Older blog entries for whytheluckystiff (starting at number 35)

my neighbors just got a maniacal pair of sugar gliders. 
these little guys had great tails: an awesome tube shape, black at the end, 
curling about.  and of course, they jump.  man, i'd love some of that 
ankle-to-wrist stretching membrane.  one of the kids had a glider balled 
up in his hand that he'd walk around with.  yeah, it was like actual 
pokemon for these kids.  

just as fun as finding out about new animals: finding out about pet websites.  
my mom's just finished writing a book about dealing with grief and spent a 
section on death of pet.  she found some fantastic poetry, among
which was this find parallel between a dog's death and common excretion terms:

	...Also, you have to take me out, or let me outside to "relieve" myself. I 
	would really prefer to not do it inside, where you and I have to live. But 
	when I have to "go", I simply have to "go." I need you to help me take care 
	of this, so we can both have an "odor-free" living environment.
  
and then it ends with something about I just have to "do" what's right.  
not that i'm big on rappin on dead pets, but not knowing the pet and reading the 
poems out of context can trip out some laughs.  i mean i cried like crazy when my 
dog died last year, but i don't think i'll ever do that again.  i'm young and it
was my first dog.  but she had to "go" and her face had that "poo"r expression of 
weeping wax.

browsing around.  he knows himself too well.  and requests for
demotion ignored. or we are full of mercy.  and badv is full of complete 
understanding, the kind that can only come from the fbi.

cristian guissani just released DbTcp 0.1.14, a lo-fi ODBC connector that i've had good
success with in a certain nebraska foxpro situation (with birds.)  it's been an angelic presence.  (big birds.)

there is so much newness to life.  thousands of days pass, but waking up in the morning is still a new experience.
even sometimes opening and closing eyelids is a new pleasure.  and i appreciate the angle at which i am looking
in the moment.

rasmus, amars, vab, others:

my extension to the thought is: a person who releases free software for the ethics
alone cannot appreciate the movement as much a person who, having satisfied their own
obstacles with software, resolves to freely pass their creation on to the world.  and
there is resolution in doing this.  everything i have learned, i have learned from
someone else.  a book, a class, a discussion-- perhaps i have made a few original
discoveries.  once my software is given to the world, i expect no reward, as i have
received so much already.

the creature who codes for the ethics alone is dependant on the ethics as a reward.
if the movement appears to falter, then they loose their inspiration.  so i find it
encouraging to think about those software authors who released free software before
the Movement.  why did they do it?  maybe they were just nice people.

and i'm sure some people question my certification of bytesplit as Journeyer.
i suppose i don't have much of a defense, except that i tend to certify high.  if someone
is keeping up their involvement on this site, then i feel like encouraging them.  and if
i certify them as Journeyer, then there's a chance they might respect that. and actually
start acting like a Journeyer.  

Journeyers, Ho!

the brainwashing of our world is not enough.  i want to fork
the brain and keep the child.  if only to reread huck finn for
the first time again.  perhaps a new brain would help me find a
reason for my navel.  maybe even: to store salt in, so i can dip
celery into when i'm in bed and i get hungry.

thanks to someone around here for linking yaml one
day.  i listened on the list for a bit and started the yaml4r
project (a YAML emitter/parser for Ruby).  It's nice to be pitching in on someone
else's project.  Clark, Oren and Brian all have been welcoming and VERY appreciative
of my effort.  in many ways, it's often more rewarding to help out on a project than to
push my own. 

i've been enjoying reading recentlog lately.  I've thought it would be kind of cool
for an advogator out there to make a weekly summary page.  One-liners for some of the
highlight entries.  Perhaps even rank the topics and encourage more succulent content.

sickness cancelled my trip.  bah, i really wanted to see bjork.
oh, thomasvs, i certified you because i couldn't
resist certifying a breeders fan.  and i was overjoyed to hear they were
touring again, so i threw on I Just Wanna Get Along and started certifying
all breeders fans in sight (you) and i almost certified you a master because i was
practically rabid.  i figured i'd better try out GStreamer first.  ;)

yeah, so i was trapped in los angeles while i was sick and had no computer, so i
wrote out the article on mixins for the front page on a tiny legal pad.  which was
difficult, as i couldn't try out my examples until i was feeling good enough to stand
erect.  had to revise it a bit, but i guess even when i'm sick i can't bear not
getting something done.  thanks to positive feeback on the article.

i guess i've been in "marketing" mode too a bit much.  looking back on my previous
diary entries, i think i've talked too much of my own projects.  which i suppose is
okay, since it's my own diary and it's good to feel fascination (rather than disdain)
for stuff i spend time on.  but i think i'm going to scan freshmeat and lend a hand on
any interesting projects i find.  or i can watch more sealab.

