Clearly The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight
Dimension is one of the most likely to be stolen DVDs ever.
It's not only shrinkwrapped with the sticker on the top, but has two
more stickers on the other edges (labelled “Security Device
Enclosed”), and a radio-frequency security stickon inside.
Yeesh.
The extras I've looked at so far are pretty cool, too.
Ha! I finally got Emacs to allow me to TeX
documents using our multiple-master fonts. Basically, it wasn't
looking in one of the texmf trees that happened to have
all the multiple-master support files. It turned out to be my fault
(of course)—I was setting TEXMF inside an
if loop for interactive shells. Emacs wasn't using an
interactive shell when it TeXed a document, so it was only seeing the
base system texmf tree, plus the one in my home
directory.
Moving it out of the loop should have worked, except, of course, that I was starting Emacs by clicking on an icon in WindowMaker. WindowMaker, of course, was started when I logged in, and it didn't know anything about the changes I'd made to my startup files. Once I twigged to that, I logged out, logged back in, and viola!, an annoyance I'd been haunted by for the last couple of years finally went away. Amazing what a bit of logical attention can accomplish, isn't it?
(Why? Because when you TeX from within Emacs, it has all sorts of nice error-catching features, so you can jump to the problem line in the problem file, instead of having to scan through the log file to figure out where to look. Very useful when you're working on a document made up of half-a-dozen files.)
Wow! According to BBC News, the
folks who made The Fellowship of the Ring are going to make
movies from Philip Pullman's “His Dark Materials” books.
I still haven't started reading these (I'm missing the middle one, which I think might arrive tomorrow), but everything I've heard has been good. I've heard good things about the “Lord of the Rings” film, too, although we still havent' seen it, so the film might be even be good.
I doubt we'll see the massive merchandising tie-ins that “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter” have been getting. At least I hope we won't.
There's also a RealMedia interview
with Philip Pullman. (And an HTML
transcript, albeit missing some questions.)
Apparently there will be another book in the same world, but not with the main characters of the earlier books.
More work on the Mason docs.
Aha! Better now—The Golden Compass has me in its
grip! Any book with dirigibles pretty much has to be a good book.
IMHO, TGC counts as steampunk—you have all the
Victorian colour, plus wonderful mechanical technology such as
airships, aeroplanes, anbaric energy, the Cthonic Railway, and so
forth. Good stuff. I'm fascinated by that level of technology,
probably because it's so accessible. Computers and the rest of our
modern technology can do wondrous things, sure, but it's all
invisible. Electrons are moving from one place to another, but you
can't actually see them.
With mechanical technology, you can see everything. How does a steam engine work? You can watch the pistons moving to turn a wheel. How are logarithmic tables calculated? Watch the spindles, gears, and cams turn, move, click and whir.
One of the many things we saw in London was the full-scale working model of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine in the Science Museum. Alas, we got there late, and really only had time to see the Difference Engine and take a quick walk through the other computing exhibits (and the typesetting and printing exhibits), but I hope to go back someday and spend more time there. (We'd spent most of the day at the Natural History Museum, which is more-or-less next door.)
It seems pretty clear that there's a connection between my fascination with mechanical technology and my fascination with the kinds of craftwork so well highlighted in shows such as Modern Masters (on Home and Garden Television). If we were somewhere on the east coast, where there's actual history, I would probably be working at a museum dealing with such technology.
Hmm. I tried to get my new design working under Mason, but it turns out that I'm
going to have to make some major changes in the way things work there
in order to get it to work. Once I manage that, of course, CSS
changes will be a breeze. However, now that I've backed out all those
changes (yay CVS!), it looks like it's time for deep thinking,
meditation on the manual, and some serious hacking.
Or maybe it's just time for a nap.
(Corollary: 1:00 AM is not the best time to start making major changes to a pile of spaghetti Perl code....)
I'm a bit confused about all the anti-religious accusations flying
Philip Pullman's way over these books, based on what I've read so far.
I mean, sorry, but the world in The Golden Compass (or
Northern Lights) isn't our world. The history
is different, the science (theological philosophy) is different, the
Church is different.
