out I have to get a plan that's $35 or more (my current plan is $30) in order to qualify for the $150 mail-in rebate on a new phone. The problem is that the $35 plans they showed me were $5 more than my current plan (which is obvious), had the same number of minutes (300), but nights start at 9:00pm so it's inferior to the current plan I have.

I did some rough math (which stunned the guy I was talking to for reasons I'm not entirely sure of) and figured that if I have the new phone for three years, then $5 * 12 (months in a year) * 3 (years to have the phone) is $180. That makes getting a new phone with their mail-in rebate and forced plan change $30 more than just buying a new phone outright. After I pointed this out, the guy didn't want to deal with me anymore which really surprised me.

I think I'm going to call Sprint PCS customer care and see what they say. I want to upgrade my phone but not downgrade my plan and pay more money in the process--that's a scam. If they're not interested in helping, I'll just wait out my contract and investigate my options. Maybe I'll switch carriers. Maybe I'll just wait until I've accrued enough Amazon.com coupons (I have an Amazon.com credit card) to buy a phone from them--though I'm not sure how switching from one phone to the next works.

Any thoughts?

I took Friday off to finish moving out of my old place, renew my resident parking sticker, register my change of address with the post office, talk to the Sprint guys (that's detailed in the next post), pick up a new mattress, and then pick up all the building materials we needed to build the bed frame. My roommate had to save us at Home Depot because the plywood (which was cut into small sections) was too big to fit in my car. It was a long day and I was pretty tired.

Then on Saturday, we started assembling the bed frame from the plans I had drawn up a few days beforehand. We discovered we'd need another beam down the center of the bed and that I had miscalculated the number of board feet required for the legs of the bed (I forgot beds have four legs and not two). Then due to a lack of mitre saw or other right-angle-maker (in retrospect, I should have bought one), I spent some time trying to make right angles out of the cuts I had made. We did a trip to Home Depot to pick up another board and some joist pieces to afix the board to the head and foot pieces. Even with the delays and minor issues, we got one of the sides assembled and we were pretty happy with it. After a full day of working in 90 degree 150% humidity in the sun trying to overcome our minor issues, I was pretty tired.

On Sunday, I woke up and finished putting together the second side. Then I attached the head and foot pieces and had a completely assembled bed. My girlfriend came home from church and we ate some food and then did a round of staining with a 2-in-1 poly-urethane/stain. After staining, we discovered our hands and brushes were really sticky and we didn't have any mineral spirits (which is a solvent). I rushed over to Home Depot driving with my elbows and picked some up.

Now we have a lovely bed frame that I designed with lots of insight from my girlfriend and her dad and that we built together. Right angles on the bed are pretty short in number--but we can fix some of that later on if it becomes an issue.

Now I'm just super tired. Not to mention that my allergies went beserk this weekend whilst all this other stuff was happening.

So that brings me to the interesting part. Here's my list of things to keep in mind on building projects:

• beds have four legs--not two
• get a mitre saw to do right angle cuts (or alternatively you could get a table saw or even just build a guide for a circular saw)
• ratchet sets make dealing with bolts and nuts a lot easier
• it's all about a great set of clamps
• measure, measure, cut
• you can approximate right angle cuts after the fact by sanding the end of the board while making sure to flip the board over every 15-20 seconds of sanding--I find I must be putting more pressure on my right side than my left because that's the part that gets more sanding
• know where your nearest hardware stores are and the times that they are open just in case you find yourself in a "predicament"

There's a great interview with Craig of Craigslist here at Wired Magazine. I have to say that after reading the interview, I'm really psyched the guy exists. From a selfish perspective, Craigslist is the glue that binds huge parts of my life and makes certain things infinitely easier to do. Through it I've met other people (like, for example, my current girlfriend who used Craigslist to find the room my brother used to live in); I've bought and sold stuff; I've done research on stuff; friends have bought furniture and advertised venues; ... He has single-handedly affected my life in great positive ways.

