Entries in Life

This past weekend was my birthday, and I’ve now officially embarked upon my 4th decade of life. As a special treat, my younger brothers and sister, as well as my parentsd came to visit. We had fun showing them around the French Quarter, and I had fun with my new digital camera.

Shortly after I met up with Nate and Joy, we came upon the acrobatic street performers across from Jackson Square. Even they took a break for the war as a noisy peace protest made its way down Decatur. I turned around, and there was a French Quarter wedding in progress.

All in all I had a great weekend. I spent a lot of time with my family, barely any time on the Internet and took a lot of pictures. For the record, (because some people don’t know about my recent drastic makeover), here are before and after pictures:

People have been asking me why I cut my hair after having it long for so many years. I really don’t have an answer. I just felt like it was time. Perhaps it was the headset I wear at work for the phone — it kept getting tangled in my hair.

Anyway, its short now and I may keep it this way for a while. I had trimmed my hair down a couple of years ago, only to let it down again.

Excellent

XFree86 is forking. And its about time.

Here’s a story in The Register in case you don’t know anything about it. Essentially, one of the primary developers for XFree86 has been excommunicated. He wants to make XFree86 non-networking-dependent. Right now, your X session can easily be sent over the network and you’ll never know the difference (unless you try 3D gaming). Evidently, Packard, the developer, wants to take out the network bits to improve display speed for 3D gaming. It would make sense to split off development effort to do this (even more sense if we didn’t already have GGI or SDL).

This week I got a couple of toys. The first was a HalfKeyboard. My right hand is showing symptoms of over-use. Tingling in my fingertips when I type, dull pain in my forearm, etc. So I got a HalfKeyboard to force me to use my left hand more. Since I’m not very adept with my left hand, some of the chord patterns that the keyboard requires are difficult and (right now) require some thought. But, overall, an good keyboard. The Control key isn’t where I’d like it to be (it should be swapped with the Return key so that it sits on the left), but I may be able to remap it. Other than that, if I force myself to use the keyboard (which I need to do), I can type at about 1/3 my already slow speed. Hopefully that’ll speed up.

The other toy I got this week is a digital camera. Since I have to go downtown to work tomorrow, I plan to take a trip around the Quarter and get some pictures. Perhaps I’ll have more stunning visual effects on this weblog from now on.

All readily admit, that war of itself is evil, although perhaps a lesser evil. … when war has broken out, people and nations cannot not face the question about the meaning of the war, they try to make sense of it, just as in all the significant events in life. … War does not have a meaning, there cannot be the appearance of a meaning, war is meaningless, it is an outrage against meaning, and within it act irrational and fatal powers. The sole purpose of war is victory over an enemy.

… The war itself per se will not create new life, it is destruction. But the people, living through the terrors of the war, the people, discerning within themselves a creative freedom, can direct their powers to the creativity of a new, a better, a more human life.

— Nicolai Berdyaev’s War and Eschatology

Tim Bray is a great guy. He bikes to work; uses Emacs for a lot of things — including his weblog and programs in Perl. Sounds just like me.

Unlike me, he mananged to single-handedly shut down AOL. Yeah, he’s pretty likable.

Mark Pilgram: That’s a total of 25 security vulnerabilities in 5 years for a program that is, at this very moment, serving 11 million active sites. … you can tell by glancing at a single version number that your copy of Apache is up to date.

Rafe Coleman isn’t fighting fair.

In an article comparing Perl and Java, he looks at Bosxom code and finds a one-liner that would take 7 lines in Java. Then he says (in an update) that, yes, you could write the similar code in Perl, but if you did, he would think you were a poor Perl programmer.

So which is it, Rafe? If we write what you consider readable code, we’re poor Perl programmers. If we really stretch the expressiveness of Perl (and demonstrate that we’re good Perl programmers), you fault us for creating un-maintainable code.

When I was young, my mother made bread every week. She also made her own butter and canned vegetables grown in our own garden. I can do without the canned stewed tomatos, but I do miss the bread and her salty butter.

After we moved south to where the dirt was red clay instead of rich loamy soil, our family garden disappeared. My father had a better job, too, so my mother didn’t have to make her own butter any more and she stopped making her own bread frequently.

But, if you’ve had home-made bread, you know the wonderful texture of the hard crust and soft center makes a delicious combination. And, look, Kuro5hin has a bread recipe! I’m gonna make some.

Tonight, Basil was looking at the stars. We don’t see the millions of stars that you can see in the country, but we do see a few. Anyway, he picked out Orion’s Belt right away. I googled some star charts and managed to pick out the other points in the constellation.

Then, I got confused… Was that Saturn or Betelgeuse? Luckily, I found MyStarsLive.com which gave me an instantaneous map to our sky. Cool.