Leaving aside the reality that in our world, various religions have done some pretty horrible things in the names of their respective gods, I can't see how it's unreasonable to believe that different people, with different scientific, historical, and cultural backgrounds, might have different views on reality. Whatever happened to cultural relativism?
Back to a thread from Thursday
(which was actually written this morning), I do feel that a lot of the
magic has gone out of the world—for me, in particular, but for
society-at-large, as well.
When I was a kid, I believed in psychic powers, ghosts, magic, and all that. But I could never get anything to happen for me other than occasional mysterious events just as easily explained by coincidence as supernatural activity, and so my belief began to fade.
By the time I was in college, I was reading The Skeptical Inquirer. Religion seems pointless—either you're not responsible for anything, or everything is your fault (and, boy, will you ever pay). The appeal is still there—the idea that there really is something out there other than ourselves, that there's something that we can't understand—but not the belief, because there's no credible evidence. In many ways, I feel like my view is clearer than that of people still laboring under these naive beliefs, but there's still a sense of loss.
At least there's fiction, where I can occasionally escape into worlds where such things are real.
I just found out that M is going to be serving on the program committee
of WAAAPL'02,
which is taking place in Pittsburgh in October. (For those
non-computer weenies out there, WAAAPL is the “Workshop on
Algorithmic Aspects of Advanced Programming Languages”. It's part of
PLI 2002 (“Principles,
Logics, and Implementations of High-Level Programming Languages”),
and will take part in conjunction with ICFP 2002 (“International
Conference on Functional Languages”). Got that? Who needs TLAs
anymore?!)
Hmm.... Ideas, ideas, ideas....
If I'm going to have to rebuild the site from (almost) scratch, I
might want to think about adding various new and exciting features.
One thing I've noticed popping up from time to time (notably on Slashdot) is a “Site Navigation
Bar” (on Mozilla). Doing a
search to find out how it works, I found this
message, which gets Dave Hodder double points—first for
explaining succinctly what the deal is (it uses
<LINK> tags) and for using Iain Banks's The
Wasp Factory as the source for his sample book outline.
Gosh, I'm being terribly prolific. Maybe I should completely break
and restore my site every day....
I'm feeling a bit better about the prospects of revamping the site
now. I (1) found out that the reason some of the stuff I was trying
last night involving sharing information between components was, in
fact, impossible, and (2) figured out how to redirect pages (you may
notice that going to my home
page now takes you directly to my blog). (1) tells me that I'll
have to try an alternative method that works if I still need to share
information between pages, and (2) tells me that I can feel free to
rip up the current structure of the site and rearrange it anyway I
decide will work. Cool.
After Car Talk and Wait, Wait, we headed for
the Glendale Galleria, where I finally got another pair of shoes (Ecco
New Mobiles) and utterly failed to find any jeans (the current style
seems to be really expensive jeans with immense flares that look like
someone's been digging in a garden for a week—yuck!).
Saw the new iMac and iBook at the Apple Store there. Fine for some, I guess, but the bigger iBook seems worthless, and I'm happy with my G4.
Found our way to Ikea Burbank, bizarrely located in an outdoor shopping complex. Ate Swedish meatballs (Burbank has a restaurant, unlike Industry). Looked at office furniture for M and various bookshelves, regular shelves, stools, and other odd bits for our apartment. Ended up with yet another “Not” torchiere, another CPU holder and (hurray!) both parts of a shelf for the Effectiv desk!
Rearranged the desk significantly. Shelf holds inkjet printer off the surface. DSL modem and switch have migrated out of the way. G4 hides behind its monitor. More room to lose to various debris!
Completely and utterly broke the websites I develop on
diziet by following the directions in the Mason manual for setting up
multiple sites with their own component roots.
Spent much of the day watching television (mostly stuff from the
Tivo), talking with my mom on the telephone, and wrestling with Mason.