Anyhow, so I really like Craigslist and really appreciate that it's there. It provides community for us folks who move around a lot and don't have contacts and friends everywhere. It's a great service to people.

Having said all that, I'm filled with trepidation. I'm afraid that even though he's said all these wonderful things and I've never seen evidence that the things he's said in this interview are false, I can't bring myself to believe the statements. I half expect him to sell the shares anyhow. If everything Craig said is true--both today and tomorrow--then he is definitely the exception and not the rule.

I've been super busy over the last few weeks. Between work and moving and weddings and trying to catch up with things, I haven't had much time to ruminate on anything or work on any of my projects.

There's one exception to that... I'm a coder on DarkRifts and I've been doing some minor refactoring and overhauls of some of the pieces of their mudlib. That's coming along nicely. The other coders have been really kicking in and getting things done lately. Watching the codebase flourish has been wonderful.

I'm not entirely sure what I should do with PyBlosxom. Development has pretty much stopped--Ted, Wari, Blake and I have all moved on to other things (babies, other projects, ...). No one else has stepped up to the plate. Though we keep getting emails on the dev lists and elsewhere about how no one will use PyBlosxom unless it does feature x and feature y and how there's lots of bad code and so on so forth. I wish more people would take the responsibility to help out.

On this gapingvoid blog entry, Hugh says this:

2. I am more interested in the subject of how one remains creative, how one retains one's humanity, within the confines of the rat-race, far more than I am concerned with the subject of escaping the rat-race altogether.

Rather than quitting my current job to go off and do something 'creative'-- write a novel, open a bed & breakfast in Vermont, start a scented candle mail-order business, whatever--frankly I'd prefer just to keep on finding new and creative ways to get more from the job situation I already have.

http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/000894.html

That's an awesome thought. In this world where so many people are struggling to "discover their true selves", I think in doing so, they cease to be a positive functioning part of society and that only makes their problems worse. And it drives the people around them crazy, too. I mean, really, who wants to hang out with someone who's main hobby is finding their "true self"?

As an aside, I think that the hunt for "true self" and that train of thought and life questioning is utter hogwash. True self? Silliness. You are what you do and what you've done. You are not your inner fantasy of who you think you are. You can see yourself in the mirror; you can see yourself by understanding how others see you. You are not a singular individual in a contextless void. You're a node in the fabric of social structure--your family, your friends, the people you interact with day to day. That's who you are. If your primary hobby is finding your "true self", then you are lost. It's not the other way around....

Regardless, gapingvoid is a great blog. Great art and great thoughts.

I've spent the last month and a half going on vacations, moving, and trying to get some of the big issues I've been sitting on for some time out of the way.

The vacations have been nice, but they're kind of a pain in the ass and here's why: when I go on vacation, the work I have to do still has to get done. Some of it is time-sensitive, so I still have to get it done by the deadline. Some of it is work that involves a lot of time and it's easier to chip away at it bit by bit, day by day than to take it on in a couple of massive chunks.

Moving is a pain in the ass, too. It's compounded by the fact that I seem to find really good reasons for moving every 9-12 months. Course, that's a lot better than the period just after college where I was moving on average every 3-4 months. I really dislike moving.

In terms of big issues, I finally sold my car for a song (their song--not mine, which sucked) so that's one thing out of the way. I also (during the packing process) discovered my Black Adder's Christmas Carol tape and my visor cd thingy with cd's in it that had gone missing for some time. I still haven't located my The Good, The Bad, The Ugly soundtrack cd, though, and that's irritating.

Anyhow, things are getting settled--more time for coding and projects and things. :)

S and I bought a spearmint plant on Sunday and I repotted the plant (it had outgrown the pot they sold it to us in) and clipped off all the leaves that were either dead or in the process of dying.

Depending on how well we do with spearmint (which is really hearty and grows like a weed [and I may join the spearmint with some mint from my grandfather's house]), we may try growing our own basil. If the basil works as well, we may move on to other herbs!

