Recent blog entries for whytheluckystiff

I'm practically paralyzed under a flood of ideas, none of
which is particularly important, but all of which give me an
initial sting of glee and, afterward, scheduling problems.
Of these, I think The Least Surprised is showing
promise.  It's just once a week.
I hate Moleskine notebooks.  They ruined two months worth of writing.
Did Van Gogh not see this coming?  They are too small, too few of
pages and the pocket always falls apart.  I am left with the notebook
equivalent of a condemned building.  Fortunately, I have stumbled
upon Xonex journals on ebay, which are a hearty 240 pages, wide and
ruled and much sturdier.  I know this notebook works because I just filled
one up in the last little while.  Filled with a myriad of incidents,
short plays and large prosaic outlines.  The Xonex journal I am
using right now was given to me by a friend who left for Indiana
so he could give his daughter better medical treatment.
The (Poignant) Guide is now moving forward with French and 
German translations.  If you have any goodwill to offer in this
respect, please consider joining the translators' list and
go right ahead and announce your name.  I'm going to work on translating
the comics to German in these next few hours.
kjw, I'm checking out your RST tarball just now.
You should also examine the un library, described at the
very end of What's Shiny and New in Ruby 1.8.0?
(Search for "-run".)

ohhhh, a laptop has changed my life.  my last laptop was a hand-me-down 166 mhz
dell latitude.  it passed on earlier this year.  and it was remarkably handy
to its ill end.

i had contemplated getting a powerbook.  but my compaq v2000 was cheaper, its
dothan chip clearly bests the g4 in benchmarks, and i just resist blending in
with the coffeehouse crowd at present.  my apologies, that was mean.  or true.
i saw four guys in a row, mesmerized, with glowing apples, and i thirsted for
otherwise.

so, yeah.  it's just easier to be productive when i can code out in the biosphere.

having a good time doing RedHanded.  ruby is aged enough to
have a smattering of excellent inside jokes: son-shi, code katas, slavoj zizek, and of
course the elaborate duck enthusiasm that pervades the culture.

spent all last week and this week working on the syck updates.  the base lib in
cvs is now usable again.  the ruby extension is broken, but should be stellar
soon enough.

and yet, i still need lasers in my life.

if i can recommend three fine coders for your certs.  these are
three active fellows in the world, who can't seem to manage even an
apprentice and (not that it's a big deal), but they're quite deserving
of the encouragement.

* neoneye: simon is terribly entrenched in good
  works of ruby.  the resources section of his aeditor project
  is a decent chunk of helpful documentation.  i mean really.  cert!!

* tcopeland: tom is the admin of rubyforge, for cryin
  out loud!!  he's a gifted surgeon for tweakin GForge to our needs, 
  he's very very attentive to the rubyforge denizens, and he's a 
  constant force for good on ruby-talk.  this asset = cert!!

* codedbliss: bruce is responsible for codepaste.org, which
  is down at the moment, but i assure you it is quality.  he 
  is currently an apprentice, but we can nudge that up, right?? 
  right?? cert!!
  
i'm just saying.  ruby guys in the house.  if you're up to one more: aero6dof.

at last.  a bit of time to wrap up chapter five of my
scrappy little manual, the (poignant) guide.  i hope
no one minds if i open up and talk about this for just
a moment.

i love my sister.  she's a knockout.  the eyes, the
prominent cheekbone.  her teeth are sparkly.  but, better
yet, she can improvise.  i can sing, "who's locked the
cupboard and kept me from my shiny metal whistle?" and she
will not hesitate, "call the judges, call the county!
the law states that you must die!!"  moves into jazzy
numbers, moves into hymns, moves into heavy metal anthems
and sloppy falsettos.  and she is brave enough to misstep,
which used to cause her dates to leave.  and she got one
guy to chase cantaloupes.

but now her everyday is a painful, wretched skeleton grip.
with enough marijuana, with enough shrooms, with enough
vodka, whoa whoa no-no on the sleeping pills.  no, you
will die. (but, i want to die.)  hang on, kid, hang on.
(i've hurt everyone, i need to go away.)  that's the vodka,
girl.  that's not you at all, at all.  her eyes are sad.
my eyes are sad.  but we look at each other for a while
and we take a walk and we play with some chimes.  and we
can still make up songs, but this is going to take years.
it's okay, there's a sky and there's a lake and there's 
a swingset.

and i go home and draw cats and doctors in space.  without
the medication.  i'm a stiff.  an upright.  i'll never pass
a joint.  maybe mj works, maybe mj's death.  i have too much
mental illness in my blood to find out.  narco+alco have
turned kooky people i love into obliterated people i love.
god, god, god, please keep her alive.  (if i'm lucky maybe
god will let a horse run by.)

