I used to read Choose Your Own Adventure books straight through from page 1 to 100.

Now, I wget -m websites, and less * ... same deal.

PS, Thanks for the great feedback on rel-vcs. The spec has been updated, fixing many of your nits, and there's an implementation in gitweb, ikiwiki, and mr.

I'm working on designing a microformat that can be used to indicate the location of VCS (git, svn, etc) repositories related to a web page.

I'd appreciate some web standards-savvy eyes on my rel-vcs microformat rfc.

If it looks good, next steps will be making things like gitweb, viewvc, ikiwiki, etc, support it. I've already written a preliminary webcheckout tool that will download an url, parse the microformat, and run the appropriate VCS program(s).

(Followed by, with any luck, github, ohloh, etc using the microformat in both the pages they publish, and perhaps, in their data importers.)

Why? Well,

1. A similar approach worked great for Debian source packages with the XS-VCS-* fields.
2. Pasting git urls from download pages of software projects gets old.
3. I'm tired of having to do serious digging to find where to clone the source to websites like Keith Packard's blog, or cariographics.org, or St Hugh of Lincoln Primary School. Sites that I know live in a git repo, somewhere.
4. With the downturn, hosting sites are going down left and right, and users who trusted their data to these sites are losing it. Examples include AOL Hometown and Ficlets, Google lively, Journalspace, podango, etc etc. Even livejournal's future is looking shakey. Various people are trying to archive some of this data before it vanishes for good. I'm more interested in establishing best practices that make it easy and attractive to let all the data on your website be cloned/forked/preserved. Things that people bitten by these closures just might demand in the future. This will be one small step in that direction.

I'm trying to work on having days that are somehow individually memorable this year. So far..

0 (leap day)

Finally tackled the chapter on monads. I'd read various explanations a year ago, but was swimming in syntax I didn't understand. After percolating for a year, and learning to read the syntax better, monads turned out to make very simple sense.

(I can't say the same about Johnny Monad.)

I had been meaning to write sometime about a method I used in ikiwiki to let expressions in a mini-language, that normally are evaluated to match a set of pages, instead be evaluated to explain why they succeed or fail. It's a cute technique, though hard to explain. Now I'm pretty sure it's just a monad. So I don't have to explain it!

1

Visiting Abram's falls this time of year, the canyon is in constant wintry shadow. The falls are not frozen, but have icicles twice my height, and there are rank upon rank of icicles all down the walls, an ice cathederal.

It's a bright sunny day, but on the whole hike, I only get into the sunlight once, briefly, at the top of the giant steps. Then back into the shade. Back at my car, I'm suprised that it's only 3 pm, feels like it should be 5.

Made a pecan pie with daddy's pecans and eggs.

2

A grey day with snow and worse. The paper's rss feed repeats "dozens^Whundreds of wrecks" over and over, as if to make up for there being no 60 point type.

I'm reading Ted Nelson's book Geeks Bearing Gifts. The chapter summaries seem better than the actual book. And the on-demand printing makes me think I'm reading a poorly laid out web page, rather than something typeset. But I love that he goes all the way back to the invention of the alphabet and of hierarchical categorization and suggests all the basis for modern computers is arbitrary and/or wrong.

Eating ginger duck downtown I look up and a pizza delivery guy has slid out of control right in front of me and crashed.

Suppose you have a free software package that includes an OpenID login form. Such forms are supposed to include a little OpenID logo . But as hard as you look, you can't find a license for the OpenID logo. Though there seem to be indications that it might get one in 2009, it seems like it will not be free enough to be included in a free software package.

Due to this problem, all the ikiwiki sites out there have not used the OpenID logo, or indeed any logo, in their login form for the 2+ years that ikiwiki has proudly supported OpenID. That was so suboptimal that I spent some donations to commision an unofficial OpenID logo . It's freely licensed for use in whatever.

Putting the little OpenID logo in the login form is a nice touch, it helps spread awareness about OpenID and users learn to look for it. The fact that free software packages can't include it weakens that. Having an alternative logo that evokes the "real" logo and the concept of a login is better than no logo at all. But it is also needlessly confusing.

I encourage the new OpenID board to reconsider plans for logo licensing, and bear in mind that many free software packages can have native OpenID support, and should be able to include a copy of the logo, without worrying about it conflicting with their license, or not being free enough to be included in a free software distribution.

I was asked for my borscht recipe. This is loosely derived from a recipe that is really weird -- it says to throw away the beets! Both that recipe and mine are probably very unauthentic. But good.

6 cups water
3 medium size beets
2 medium size potatoes, quartered
1/2 cup chopped carrots
1 stalk celery, chopped -- optional
1/2 a bell pepper, chopped (red or green) -- optional
1/3 cup butter
1/2 to 1 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup tomatoes (fresh are best, canned or tomato paste + water is ok)
1/4 cup milk
2 cups finely chopped cabbage
1 tablespoon vinegar
1 teaspoon dried dill weed
sour cream

Put water in a large pot on high heat. Add beets, potatoes, carrots, celery, and bell pepper. Cover and boil until potatoes are tender.