I have data issues. I have email going back to 1996 and I have documents and other data formats for which I don't have the original program anymore.

In regards to email, every now and then I get up enough energy to start going through it and deleting email that's clearly not interesting. The problem here is that I accumulate more email than I delete and I feel like I spend a lot of energy and time organizing it.

In regards to the other data, I could keep moving it from format to format but that also takes a lot of energy and time.

I don't keep a journal or a diary, so this data is really the only records I have of past years. It's the only way I can get a glimpse of how I've grown over time.

The question is how important is this data? Is it important to keep it all, or is it good enough to just keep a few things that capture enough of the essence of that period of time? Is it better to go through things and create an "editorial" of that period of time with citations from the original pieces and then destroy all the original data?

What uses does the data have? Maybe it's better to just jettison it all and start afresh?

It's the end of an era of my life, sad to say. I finally sold my car to a dealership for less than I wanted, but at least I can put that issue behind me and work on other things that need attention. I think I'm the last of my crew to sell the car I bought during the dot com hay day.

Now I'm going to spend some time adding folder management features to bluemail (which currently has none) and generally updating the codebase to use fewer deprecated Python things.

Most of the time Meerkat is really intensely cool! It's one of the few places I read day to day. Anyhow, there are a bunch of sites for which they provide totally bogus links which is irritating. I don't know if it's their fault or the fault of the sites--and I don't really care a whole lot....

What's really irritating is that on the about page for Meerkat (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/rss/2000/03/17/about_meerkat.html), they have a section the bottom that ask for suggestions, bugs, comments, and other feedback and point people to their O'Reilly Network RSS forum. You click on the link to discover the forums are closed indefinitely and "new improved forums will be coming in the near future".

How irritating. How am I supposed to help out and make the service better when there is no feedback mechanism I can use to tell them there are problems?

It's pretty weird that The Passion of the Christ is in the top 10 IMDb quotes pages list. Well, now that I think about it, maybe I'm not that surprised.

I was listening to one of Ed's cd's (I talked about Ed in a previous post--his movie "Mounting Evidence" really kicked ass at the 48 Hour Film Project) when I was at his house the other day. One of the songs has a refrain along the lines of, "No really--I said no killing! Which word didn't you understand?"

We're all just a bunch of folks trying to get by whichever way you slice it. Most folks had a hard day--most folks have a hard day every day. It's easy to be nice to nice people. Being nice to the people who aren't so nice will help to make the world more pleasant for everyone.

I've re-written this entry four or five times now in an attempt not to turn preachy. But whatever. Everyone should be reminded every now and then to chill out and be nice.

I bet I could come up with a usefulness score for a given web-page that's based on the ratio of number of images to number of words. I occasionally read articles about how people don't like to read large blocks of text and that it should be skimmable and blah blah blah--but in reality, I think if the ratio of images to text is high, then the page is making up for in visual appeal what it lacks in raw information.

I guess the issue is that I prefer sites that are more like books and encyclopedias than like marketing brochures.

My sister Lydia is now engaged. She and Nate told us at brunch on Saturday. :)

I bought a 2001 S4 brand new way back when I lived in Newport Beach, CA. It's a fantastic car and when I moved back to Boston, I drove it cross country--a fantastic experience.

So now I'm living in apartments in and around Boston and I've been parking on the street. I kept tossing around downgrading to a car that "blends in", but never got around to it. Last Sunday, some dork stole my headlights. After talking with the insurance people and the Audi people and discovering that it's not an uncommon thing to have one's Xenon headlights stolen and that there's nothing I can do about it except replace them, I decided that this was prime time to downgrade.

After talking with a sales guy for 15 minutes, I bought a nice little used 2001 Jetta. It has the same exact body as my S4, but it "blends in" a lot better and has halogen lights.

