ARrr!!

It really is one of the best days of celebration every year.

:g/^$/d

From tip 372. I keep forgetting how to do this so I'm writing it down.

Brett discovered some issues with booklist as it interacts with comments. So this fixes those issues.

You should note that if you're using booklist and comments, you should have at least 2 books in your list. Otherwise comments sees it as a single entry, decides to show comments for it, and then stomps on the property in the entry that dictates which template to use. That's a bug in comments that needs to get fixed.

Get it on my pyblosxom plugins listing.

Fixed encoding issues and some other things. Thanks Aslak!

Get it on my pyblosxom plugins listing.

I'm seriously looking into doing grad school starting Fall of 2005 and getting either a Masters or a PhD in Computer Science. As such, I started reading through the sites of schools in the area that offer that sort of thing. The NEU CCS site is pretty interesting. They list faculty and their research interests of which the following piqued my interest:

• Lieberherr and Lorenz - the Demeter project, Adaptive Programming (and AOP), and dealing with software design issues. This is very much something I'd like to pursue.

• Clinger - compiler optimization for higher-order languages and nonpredictive generational garbage collection. This is really interesting as well.

• Tarasewich - bridging information systems, computer science, engineering, and marketing. It's similar (or at least parallel) to what I've been doing for the last few years and it might be interesting to pursue.

• Wand - programming-language semantics and their application to compiler correctness. This is really fascinating--but I have less a priori knowledge and experience of this than I do for the above faculty and their research interests (though that's a very first-blush analysis).

• Williams - machine learning, a subspecialty of artificial intelligence. This is also really interesting.

When I was talking with the University of Phoenix folks (I tossed around getting an MBA for a brief period of time and bumped into a UoP booth while fetching lunch), they were pretty adamant about me answering the question of why I want to go back to school. I think that's a little weird. I want to go back to school because I want to flesh out my knoweldge and experience in various areas and I think the most effective way to do that especially in regards to Programming Language design and theory is to go back to school. Sure, I can putz around on python-dev and read the articles listed on LtU as I've been doing the last couple of years, but I'd get a lot more out of getting a Masters or PhD. And I think now is a good time in my life to do it.

In my copious free time, I do some work on a mud named DarkRifts. The mud itself runs on MudOS on top of a mudlib based on a mudlib based on TMI-2. I've worked on a few other mud projects, but decided I didn't want to run my own mud since I don't have enough time for that and it'd be better to help out with someone else's mud.

The mud is still pretty infantile in terms of maturity of the codebase and player base. We have seven guilds that are in-game (two of which are "starter" guilds) in two realms with twenty-nine different areas and several cities. We've got a few alpha-testers who come irregularly.

There's a lot of polish work to be done--but we're not at that stage yet, though we are progressing. One difficulty is that our alpha-testers are pretty irregular in their testing. So the mud is pretty quiet most of the time (I think we average 2 players online). The other difficulty is that we could use a few more coders to help even out the rough edges on that side of the equation.

Anyhow, if you have any interest in seeing what we've got going on, helping out, or otherwise chiming in, check out the DarkRifts website and/or add a comment below. If you log in, my name is "Flake". I idle there during the day and do some work on nights and weekends (I'm in Boston, MA which is Eastern Standard Time). Please drop in and say hi!

I've got one of those GRE study guide prep book things and they have a wordlist of 3500 words that I should know. The breakdown is something like this:

• 50% are words I already know and use in my daily hooplah

• 10% are words I already know but I don't use them

• 10% are words I recognize, but couldn't tell you the definition if you asked

That leaves 30% of the words to learn. Course, that's like 1000 words so I decided to put all the ones I didn't know in a wordlist file and wrote a cgi script to pull up a random word from a random wordlist (the 3500 words are broken down into 50 or so wordlists) and give me the word and definition. I figure I'll start using them in emails and other digital correspondence and that way I'll cycle them into my vocabulary.

Feel free to join along in this little game of mine. It's a game I like to call, "I don't want to be studying--I want to be programming".

Over the last 4 or 5 years I've been telling people that I'm looking to get my masters--but I never really found a good break-point in life stuff to actually go get my masters. Thus it is with some excitement that I've now gone and completed the first step: I've signed up to take the GRE General exam.

Where this will go--only time will tell.

On a complete irrelevant side note, it's interesting to note that I can type paragraph tags ( <p> ... </p> ) with my right hand while my left hand aimlessly scratches my back.

There are a few people doing analysis on the tools.Walk chain with the hope of slimming it down because it's one of the corner issues with PyBlosxom scaling up to thousands of entries. I don't really have time today to look at them (I'm at work right now), but I will (hopefully) soon and hopefully this spawns a discussion that results in better PyBlosxom code.

• cursory performance analysis of tools.walk

• pyblosxom performance analysis

• discussion in the pyblosxom todo wiki page

There's been a flurry of email on the PyBlosxom mailing lists over the last month. I'm totally buried at the moment, so I haven't had time to go through them and figure out what it all means in the grand scheme of things.

I updated the todo list with everything in my head right now (though I'm sure there's other things floating around that aren't on that page).

Robert Wall is working on doing analysis on PyBlosxom and coming up with some code to fix issues he's uncovering.

Hopefully, his work and the work of others will result in some big fixes to PyBlosxom that will (hopefully) simplify the architecture, reduce the number of performance issues, and open up more possibilities.

I also finished up work on Planet PyBlosxom which I had been threatening to do for a while now.

Lots of progress, though. I wish I had more free time to help grease the skids a bit.