Category: Meta

Almost six weeks with nary a post. Nothing at all for July.

I’d love to have some excuse–that I was busy with work or something–but the changes to my schedule that did, in fact, happen are not actually the cause. I just haven’t had much to say.

Yeah, I’m back. I don’t want to think about how long it’s been since I’ve posted. I swear, baby, this time I’ll post every day, just come back.

No, I’m not going to go full Ike on you. Not right now, at least. Instead, I will leave you with “an amusing quote from Jon Carroll”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=%2Fchronicle%2Farchive%2F2005%2F05%2F31%2FDDGM7C7THN1.DTL:

bq. In my youth (and still, today, in Las Vegas), all the rules were available in advance. The nature of the problem was known. The solution to the problem depended on many variables, but the variables were also known. Many unexpected things can happen in poker, but none of them is that a Merkon Death Ray will turn all the cards into lizards. It is never true in poker that your only hope of survival is to steal the belt of the man sitting next to you.

Yeah, the person who found my site by searching for ??holly hunter unattractive??. Dude, you’re just *wrong*. Wrong I tell you!

On the other hand, ??one on one sex chet video software?? is just funny.

One last selection: ??elephants anatomy porn??.

_whimper_.

OK, so the single best reason to analyze ones weblog access logs is not to find out how many people are hitting your site or any shit like that–although I have to admit to a certain bafflement at how many hits I get, even if you carve out bloglines.com’s constant polling.

No, the best reason to analyse ones access logs is to see the absolutely hilarious searches that people follow to your site. I’ve mentioned “milla jovovich naked” before–I don’t think the person using that got what they wanted, “since it was a result of me bashing ??Resident Evil??”:/2004/09/dinner-rush.html. Anne and I spent a few minutes a week or so ago lauging about some.

You must see where this is going…

I can’t say how amused I was to find the all-time-best-search today: Live Sex Chet.

Chet, of course, demanded that I make it the headline, which I’ve agreed to do for a day or two.

I have to say, there’s an awful lot of other amusing ones, and some that I just don’t understand how they got to me:

* gas treatment dupont (no frigging idea)
* kernels that stick in your teeth (err, linux + new Nine Inch Nails album?)
* free porn that you can watch for free (no idea)
* a boy bow down to his parents (the old title, bet this wasn’t what they expected)
* all sorts of warts (no idea, don’t want to think about it)
* dogs fuck women novels (whoa, where’d that come from!)
* naked librians (yeah!)
* wachowski brothers and sex change (v for vendetta and…uh…)
* how to tell someone you hate them (I’m kinda amused, but baffled)
* get out of this shitty marriage (this kinda makes me sad)
* how to give a lap dance (u2 + who knows)

“Chet’s recollection”:http://miscellaneousheathen.com/life/050224phoneshenanigans.html of me screwing around with people who kept calling my number in error. It has a vague sense of familiarity, but, honestly, it might have been Patrick–simply taking reservations seemed a little subtle for me, I was much more the “beat the phone against the wall” sort of person at that point.

I’m much better now. Unless you’re a telephone solicitor. Or a wrong number calling me too early in the morning.

So, um, I took a week off, more or less, from any real, sensible, useful work to write my own blogging package.

This choice, believe it or not, was not undertaken lightly. Well, that’s not entirely true–the need to resolve the issues I’d been having bit me in the ass one day, and I just couldn’t concentrate on anything else until it was done. But I’d been thinking about moving for a while, because there were issues with the software I had been using, but the software, “Blosxom”:http://blosxom.com/, is basically dead.

Well, perhaps that’s overstating the case. It still has a community of users, and many of them are quite happy–heck, I was _mostly_ happy–but it has no leader to keep development moving forward, and the prior leader, “Rael Dornfest”:http://raelity.org/, released the last alpha version of the “big new update” nearly a year ago with a restrictive license that forbids anyone from picking it up and continuing development.

And the idea of hacking on the prior version, of which I’ve done a little, was not attractive.