families are a network of lost packets and bad routing.
cause you got spouses on the vpn.  it's not all that bad,
but it's fun to moan, ya know.

i love working on an obscure book.  people cling to ideas,
because they're supposed to be vouchers for a million
dollars.  no, write an obscure book.  build something
outside all that pressure.  i guess treehouses for kids
qualify.

ok, well, i'm sounding like livejournal.  pathetic.  ;)

just want to pop a thank to Liedra for her
certification.  i submitted an entry to freshmeat for the (poignant)
guide last week or so.  she responded with a very nice message that,
though freshmeat didn't accept lit listings any longer, she had
checked out the guide and found it appealing.  something like that.

then, i see her certification on my page and i just have to say: that's
really classy.  amazing that after a full year of sorting through
(what must be) hundreds of thousands of submissions, you're still so
dedicated and good to the users.

quiet.

and here's what i'm learning from it:

- there is an enormous amount of furry art on the internet.
  either that or it receives precedence on search engines
  due to heavy link backslapping.

  it's paying its toll on my psyche and i'm suspicious of
  all of my friends, loved ones.  do they have a secret
  animal persona?  i'll be talking to someone and my
  brain does surprisingly textured real-time transformations
  of them into rodents, panthers, even shrimp.

  i literally have to slap myself.  i am not a furry!  maybe
  a crustacy, but not a furry!  i need a shell on that hot
  animal love!

- yes there are plenty of overtly funny things to see on the
  interweb.  like this.  but it is truly thrilling to find
  the subtle and the timeless.

  well, yeah, the clown's timeless, too, I guess.

- the goal is not to be funny.  i think there is a lot to
  lol over, but it seems more worthwhile to juxtapose a
  number of reactions against each other.  yet, keep a
  certain theme within a 24hr block.

  what blows my mind is that each of these images is backed
  up by a human who took the time to draw the picture, make
  the puppets, glue the cereal, effect the shot, and put it
  on the web. let that represent!

  of course, in their original context, some of these make
  sense but-- take them out of their cozy environment--
  toss them in the troff where all things are equal--
  it starts to feel like an oceanic view, built from
  these individual servings of sight.
   
- love the vintage.

 ---
 opening: >
   good things happening in YAMLand right now.  Syck has 
   received a Perl module, sewn by Ingy.  Clark has 
   worked up Revision #4 of the bytecode.  as well as a new API.

 should i have the time:
 - add Unicode support to re2c and patch-or-fork.
   i'm thinking of rewriting it in ruby, as it would make
   a great alternative to pure regexp parsing and could be
   supported in ruby's core.

 - add bytecode lexer.  uses the same grammar as the YAML lexer.

 - support clark's api within the parser.  this will cause
   me to shortly abstract away the current node handler.  in
   other words, the current callback system will secretly be
   powered by a pull parser.

 - provide an API for returning a node's YPath.  this will
   allow stream filtering with YPath.  let's say you run a
   YPath query against a massive stream, you could return
   nodes as they are completed (in their own stream).

I've just finished a short howto for YAML beginners called:

  Yaml In Five Minutes

If you don't know what YAML is, check it out and send me any feedback.
YAML support in now built into the Ruby programming
language and has building roots in the Perl world as well.

I've really, really, really been enjoying Luck Wander Boy.
I have only momentarily put the book down today.  I will finish by nightfall.
It's not an outrageously funny or sad book, but it is good enjoyment.  The Pac-Man
stuff is absolutely brilliant.  Pick it up at the bookstore and read just the
first essay on Pac-Man.  It's like five pages into the book.

Or, here's excerpt from the site.

bgeiger: I'm guessing you're using Heisig's book and study cards
on remembering the hiragana and katakana?  If not, I found his strange
imagery to be quite helpful in seeing the shape and sound of the characters.

also, i covered like fifty pages of a legal pad while practicing.  and i'd
also recommend some Japanese for Busy People book that is a kana workbook.

anyways, hope it comes together for you.

Syck is now checked into Ruby CVS.  You'll see it appear in the
Ruby 1.8.0 release forthcoming.  I'd like to propose Syck for
inclusion in PHP and Python as well, since both extensions are
coming along nicely.  Once YAML finds acceptance in these
communities, open source scripting languages will have an
asset not found elsewhere.

Plus, I think we'll save a lot people from writing parsers.  And
consequently, massive regular expressions.

I feel there are great possibilities for YAML and Python, since
they share indentation for scoping.  If the YAML document separator
('---') became a Python construct, you could perform assignment with
YAML rather than Python constructs.

    pkginfo =
      ---
      Name: Syck
      Version: 0.28
      Summary: YAML Parser for Python
      Home-page: http://www.whytheluckystiff.net/syck/
      ...

So check YAML out.  The best place to start is the Cookbook.