Blog: 2001-07

The Boston/Cambridge housing market is a killer.

There's a lot to be said for the conventional Web mindset, but sometimes it's good to take a step back and remember simple "best-practices" from before the Web. One example is local copies of API documentation. Docs for the APIs you need for your work are scattered around the Web, installed locally on a particular machine in /usr/doc/ (and, unfortunately, /usr/share/doc/), in source trees, etc. You have to remember where a particular API's docs are, and hope that you have Web access at the moment and the docs are still where they used be, or that you happened to locally install that particular documentation .deb or .rpm or .tar.gz on the particular machine you're using at the moment. The grand vision of the Web will address these problems with URNs and transparent caching and better user interfaces and such. But for now, as a simple low-tech approach, I've collected under ~/doc/ of my home directory a small personal "bookshelf" of API documents I might need (e.g., X11, GTK, RFCs, Java, etc.). The bookshelf is maintained in my personal CVS repository, so that whenever I move to a new machine or want the latest version of the bookshelf, I just type cvs checkout doc and then am free to unplug from the net and go laptop from a park or whatever.

I continue to be generally impressed with the text-mode Web browser W3M by A. Ito. In addition to doing tables and SSL, it's small and fast and doesn't demand a lot of display real-estate, which is especially useful on a laptop running under battery power. I normally use Netscape Navigator 4.x (with Java, JavaScript, and plugins disabled), but Netscape takes a noticeable chunk out of laptop battery charge lifetime and is not really necessary for text-heavy documents. I really should customize the keymap for W3M at some point, however.

Released junkbust.el version 0.8. The changes consist of the insertion of one character (to support the latest Akamai URLs).

And here's sending some Google karma to a site put up by friend and colleague Jim Youll: www.freesklyarov.org.

DSL is back, as of Friday evening; my productivity is ramping back up; and analysis of Speakeasy.net's performance is forthcoming.

I really should plug Pair.com, who helped get me through the 6 weeks of DSL outage. For about $9 a month, they host my Web pages, and I used the account's included mail hosting and Linux shell for urgent email while DSL was down. Recommended.

On Saturday, I spotted a Brown University Chair on the sidewalk out front of an antique shop near MIT, and had to have it. This is the $350 chair that they sell to new grads ("you've got the degree — now own the chair!"). Men have gone to war over this chair. George Washington probably rested his tired buns in it. Mine cost $10 and a few bruises from carrying it home. Ivy On A Budget. The cushion is temporary til I figure out how to refinish the chair, but the housemate's cat adopted it within 10 seconds.

Also updated Sample Junkbuster Blockfile this morning.

I finally put my Web site build tree into CVS, which makes it much easier to update while waiting for home Internet service to be restored.

I'll be updating some of the pages to provide technical detail on my recent research, especially MindShare.

I'll also start releasing some of the Scheme code packages I've been working on (which are currently in GNU Guile dialect, though I plan to port to MIT Scheme, PLT, Scsh, and a few others). I was going to release a Scheme-based Internet agent framework all at once, but work on that slowed to a crawl when Speakeasy mistakenly disconnected my DSL Internet service and then wasn't able to restore it for bureaucratic reasons. I need to focus on PhD-related tasks for the next couple weeks, so Scheme will be put on hold.