So I decided to take those aspects of Blosxom that I really liked–mostly using the filesystem as your database–and build my own. And I have, and it’s not really ready to be released just yet (there’s still a ton of rough edges), but I can talk about the design a little bit.

The single biggest thing I like about Blosxom is that it uses the filesystem as its database of articles, which are all just text files–you type them up, give them silly names, dump them in directories, and it picks through it all to find stuff. This works great for me, with my devotion to Emacs, and it allows me to easily and reliably do all my editing locally, and then push my changes up to the real server using rsync or sitecopy or what-have-you.

Where my too begins to differ is that Blosxom considers the first line of your file the title, and the rest is the body. For various reasons, I got in the habit of separating those with a line, and I decided to exploit that. So my tool considers anything up to the first blank line to be a “header”, while the rest of the file is the body.

Now, at the moment, I actually prefix this header text with the string “title: “, and then split the whole thing up on the colons, much like one would a mail header. This allows you to define arbitrary properties for a message. You can put:

bq. This is a title
Foo: Fee
author: Jiminy

Etc., etc. The body part of the message gets run through “Textile”:http://textism.com/tools/textile/, which is a very nice, very smart formatter that takes a lot of the scutwork out of the sort of text I’m writing. It gives me back xhtml.

From all this, I can produce a chunk of XML to represent the article, including those arbitrary properties from the header. This all gets glommed together with some header information for the whole feed into a big XML document that represents the semantic content I want to produce.

Then, depending on what sort of output you requested (this is the “flavor” in Blosxom parlance), that XML is cranked through a stylesheet that will produce well-formed XHTML, or RSS (of any type), or Atom, or conceivably other things.

Even though this is all written in perl, it’s pretty damn fast–all the XML tomfoolery is done using the XML::LibXML and XML::LibXSLT libraries, which are wrappers around libxml2 and libxslt1.1, which are lightning-fast C libraries for doing this stuff.

I also think it’s ridiculously flexible, for the usual reasons: it divorces content from presentation (mostly), so it’s easy to support multiple formats with a fair shot at producing optimal results in them.

I also have ideas for “plugins”–the fundamental thing to realize is that we can dump as much stuff as we want into our “source document”, and then use XSLT stylesheets to tailor things for presentation. So that list of days with number of posts can be put in some arbitrary place and the XSLT (probably plus some CSS) can move it to be a sidebar.

Overall, I think it’s going to end up being a nice system–perhaps not perfect, but close. But for the moment I need to go to bed.

I hope everyone reading is well–all two or three of you.

We had a day of beautiful weather–it was more like January in Miami than January in Durham. Of course, I spent too much of it inside playing World of Warcraft, but Anne and I still got a walk of a bit over an hour and a quarter in midafternoon.

On an amusing meta-note, I can only guess that the person who found this site by searching for “milla jovovich naked” did not get what he (presumably) was looking for, since it probably wasn’t snarky comments about ??Resident Evil??.

I’m vaguely amazed that I have enough google juice that I would show up in such a search.

Oh, and if you haven’t read ??Moneyball??, do. I don’t care if you don’t like baseball, you should still read it. I might do a more detailed review later, but for the moment, I’ll just say that JD and Cory (my sister and brother-in-law–I’m guessing the nephews, Calvin and Nigel had no direct input) got it for me for Christmas, and, well, it didn’t make it through Boxing Day. Generally nonfiction takes me longer than that.

Anyway, get some sleep. I’m going to.

The question is kind of tongue-in-cheek but the fact is I’m starting to think that for me the answer is “mild depression”.

Now I’m really not trying to cause anyone concern–this is not “I’m going to go jump off a bridge now” material. I don’t feel unhappy or anything–which even now makes me wonder if I’m wrong–instead, I’m just totally and utterly apathetic. I have no energy, no desire to do anything active at all–I’d happily sleep, eat and watch television, maybe read and play World of Warcraft.