After much tinkering, I restored M's class website to working order. Doing so was especially fun because of the aforementioned lack of correct information in the manual (who needs a Parser object, after all?). Once I'd sorted that, however, I found I was having bizarre problems dealing with caching—some of the images simply wouldn't show up. It turned out to be a combination of the configuration problems, Mason's caching of objects, and Mozilla's cache. Images were being treated as Mason components, and “interpreted”. Once Mason had worked on them, it cached its bad output, and because the images hadn't changed, it didn't change its cache. After I'd fixed the code to make Mason not mess with images (and stylesheets), and figured out the caching situation, I discovered that Mozilla had helpfully cached the bad data as well. Cleared its caches, and viola!, we were back in business.
On rare occasions (such as this), I'm impressed by my own technical expertise and remember why I got into the biz in the first place.
This morning's news reminded me of why I've mostly stopped listening
to the news. What is it with these idiots? (Feel free to assign any
group you'd like to the “idiots” category, but I would suggest you
go with California Republicans, people who trusted Kenneth Lay, the
Israeli government, the members of the United Nations who stand by and
watch the Israeli government without saying anything, and George
W. Bush, not necessarily in that order.)
Rapidly approaching the end of The Golden Compass, and
it's both exciting and nerve-wracking. At last we get a bit more of
the religious stuff that seems to have so many people so upset. Get
over it, kids (of all ages).
Creepy Botox set to
sweep the nation. I saw an episode of The Operation
where they did the manual equivalent of a Botox injection—cutting
away the scalp so they could scrape out the muscles just above the
nose. Clearly Botox is a less invasive, if more expensive (in the
long run) alternative for people who don't like to express emotion.
Best quote:
Hollywood directions like Martin Scorcese and Baz Luhrmann have complained that Botox is so popular among actors that it is playing havoc with facial expression. In a variant on “The Stepford Wives,” [sic] it is now rare in certain social enclaves to see a woman older than 35 with the ability to look angry.
Maybe there's a feedback loop here—if you can't look
angry, perhaps you can't really be angry. Or maybe that's
what people are hoping.
Via Graham.
Back to square one with the redesign, but making great strides
forward!
After extensive fiddling with CVS, I've created a branch off my main site that I can use for development work, allowing me to continue to post as though nothing has changed, but also get things working with the new site.
Weirdly enough, things are making a lot more sense. Maybe I'm on some sort of roll here....
Only you know if you're cool or not, but I'm pretty sure that allowing
some
wanker at the Guardian to tell you isn't.
Via Andrew and Graham (who
should know better).
Cool! U-Haul has the graphics from the sides of their trucks on the
Web now. Way back when, my brother and I moved the contents of a 4' x
4' x 8' storage locker I'd rented in California up to his basement in
Seattle (marginally closer to Vancouver, where I was living at the
time). We ended up with a fairly huge truck—my stuff fit almost
completely in the little section above the cab! But on the side of
that truck was U-Haul's
take on Roswell...
Via Screenshot
Whoops—looks like I just trashed my mail archive pretty seriously.
I decided to run my archive script, which worked fine except for
putting two archive folders a level higher than I expected. Then I
ran a foreach loop to go through and sort and pack the folders (as
exmh was still claiming that I had 5000 messages in one
folder, most of which should have been archived). Alas, I didn't drop
the archive files from the working list, and it looks like
nmh cleverly decided to treat the folders (with names
such as 1999, 2000, etc.) as messages, and renumbered them. Looking
inside, it seemed like there were some subfolders missing, although
that may not really be the case.
Luckily, I made a backup first (as anyone would tell you to do before you start messing around with something as important as mail), but it's still going to take a while to unpack and figure out the best next step.
Two options:
We shall see....
Ah, that was easy. Just renamed the folders and all is well. This
time I preceded the year with a y, so nmh
won't interpret them as messages in the future.
(Not counting the mail I may have received since I started the backup and archive process, I have 37,601 messages in 303 folders dating back to 1993. And that's just the mail I was able to archive—I'm not sure how much I may have lost prior to that point. Scary, huh?)
