Older blog entries for jfleck (starting at number 226)

"We are all here on Earth to fart around."
- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Vonnegut spoke last night at the University of New Mexico, and I took daughter Nora to see him. I was her age when I started reading Vonnegut, and he very strongly influenced the path I followed as a writer. I recently went back and re-read Breakfast of Champions and was taken aback by its echoes in my own writing. I am, of course, no Vonnegut, just a cheap copycat, and I've also gone off in other directions as well, but my basic toolkit has its roots there.

I was a bit worried - what if my childhood hero disappointed? He did not. He was so very funny in the sort of uncompromising manner he always has had. The human condition sucks, but it is possible to have a rollicking good time while here.

I brought Nora because she aspires to writing, and for her and the other young writers in the audience, he opened his talk with this advice: "Never use semicolons."

A black cloud.

I rebuilt GNOME2 yesterday and ended up with a completely hosed and unusuable desktop. It took two rebuilds and hours of work to get things running again. It was a very frustrating experience. Since I have no idea what I'm doing, I'm rather like the pigeon in the Skinner Box randomly pecking at the lever until magically a pellet of food comes down the chute. It took three rebuilds and a bunch of random-lookng ORBit and bonobo errors, along with something that was eating up my whole file table, before I got something running again. The third rebuild is still underway, but I'm back on the GNOME2 desktop again at least.

I came up with a temporary DocTable for GNOME2 work. It's barely usable, but barely usable is better than nothing. I was losing track of what's going on, and we needed something that everyone could look at, rather than the litter of scraps of paper and files on my actual and virtual desktops.

Our old friends Barbara and Bill, from California, are coming through this weekend. We plan to fart around.

Turns out Dungeons and Dragons also is a tool of Satan. I bet the Apple programmers play D&D on their lunch breaks! (Thanks to Nora for the link.)

I wish I was this funny. Good satire is hard, and this guy seems to have it nailed.
In a nutshell - Apple computers and BSD are tools of Satan. Really. Some excerpts:

• "That's right, new Macs are based on Darwinism! While they currently don't advertise this fact to consumers, it is well known among the computer elite, who are mostly Atheists and Pagans."
• "Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an `Open Source' license, which is just another name for Communism."
• "Consider co-founder and leader Steve Jobs' constant exhortation through advertising (i.e. mind control) that its followers should `think different'. We have to ask ourselves: `think different than whom or what?' The disturbing answer is that they want us to think different than our Christian upbringing, to reject all the values that we have been taught and to heed not the message of the Lord Jesus Christ!"
• From an addendum: "Apparently the Darwin OS is not the original creation of Apple Computers but is instead based off of an older, obsolete OS called `BSD Unix'. The child-indoctrinatingly-cute cartoon mascot of this OS is a devil holding a pitchfork."
• And my personal favorite: "The new MacOS X contains another Satanic holdover from the `BSD Unix' OS mentioned above; to open up certain locked files one has to run a program much like the DOS prompt in Microsoft Windows and type in a secret code: `chmod 666'. What other horrors lurk in this thing?"

The American Physical Society and American Astronomical Society were in town for a meeting over the weekend, with vastly entertaining results:

• black bubbles
• the case of the missing neutrinos

XSLT rocks again. The latest veresion of ScrollKeeper uses a refined DTD for the OMF files, which means our old OMF files have to be converted. It's what XSLT was designed for, converting one flavor of XML to another. Of course figuring out the stylesheet tricks to do it took me hours, where it clearly would have taken about 10 minutes for someone who actually knows XSLT, but I think I've got it. A bit more testing this evening, and I'll unleash it upon our world.

Went out this evening with the people from The Albuquerque Astronomical Society (they rock) to look at the planetary alignment. I saw Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn with the naked eye, and in their telescopes four moons of Jupiter, two more of Saturn. Plus our moon. Plus Earth. We were standing on it.

Our family room was all full of dungeons and dragons this afternoon, which is apparently a louder game than I realized. Many Rice Krispy Treats were consumed, and the kids will apparently be returning Sunday to finish up, as they have not yet vanquished whatever it is that they need to vanquish. It may be the Rice Krispy Treats that need to be vanquished. I'm not sure.

Hooked up with jody and Dan Mueth on irc this evening to try to smooth over the rough edges in our docs building and installation. They've got some good ideas about better using automagical stuff so we don't have tens of separate copies of our build scripts littered throughout GNOME cvs. Happy to have Jody's help and smartness applied to our problem.

all-star surrealist smackdown - any cartoonist who can get Rene Magritte, Elton John and Chuck Norris in a single strip gets a full 10 points for the day, with an extra five bonus points for the sly Marcel Duchamp reference. But newspaper cartooning is an unforgiving business. What will he have for us tomorrow?

(This prolly won't matter to anybody else, but today's Muffler Man is from Farmington, New Mexico. Local boy makes good, as it were.)

I'm kind of a doofus, in that I was waiting for a fix in our docs build infrastructure that had already been completed, and I'd even tested it, and I just forgot. So I can start finishing up the GNOME 2 docs build systems now.

The desktop is looking good, (smaller version if your bandwidth is low). It's pretty much completely usable now, and the most annoying bugs I've been running into lately seem to be related to having it build in the sandbox, rather than installed under "/usr", where real grownup software belongs. Not that we shouldn't be able to install in odd places, of course. But maybe it's time to build GNOME2 for real.

I'm starting a new effort, to improve the documentation for libxml. It's a terrific library, and DV finds tons of traffic to his site from Google and the like that looks like people hunting documentation. But the documentation is a bit thin.

With the Sun people contributing so much GNOME documentation, there has been less and less writing to be done there, and I wanna write. I also want to learn XML better, so the libxml stuff seems a good fit. I've been using the library a bit for GNOME documentation handling, and also for toy projects at home, and it's a fun kit.

dyork: congratulations is a word of such understatement, but it's the best I've got.

My fire story, referenced in an earlier diary entry.