Stupid banks and stupid bank holidays. Two important deposits didn’t happen when I needed them to.

I could be sleeping, but 5:45 wasn’t so bad. I didn’t have to get up quite that early, I suppose, but I wanted to make sure I made it to the bus. So instead of sleeping, I’m posting on Live Journal.

I wish that Ridgway had a full-service bus-stop. It’s discharge-only officially. so one has to stand out by the highway (for a half hour in my case) and flag the bus down. At least the driver is a good, competent and nice fellow.

I think half the population of Oaxaca must be on this bus — there was hardly a seat available. Everyone is peacefully sleeping, something I wish I had mastered on Greyhound.

Anyway, I’m off to Durango for the weekend, so don’t expect me on IRC.

I could be sleeping, but 5:45 wasn’t so bad. I didn’t have to get up quite that early, I suppose, but I wanted to make sure I made it to the bus. So instead of sleeping, I’m posting on Live Journal.

I wish that Ridgway had a full-service bus-stop. It’s discharge-only officially. so one has to stand out by the highway (for a half hour in my case) and flag the bus down. At least the driver is a good, competent and nice fellow.

I think half the population of Oaxaca must be on this bus — there was hardly a seat available. Everyone is peacefully sleeping, something I wish I had mastered on Greyhound.

Anyway, I’m off to Durango for the weekend, so don’t expect me on IRC.

Last night, I did a radio show with John Lorimer on the topic of Linux. It was delight, since it’s a call-in show, and we had four calls, some about Linux and some otherwise. We talked about the virus thing and spam and spyware and how vendor lock‐in works.

Of course, during a live radio show, things happen. Like my server went down, a massive internet failure at the same time keeps me from logging in from the school where the radio studio is. Mail started bouncing for no reason when it came in to my backup server. A hard drive filled up. And I had made a pasteo in the config file in the PBX at the Chipeta just before leaving, so they had no outgoing phones in the rooms.

Today, I had 18 messages on walking into the office. I answered them all, and promptly went out on a two hour virus call. The virus scanner wouldn’t update thanks to another network outage. I couldn’t get the Mozilla suite either, until the end. I think the world is conspiring against me today.

That said, I have a delicious lentil soup in my bowl, good simple tea in my cup, and good music in my ears.

I just updated the ShowChanges code on the NBTSC Wiki, and at the same time, unleashed XHTMLDiff 1.2.0 upon the world.

Spot what’s wrong in this picture:

`

aredridel@acrux:~$ telnet 64.246.58.98 25
Trying 64.246.58.98.25...
Connected to boredmail.com.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
+OK POP3 bored.com (Version 1.6e) http://surgemail.com

`

Twice today, I’ve been praised as the “Nicest web host I’ve ever used”. I think I’m doing something right.

Like all nights with astronomical events, it’s cloudy.

Premature conservation of IP addresses is the root of all evil.

You can quote me on that.

I must say, David’s good with the spin. I gave ActiveRecord perhaps more than it deserved, but it’s really promising in the long run. If only it were written in a less imperative code, all the little bugs I ran into wouldn’t have happened, and when it broke, I’d have the stack to tell me where. It’s still broken in too many ways. If you do something David didn’t anticipate, it breaks horribly. AR never breaks slightly, either not at all or totally unfixably. I don’t mean to speak badly of David. He’s a great app programmer — environments where you can limit the user to just valid data are perfect — but making libraries is a whole other art. You have to have this sort of Zen, making an imperfect system that’s usable by all and hard to break, rather than something tall, beautiful, and ultimately fragile. Toolsmithing isn’t as glamourous as app building, but I’ve seen more buildings with architectural flaws than hammers with design flaws. Of course, if I found one that was badly done, I’d suspect an architect of having their hand in it.

I want to hang out with a bunch of programmers and designers and app builders and toolsmiths some time, and just see if I can get them speaking a common language. It’s all art, but we all have our jargon and prejudices and ways of going about stuff, and it’d be nice to see some conceptual leakage, and see if people produce better stuff afterward. I’d love to see programmers get a good foundation in graphics; app builders a good feel for what library authors think like.

Polypaudio server, a drop-in replacement for esound.

I just completed a rewrite of the ShowChanges code on the NBTSC Wiki. It’s been two years in the making, counting from when I first hunted down the sourcecode to diff, the diff.st implementation, and a few hours of talks with my dad on possible ways to figure out what’s changed, and since I looked at the HTML spec to figure out where the <ins> and <del> tags were allowed to go.

It’s not an easy algorithm in the first place. It’s made worse by HTML’s stuff-inside-of-stuff-inside-of-stuff layout. The usual way diffs work is on flat lists of things. That’s the easy part. The hard part is figuring out the little bits that changed in a complex document.

I’d really appreciate bug reports right now, but I can’t make it break (for once!), and I’ve run it through a fair number of tests.

There’s more improvements in the works — at the moment, the smallest changes it’ll highlight is paragraphs. I’d like it to find individual words and sentences that have changed, but that’ll have to wait a while longer.

I want to be with you so much, but I want to travel too…

That’s what she said to me.

The SYC group (Carrie included) came over this evening, to hang out and use the table for art projects ad hang out indoors for a change. It turned into a “let’s do dinner” thing afterward, so we made pasta and Jasmine made a chicken sauce, and I made a veggie one. Careth and Mike bought ice cream. It was delicious and fun. They’re all emminently quotable (not that I remember anything anyone said, but it was delightful).

I think things are okay now.