up way too late composing Latin

cause some guy on ISCA bbs asked how to render into Latin the sentence “to truly live is to stare defiantly into the face of death.”

I started working on it and noticed that my sentence was about half hexameter, so I labored and obsessed until I put the whole thing into dactylic hexameter, or something close enough for government work. I had to ditch the “defiance” but I thought the epic meter made up for it:

intueri in vultum mortis, id vivere vere est.

Then I realized I had totally jumbled around the sense of his words to get that. It should be more like:

Vere vivere, id est fortiter intueri in vultum mortis.

No epic meter there, nor any easy way to cast it that way.

But “fortiter intueri in vultum…” — that’s a lovely little chunk of hexameter in the middle of it. Makes me sad not to be able to render it all that way.

Ah, Latin. What fun.

Here’s an awesome page giving English verses composed in Classical meters.

Personal Linkage

Who do you have connections to?

I worked as a driver for an old, rich man who had gone to boarding school with George H.W. Bush.

I gamed with the designer of the game Villains & Vigilantes once, when he lived in Grand Rapids.

A friend of mine I see occasionally is fairly tight with the guy who designed the Amber RPG.

I gave away two black cats to the guy who did the Elvish translations for the Lord of the Rings movies.

My great grandfather was a well known missionary to the Navajo.

My wife has met and hung out with a large number of science fiction authors in the course of helping run a science fiction convention.

I chat regularly with the former editor of Linux Today and Linux Planet.

I know somebody who’s got his own about:// page in one of the most popular Linux browser (Galeon).

I know somebody who used to hang out and game with the Slashdot guys.

I know somebody who’s friends with at least one well known Catholic theologian from Chicago.

I corresponded with Mark Turner when I was in grad school, before my academic spirit died the death. Turner has written some great books including co-authored ones with George Lakoff, who’s getting well known lately for his analysis of political discourse.

What famous (famous to everybody or just famous to you, with respect to things you know or care about) people are you linked to, directly or indirectly, in interesting ways?

Consider this a meme I just came up with. Post it to your livejournals or something. :)

Gradual Software

I have this little project that’s been 95% finished for months, ‘blogbot 2’, a python script which monitors a list of RSS/Atom feeds daily and sends out an email with all the new ones to a mailing list. Blogbot 1 was a ruby script where I rolled my own feed parser using Ruby’s built-in XML parser. Ruby’s parser rocks, but my wielding of it was only 90% good enough, so I wanted to leverage somebody else’s work and rewrite it in Python using the Universal Feed Parser.

I kept stumbling over Unicode issues. The UFP is so correct that it often returns Unicode, and Python’s unicode handling, while very good if you know how to use it, is pretty sucky if you are me. The default handling for unicode-to-string conversion is to use the ‘ascii’ encoding, which can’t handle practically anything, and the default behavior when it hits something it can’t handle is to throw up its arms and scream in mute horror. You cannot globally change these defaults; you have to catch it conversion by conversion and change them.

I finally got it all figured out and it’s working great. But I tore hair out over that last 5%.

Another project I’m working on is “artblog/imageblog” software. I want something which does no more nor less than I want it to, and does it well and easily. I’m hacking this one together in PHP/MySQL, and it’s been fun learning PHP. (Hint to anyone going to use PHP/MySQL: use Pear DB if you possibly can. It will rock your world. MUCH better API than the default mysql stuff.)

Anyway, I’m doing the artblog thing very graduall, and that’s turning out to be a good thing. Cause it means I don’t spend too long going in the wrong direction. The big trick with PHP/MySQL is to decide what ought to be a PHP issue and what ought to be a MySQL issue. Originally I had this concept where I was going to have thumbnail images listed in the same table as fullsize images, and have a many-to-one relation between them via an extra column in that table that related back to itself. (This was actually my second iteration — originally thumb images were in their own table with a many to one relationship to the main table… this was while I was still thinking I would ever actually care to have multiple thumbnails for the same image, which I decided in the end I never would.)

Anyway, I ended up deciding “screw all that — I’m going to have thumbnails be created automagically if they don’t already exist via PHP magic, and the database isn’t going to know or care about them.” I coded it up and it’s awesome.

The thing is, I had all of these ideas in the time I wasn’t working on the project. I’d work on it for a while and then do other things (cause I don’t have that much spare time for it) for a day or three at a time. Then by the time I’d come back I’d have had a lot of time for those “standing there in the shower and suddenly realize how the system ought to be designed” moments.

This project is going to be better than it would have been because it’s gradual. All these people are on about “rapid/agile development” — well, I think development is more agile when it’s less rapid. Because if you move fast, then you get a lot coded the way you first thought of doing it, which is seldom the best way to do it.

This is not a friendly world for gradual activity though, and the programming world is especially unfriendly to gradual development.

Ah well.

The Power of the Protest Film

OK, so protest films weren’t able to prevent America from “re” electing a lying, torturing, murderous dynastic warlord to be the president of the nation.

But they were able to successfully change the world in one important way — I am no longer able to order a 42 oz. Diet Coke from McDonald’s.

We’ll still have a President with the blood of thousands of soldiers and a hundred thousand civilians on his hands, but hey, at least I won’t be drinking too much Diet Coke without having to go back for a refill.

Thanks, protest films.

New Wifi Haven

It’s egregiously nonfree, but I have a feeling that with my employment being what it is I will easily get my money’s worth for a $20 monthly subscription to Freedomlink so that I can get online at Barnes & Noble’s.

The ones on 28th street and at Rivertown Mall now have wifi.

I think I’m gonna become what they call a “regular.”