I came across the Typing Injuries FAQ
site today, which not only gives you lots of information about
typing injuries but also about general ergonomics issues, and reviews
furniture and technology meant to deal with those issues.
(Specifically, I did a search on Google for “slant boards”, a more common way of describing Levenger's editor's desks.)
Pocket Full of
Therapy has all sorts of interesting ergonomic and therapeutic
products.
Way back in college, I discovered Savage
Republic, an LA-based “industrial art-punk band”. I can't
recall now what caught my attention—I probably heard a track or two
on the college's radio station, read an article in one of the zines I
bought at a record store, or perhaps was entranced by the
sleeves.
They were cool—jangly guitars, tribal rhythms, clashing steel. And haunting lyrics, some of which I still hear in my head from time to time even though I haven't heard the song for ten years or so (LPs but no turntable, y'know).
But now Mobilization Records have released all their studio albums on CD, with new Independent Project Press artwork. I am sorely tempted, although I have one album on CD (Customs), and two on LP (Tragic Figures and Ceremonial).
The Cooper-Hewitt National Design
Museum's site for the Mixed
Messages exhibit that I mentioned above is pretty interesting, as
well.
Whoops. Another Valentine's Day gone by and another year I forgot to
share the yucky candy heart sayings my friends and I made up when we
were in high school. (Made yuckier by scraping off the old messages
from real candy hearts and writing new ones with .30 mm technical
pens.)
I even came across the notebook they're in on the day itself, remembered I'd been looking for that notebook at some point (a year ago, obviously), but couldn't remember when.
Rats.
This morning I was complaining about how lots of people over on Macintouch were whining about how awful Earthlink—which happens to be our DSL provider—was. Other than waiting for what seemed like forever to get the line set up and the equipment shipped (wow does modem-only access suck after you've had DSL for a year or so), and the incredibly horrible performance we were seeing when we first hooked things up (which was a problem on their end that they solved by the next day), they've been pretty good, with relatively few outages and no billing problems (that I'm aware of).
So our connection died this afternoon, and is still down as of midnight (when I'm writing this entry). Sigh. When will I learn to be careful with my praise?
(BTW, Futurama is being cancelled because we finally got to see one and I was reminded of how funny it is. Tonight's episode was surprisingly sweet—almost a Valentine's Day episode.)
tenbyand some combination of those changes seems to have gotten things working again. You gotta love computers. (Don't you?)
While I'm complaining about computers, I want to mention an annoying
thing our Quicksilver does that no one else seems to admit to (or to
have figured out).
Because M has an iBook, we have a networked printer, three desktop
computers (well, okay, four), and only a four-port switch, we ordered
the G4 with an Airport card. By setting up an Airport network, M's
iBook can talk to the world via perosteck. We also got a
set of Harman/Kardon SoundSticks for perosteck. Not long
after hooking them up, they suddenly stopped working. Experimentation
led us to understand that there's some interaction between iTunes and
the Airport network such that when you move a significant amount of
data from the G4 to the iBook, the SoundSticks die, and can't be
revived unless you (1) move the USB cable to another USB port (on a
different bus) or (2) reboot the computer. Really annoying. (Poking
around a bit more, it seems like other people are seeing this problem,
too, without the Airport connection, but with the copying. Maybe it
will be fixed someday....)
For those of you interested in such things, M has finally made a beta
release of FontKit, tools that allow you to use
multiple-master fonts with TeX and LaTeX.
FontKit is the software we use to produce documents such as my
résumé, M's dissertation, and so forth. It's great
stuff, and the main reason I packaged mminstance and
t1utils for Debian GNU/Linux.
I'll mention it again when she updates the SourceForge project or uploads it to CTAN.
Amazon has an amazing deal on for you ON-U, dub, and reggae fans. Adrian
Sherwood Presents the Master Recordings is a 16-track
sampler with the likes of Dr. Pablo and the Dub Syndicate, Singers
& Players, African Head Charge, Bim Sherman, the Barmy Army, and
more. And it's $7.98.