Krelin: i can completely relate to being torn during a concert.
i used to bring recording equipment to concerts, but it prevented me from doing a
whole lot of dancing because minidiscs skip too easily.  but harry connick was probably
a sitting concert, so.. ideal bootleg situation.  anyway, the comment struck me.

abiword devs:  (and i noticed there are a bunch of you commenting on guadec, but i've
no idea who's who)  you have created an excellent app.  lightweight, saves in XML,
cross-platform, and so on.  i write at least ten pages a week to keep my fiction
alive and abiword is my tool.  i've even come away from using strictly longhand.
so thanks.

oh crap.  the other day i was starting to get nostalgic about adovgato.  i started to
really miss ReadMe.

aw gee.. about that php is toy coding comment.. no harm intended.
sloccount shows that the libraries the javuh team just completed
totals 14,628 lines of code.  needless to say, it was very fun
to code (hence "toy coding") and quite guiltless.  and truth be
told, i'd rather be categorized with the kids than the adults.
at ApacheCon and anywhere else.

i think our project goes along with the whole "rapid prototyping"
idea as well.. a possibility which would be much more cumbersome
in other prominent web languages.  we are able to build a basic
object schema and generate the HTML forms, databases, and PHP
classes from that.  saves a lot of time.  i think this goes with
other comments just voiced.

i just went back and watched the pilot to alias, which
i missed because i got into the series late.  i am addicted to
that show.  and the pilot has so much more meaning now.  it's
amazing that it's only been a single season. 

released javuh 1.0 yesterday,
which was a rush.  for the first time, i'm not really concerned about users getting
into it.  i've spent the last seven months working rather regularly on this code and
seeing it bring great strides to my PHP development.  now, i'm able to
release a rather stable chunk of code to the world and anyone can pick it up and use
it.  oddly, a lot of my previous projects were just done to get involved in
open source.  this ono has geniunely useful code to me and i'm satisfied if even a
single person benefits, because i'm not looking for a return.  it's kind
of cool.

lest i present myself as too good natured, i think a lot of
the reason i feel so casual about this code is because it's all PHP.  for some
reason, PHP just seems like toy coding (even though it's responsible for my
salary).  and i guess another would be that much of the code was built for
projects i got paid for.

i've been getting back into the rubik's cube lately.  i've
hit a plateau of about four minutes.  it's an awesome game for programmers.  my
method of solving the cube often involves shuffling the cubes in order around the
edges.  for some reason it feels like a relative of the turing machine.  there's a
fabulous video of the 1982 world championships up at speedcubing's
multimedia section.

glad of the cmiller script for XML-RPC.  i always foresee
a day when all the software on my machine will be interpreted code.  
i could do it now, but suffer the loss of a decent web browser, video
player, wait i couldn't do it right now.  but i can post this entry!

i'm terribly amazed with ruby.  i use php for practical reasons on 
my sites, and have enjoyed it as an escape from asp, jsp.  this week,
i built a debugging tool for php.  the tool is written in ruby and
speaks xml over udp.  it's a gui tool using fox toolkit widgets. 
here's a current screenshot.  the code
for php looks like this:

<?
  site_debug( "Session", "Reading session data." );
  site_debug( "SQL,MySQL", "SELECT ... " );
?>

You can also set watches and use trigger_error() to send debug info.  
The latest version of FXRuby came out just in time too.  The table 
was looking pretty weak under the old version, but a new version came 
out and now it's rather stylish.  I'd really like to get some icons 
in there for severity. 

i'm also quite in love with mail reader sylpheed, which
is the only mail client i've found that does imap how i desire.  unless
you know of a way that mutt can show my imap mailbox list with the number of
new and unread messages.  thanks in advance.

kind of put out that my first few projects with Zope 
weren't as enjoyable as I'd hoped.  I think one of the main 
obstacles to that project is the lack of documentation.  I 
mean the Zope Book is good if you're doing simple stuff and 
if you're using DTML.  But I don't want to use DTML.  It 
feels like Cold Fusion.  So when using Zope Page Templates, 
I referred to ZopeLabs a lot to glean bits from their 
cookbook.  I appreciated help from #zope idlers, but I
don't think I'm going to take that route any longer.
can't wait for the freebsd native jdk to come out.  i'm 
still running a patched 1.1.8 on my server because i
couldn't ever get any of the others to patch correctly and
i didn't want to install all the linux base ports.
desktopian.org is down for a bit.  looks like the legacy
of pimpin.net is finally and completely gone.  we're going
to be back up on a new and better server soon, so it's for
the best.  we've been up and down for two months now.