Meanwhile, melt butter in a skillet. Saute onion in butter until tender, about 5 minutes. Stir in tomatoes, reduce heat to medium low, cover, and simmer for 15 minutes.

Remove half of sauce from skillet into a medium size bowl. Add cabbage to remainder of sauce in skillet and cook coverted on medium low heat, stirring occasionally for ten minutes, or until tender.

Reduce heat on pot to a simmer. Remove beets from pot and set aside to cool.

Remove quartered potatoes and add to bowl with sauce. Mash potatoes, adding milk, until creamy. Stir mashed potato mixture into soup in pot.

Grate beets, removing skin if desired, or grating it in. Combine grated beets and cabbage into pot. Add vinegar to taste (optional but recommended with sweet beets). Add salt and pepper to taste. Stir in a teaspoon of dill.

Cover and cook for at least another 5 minutes on low heat, then let it cook in its residual heat for as long as desired.

Serve hot, garnished with sour cream and dill.

40319

An e-book reader where I can click on any word and enter a definition for it. The definition will then appear as a tooltip when I hover over the word.

Take that, Iain Banks, and Neal Stephenson!

32

I want Deskview X's terminal program. The one that resizes the font when the window is resized. Except free and modern.

With modern (ie, auto-layout tiling) window managers, this is less of a wishlist and more of a missing necessity. Ideally, it would always keep the window 80 columns (or some other user-defined value) wide.

I've poked around in gnome-terminal's source, and this looks fairly doable, but I have not found the time to get down and do it.

Happy solstice! High point of the season for me, and today was a two party day. My sister has reached the point where a good b-day present for her is merging the blog style comments branch into ikiwiki and installing linux on yet another laptop. So we had a little installation party with cake and Carcassonne. Except for wireless it was a success. Since I outsourced the other present to the UK, perhaps someone can sort out Christmas by telling me how to get Intel 5100 wireless working in Debian? ;-)

At the solstice party tonight, all three of the recent inhabitants of the bottom of Wortroot washed up on the porch, each of us looking a bit scraggly (especially the current resident). Jeremy told this story:

His friend decided to drive his SUV down the driveway to the farm, without consulting with him first. (This driveway was blasted out of the hillside by amateurs, using dynamite, in an earlier era of life at the farm. It has been basically unmaintained since, progressively more eroded and rutted, and over the last 20 years only the Yellow Truck (with no brakes) has had free reign over it.)

He got down the hill ok, and he passed the small field, and then he got to the narrow place. (Where the creek is eroding the driveway away faster than we can cut into the hill to widen it.) And Jeremey told him to stop, but he kept on going.. sliding right off the driveway, and rolling the SUV into the creek.

(The creek here is, now that I think of it, exactly as wide as your average SUV is tall, and in a gully exactly as deep as your average SUV is wide. It must have fit perfectly.)

They tried winching it out. That didn't work. They didn't even think to ask neighbor Jimmie to once again haul a vehicle up the driveway. His tractor couldn't have gotten this one out. They had to rent a "small backhoe on treads, like a tank" to do the job.

Ok, maybe you have to have lived there to appreciate this. :-)

Dell chose to ship Linux on the Mini 9, and so they were not required to plaster Windows stickers all over the case.

They made up for this sticker deficit with a useless sticker that reads just "Inspiron M series" (or something approximating that). My mind boggles at the decision process behind that.

Removing this sticker, I scratched the case of my new laptop. I also spent about 20 minutes scrubbing off the evil glue they used, which spread everywhere.

I had hoped the white power LED on this laptop would be less eye-searingly painful than the blue leds that were trendy before.

It is, but it's also right on the front of the laptop, which is often in a direct line of site to the screen. In any dim enviroment, the LED is still brighter than the screen.

I fixed this by applying some electrician's sticky tape to the case. Obviously, I can't win.

Well, I got the Dell Mini 9. Tiny little toy-looking laptop. It's too soon to tell if I'll like it. Or if my goal of using this as my only laptop, and primary work machine will succeed. But what a lot of firsts and changes!

My first laptop with no moving parts. Yay!

My first completely silent laptop. Double yay!

First laptop I've bought with linux preloaded. The default Ubuntu load was ok. It also contains my name 886 times. :-) Scarily, it also runs bits of code I wrote for base-config.

Installing Debian went ok, mostly, though wireless is a bit of a pain, and I have a strange problem with something fiddling with LCD brightness periodically. Oh, and SHDC cards make it crash on boot and resume. I've set up a page with the details, including how to fix the missing punctuation keys.

I've switched to using white on black for my terminals, and run them full screen rather than tiled. Cause the screen is small, and doesn't handle large black expanses as well as I've been spoiled to expect by machines that cost three times as much.

I like that netbooks encourage minimalism.

Blessing, VA

I'm in Charlottesville for a few days. Got to visit the always atmospheric Crozet Pizza, and am enjoying a cabin at Misty Mtn.

Had a good long think on the drive up, but it doesn't want to come out as a blog right now.