I have a theory about this crematorium business. In fact, I can think
of two possible explanations:
Now, option 1 sounds like the kind of thing you'd expect to hear, except that it doesn't make sense. There are hundreds or thousands of crematoria around that make plenty of money actually doing the work they're supposed to be doing. But I just heard a claim (on NPR, of course) that “the incinerator was broken”. Which is all well and good, except that they've got something like 140 corpses so far, some of which are mummified. I don't know what the death rate is down there, or how wide an area that one crematorium is serving, but it doesn't seem like you could end up with mummified corpses in the amount of time it would reasonably take to repair an incinerator. Also, if the thing was just damaged and you didn't have some ulterior motive, would you really take in bodies, stick them in the back of a cave, and give the relatives an urn full of cement powder? Seems unlikely to me, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
Began the stunningly tedious task of verifying that all the
documentation files included with Debian's
teTeX packages are, in fact, DFSG-free.
Doing so involves looking at the original TeX document (when possible), searching CTAN for insight, and searching the rest of the Web when CTAN doesn't have the file.
On the plus side, I wrote a nice little Perl script to read through the data and let me know how much more work I have left.
Apple's Mac OS X 10.1.3 update seems to be a
mixed bag. It has made some things better—notably, iTunes doesn't
seem to skip as much when the screensaver kicks in and again when the
screen turns itself off. But it hasn't fixed the “can't sleep”
problem (which appears to be the fault of the SCSI adaptor that Apple
installed in the machine—lame!) or the “copying some big files
from the machine while iTunes is playing kills the USB driver for the
SoundSticks problem”.
One thing the update did fix, however, is a problem I was
having where double-clicking on (or downloading) a PDF file would open
Acrobat and display the file the first time. After that, Acrobat
would pop to the front, but not open the file. So that's a useful
thing, especially with all the PDF files I've been looking at the last
couple of days.
After assorted hacking and slashing, I've patched up the Mason version
of M's personal site so that it can be rendered and published. That
involved lots of copying of components from other sites, not to
mention some yucky reconstruction work resurrecting a working glossary
file for her site from the one in the CVS archive.
While I was at it, I figured out a reasonably clever way of providing
full navigation for the site at home without actually making
everything visible to the world (most of the content is about a year
old, complete with extensive references to our living in Vancouver).
Basically, because wget only follows links, I put in some
code to check to see if the user-agent is
wget, and, if so, feed it a different (truncated) menu.
Thus publishing the site only gets the parts that are updated, but
looking at it with a real browser gets the full version of the site.
(The other side of this, um, innovation, is that if I ever decide to
do some sort of CGI-thingy to allow me to edit my blog from a browser,
I can probably add the necessary <form> elements to
do so pretty easily.)
A couple of weeks ago, I had a disastrous attempt at making a
grilled-cheese sandwich. I ate it, of course, but it was excessively
charred and a disappointment.
Today, however, I managed to improve considerably on my previous performance. The keys, I think, were using a larger, Teflon-coated pan (making it a bit easier to get the fish slice under the sandwich to flip it, and also making it less likely to stick) and using sliced cheese rather than shredded (because we usually only use cheese for cooking, we generally shred and freeze it it soon after bringing it home).
The potato bread (from Albertsons) worked well, too. Yum.
I spent some time cleaning up some of the entries in iTunes (some of
which are truncated), and discovered that you could “upgrade” the
version of the ID3 tags for various files, which would allow you to
enter longer titles.
Before I figured that out, however, I deleted and decided to rerip Lee `Scratch' Perry & Dub Syndicate's Time Boom X De Devil Dead, and while I was locating the CD, I came across a couple of CDs we hadn't ripped and I hadn't heard in a while—Sykurmolarnir's Illur Arfur! (The Sugarcubes' Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week!, in Icelandic—especially confusing because the track listing on the back and the lyrics in the booklet are in English!) and OP8 featuring the Ilk of Lisa Germano's Slush (what Andrew would call a “shoegazer” band, no doubt).
The fill-in collection.... But still, some great stuff here, including stuff I haven't heard for years.