In fact, at first I just thought it was that I was tired–three months in DC did take a lot out of me; it was stressful for a whole host of reasons, and it didn’t exactly end on a high note. But I’ve had plenty of time to get past the physiological effects, and yet here I find myself, feeling like Inertia Man–if I can get moving, I can sometimes find some energy and keep it going, but most of the time, I lose steam quickly. And it happens pretty much every year.

Oh, well, as reliably as it comes, it goes, too. In a couple of weeks I’ll wake up bursting with energy, wondering why I was so egregiously slack for the last month–it’s just weird to realize all this.

…that postings have dried up, insofar as he hectored me into buying Worlds of Warcraft, which is interfering with me getting any, you know, _work_ done.

I haven’t spent this much time with a video game since ’95 or ’96, when Quake came out.

“Find it at http://www.diepunyhumans.com”:http://www.diepunyhumans.com/

This should be important to anyone who’s read ??Transmetropolitan?? (bet that one came out OK, Nova), and, well, _everyone_ should read ??Transmetropolitan??.

Oh, and that link where he says don’t look–seriously, don’t look. Nothing good can come of it. Nothing. I need to go spend about three hours in the shower now.

“via William Gibson”:http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp

Never, ever, ever go three months without playing guitar.

While–should I get back to any sort of substantive posting before November 2, which is unclear at this point–I may “link to things other people have to say”:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2004/10/an_indecent_dis.html, or discuss the way my involvement in all this has changed me, I don’t think I can continue to talk about my feelings, because it’s obvious that when I do so I am unable to rise above fairly corrosive incivility.

So I’m going to stop. I’m unlikely to convince anyone, no matter how well I document the compulsive mendacity, or the failed programs or the disastrous policies, if I can’t even begin to make the case at anything less than a primal scream.

More yoga is probably the answer. Or more gin and tequila. It’s probably situation-dependent.

Taken by putting together the words that appear most often in searches that arrive at this blog:

bow the down poodle one before you serve blonde concrete

“Read about it here.”:http://www.wonkette.com/archives/wonkette-seeks-nubile-young-things-018882.php

But, of course, I don’t live in DC at the moment, and I’m not in a

position to work for free.

But I am in a position to compose haikus about Al Gore. How long do

you think I can draw this sick joke out?

JWZ mentions Sister Machine Gun “in the latest DNA Lounge updatelet”:http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2004/06.html#17.

My only synth module–I use it with my guitar synth module–is a a Roland JV-1080 I bought seven or eight years ago from one of the members of Sister Machine Gun via the net.

And I’ve never had second thoughts. In the end, I don’t know that there’s anything more to say.

9 years and 11 months ago, Anne and I got married at Cambridge City Hall. We didn’t tell people we knew for varying periods of time, for lots of reasons.

We’re both intensely proud, though, to see that same location being used to officiate some of the first our-Supreme-Court-said-it-was-ok same-sex marriages in this country.

And to all you miserable bastards in the south who rail against it, get a fucking job–Massachussets pays for your laziness, getting $0.75 on the dollar back for each buck it sends to Washington, while most of you get more back than you put in.

Every time I hear about the marriages in San Francisco, it makes me smile.

Most know this, but should anyone not, my wife and I got married for the very unromantic purpose of getting me health insurance when we moved to Miami. Then we didn’t tell anyone for a couple of years.

We’re both committed to the relationship–well, I am, and it keeps my stress level lower to believe that she is, too–but that commitment doesn’t reside in a piece of paper issued to us by the City of Cambridge, hinge on a big public ceremony or somehow reside in piles of wedding gifts. Which is good, since we only have one of the three.

