Oddness ensues
Something about Blake 7 crossed my mind and now weirdness has infected my blog. Normal service will not be resumed.
Effortless
The more astute reader may have notice my blog's been offline for over a week. The first reason was a hard disk failure on the box that runs it. Was a right strange one: bootup, fsck, crash, bootup, fsck, crash, etc., etc. Not a serious problem as I had backups of most things, so all it needed was a replacement HDD and bit of effort. Which brings me to the second reason for such a long outage. I ran out of effort.
Toys
My new toy arrived almost three weeks ago now. I did think a PowerBook would solve my procrastination woes. Silly me. Still, at least my I can effortlessly time-waste with style and efficiency.
Wanted.
Wanted: one ghostwriter for my blog.
I know what I want to say and the points I want to make. But frankly I sometimes find sitting down and stringing eveything together is such a chore. I can't giveup as, as the tagline to Sam's blog says, "I'd rather have it written down here than bouncing around in my head."
Bah, if I could only get my shit together I'd be dangerous.
Fecking thing
You'd think my mind had a mind of it's own.
Tropical Fish
It's probably the correlation between my mood and the full-moon which has something to do with my lifelong fascination with the moon. It's true that correlation does not imply causation. However, as diaries and calenders usually show when the full-moon, it's a correlation I've found fairly handy. So when I discovered a moon phase module I could add to my blogsite I thought I'd give it a try.
There were, however, a few problems. It's a bit light on useful data. I don't like javascript (or any client-side processing) and I certainly do not like pulling scripts and images from a server I don't own. But the main reason I decided that the moon phase module was not for my site was that it's wrong. Really. It's wrong.
But when the idea simply would not go away I got to work with my trusty copy of Perl. All the hard calculation work is handled by Astro::MoonPhase and graphics manipulation is handled by GD The images of the moon were downloaded (lifted) in gif format from the U.S. Naval Observatory (originally created by R. Schmidt from ray-traced images of the Moon). However, for some mysterious reason, when I told GD to read a file as a gif it tried to read as a jpeg and barfed - a quick bit of CLI foo turned everything into png format which GD seems to like.
So if you now look in the sidebar you can see the results of my efforts. Cool, eh?
Something Stupid
I've discovered that blogging motivates me. Keeps my mind active through the week. Stops me from descending to that level of consciousness best described as couch potato. Trying to do other things during the week is pointless - they require a different type of concentration to blogging. The problem come the weekend when all I want to do is write about all the memes I've been cogitating on over the week. Yet there are them other things I really want to sped time on too. So I get fraught. And stop enjoying it. And don't do anything but wish I had the time...
So I've decided to try to produce precisely one blog per week to keep my brain awake. Then use my weekends to get on with some non-interruptible concentration. I've even got a cap which I intend to wear to highlight my clarity of purpose to anyone entering the room. A thinking cap. Wearing it makes me look suitably stupid...
That reminds me...
For months I've planned to install an RSS aggregator on my XP desktop. Well, finally I've done it. Took me all of ten minutes. This happily lead me off of a weekend's worth of diversion when I realised my blog was not quite as RSS friendly as it could be. But then RSS is not particularly friendly to beginners. After all, it's not immediately obvious that RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and RSS (RDF Site Summary) are not the same thing. Eventually, merely because it's from W3C, I picked RSS 1.0 (RDF Site Summary). Several hours later I regretted this decision when the best I could acheive, without Perl hacking, was technically invalid. It works in SharpReader, so I'll live with less than perfect for the moment.
And yes, this did remind me of something.
Hacking Swish++
For a while now I'm been getting hacked of with my search functionality. Because for some reason it would refuse to search for "MySQL". The final straw however was when it refused to search for "rsync". When I actually read the man pages I discovered that swish++ by default does not treat words with no vowels as words. Annoyingly changing this could only be done by recompiling. But it did give me an opportunity to bump my installed version to the latest and greatest.
However, I've still not even begun to speculate about the possibility of handling zero results nicely.