Tinkering with the new site layout. I'm trying to decide if I really
want to drop the whole personal directory. I'm
definitely leaning toward it—after all, this is my
personal site, and it seems kind of silly to have a
personal directory just to preserve a nice hierarchy.
(Technically, after all, even the stuff in my work
directory is really personal.)
On the downside, moving the blog up a level will break any permalinks people may have made to entries on my site. On the other hand, Google tells me that isn't likely to be a problem.
We went to see Gosford
Park this afternoon. The film itself was well done,
although it certainly seemed to me that very few (okay, none) of the
“upstairs” characters really had anything to recommend them—great
acting, just awful people. But mostly it served to reinforce my
feeling that the universe would be better off should the Earth spin
off into the sun.
The sad thing is that no matter how good a film is, the experience of seeing it in a modern American theatre in the Los Angeles area is so unpleasant that it overshadows the film.
At some point after I left the States, the people running these places decided that bombarding the audience with ads was not just acceptable, it was a great idea. Never mind that the cost of tickets has pretty doubled from when I was a kid. And the ads are amazingly stupid—the highlight this time was a “bottle race” between various kinds of fizzy sugar water from a large Southern manufacturer. What kind of low-grade morons could they expect to get excited and involved in such an ad? They're slides!
The ad bombardment is accompanied by one of those corporate satellite “radio” stations playing the most pathetic music imaginable. We had some of that horrible lovely-dovey, vaguely hip-hop stuff that sounds exactly like much of the forgettable music of the seventies, followed by a county-westerny piece that may well have been one of the Shrub's choices for annoying the Chinese. (it worked for me.) I can only hope that what we heard isn't representative of what most people in the States are listening to, but I suspect otherwise.
Once the lights dimmed, we were treated to a slew of previews for films I wouldn't be caught dead at. The best was for The Bourne Identity, based on a Robert Ludlum book written in 1980 (that I read when I was in high school). It looks like they've tarted it up with lasers and computers and satellite tracking systems and all the other lame crap Hollywood puts in every spy movie these days. (It wasn't clear from the preview, but I wouldn't be surprised if the evil American spy agency is the NSA, as well. The NSA as villain was fine for Sneakers and Enemy of the State, but not for several other films it's been used in lately. I always wonder if the mathematicians and language experts at the NSA order in some pizza and watch these films and make jokes about not being able to kill anyone they want like the guys in the movies do.) Weirdly, they also had bits of Tom Tykwer's soundtrack from Lola Rennt, apparently because Franka Potente is in this film, as well. (Playing the French-Canadian economist—German, Canadian, whatever—they're all ferriners, right?)
I couldn't choose a worst, however, because, based on their previews, all the other movies were incredibly, horribly, awful dreck meant for the dumbest of the dumb. How they figured that anyone who wanted to see Gosford Park would be interested in any of these other films, I don't know.
Except that they were probably right. The audience was pretty dopey. They laughed loudly and long at an incredibly stupid ad that gave away its joke within the first few seconds. And, wow, could they talk. We actually had to ask the people sitting next to us to shut up, as they were busy reading every credit that appeared on the screen and remembering other things they'd seen the actors in.
Yuck. And if that experience wasn't bad enough, we went to Evil Sam's Club afterwards to pick up some large-size containers of stuff that we can't find anywhere else. Even though they're evil. And we're complicit in that evil just by living here.
America sucks.
Looks like Adobe Illustrator 10 does, in fact, support multiple-master
fonts, which is very, very good to know.
I know, most people don't know from multiple masters, but we have quite a collection—Kepler, Cronos, Minion, Jenson, Tekton, Myriad, and Nueva, I believe. Practically speaking, multiple-master fonts are useless for most applications (including, IMHO, most desktop-publishing applications). There's no practical way of applying the proper font instances to your text in a word processor, for example, and getting the application to generate the correct instance with a heavier weight when you choose “bold” from a menu, or to generate and switch to the correct weight, width, and optical size when you choose “italic”.
Unless, of course, you're using a graphics application, such as Illustrator or Photoshop, where you're dealing with all the little details (and generally not very large chunks of text), or, of course, with TeX.