So the saga goes on. I can't even get my headlights fixed until the end of January. Then I need to sell my S4. In the meantime, the stereo in my Jetta kind of sucks so I may have to go hunting for a receiver that gets radio stations and plays CDs and also has an 1/8" jack input so I can plug in an MP3 player or other device.

It occurs to me as I write this that it's time to build an image plugin for pyblosxom.

Anyhow, it's a bummer, but I'll live. Could have been worse. I'm lucky that I was able to drive an S4 for a few years and that I can just go get a "new" car when I have problems.

I'll miss that all red display and the punch on the highway but I won't miss the hassle of replacing headlights. Foo on that.

   you only live once, but don't kill yourself trying to make the most 
   out of every moment.  one thing i learned from jamie was to just sit 
   there and waste ten minutes of time every day.  let the batteries 
   recharge a little and one enjoys the rest of the day so much more.

That was the last paragraph in an email I wrote in 1997. I was so busy being irritatingly trite that I had no clue how irritatingly trite I was being. Blech. Part of me wants to purge all this old old old email. But the other part of me thinks that maybe if I have kids it'd be nice to show them evidence of my stages of progression so then maybe they'll be slightly more self-aware when they're going through their irritatingly trite period. Blech.

Having said that, the Jamie being referred to was this really great guy I knew in high school named Jamie. As time goes on, I realize he had far greater a clue than I had back then. I met him in high school, but his mom knew my nonna--they were both quilters in Chelmsford. The world is a small place.

Oh no--I'm being trite again! Must end the pain!

This morning, I started my car, brushed the snow off, and then took a right at the end of Simpson Ave onto Highland Ave and discovered myself in the biggest parking lot _ever_.

A couple of weeks ago, Brook loaned me some cds and luckily I had them in my car. Partially because that's as far as they had gotten in their journey from his house to mine and partially because I don't really own a cd player except for the one in my car.

I turned on my car's stereo and slapped in Global Underground: Oslo and listened to that for a bit. That was kind of cool, but a bit non exciting. Then I saw a purple case and thought to myself, "Wow--purple.... I bet that's fantastic. I'll put that one in." So I put it in and it was AMAZING! I listened to it for 2 hours on my 8 mile trip to work this morning. Brook saved my life.

There's this guy who I've met a million times and I never remember what his name is. He reminds me of Mike Pawlik (the good Mike Pawlik) and I have this urge to call him Mark, though I'm not entirely sure why. Anyhow, his name is Adam and I decided to blog it figuring that if I forgot, I could then look it up. And if my blog disappeared, it would be cached forever in the annals of the Internet history. This one tidbit of vital information will never be lost short of asteroid impact, nuclear war, and things of that nature.... On second thought, maybe I should write it down on a post-it note as well.

If you don't understand both sides of an issue, you cannot make an intelligent choice; in fact, if you don't understand all the ramifications of your actions, you're not designing at all. You're stumbling in the dark. Allen Holub, http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-09-2003/jw-0905-toolbox.html?

I think that's pretty right on and I've been saying it for years (and spent a good portion of time stumbling in the dark myself). Having said that I've been saying it for years, it should be noted that my saying it over and over again has caused much grief and agony for various people I've worked with. Sorry John--even though I was mean and nasty, it really did behoove you to read the manual.

I've been trying to cancel my service for 2 days now. I call them up, go through 47 menus 2 of which involve them repeating back to me the things I just typed into the phone in a voice not unlike DRSBAITSO, and then finally sit on hold and listen to whatever tunes they play. Right now they're playing Shaggy's "Wasn't Me".

Do they know what this song is about? Who's idea was it to put this on as hold music? It reminds me of living in California when it just came out. So that's nice. But still, I'm pretty surprised they're playing it. What's next? Sir Mix-a-lot?

Why can't I get a human to answer the phone? Hello? Hello RCN! Pick up the phone so I can cancel my service. Stop apologizing for the delay and telling me how all your representatives are assisting other callers--I don't believe you!

