I'm going through the 6.170 course materials from OpenCourseWare at MIT. So far (middle of the second lecture notes) things are very much as expected, but with a slightly different point of view than many of the books I've read on it.

Slackware 8.1

I just finished burning a Slackware 8.1 ISO to install on my old laptop. I had installed QNX on it just to see what was happening in that world, but QNX doesn't like a Celeron 366 with 32MB RAM too much -- but Linux will do just fine. I'm just going to run a cable from the office to the bedroom so I can do my thing while Ellen reads, but still hang out together.

Ruby and XML

After a brief search, I have come across nqxml, a pure Ruby non-validating XML parser. It misses a couple of things from the spec, but those things are documented, so I can be sure to avoid them.

I'm going to make a little tag-rewriting tool with it, and hopefully it won't turn out too bad. The only real worry I have is that it will turn out to be as confusing as XSL-FO. We'll see.