Older blog entries for Kalana (starting at number 2)

Worldforge

Web site's finally back up today. I actually had a few people email me about it over the weekend, which hadn't happened before (I suppose they just read the website..). I never knew people outside the project had actually heard about us. I suppose my indiscriminate meme scattering is working <Laugh Role="diabolical">

We've decided to use DocBook for our whitepapers and the Circe ruleset, so I've been trying to learn it, mostly from examples. I've pretty much got the basics down, so now I'm trying to figure out how to get the rest of the project to learn how to write it. Docbook: TDG seems a bit too deep for those unfamiliar with SGML, even hackers, and Get Going With DocBook: Notes for Hackers is great, but the sections containing only the word "dude" detract from it just a bit. I looked at the LDP's Using DocBook HOWTO, and didn't particularly like it either. I took a look at the OSWG's PID project, which looks like just what I need, but it's not done yet (and doesn't look like it's very active). There has got to be a good introduction to writing DocBook for the intelligent SGML-newbie. Hasn't there?

Advogato

Looked at the site in color for the first time (since lynx is just better when one actually wants to write something of any length. btw, anyone know if mozilla will allow spawning an external editor for textareas? I'd do it myself, but mozilla seems too... huge to get into for something so small). Nifty. One interesting thing I just noticed is that the comments and articles are mostly posted by Journeyers, wheras the diary entries are evenly split among Master, Journeyer, and Apprentice. I suppose the Apprentices are somewhat intimidated. Not sure if that's good, bad, or none of the above.

It'd be interesting if advogato's diary engine allowed replies to entries. Seems like it would fit into the whole theme of "community site for free software developers". Of course, a diary is different from the main articles page, so the owner of the diary should have more control over it. Perhaps the ability to delete postings, or to restrict them to a set of trusted accounts (maybe adapt the site wide trust metric to a personal trust metric by using yourself as the seed instead of the seed accounts).

Enough rambling about that. But life sucks anyway, and I don't feel like elaborating on that in public.

I discovered advogato today (or possibly yesterday, depending on the time zone it uses). Looks great!
On other subjects, I've been working on porting the song Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious to UNIX, ie. by changing the choruses to things like: "sudo cal egrep vi regexp ps chmod fsck". Of course, every one of the 8 occurances of Supercal... will be replaced by a different string of commands, so this is just a bit non-trivial. OTOH, it would be pretty cool if each of those lines was an actual command. But the only way I can see that working is if literally every other word is |. This seems like a pretty obvious idea, but I haven't found any references to it. If you've seen this done before, please tell me (does advogato have my email on my page? I guess I'll put it in my Notes secion if not).

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!