Most of the time, the use of the expression "letting the genie out of the bottle" (and derivatives) denotes that the speaker is discarding useful rhetoric in exchange for theatrical effect. Its usage precedes sensationalist hooey that is frequently neither well-thought-out nor factually supported. Often it's wholly uninteresting as well.

I hereby declare a pox on people who continue use this phrase.

Further, I declare a double pox on people who use it in the context of some politically-oriented teary-eyed soliloquy.

And I declare a triple pox on people who use it as a headline for an article!^[1] Knock it off!

[1] This article excluded.

I think the reason some people buy houses is because they're just sick to death of moving. I know I'm very soon going to become one of these people... well, maybe in a year or so.

I've only hired movers for two moves: going from NH to CA and going from CA to MA. In both cases, the cost of shipping the stuff was so large that adding in a bunch of big hefty guys packing everything up and moving it down a million flights of stairs into a truck parked miles away was barely .001% of the cost.

For every other move (and I've moved a lot over the last 10 or so years), I've moved myself with the help of friends and family. Every time, I've used muscles I didn't know I had and gotten bruises the size of small third world nations in places I didn't think could bruise. Crazy stuff!

This time I vow not to get any new stuff and to give away half of the stuff I have! I swear I'm going to do it this time!

After work, I went to my car with the full expectation that I was going to hop into it and drive home. Alas, such was not the case! There was this bulge in the sidewall of my front driver-side tire. The bulge was the size of Kansas, so I thought it prudent not to drive on it. I look in my trunk and notice my spare is flat (again). It has this really really slow leak that totally stumps the people I've brought it to twice to get it fixed. Anyhow, so I bring it all across the street where we have a most convenient gas station with an air hose. But the air hose is broken. I toss things around and decide it'll be ok to drive a mile and a half down the road to the next gas station. They have an air hose and it works. So I pull out all the gear, jack up the car, pull all the bolts off, and when I try to pull the wheel off, it doesn't budge.

At this point, I realize that everything is against me. My scrawny 150-lb ass doesn't have things like weight, leverage, or raw muscle so there's no way I'm going to get this wheel off the car. I called AAA and they came down and this beer guzzling mass of man shifts his mass out of the way and pops my wheel off as if he was popping off the head of a dandelion. Then we filled my slow-leak spare and he informed me that a tire that looked like mine did (it had a bulge on one side the size of Kansas and the other side had more cracks than a plumber convention) was definitely not fit to drive on. Furthermore, he added I should get it replaced for free because tires shouldn't degrade like that with such little usage. Then he muscled his mass into his truck and drove off.

I know a lot about some stuff, but nothing about tires. I think I could go to the dealership (I bought the car in CA and I'm in MA now) nearby and argue with them, but I really hate doing that mostly because I just hate interacting with the people at the dealership. I think I'll just have to buy a new tire. Blech.

And that's the end of the story where I found myself in a situation which I had no hope of solving and I called AAA and they came to rescue me.

So this woman knocks on my door and tells me she's my neighbor. Turns out she's lost her cell phone and it's her only phone so she didn't have another phone to call her cell phone with so that it could announce its presence with an 8-bit symphonically annoying ring that makes students of classical music cringe in ulcer-oriented nausea.

She hands me a pink piece of paper with her number on it and tells me, very contrary to the typical 3 or 4 day waiting period between when you get digits and are supposed to dial them, to call her in 2 minutes. This is definitely the fastest women I've ever met.

She bounces off of my stoop and runs back to her house eager for my telephone call. I decided to check my mail. Interesting... a bill from Verizon. Seems all they send me is bills and brochures about new plans which would never in a thousand years match my calling habits or meet my needs. Silly phone company. If I ever start a phone company, I'm going to send people other things too. Like maybe a nice little notice, "Hi! We just wanted to say we were thinking of you! Hope you're having a wonderful day! From your friends at [insert Will's phone company's name here]"

After thinking about things for a bit, I called this poor damsel in distress. Her cell phone must have been pretty accessible... perhaps it was hidden by a plant of some kind. Maybe a cactus. Anyhow, it must have been pretty accessible since she found it on the second ring. She answered, "Thank you so very much! You helped me out so much!"

