Weblog: Aug 2002

Update of Sample Junkbuster Blockfile.

Jogging over 5km a day now. There's a 5km run in October. Time to buy a wristwatch for working on faster pacing. I stopped wearing a watch a decade ago. This one will be for jogging only.

We went to tour the Big Dig tunnel on Sunday. I flirted with stacking randomness against myself by photographing a Subject to Random Inspection sign. Don't see a satisfying way to reconcile "random inspection" with Constitutional protections against unreasonable search. Land of the free, home of the brave.

Released Quack version 0.8. Now when you visit a .plt package file, the file is decoded, decompressed, and presented with a little fontification and ellision, for visual inspection before installing.

We are, after all, professionals.

Trust me. I understand these things.

Released Quack version 0.7. Biggest change is FSF Emacs 20 compatibility. But, really, try Emacs 21.

Released Quack version 0.6 early this morning. Biggest new features are support for multi-line PLT require forms in quack-find-file, and Info-like navigation commands ([, ], and t) in the special emacs-w3m support. Also a little more support for other Scheme implementations: fontification of non-PLT macro definition forms, and added Chicken interpreter to the default programs list.

Started jogging Saturday, and gone out every day since, increasing distance each time.

New release of SSAX for PLT Scheme, including PLT 201 fix by Kirill Lisovsky.

Released Quack version 0.5 early this morning. Most useful feature may be that PLT-style fontification can now put names in definition forms in boldface by default. Also, quack-find-file will default to the file indicated by the require form under point. I'll add support for Guile forms once I get multi-line PLT forms to work.

Found an excellent roommate this afternoon. Will be catching up on work the next few days.

Perhaps aforementioned International grad students will actually be right this year. Just talked to the housing office manager at MIT. Seems the reason there are mysteriously almost no MIT grad students on the roommate market this year is that MIT just opened the new 750-unit grad dorm. I was wondering why numerous people weren't already offering me monetary bribes (and more salacious considerations) to pick them.

Fortunately, almost all of the two-dozen people who've come by to look at the place here would probably be decent roommates, and some quite nice, so we just need for one of them to decide they've seen enough places and are ready to pick this one.

The things we do for PhDs.

Taken up chai again. This time it's mostly Oregon Chai (Organic or Green Tea), heavily diluted with vanilla Rice Dream Enriched. I think I can handle one in the morning and an occasional booster shot in the afternoon without too many people getting hurt. Works chilled or hot, and at a fraction of the cost of hitting a cafe or Dunkin.

I'll note again that $50 for the wireless network card for the laptop was one of the best quality-of-life investments I've made in a long time. During this brief August heat wave, it's especially nice to sit outside in the park in the evening, while still being able to do CVS checkouts, respond to roommate emails, etc.

Two of my domain names expire tomorrow — openmagic.net and openmagic.org — and there's now a squatter on the .com, to whom I'd hate to send any traffic. Let me know if you want me to authorize transfer of these domains to you.

Getting in a little hacking in the late evenings. Most time the last 10 days is spent finding a new roommate. Based on past experience, the roommate market gets insane the last couple weeks of August, limited mainly to very desperate people and to International graduate students who thought that arriving a week before classes start would permit more than enough time to make their selection from among numerous palatial yet affordable Boston residence options.

Bumped into RMS on the street late tonight and had a nice little talk about Free Software. As might be expected, he encouraged me to make more time and take on a substantial project. I didn't mention that I really do need to finish my PhD. I'm making a note to followup with what useful things I can do at this time.

I think the FSF has been exploited to various degrees in recent years by some people who did not fully agree with the principles or goals of the FSF, but who found it profitable to leverage the goodwill and volunteer effort associated with the FSF. One of the weaknesses we see in many altruists is that they want to believe others are altruistic. This makes them especially vulnerable to manipulation by the clever and charismatic.

Whereas Harvard Square has none of McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's, Central Square has one of each. I'd boycotted all three when I learned that none of their fries is vegetarian-safe. Culinary discovery of the evening is that Wendy's has a 99-cent baked potato that's not bad. Munching potato as I sit outside and type this message over borrowed wireless.

Baked potatoes are almost self-packaging. This one, however, requires a paper bag, a styrofoam tray, a clear plastic lid, a plastic and foil butter container, a paper sour cream container, half a dozen paper salt and pepper packets, and a plastic fork in a clear plastic wrapper. Surely this is an observation everyone makes at some point. But we do the math, and Wendy's does the math, and we all arrive at guilt-inducing packaging that compromises the virtue of a 99-cent baked potato.

Released Quack version 0.4, which subsumes giguile.el and includes a few additional improvements.

The worst part of the popular Web browsers on the Macintosh not supporting the CSS2 standard is that it makes my Web pages look like hell on the screens of people most likely to have a visual design bent. Go on, you know you want to (or to).

A resourceful, if somehow vaguely insensitive, bit of road sign reuse. Might even be third generation.

Quack version 0.3 has been released. This is a definite upgrade if you're on FSF Emacs, though XEmacs no longer works. Does anyone want to use Quack with XEmacs?

Have to find a new roommate for our place in Cambridge. Walk to MIT, Harvard, Central Square T, and most everything else. One-year lease starting September 1st. Includes on-site Lisp technical support. You can bring your cat.

Continuing the flag theme, everyone's gotta do it in their own way.