Last Modified
I've been reading that RSS has a bandwidth penalty. Having looked at my log I can certainly agree. The number of requests for the RSS version of my blog is ten times that of the next most requested page. A quick check and it appears there are no Last-Modified headers on anything served out of my weblog. An afternoon created a blosxom plugin so laughably simple.
package modified;
my $enabled = 1;
my @mtimes;
use Time::gmtime;
sub start {
# Bail out?
return 0 unless $enabled;
return 0 unless $blosxom::static_or_dynamic eq 'dynamic';
return 1;
}
sub date {
push @mtimes, $_[3];
return 1;
}
sub foot {
$blosxom::header->{'-last-modified'} = gmctime((reverse sort @mtimes)[0]);
return 1;
}
Now, hopefully I should see hourly 304 responses, not an hourly pull of 100K or so. If I dont... well, it's not like I really care :-).
Late night musings.
The problem with blogging is that it take me an awfully long time to actually write what I want to say. Even then I'm never 100% sure I've said what I mean. Or even that I mean what I say.
I have lots of thoughts in my head, you see. Most of which are perfect material for blogging. Only, well, I never have the time to write them down. I can't abide being wrong you see. So in everything I do I spend an inordinate amount of effort ensuring I'm not wrong. Or that when I'm knowingly uncertain I've thrown in enough caveats to act as an advance apology. So writing just a simple sentence take an inordinate amount of effort. And time.
I suppose this literary anal retentiveness stems from my education. Lazy teachers in a school that only accepted the brightest (how I passed the entrance exam I'll never know). "Never ignore a the chance to belittle someone who is struggling," seemed to be the staff motto. Just imagine a place where every teacher was perfect caricature of a P.E. teacher and you'll get the picture. Even a with a defence mechanism of rebelliousness after eight years of having it implied that you're stupid there is bound to be an effect.
A brief check indicates I'm currently writing this at a rate of four words per minute. But late at night. When I'm tucked-up in bed. With a mind which simply will not stop. I think so clearly. Okay, a lot of it is really weird shit I'd not choose to share. But fairly often entire blogs will form in my head. But when I'm warm and contented the last thing I want to do is make notes. So by morning I only have a vague recollection.
Which is why last night I started thinking about how cool it would be to be able to interface with a computer directly. I was half asleep at one point just letting related thoughts drift across my mind when I thought of something so funny I woke up laughing. But all that I can recall of this little jem of techie humour is that it was something to do with SSH.
ho hum...
Now with added Search
Finally I've gotten searching on my blog. Backend functionality is provided by swish++ with my very own blosxom plugin to make it all work. All I need now is a pretty way to handle zero results.
How long?
I've finally managed to find the time to amend my blosxom setup to stop the timestamp and links attached to each entry from annoying me. Replacing posted with timestamp may seem like an inconsequential change, but owing to the way I do things (with shell scripts, CVS, Makefiles, and a test site) the time you see is not the time I posted. As for the permanent link - well I do most things from the command line, so being able to see where something lives avoids the need to figure stuff out.
In all it only took fifteen minutes, which is daft as I've been meaning to for an age. There is probably a lesson in there somewhere. But then if everything I've been meaning to took fifteen minutes I'd be need a week. So I doubt such a lesson would be useful. Ho hum...
Mental Pressure
I had hoped blogging would allow me to vent a bit of mental steam. I have so much bouncing about my brain that I can never seem to form a coherent mental picture about anything. Except with email. With an audience and a subject I can explain anything (whether I make sense is another issue). Blogging, I decided, would help me get my thoughts together on subjects I choose without the need for an explicit audience.
It doesn't work of course. Blogging just stops me from disregarding ideas. So they fill up my head and haunt me until I kick myself for not expanding upon them in my blog. Wiggy's Vagueware project looks like it could be more of the same. Only Vagueware is a collaborative project... so the choice of subjects really does depend on natural selection and the underling the zeitgeist. Which may just be my salvation.