And that's the story of the most interesting way I've ever gotten digits. Actually, it's the only time I've ever gotten digits from someone I didn't know. Thus it's both the most and least interesting way I've ever gotten digits.

There's this cat outside my window talking with this other cat somewhere else. That's all fine. The disconcerting part is that it sounds like a crying baby. It's such an eerie sound that I'm wondering if I'm not smack-dab in the middle of a Stephen King novel. Incidentally, that would explain many things.

So I used to be an E2 noder way back and then didn't really have anything to node anymore so I stopped. One of the things I noded was Tom Lehrer. I did that way back in 2000--almost 3 years ago. My friend sends me an im today with this. Funnily enough, it's identical to what I wrote--the dude stole the links and everything!

Totally wild. Someone stole stuff I wrote and then built a web-site out of it.

For instance, one dream is to make 500K and then go teach science or math in high school somewhere. Maybe New Hampshire or Vermont. I'd bet school systems could really use someone like me to hang out and get all the pieces working. The 500K part is there because that'd put me at a point in my life where I'm more wizened and less rambunctious (sp?) than I am now. It'd also make it easier on the school system money-wise if I didn't really need it. But that's a future-term dream.

My near-term dream is to take a nap with a pretty girl in a frolicing field of lilacs or daisies or something nice like that.

My near-near-term dream is to figure out how to get this piece of code working without doing the brute force method. There must be a quick corner-cutting easy way to fake this without doing a brute force method and still get the same quality results. I need to be the ball... Nu-nu-nu-nu-nu-nu-nu....

There were two things I did in the last 6 months that have significantly changed my life for the better:

1. I stopped watching TV
2. I stopped reading Slashdot

In regards to TV, almost everyone I know watches too much TV. And it's not as if they're watching good TV--they're watching things like American Idol. What possible value does that show have other than pure unintelligent entertainment? (Sociologists are excluded from this question.) People tell me they feel like they're being bombarded by advertising. If you get rid of your TV and find a browser that allows you to disable pop-up ads--over half of the advertising in the world melts away. Save yourselves!

I'm another anti-Slashdot person. Best of luck to the admin who try their best in building a moderation system that allows me to read comments without having to interact with the ignorant (yet exceptionally vocal) masses. The only value I think Slashdot has at this point is as a venue for political activism and education. Most of us have no clue what's going on in the wiley world of legislation and it's nice to have a couple of one-stop-shops to catch up on the list of things I can't do any more.

Read more books! Get outside! Fight the powers that are crushing you like bugs! Exercise! Brush your teeth! In these ways, you have the habits for a healthier and happier life.

It's threatening to snow outside. Normally this sort of thing doesn't occur so it's a bit bizarre. Not to mention the fact that it'd be nice if it was nice outside. On the flip side, since I'm at work all day and the only windows in my cube are the ones on my monitor, I'm not wholly sure I care.

I read a terrible article on Freshmeat about Open Source software. The dude says he's a software engineer and that he was "enlightened in 1997 by Free Software" (capital letters and verbiage are his) which is silliness. If he was "enlightened" and really understood the motivations of the hundreds of thousands of faceless developers out there silently (from a media perspective) working on open source software, he'd never have written this article. He'd have known about the synergy that occurs between projects who have some similar goals as they learn from each other--both mistakes and successes. He'd have known that most of us are decent developers looking to learn more about development--that many projects are done to learn--that the production is far far far more important for the developer in question than the product. He'd have known that most developers are not magic makers--that most of us specialize in a few aspects of software development and that a TEAM of people is responsible for a solid product that has solid design, solid goals, solid functionality, solid unit testing, solid documentation, and solid support. He'd have known that as a project matures and evolves as a function of its user base and its usage, it hits a point where the code becomes unwieldy and it needs refactoring. Sometimes it needs to be rewritten. This is good. He'd have known that there are a bunch of http software projects--with different missions and different characteristics. He'd have known the same about SMTP MTAs, database servers, and various other server components. He'd have known a lot of things. He's enlightened for incredibly loose usages of the word enlightened.

