I managed to avoid getting sick for a week of living on Canal St. in NYC,
then a week of living in a house full of my siblings who are all sick
(including my hygenically careless 2-year-old brother).
Of course, my luck would run out once I am safely ensconced in my near
antiseptic apartment, miles and miles away from anyone who might infect me
(and equally distant from anyone who could bring me chicken soup).
It was a good sick, though, as such things go. I was dizzy, disoriented, and
my 18-hour nap was fitful and full of surreal images and vivid auditory
hallucinations. I particularly liked the dream where I was attending the
Simon Belmont VII Memorial Institute for Extraterrestrial Hunter/Killer
Studies, hanging upside down by my anti-gravity boots and using a glowing
blunderbuss with ammunition reminiscent of tylenol gel capsules to ring a
huge church bell to signal the start of class.
I'm hacking away on my mac laptop, actually happy with the tools I'm using
(mostly) for the first time in a good long while. The tools that finally
made this possible:
- Mindlube Emacs
- uControl (now working with Panther)
- X-Chat Aqua
- Mac Python (now properly bundled by Apple)
- iJournal (what I'm making this posting with
IT'S OUT. Get it, it's the best one yet.
Quotient 0.7.0
We're making really good progress now, but we have GOT to stop these midnight releases.
Quotient 0.7.0
We're making really good progress now, but we have GOT to stop these midnight releases.
Timezones are more complicated than I had hoped, but less than I'd feared.
At least, some of them.
All the confusion stems from daylight savings time, which is, I might add, a terrible, terrible idea. US time and European time are just subtly different enough to be annoying, but they don't have anything seriously surprising in them.
Python's spiffy new datetime module is aware of these issues, and apparently wishes to avoid becoming embroiled in the hothouse world of temporal politics. Odd design choice, considering that the language was designed by a time traveler. While this is irritating from the point of view of someone who wants to just stuff some date objects into strings formatted appropriately for different time zones, I can see why. The amount of work you'd need to do to properly support every time zone is staggering.
For example, it turns out that israeli daylight savings switch-over time is set every year by the ministry of the interior, so you can't actually anticipate it in software, only retroactively apply the dates.
I have no idea how japanese, russian, african, or chinese dates work yet, and I'm not really looking forward to find out unless it's in the form of a robust
All the confusion stems from daylight savings time, which is, I might add, a terrible, terrible idea. US time and European time are just subtly different enough to be annoying, but they don't have anything seriously surprising in them.
Python's spiffy new datetime module is aware of these issues, and apparently wishes to avoid becoming embroiled in the hothouse world of temporal politics. Odd design choice, considering that the language was designed by a time traveler. While this is irritating from the point of view of someone who wants to just stuff some date objects into strings formatted appropriately for different time zones, I can see why. The amount of work you'd need to do to properly support every time zone is staggering.
For example, it turns out that israeli daylight savings switch-over time is set every year by the ministry of the interior, so you can't actually anticipate it in software, only retroactively apply the dates.
I have no idea how japanese, russian, african, or chinese dates work yet, and I'm not really looking forward to find out unless it's in the form of a robust
tzinfo implementation...
A few people have asked me for the web comics I read this week. Here is a
sampling: