File "/usr/lib/python2.3/urllib.py", line 787, in __init__
    self.read = self.fp.read
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'read'

Sigh. I believe this is how Joe feels all the time, only much less so.

Alrighty, the example blog really works again. I should spend some time on making some interesting “themes” now, probably, but I really hate making themes. Web “design” in general really.

See what I said here, really. I’ve never been entirely sure if that page is supposed to be something you should read if your attitude needs adjusting, or if my attitude needs adjusting. Probably both. (“The Pope and I can take it, but don’t pick on Pat Buchanan...”)

What I really ought to do is kill that stupid S2 friends-view layout I have, but, yuck. S2.

Okay, I think the tag plugin is done.

So I’ve gotten the roux rewrite running, finally. Not doing anything useful, but running. I can’t believe I was using a pull parser and generating the Atom 0.3 by hand(!) before. Ugh. Totally, completely, hideously embarrassing.

Anyway last time I got distracted on the way to making it useful and just said “screw this, I’ll put some regular expression crap in” and it’s been hobbling along on that (basically no better than the million other screen-scrapers out there). But. I had a brainwave about how to implement what I was really looking for (the “civilized” bit), which works on simple cases at this point; I just need to think about making it extendible. Should be fun.

Enabling domain-specific languages seems to be a theme with all this recent stuff. I don’t know why.

You know it’s bad when writing several screenfuls of recursive fuzzy tree matcher in Python is fun and doing a tiny bit of tree and Makefile maintenance on a C project so you can push out fixes from last year is a chore you’ve been putting off for weeks.

I truly, truly hate email. First you have the __getitem__ and __setitem__ that work nothing like a dict (no KeyError ever, just returns None, despite there being a get, silently fails to overwrite an existing value, no update). But of course they're just as stupid as a dict if you change the content, instead of associating the type with that object. And then. decode_header. Does this:

[('Foo', 'utf-8'), ('Bar', None)]

Hint: ('Bar', None) is not a valid list of arguments for creating a unicode object. I don’t even want to create it myself. I just want the thing decoded. Ugh, ugh, ugh. Everything that possibly could have sucked here has sucked. Lots.

One of the reasons I decided to use Maildir is because it takes two lines of code to turn it into a structured list of objects. Except of course both of the standard modules that make that possible are horribly designed. I really don’t want to reimplement this shit. I really don’t want to go to a “real” database backend where suddenly you can't use any standard unix tools to do anything and you have to write them all from scratch.

All software sucks. Down, not across.