Hi, agntdrake. /usr/dict/words is now /usr/share/dict/words. I think the FHS requires that.

cmacd, I appreciate your suggestion. But I tried several ISBNs, and it didn't seem that the Canadian National Library had anything that the Library of Congress didn't, at least in my collection, which is overwhelmingly titles printed in the U.S.

brg, I now have a copy of Fear and Trembling. I'll read it soon.

vicious, one can write a Python program (GEGL.py?) which invokes sed to do what you want, without mentioning that forbidden character inside the program. I have a demonstration version, but (darn it!) the regexps in sed are annoying and you'd have to use a number of them. Here's a hint: "[%s%s]" % ((chr(76), chr(108)).

Furthermore, there's a short C program which reads stdin and writes stdout and ensures that any use of that character is in conformance with your instruction. It's a state machine with four states: "none", "G1", "E", and "G2". It ought to be be straightforward to describe the transition conditions. Those who have worked with the techniques for writing programs such as grep may even manage to generate those conditions just as a machine might do it.

It may be a very great heresy, but I have no idea what GEGL is.

hypatia, I certified you and now you have Apprentice. I personally think that running a Nomic game should get you Journeyer at least (but maybe not in free software).

• schoen certified PeterSuber as Master.

Actually, maybe a somewhat modified version of mod_virgule would work well as a forum for on-line Nomic games. Many aspects of voting and rules could be implemented on-line. The interesting thing would be that the code would have to modified in response to certain rule changes. Talk about "code is law"!

I'd like to know if Larry Lessig understands some of Bruce Schneier's points (also daw's points) about what cryptography fundamentally can and can't do. Lessig might be a good person to try to explain to the "outside world" why, for example, copy protection in software can't work.

In other news

I'm still putting off my ambitious ioctl documentation idea because I'm still having RSI problems. I appreciate several readers' suggestions.

I managed to break my phone, so I can't get phone calls, and then both zork and pie went down, so I couldn't get e-mail. It was certainly a very quiet end of the week. (At least the phone has remotely-accessible voicemail and I have a backup MX.)

Also, my toilet overflowed (it's been very unreliable). Since it was empty, it's not as gross as it might have been: but how do you get a bunch of water out of a carpet? The carpet is very absorbent, so paper towels don't take up all the water the way they would on a less absorbent surface.

I think it's actually a situation very like heat flow and heat capacity. (The absorbency of a substance is like its heat capacity, and "wetness" is like temperature; volume of water is like heat. And water will flow only from a more wet material to saturate or wetten a less wet material, when they are placed in contact. Of course, that's ignoring the effect of gravity, because this is a relatively small volume of water on a flat surface.)

I think I'm going to the Exploratorium on Sunday.