I submitted them yesterday. Yes, I'm a year behind--but I'm catching up!

It's true. Take for example this morning when I upgraded sendmail innocently on my server only to discover a bunch of things suddenly stopped working. Some of the things were things I didn't even know people were using.

Hours of tailing the maillog and poking around the sendmail site, I discovered all kinds of exciting stuff about configuring sendmail for smtp authentication that I didn't know about.

Every time I upgrade Apache, I learn all kinds of new things as well. The only thing I wished, is that it wasn't quite so trial-by-fire. Of course, for that to be the case, I would have to know everything and there's a whole lot of stuff out there that I'd rather learn posteriori rather than a priori. Otherwise, I'd just spend all my time studying things I would never have time to use.

Please make it stop snowing... please! I'm a programmer--I'm not built for this sort of thing.

I saw a reference to this on Oblomovka.

Both are somewhat funky. I'm not sure how I feel about it but I think that Paul Ford is not correctly separating the action from the final product. I diagree with the idea that Ellen Ullman's fixation and involvement with the creation of those code blocks as part of the cohesive whole of her story necessarily contradicts her first quote. I think for her, interestingly like many artist types I know, the product is rarely interesting--to the point where they might just throw it out. It's the act of production that's so addictive.

Anyhow, Getting Close to the Machine sounds like an interesting book.

So on Friday (or Thursday--I forget) I bowed out of the SillyCS mailing list--a list I helped to start back in 1996 or so when we were all happy Computer Science majors at Boston College. People have approached me as to why I did such a thing. I just became less and less interested and it was less and less fun for me.

I think part of the problem was that the SillyCS went one way but I wanted it to go another. Case in point--it was SillyCS not SillySPORTS.

Anyhow, for nostalgic reasons, I post the following excerpts of the SillyCS mythos from way back in the day:

• Rose Quartz and the 7 Dwarves
• SillyCS FAQ
• The first episode of the We Never Learn People's Front
• The second episode of the We Never Learn People's Front
• The Pirates of the C Chanty (verses 1-3)

not enough Will.

when my internet connection is going up and down faster than a Mexican jumping bean when I really really really appreciate the all powerful wget command. All hail wget!

I was using telnet to connect to this mud I play on and I got tired of telnet. So I started looking around for solid mudclients and found a few--but they were either flakey or bloated or shareware or lame or any number of a myriad of bad things. I decide to roll my own and do it in Python. Then I discover Lyntin--this mudclient written in Python and the maintainer hadn't touched it in months. He hands over the maintenance of the project to me. I move it to Sourceforge, put out a few versions, fix a few bugs, and voilla! I have a solid mudclient.

Then I start releasing versions with the fixes in it. And people around the world email me on occasion--I get like 1 or 2 emails a week. Some of them have patches for things that are broken. Some of them have feature requests. One of them said he didn't like Lyntin at all. But all of them were "Thanks--great job!"

That's so cool.

I found out that when my mom went to italy, she used bluemail to check her mail--she thought it was great. MY MOM USED BLUEMAIL! How insane is that? My silly mother thought it was a real program, too--she didn't pick up on the fact that a) it's missing a _lot_ of functionality, and b) it was written by US!

So she's like "oh, and I used Bluemail--it was great!" And I said, "yeah, I implemented forwarding and reply-all a few months ago and no one's really touch it since then." And then she goes, "what? you guys wrote that? wow...."

HELL'S YEAH!