As I mentioned before, M has some clever tools written in Perl that basically take the place of some of TeX's clever tools so that you can typeset a document and have her tools figure out the specific settings for the necessary instance, generate the metrics, create a single-instance font, and allow you to do that again and again, for each of the (potentially dozens) of individual fonts in a document.
So the TeX side is sorted, but I was very worried that the graphics side wouldn't be, as Adobe and Apple have shown no instance in making multiple-master fonts generally available in Mac OS X. So long as they can be used in Adobe's applications, though, I think I can be happy with that situation. (But wait 'til Illustrator 11....)
Also of interest: What Did
Gutenberg Invent?, an Open University site examining the question
of whether Gutenberg really invented movable type, or whether he just
managed to make a success of someone else's invention.
Via Lines & Splines.
I know, I know, you're having problems. It's broken in Internet Explorer. You don't like the fonts. You hate the colors. All your links to my archives have broken. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
I decided it would be better for me to merge the branch in and then fix the main site up than to continue maintaining the two branches separately. There are generated components that had to be shared between the branches, and other components that I was having to update in parallel. Merging the branch now is the easiest solution, as it will reduce my maintenance overhead and allow me to concentrate on fixing the broken stuff.
Note that the blog will still not validate—that's because the script that assembles blog pages needs some serious tinkering, perhaps even a major rewrite. Dealing with the script is next on my list.
As for the archive links, if you edit your links to remove
personal, they should work just fine.
Please let me know if you have any other problems. Once I finish with the teTeX document vetting, I'll get back to work on the site.
If you're reading this entry, then I've finished debugging my rewrite
of my blog script.
I think it's pretty slick, if I do say so myself.
I didn't rewrite the whole script from scratch, but instead started by commenting everything major out and going though it line by line, commenting as I went. I now think that I not only have a pretty good idea what it's doing, but also have put enough information in the script that I'll probably still be able to understand it if I need to tinker with it in the future.
I did rewrite the whole subroutine that handles formatting
entries, though, changing it from a slew of regular expression
searches and replaces on a variable to some code that does some
searching and replacing, but also inserts all of the structural stuff
elsewhere. The code also works on each entry separately, instead of
on the whole day's worth of entries, which takes a really messy bit
out of the picture. I also improved the <p>
cleanup a lot.
I'm still having annoying problems with <p> tags
and block-level elements that do contain more than one
paragraph (e.g., <blockquote>). In the end, I
decided to just force the insertion of
<p></p> pairs, which seems to make the
validators happy.
In other news, yesterday Adaptec came out with new drivers for their
SCSI cards fixing the deep sleep problem with Mac OS X.
Right after we'd given up and taken the card out, of course. Anyway,
card's back in and it seems to work.
If only Apple would fix the USB death problem (now the keyboard and mouse sometimes die, too, especially neat given that they're on what should be a completely different bus...).
While I was working on making sure the script created valid HTML, I
came across something that I think is likely to be a big problem down
the road.
XHTML
appears to be heading toward deprecating the name
attribute to the <a> element in favor of the
id attribute (see, for example, this
mail message). That's all well and good, as generating an
id is as easy as generating a name is now,
except that id has one limitation that name
does not: ids must begin with a letter
(a-zA-Z). Why is that a problem? Because many—maybe
even most—blogging tools assign numeric name anchors
(either dates or some other unique numeric identifiers) for use in
permanent links. Thus, if name goes away, everyone's
permalinks are going to break.
I sent off a report on my teTex documentation survey to
debian-tetex-maint. (There's also a longer
HTML version.) There are about thirty documents (and their
associated packages) that may not be
DFSG-free,
which we will have to check out in more detail. If we can't get them
licensed under a DFSG-compatible license, we may have to drop them
from the distribution.
Copyright © 1998–2005, C.M. Connelly.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Last modified at 3:56 PM PST, Wednesday, December 17, 2008; last rendered at 3:56 PM PST, Wednesday, December 17, 2008 with Mason and Perl.
Please e-mail me about problems with this page. Thanks.
