Things about Ari: Her alarm is set for 5:37, she has an onion in her handbag and has for a week, she likes spicy foods and has a constant craving for pickles. She finds melancholy to be beautiful, likes rain more than sun, and thunderstorms most of all. She drinks five shots of espresso unflinchingly, and loves tea.

I Like Girls is a cute, sweet less-than-twenty-page comic read.

I ran into the BBC Cult TV Site and ran into Buffy stuff there. I could be addicted so easily. I so do not need that right now!

Ralph Klein is a jerk, but he suggests doing the right thing.

Best blonde joke evar.

• Play with QT4
• Learn about and play with OpenID

1. Moss
2. Pride events
3. Flea markets
4. Bridges
5. Rose gardens

“Adios!” “Adiablo” “Aloshumanos!”

This transgender-themed newspiece has made me happy all day.

• Improving ruby bindings for Raptor, Rasqal and Redland.
• Separating my web framework from the financial app it was created for, and turning it into small, orthagonal, releasable pieces. I’d love for it to be a toolkit for those who want to build a larger web framework, not a whole framework in itself, really. Rails is great, but it’s still shifting sands as it develops, and the pieces aren’t very loosely coupled.
• Using Behavior.js, Script.aculo.us’ scripts and some other Javascript libraries to play with some fun UI stuff.
• Hack more on [Ruby to add some aspect-oriented features to the syntax.
• Whip XChat-GNOME](http://ruby-lang.org/) into better shape.
• Play with Ruby-Web/Narf, which looks like a good clean-up on the ruby CGI library, though why on earth someone would treat CGI environment and HTTP headers as case-insensitive is beyond me. I also worry about the usage of thread-local structure like that. It’s so close to right that it’ll probably stick and keep it from being actually right . Grr.
• Do more illustrations for Illustration Friday. Just one a week, though.
• Find the sheet music or tab to Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” and learn to play it better.
• Play with Ruby/Odeum, and put it to good use on the NBTSWikiWiki.
• Finish writing my change-tracking virtual filesystem overlay.
• Learn enough Haskell to hack on Darcs some.
• Install Pubcookie or Webauth on Polis.
• Finish the Ruby NSS module I’ve been working on.
• Write a script for said NSS module to allow users on Polis to define a friends-group pseudo-user, and using that and Posix-draft ACLs, make unix-secure web files. This will probably take something like the aforementioned Pubcookie for authentication, and a webserver with privilege to change userids, or a dynamic proxy or FastCGI type thing to fire up a servlet process as a given user when supplied with adequate credentials. Thar be some dragons.
• Work on Xenophile.

And people wonder why I say I don’t believe in boredom.

• Rain. More than anything, watching a rainstorm soothes my mind. Thunder and lightning and everything so much larger than I is a wonderful feeling.
• Cooking. Making, preparing, and eating well feels like a wonderful thing. I eat conciously, aware of what I am eating and where it came from, how it affects the world and my body. I love to share it with people I care about, because the feeling of providing for others is a wonderful one. I also tend to be hypoglycemic, and to feel terrible if I do not eat.
• Music. If I can find a sound-track to match my mood, I can start slipping in songs to lift me from there. Learning to play the cello has given me something to focus on when things are bad.
• Contact with friends. Loneliness sucks.
• A feeling of independence. Working for myself lifted my moods. Hobbies that I can do myself, don’t need other people around for are wonderful, too.
• A space of my own to control. Just having my own house, even if it’s tiny, or my own room, gives me another point of stability.
• Not drinking much. Alchohol upsets my body, and that just makes me feel bad.

Polis has crashed a couple times recently due to RAM shortage. I’m waiting for a reboot right now, and hopefully I can get up to Ouray on Tuesday with a new stick, giving a full gigabyte.

I always thought that the girl in “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken” was going to be gay. I always find it disturbing that she wasn’t.

• qboosh’s anal-retentive package corrections. Things work consistently. Very, very consistently. And he can spel, too.
• Out of the box IPv6 support, and no ifconfig(8) needed.
• Choices aren’t made as distro policy except when there’s One Right Way, or having one way is the only possible way, no matter what it is.
• Packages are as small as possible, but not annoyingly fragmented like a certain distro’s Ruby package
• Things work out of the box most of the time.
• It uses RPM.
• Development is transparent — enough so that I as a non-Polish-speaker could get involved. The technical clarity makes up for most of the lack of English developer docs.
• Up-to-dateness without actually bleeding much. I’ve been running GNOME 2.10 since shortly after it came out from gnome.org, and the breakage was nearly nil. No reason to delay the update forever.
• Effort into solving things solidly. I can confidently upgrade a kernel with RPM, and not fret that the system won’t boot. I’ve had two exceptions to this, both with some exceedingly odd (read: unreasonable, and using bleeding-edge softtware) setups that I created. Both of which PLD’s current RPMs handle, actually.

Ruby’s packages in PLD are decent (I made most of them), but there’s some nasty quirks around ri because it doesn’t play nice with RPM: a package that adds methods to a core class like Array generates a new cdesc-Classname.yaml file, which would require a programatic merge (and worse, unmerge) from the installed copy. This isn’t acceptable, because it makes MD5 checksum verification much more fragile, which is one reason people use an RPM-based system: the validity checks are powerful when the packages are made right.

I’m planning on doing several things to PLD’s ruby packaging in the coming time:

• Package setup.rb as a package in its own right, for build scripts to draw on. I have a copy in CVS right now, but I’m manually synching it with upstream, and there’s no versioning that way. Now, I can declare which version of setup.rb I coded the package spec against, so that when I update setup.rb, I’ll know what packages have to be updated to match, since there are no backward-compatibility guarantees.
• Patch ri to use more than one YAML file for its class description format. Or maybe scrap it entirely since ri is amazingly slow, when compared to man(1).
• Make a new, less ugly and more useful and easier to index RDoc template.
• Perhaps centralize ruby docs into /usr/share/doc/ruby/{core,stdlib,packagename}, for easy mass-publishing to the web, since most docs require a browser to read effectively.
• Package some of the Heretix system administration scripts, to toy with at least.
• Pipe dream: find an effective way to replace init(8) and rc-scripts with ruby, and make the boot sequence faster and better organized.
• Code a nice full-text index to the installed documentation, and an XMLHTTPRequest-based UI for it, for efficient searching of the entire installed set of package docs.
• Patch Ruby (or maybe just Ruby’s build) to look for architecture-independent libraries in /usr/share instead of /usr/lib{,64}, so that noarch packages can be built, and are actually the same when built on all architectures. Sparc64 and AMD64 are problematic in that there is both a /usr/lib and /usr/lib64, but Ruby only looks at the one it was built with, and in /usr/share not at all.