Apathetic Apathy
With most things when novelty of newness wears off Apathy returns. It's the same with blogging. I've got 1001 thing I could fire off a blog about, only I always seem to find something more important to do. Even when something else involves nothing more than sitting on my backside staring out of the window. However, I suspect I've hit upon a solution. The trick it seems is to build up a head of apathy on a different subject, then to actively avoid doing it by doing something else. Although I really couldn't be bothered working out what it is I'm avoiding by writing this blog entry - I suspect it involves email, but it could be something to do with DNS.
Meanwhile, whilst contemplating apathy I typed a relevant search into google and have been wandering around the net finding all sorts of interesting things.
The highpoint has to be an article on Tony Benn's website. Which lead me to read a few more of his articles, all of which are excellent. Especially as they fulfil some of the prime requisites of apathetic surfing. Instantly interesting, generally diverting, and a splendid way to waste time.
Then there was the abstract of an article entitled Apathy: a treatable syndrome from the The Journal of Neuropsychiatry (a hideous website, proving something I'm sure). The abstract is only a single paragraph, and most of the words are jargon but the first line leaps out
Apathy occurs frequently in neuropsychiatric disorders both as a symptom of other syndromes and as a syndrome per se.
Pills available from you doctor no doubt. The front page of the site where I found this abstract is entitled The Responsible Parent's Guide To Healthy Mood Boosters For All The Family and if that wasn't odd enough, the whole site is part of BLTC Research an organisation founded in 1995 to promote paradise-engineering. For the apathetic surfer downright weird is always a good call.
And then, as if I needed more amusement I discovered a site for apathetic geniuses.
Standard Standards.
There is no excuse for not observing the rules of the road. On the Internet, the rules are standards, and on the Web the standards come from W3C. It's thanks to the W3C I have free tools to verify both my xhtml, and my CSS.
Thanks partly to my laissez faire approach getting everything to comply with the standards was mildy icky. There are still a few little insignificant things, but I've done it, I'm finally compliant.
Gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. And a feeling of moral superiority, which I'm sure will give rise to riteous indignation whenever a site fails to work with konqueror, or some other !IE browser.
On the categorisation of stuff.
I like to think I'm a very ordered person. I'm not of course. There may be patches of order, but mostly I'm completely disorganised. But just like black-ice on a Winter's day I have to watch out I don't slip on these patches of order.
This blog is ordered. Only then I go and write a piece about ID cards. Which I can't seem to workout where to put. So I sit and worry and get stuck in what Pursig calls a gumption trap, when I could be off doing something interesting.
Sod it. This is the sort of thing that makes me giveup.
A load off my mind.
It's funny. Wiggy mentioned how liberating it felt posting to his blog after several weeks (months?) of inactivity. And the moment I read it I knew it was the truth. It is. Just the simple act of collecting a few abstract thoughts together and writing them down. Liberating. Liberating in so many different ways.
For a start I can stop mulling over shit like this and get on with thinking about something less pointless insted.
On the subject of Apathy
The more observant may have noticed my democracy thread. Well, this was the initial impetus for writing a blog. Quite simply I found any political discussion in the media was making me angry. So I had actually quit paying attention to politics. Only things have a habit of cropping up which would force me to pay attention. And I'd get angry again. So I decided I needed to do something.
It didn't matter how silly or pointless my mission was. Just as long as I did something to turn my anger into amusemnt.
What is going on?
Well. I suppose it's that I'm fedup thinking stuff that I only go and forget. So I simply want somewhere to write it down.
But why Blog? Probably because I'll get bored writing stuff that's just going to rot away on a disk somewhere. When Pandora opened the box all the ills of the world escaped. But at the bottom of the box was hope. The chances are nobody is going to find my blog remotely interesting. But there is hope. Hope that one person somewhere may find something which is of interest. Hope that somebody else may make an interesting comment on a blog entry. But mainly hope that I don't get bored and wander off.
And somehow that makes it seem worthwhile.