Older blog entries for abg (starting at number 51)

A little software stuff and the some spleen venting

I conducted something of an off-the-cuff experiment today. I deliberately posted what I hoped would be a half-way enticing link back to my home page in the early stages of a Slashdot story and then turned on the log watching to see the small slashdot effect roll in.

It was satifying, watching the pitter patter, like during those springs when the snow is melting and you toss some chunks of ice in the run off streams and see the water divert around it. (The page was my Tivo story, fwiw.)

Is there some sort of "Keep Alive/Resurrect" daemon/program out there? Last year I wrote a renice daemon for my Zaurus - now I was thinking of modifying it to monitor a process and restart it if it ever quits. A perpetual Mozilla kiosk would be one use. Forget about futzing with settings, if someone closes it, it would automagically restart without user intervention. It would take a few hours of work to modify my rend to act this way...

My turn to whine

I got home tonight to some bad news from my wife - my mother was cancelling her trip here to visit us, including my daughter. I had been looking forward to this for weeks. I had been pumping Linnea with "Grandma Bonnie is coming!" this whole week and she cancels two days before she was supposed to come down. We had things planned! This was supposed to be a big, memorable weekend! My damn sister, my check-forging, money-stealing, emotionally-unstable sister has fscking wrecked it again. And what can I do about it? Nothing. I cannot complain - my mother is suffering from her daughter's misdeeds, agonizing over whether my sister will do jail time and what will happen to her. So when she calls and begs to come home for the weekend, my mother relents and cancels me.

Me. Me who always gets cancelled.

Me. Who hasn't asked for a g*ddam thing but time for years.

Me. Who never gets it.

There, my whining for today, on you rather than her.

So I post using the script, without ever looking at Advogato and see people already discussion reStructuredText. Crazy. Well, not that crazy since this is where I first heard of ReST. Thanks to that forgotten poster for pointing it out to me - I love it.

A

Sometimes you find something that really excites you, something that you can feel will make things better, faster, easier for you. Here is where I keep singing the praises of reStructuredText.

The format is so natural for me - almost exactly how I have been writing text files since day one. I haven't learned it all yet, but picking it up has been painless so far - reminds me of running into Python way back when. It just felt right.

Anyways, that's all for now. I've got some stuff to install, a box to fix, hardware to unpack, a shelf to build... God, what I am doing here?

Fsshhhwp.

Last effort, I promise. Advo is not for debugging. Advo is not for debugging...

I've become quite adept at shell scripting in the last year or so. They've moved away from the handcuffed style that batch files had beaten me into and into full-fledged programs. Whereas I used to reach for Python to do the simple things, now I can drop-kick a shell script to do the same thing without comprimise.

Anyways, the post2advo script will go up at gurno.com later today, if I get a chance. It's a combo shell and python script - shell to tie the programs together and python to do some of the file input/output.

See ya on the blip side

I don't know why I thought that the first try would work. I blindly assumed that the extra XML/HTML stuff would just fly away like pixie dust.

Didn't happen.

Anyways, I've cobbled a bunch of scripts together so that I just just fire off a post from the commandline, formatted through reST and advodiary and end up here.

Saw a cool diskless client at the last LUG meeting. I would love something like that - my only wish is that it does 1280x1024 now that I have my spiffy new monitor. You just can't go back from this sort of real estate.

Have a good weekend everybody.

This first post is just a test of tying together reStructured text and advodiary. Isn't Python wonderful?

I did my first release of ezgallery, along with a JUMBLE solver and a WordScrimmage solver. Neither of which are really that interesting, but I had to mention them.

The LUG is chugging along. The mailing list has been more active as of late and a few people have some interesting project going. December is always the "fun" month - I think that I'll run Jeopardy again, with a qualifying quiz for fun. Last year we gave out a MSDN Developer magazine for the person with the lowest score. Good times, good times.

Okay, enough writing - I'd better see if this works.

Adam