• 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.

Illustration Friday‘s theme this week is “Heroes”. Sometimes it just takes some determination and a will to speak up to be a hero, not be the biggest and baddest…

Insane idea of the minute: Curry lasagne.

I have always been obsessed with stories about transformation. I I spent much of my teen years seeking out books about people being changed in so many ways. I love the transformations in Dealing with Dragons, I Capture The Castle is one of the best books I’ve read more recently, about two girls going through th transformation of adolescence. I loved Ender’s Game as a coming-of-age story, children transformed into adults, and a world transformed by the end of a war. Treason, Isaac Asimov’s Robot novels, all of my favorites are in some way tied together this way.

My childhood favorite story was The Velveteen Rabbit. I didn’t read it often, nor listen to the audio tape my family owned often — it was a painful, powerful story to me, but one that’s shaped how I think in immeasurably deep ways. It still makes me cry every time I think about it, or the music comes on my random-play list.

Does anyone else have a theme to their favorites like this?

The most welcome sound in my life today: You have no messages. Press 0 to change voice mail options.. That was far too much work.

This town needs more tree and more cowbell.

The days where I get up at 7 go so much better than the days when I get up at 9:45. Wow.

Looking back, I should have realized I was trans a lot sooner.

I always had few friends — I really wanted to be one of the girls, but I wasn’t really one of them there. I didn’t want to hang out with the boys on the playground in elementary school. I was pretty sensitive as a kid, not itself a girly trait, but I think the feelings were starting then, and it was easy to upset me. My 11th birthday party was ice skating. I invited mostly girls. (I think my mom figured my hormones were kicking into gear. I really just wanted them to be friends outside of school, too.)

I’ve always gravitated toward situations where gender lines either don’t matter, or where I could slip into hanging out with the girls without being noticed. The theater company was good for that, the drama class at the high school was good for that, and the art classes I’ve taken were good for that, if relatively solitary most of the time.

It wasn’t until NBTSC that I really started developing relationships — the open, accepting atmosphere let me really be myself, or at least started me developing with no fear. Each year, I felt more like me and less like I was pretending.

Oh. And I’ve also had a strange propensity to end up with pink things with no effort on my part.

This was something I read every week at the Unitarian-Universalist congregation my family used to attend. It was on an unassuming bronze plaque, placed off to one side off the round hallway in the classroom half of the building, at the perfect height for a tall child such as myself to read as she passed.

Mostly for forecaster15 and the Portland crew, but anyone who cares to should look at some shots of the sky development in Portland this evening.