So I have this program that I wrote in C and then re-wrote in Perl that I've been running for some time. I just re-wrote it in Python. I feel kind of funny re-writing the same thing over and over again in my new favorite language, but the issue is that I've forgotten large portions of the old favorite languages and it takes a while for me to remember how to do things so I can fix new issues I've found.

I spent the greater portion of the last two weeks installing Gentoo on my laptop. I wanted to get more in depth with Linux internals and administration and additionally my laptop is somewhat underpowered and it benefitted greatly from doing a source install rather than a binary install. Things are much snappier under Gentoo than they were under Mandrake--which is the Linux distribution I used prior.

I have ALSA, APM, Gnome (with Metacity), Xmms, GDM, vim, pure-ftpd, X, gcc 3.2, pcmcia with a wireless ethernet card (SMC 2632) and a series of other things all installed and working happily with everything else.

The Gentoo forums are great for help as is the mailing list. I found I was able to fix all my problems without too much looking around.

At some point I may post the various configurations involved in getting ALSA and the wireless pcmcia stuff working--that was probably the hardest part and required the most tinkering. The rest was cake.

There isn't much progress on Stringbean yet. I do want to re-tackle it when Lyntin 3.0 is released and development dies down to a slow murmer. The first thing I'm going to do is overhaul all the Varium code and include a lot of the changes that I made for Bluemud (ansi parsing, word wrapping, ...). Then build an online tavern from that. It's not going to be much of an adventure mud from the beginning--I just want somewhere I can hang out with cool people (online).

I was looking to release 3.0 this week, but I'm going to re-write the ticker functionality and the logging functionality so they're both managers. I also want to investigate decoupling hooks from the hooks module or at least provide some registration mechanism so that module writers can create their own hooks and access hooks written by other module writers.

I also want to review all the mailing-list archives for things I intended to do, but then didn't do as well as Sebastian's emails to see what ideas he had that are now appropriate to do.

So this is my first post with my new blogging engine. I switched from a partly hacked version of Steve Gutenberg's weblog thing to pyblosxom which allows me to do blog entries with standard text files and a bunch of other stuff.

Unfortunately, it's going to take a bit to get things converted over and settled. We shall see....

I found out that when my mom went to italy, she used bluemail to check her mail--she thought it was great. MY MOM USED BLUEMAIL! How fun is that? My mother thought it was a real program, too--she didn't pick up on the fact that a) it's missing a lot of functionality, and b) it was written by me!

So she's like "oh, and I used Bluemail--it was great!" And I said, "yeah, I implemented forwarding and reply-all a few months ago and no one's really touch it since then." And then she goes, "what? you wrote that? wow...."

YES!

I was using telnet to connect to this mud I play on and I got tired of telnet. So I started looking around for solid mudclients and found a few--but they were either buggy or bloated or shareware or any number of a myriad of bad things. I decide to roll my own and do it in Python. Then I discover Lyntin--this mudclient written in Python and the maintainer hadn't touched it in months. He hands over the maintenance of the project to me. I move it to Sourceforge, put out a few versions, fix a few bugs, and voilla! I have a solid mudclient.

Then I start releasing versions with the fixes in it. And people around the world email me on occasion--I get like 1 or 2 emails a week. Some of them have patches for things that are broken. Some of them have feature requests. One of them said he didn't like Lyntin at all. But all of them were "Thanks--great job!"

That's so cool.

One doesn't drink coffee in the morning because one is thirsty, or because it provides nutritional value, or because one enjoys it, or because one is hooked. Rather it is a chance to revel in life--to enjoy its dark and bitter waters, the acidic aftertaste. Then, and only then, you know that your day couldn't possibly be that bad and you gain in the strength to go on.... One more step.... One more day of tedium.

And it helps to focus for some reason. I find I think twice as fast and twice as focused after a good meal and a couple of cups of coffee. If you skip the meal, then you just get a super caffeine high which lasts some 15 minutes and then you burn out. But whatever.

So there is a balance involved in drinking coffee. A balance of solid and liquid. Of drink and eat. Like the natural flows of the universe.

There is a certain macho factor too. Like when I'm working, I don't want a mamby-pamby cup of starbucks or green mountain coffee! I want a cup of coffee made from dirt. I want to put my spoon in my coffee and have full confidence that it will stand up in the coffee and not touch any of the sides. The coffee should be either scalding hot, or arctic cold. It should be black as night, bitter, and mildly acidic. You should be able to use the same cup of coffee to take the rust off your car.

Update:

12/9/2004: Sometime back in 1999 or so I started getting the shakes on the weekends when I wasn't at work. This was around the time when I was working for a company that had one of those really fancy coffee machines. So I quit drinking coffee. After a few weeks, I stopped getting headaches and feeling the effects of withdrawal.

Then I started drinking tea and went through a tea phase.

Then in 2001 or 2002 or sometime around there, I started drinking one or two cups a day. Every week or so I'd read yet another article that waxed philosophical about the incredible HARMS or the incredible BOONS of drinking some amount of coffee a day.

Now I'm up to two cups a day: one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Doesn't really matter if it's caffeinated or decaffeinated--I think I drink it mostly as a habit. Drinking water doesn't really do it for me.

See, that update was really interesting! Just like the rest of the essay! In retrospect, the "drinking coffee is macho" meme is probably a phase most folks go through as well. Part of me wonders what the differences between "drinking coffee is macho" and "smoking is macho" would be. Are they psychologically similar enough to be equivalent?

There has been a long list of things that have moved me. Like when you're playing harmonics on a guitar, the other notes vibrate in sympathy. While I don't recall why I originally added this topic to my on stuff list, it's one of those topics that's easy to come up with one or two things on the spur of the moment--and then spend the rest of your life thinking about.

I think the things that move me the most tend to be sudden and unexpected and usually while I'm busy trying to get something done. Rarely do I find things that move me while I'm sitting still enjoying the placitudes. Sometimes it's a connection. A sudden realization of an isomorphic mapping of a group of things that allow me some insight as to the relation of the items in the group. Course, I'm talking about items in the non-thing sense--they could just as easily be feelings or thoughts or visual abstractions.

Maybe someday I'll reach a point where it's important to make a list of the things that have moved me. Partly because I require moving again, or maybe because the list will move me and bring insight as to the things that move me. I guess, kind of a meta-moving.

Updates:

12/9/2004: Everyone has stuff that moves them, so I'm not really sure how interesting this "essay" is. I think it's a good idea to add some data points.

I was really moved the first time I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but not that moved the second time I saw it.

I was really moved when my dad told me he really admired the fact that I'm working on getting into grad school. I definitely don't have a good feel for why, but I was moved that he felt it important enough to send me an email about it.

I was moved when in January of 2004 (or maybe February--I forget specifically), my grandmother called me on the phone to tell me goodbye forever (she was really sick with cancer and a dozen or so other issues) and that she always cherished the moments we spent together and thought that I was a really good person. Then she died a few days later.

There are more but this is good enough.

I spent a lot of time in the computer science lab at Boston College.

Let me rephrase that. I spent a _lot_ of time in the DEClab. I used to sleep in the DEClab semi-regularly. I worked there, played there, socialized there (yes, I know...), and occasionally did other stuff there.

I have a lot of fond memories of that time and the people I spent the time with. Too many to write here. In the declab, someone once wrote on the white board "My karma ran over my dogma."

That pretty much sums up my long stay in the DEClab.