I find myself opening a shell and typing "man ascii" more than I would like. More recently, I've found myself looking (with no success) for a equivalent web page that isn't ugly -- sometimes a browser tab is just more convenient.

Yesterday, I decided to stop searching and just write one myself: man ascii. (I was a bit surprised that this domain, and all the variants of it Joker came up with, were available!) I think it gives me everything I got out of ascii(7), but I would love any bug reports.

Regarding that last post. I received the list via email from Alan Sondheim earlier in the week, and felt like putting up a link to it. No particular reason; it seemed appropriate for one of those sui-generis enigmatic tumblelog things. I was disappointed to find that none of the mailing lists where I might have been able to find it had public archives. (One way of dealing with people who complain about spammers harvesting their address, I suppose...)

So, I said to myself, I've got 8+ years of this guy's email work, I'd like to share it with the world, and I have Mnemosyne, which I had always thought, in the back of my mind, would be a neat way to archive email written as email rather than written as a "blog". So, a little hacking later... The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive (Warning: some parts are NSFW). It has already given me some ideas for improving the example templates; I'll release 0.12 soon with the changes I had to make to get this running. (Final tally: 4500 messages, 75 seconds from a clean htdocs, 12 to no-op. On whatever the cheapest Linode [1] [2] is. Eh. I can do better.)

This is is a wonderful metaphor: "looking in the fridge every few minutes and hoping that something tasty will appear".

I may be thick, but Planet does not appear to store any information about how often a feed ought to be polled (my blog seems to be hit every 20 minutes even when I'm AWOL). I use rawdog, which does.

When adding a feed, I make a vague guess at how often I want to poll it, and then periodically adjust the time based on how often updates actually happened. This is done with a terrible, awful, ugly hack that reads the database[1] and spits out the config file with new-and-improved times. Pretty dumb, but good enough "for now" (apparently I haven't touched it in over a year).

rawdog will also automatically update feed locations if given a 301. Since it already rewrites the config for that, I might try to merge time updating into the core someday, but no one has demanded such a feature AFAIK.

Every time I read my Apache logs I get a very strong urge to block anything claiming to be Mozilla that is not actually Mozilla. Then I go make some tea and chill out.

(Years ago this was sheer eccentricity. But for the love of God, software that didn’t even exist in 2005 is still doing it.)

So, I still hate HTML, and in particular I hate tidy for not even understanding xmlns. (Seriously! WTF, people?) And not, AFAICT, having any way to hook in something that will grok py:strip as a null container. But there’s the slightly-new layout.

I think I wrote that headline about 50 times before it was remotely close to even. I am very sloppy. And my markers suck. I was going to work on these exercises some but I think it may be a lost cause.

I was also going to put the diacritical mark on the ū, but I forgot. I need to dig through my books and website notes and finish the front page for this stupid domain name that explains what it means and why I somewhat arbitrarily chose not to transliterate it as “hu”. (Because I’m Irish and it makes more sense to me that way. Shut up.)

Also, here is something I was going to link yesterday (from Michael), but forgot: The Sarong Theorem Archive.

Perhaps the greatest existential joke ever.

One of the few annoying things about free software is simply finding it. You can get a very good idea of what is to your taste or not from people around you, but if you don't know or care (or want to care!) about some particular problem, generally people whose opinions you trust don’t like any of this crack either.

In particular, Web Frameworks(tm). Lots of people love them. I’ll take vanilla. After paging through several manuals last weekend for things which I might be able to use a templater from, and finding that despite all the other features, no one seemed to even care that much about even doing inheritance sanely, I got annoyed and grumbled something about how they all sucked and figured I could just factor that logic out myself and use what I was already using for the boring bit.

However, Erich pointed out that that sucked too. And if you care about being correct (says me who serves all these pages with the XHTML mime type despite it breaking Internet Explorer and Google), you should probably assume that if you give your users (including yourself!) something fragile, they’re inevitably going to break it (and if they’re the sort of users that have been crawling out of the woodwork these days, well...). So I checked out Kid, to which I am giving yet another link here because it’s just that good. I’ve seen attempts to implement the “it’s all valid XHTML” thing before and they were rather blah. This one seems to actually fit with its being hosted on lesscode.org. And I am nothing if not a sucker for less code. And for things being pleasant to read.

So I ported my templates over and added the four lines I alluded to, and now (since I know my output is provably valid), although I have not put them live yet, I have a starting point for making them be a little less crack (really, it’s very bad). Has anyone registered lesscrack.org yet?

Trying to brush up on my CSS (It’s appalling what one can forget in such little time), I came across this wonderful rant. I think I read this years ago. It’s still good.