8 Apr 2000 branden   » (Master)

Haven't made a diary entry in a few days.

Bought 4 books last night: Ousterhout's Tcl/Tk book -- old, but seems worth knowing; Lutz & Ascher's Learning Python -- I normally avoid O'Reilly where possible (it often isn't), but I will need to be getting my hands with sticky GUI prototyping languages for work; Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm -- apparently it's kind of a cliché to buy this these days, but hey, I heard Dick Estell reading it on NPR and it sounded good; Woodward & Bernstein, The Final Days -- I read All the President's Men last year so this seems apropos. Almost picked up Zinn's People's History of the United States but put it down after a cursory reading of some passages. When you repudiate both the Left and the Right, it sure is hard to find a political perspective that isn't aggravating. History simply is, we need neither apologize for it nor glorify it (or the people in it). Anyway, I needed some new books because I was falling back on my old standbys for bedtime reading material, The GNU C Library Reference Manual and The Columbia History of the World. Hopefully my fellow Advogatans have better things to do than laugh about my reading habits for the next few days in their own diary entries-cum-discussion threads.

I'm actually up somewhat early on a Saturday morning so I'll be spending the day beating on XFree86 4.0 as hard as I can. David Dawes quietly put out the 4.0a development release...a 1.6 megabyte diff! Some of the fixes are really important; I might have to make binary-only .deb releases until 4.0.1 is released. There are 94 bugfixes and enhancements identified in the changelog. Anyway, to say more would probably break my XFree86 development NDA, so I should just shut up and get back to work...

I have only two thread-type remarks: first, watching onionskin feminists and male chauvinist pigs fight is just as boring here as it is anyplace else, the Blys and Faludis should just excuse themselves and go scream at each other on USENET (though, to be fair, a glance at the bookshelves last night reveals that both Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi realized at some point after 1996 that men are people, too -- I guess if you can't beat Paglia, join her, eh?); and second, it's good to see Joey Hess finally realizing just how evil Slang is as a screen library. Go with ncurses, my man, and learn the blessed way...

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