(Though we _have_ been contemplating the having a 10-year anniversary party this June. Don’t know if that’ll happen, though–that’s a lot of logistics, and we’d want to try and spend most of the money where it counts: on the bar. “Feel free to register interest.”:mailto:%6D%64%6F%72%6D%61%6E%40%6D%61%6C%6C%65%74%2D%61%73%73%65%6D%62%6C%79%2E%6F%72%67)

Add to that the fact that we’ve none of the 50s-style traditional notions of marriage that seem to permeate the Republican party’s rhetoric–we both kept our last names (though Anne does occasionally use mine because it’s shorter and easier to communicate to, say, the dry cleaners or for restaurant reservations; _BTW, a belated thanks to Joy and Carl for what may be only the third wedding invitation that got it right by naming both of us as we prefer to be addressed_), neither of us wants to sit around the house eating bon-bons and watching soaps, and although I have been known to cook, I wouldn’t go barefoot in our kitchen (all the catfood bits make it an unpleasant experience), and I figure another six months of regular yoga will put any pregnancy jokes to rest once and for all–and we’d almost certainly be considered part of the problem, not the solution.

All that said, it should come as no suprise to anyone that every time I hear about the little revolution going on in San Francisco I can’t help but smile. I’m sure the Great Braying Ass that is the current Republican Party will find some way to spoil the fun, but I, for one, cannot be convinced that something that has made so many people _happy_ can be in any way a bad thing.

So Fucking There.

(Seriously, June 21st is on a Monday, so we’d probably do it the weekend before. It might just be a big house party, or if enough people wanted to come, we would do something more elaborate. I’m probably fooling myself as to whether this is a good venue to mention all this, though)

It’s been quite a year. Let’s hope 2004 comes out better in all sorts of ways. Yoga class this morning started it off pretty well, but then I watched ??Identity?? and discovered some reference to it I’d run across wasn’t joking when it said words to the effect of, “Remember that scene in ??Adaptation?? where Donald Kaufman is talking about the chase scene in his movie, and the killer, the cop and the victim are all personalities of the same person–this is that movie.”

For the next couple of weeks, and I don’t know how much I’ll be posting.

From “Ken McLeod’s blog”:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/, an amusing joke from ex-Soviet Georgia:

bq.. What did we use for lighting before we had candles?

Electricity.

p. And then “Adam Felber”:http://felbers.net/mt had a link to a site dedicated to “the Freeway Blogger”:http://www.freewayblogger.com/.

Somehow, they seemed of a piece.

And on an unrelated note, Daniel Lanois’ ??Slow Giving?? from ??Shine?? is giving me goosebumps as I write this.

I’ve been working on some fairly detailed stuff for work, and when not doing that, well, I’d have to admit that I’ve been having fun with the Miata–enjoying the freedom to actually get out of the house pretty much whenever I want, etc.

10 years of abstinence was, perhaps, a little too much.

…does this mean that I’ve been “nogatored”:http://www.nogators.com/colophon.html?

The intent here was certainly to post every day, or every other day, but now I find I’ve gone a week.

However, I have nothing of substance to say, just pointers to the amusing “Mullet Haiku”:http://www.beerchurch.com/mullet_haiku.htm, as well as an amusing “contraceptive commercial”:http://www.wezl.org/supermarket.mpg.

I’m sure that last must offend someone somewhere, but I find it hilariously funny–although I have, in many ways, softened on the idea of kids (not that I want any of my own, but I’m more willing to deal with other people’s children), I still think it’s a thing not to be entered into lightly. I think it deserves some real thought and consideration, and a realization that you are going to be giving up a significant portion of your existence to this child, so go aheadn and be prepared; it’s like living in a budget–try doing it while you have a safety net so you’ll know whether you can do it when you have to.

One of the little pleasures I find in doing this blog is the fact that I’ve decided on using exclusively textual names for the files. This means that each time I go to do a new entry, I have to come up with a unique filename for it. I’m sure some day it’ll get boring, but not yet.

I guess I’ve decided to really try and keep a blog.

Of course, one of the things that has worked against me doing so up to this point has been that there always seemed to be “web forms”:http://advogato.org/ or “proprietary software”:http://userland.com. Nothing that would work pretty-much transparently with “good old Emacs”:http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html.

Hopefully “Blosxom”:http://www.raelity.org/apps/blosxom/ will change that.