Given that it's a lunar eclipse and the Red Sox seem like they're going to sweep the series after decades of borking in the most dramatic possible way, I have made a few predictions about what will happen:

• A meteor (or ordinance from testing advanced government weapons) will hit the stadium causing injury to everyone involved thus post-poning the game indefinitely.

• The Red Sox will win the game, then take off their human masks--turns out they're aliens trying to make the point that they can play baseball, too. Though since they're illegal aliens, they will be sent to Guantanamo indefinitely with no rights and an alien mother ship will come down and wipe out the human race.

• The Earth will pass between the sun and the moon causing strange alien vibes to hit Ortiz' bionic arm. It will proceed to kill everyone on the team a la Maximum Overdrive.

However, I'll have to find out what happened tomorrow since the jackasses at RCN installed cable at the neighbor's place and foobar'd our cable and internet service. Then decided they can't come back and fix it until Thursday. Jackasses.

I'm in the process of the following:

• finishing up my grad school application for NEU

• tweaking my "new" desktop so I can do some programming work on it

• working on pyblosxom 1.1 release

• finishing up a children's book S and I wrote, illustrated, and are publishing ourselves (more on this later [I hope])

• preparing to visit with George this weekend

• watching the Red Sox... (whew--the anxiety in the air is as thick as soup!)

• trying to complete items in my infinite queue at work where the items are progressively more complex and potentially NP-complete--at least, it sure feels that way

Wow--I just installed Ubuntu on my "new" desktop (a PIII 450mhz) and it's very very nice. Installation was refreshingly easy--I didn't have to tinker with anything. Then I unison'd my user directory over from my laptop and ... tada! I'm productive.

I highly recommend it to myself. If you're like me, then you'll probably like it as well.

Ubuntu web-site

But you don't have to take my word for it. Having said that, and as most of these reviews will point out, this is a pre-release. If you check the Ubuntu forums, it's pretty clear they put this out to get feedback for the final release.

I have Debian GNU/Linux happily running on my laptop, though my laptop is pretty pokey (it's an Inspiron 7000 that I bought in 1998).

My server at Serverbeach (bluesock.org) runs Debian and it was doing fine until the kernel switched the / mount to read-only and then died. Rebooting caused the server to fsck everything and I lost /var/lib and /var/cache... Then things got pretty interesting for a few hours. My friend gave me a tarball of his /var/lib (minus some random stuff) and from that and some useful files in /var/backup, I was able to bring most of the server back to life. Additionally, I found some of the files that were missing in lost+found. Tawdry things like mailing list archives dating back to 2000. Time to institute a more rigorous backup system that includes more data....

My dad loaned me one of his monster servers (see figure 1) because it was non-functional. My roommate pulled all the stuff out and put it back in again and now it works fine... Not clear what the actual issue was. Anyhow, once I get it booting, I'm going to slap Debian on that machine and start using it for development. Then I'll switch my pokey laptop to mirroring/backing-up bluesock.org.

I've been really happy with Debian. As happy as I was with Gentoo, except I don't have to wait hours for X and various other large things to compile.

 ____
||__||   <---- server
||__||
|    |
|    |
|____|   . <-- me

Figure 1: an ascii picture of me standing next to the server

I finished taking the GRE so now I'm going to start the long process of moving everything in /contrib to the registry, moving the flavours to the registry, and then going through the steps to release PyBlosxom 1.1.

We'll do an RC and wait a week for people to speak up about issues. That puts a PyBlosxom 1.1 release around the end of October. Things that will be in the release:

• a bunch of important performance enhancements

• some bug fixes

• some other minor changes

We're also removing the contrib directory and all the flavour examples. This is probably going to be controversial, but I don't think we have enough polish to continue distributing them with PyBlosxom and it'll be easier to distribute fixes and such if they're separate from the PyBlosxom release.

The spearmint plant is doing fine. I think I'm going to move it next year to a place on our porch that's not in direct sunlight for most of the day. Seems as though the plant and soil dry out too fast when I do that. If I can clean enough of the stuff in the study out, I'll put the plant in there.

I snipped some of the branches off and dried the leaves. I think I have enough spearmint for a couple of cups of tea now. Next year, I'll be more aggressive about clipping and drying.

Other than tea, I can't think of any good uses for mint. We might add another plant next year that's more useful. Probably basil.

I have a Sharp Zaurus 5600 that I bought when Amazon.com had them for like $260 (might have been $280). It was a price at which I decided it was definitely worth getting a handheld computer with a thumboard that was running Linux.

Anyhow, so I ended up with a minor issue... The Zaurus 5600 I got had a PXA 250 Intel chip which has some problem with caching or something like that. The PXA 255 chip fixes this problem. In order for Linux to work on the device, they slowed down the something or other. So I think the end result is that the 5600 with the PXA 250 is slower than the 5600 with the PXA 255. I'm really fuzzy on all of that mostly because I don't really care a whole lot.

The OE team put out the 3.5.1 OZ release a couple of weeks ago. I followed the instructions here in the OZ install guide and downloaded the files from here.

Everything seems to be working on the pda itself. OPIE is pretty neat--I'm definitely very excited. The ability to rotate the screen is awesome. It's definitely a lot more snappy than the Sharp ROM that comes with the Zaurus 5600 itself.

Next step is to get a wireless card. After that, I want to install some games for those dull moments in life.

I had a splendid weekend with S's parents and then bumping around Harvard Square on Sunday. I did some studying for the GRE, but mostly took a couple of days off from doing work.

I also finished up overhauling all the code on DarkRifts to work with the MudOS v.22.2b14 driver. There's a huge amount of code and there were a lot of problems most of which are sorted out now. There are still a few problems, but no one seems to be logging in, so I don't really feel any urgency to work through the last bits.

I'm planning on pushing pyblosxom through to a 1.1 release soon. First, I'm going to package up the flavour files into flavour packs for the registry. Second, I'm going to add documentation to all the contributed plugins and move them all to the registry. Accomplishing those two tasks should give the code in CVS enough time to bake. Then we'll do a 1.1 release and start thinking about 1.2 which will likely involve a minor overhaul to how we pull files from the file system.

The next two weeks will be pretty busy. Already I'm way behind in replying to email.

I'm going to spruce up the comments plugin that comes with PyBlosxom. I'm going to merge the changes I've made locally with the contributed version:

• Support for "blacklisted words" which, if they're in the comment, will cause the comment to be rejected

• Fix for the comment plugin so that instead of stomping on the template it now just appends the comment template to the story template. This makes it play nice with other plugins.

• Change the behavior so that neither the comments nor the comment form show for an entry unless "showcomments=1" shows up in the querystring.

• Fixes to the logging.

I may incorporate the changes that Jesus did or at least figure out how to make that a plugin kind of thing.

Also, there should be a way to kick back messages to the user who just did stuff with the comment form. Then we can kick back messages when comments are rejected and accepted for better usability.

Updates:

09-27-2004: Updated "John" to "Jesus"--I totally got his name wrong. Oops.

I'm playing music in Winamp and the volume is too loud. It's at this point that I realize I'm going to have to find the fifty places that control volume on my machine. They are:

• Winamp - has a volume slide thingy

• Windows - has a volume slide thingy for "Wave"

• Windows - has a volume slide thingy for "Main"

• my laptop - has a master volume which is adjusted by the Fn and VolUp and VolDn keys

• my headphones - has a volume thingy between the headphone jack and the headphones

There seem to be a lot of things in computing and life that are like this.