My new phone arrived today. My first impressions are that its menu interface is very slow, that its construction is unimpressive, and that it feels like a brick compared to my RAZR.

Today, I saw some SQLite failures occur when a process had consumed all its open filehandles with session databases. My first thought was that there was a circular reference preventing destruction. After an almost comical amount of struggle to get Devel::Cycle to work, and then an actually comical amount of struggle to get Devel::FindRef to not choke on DBI connections, the problem turned up. I’m pretty sure that I wrote the offending line. I feel fairly silly about it now, since it is a pretty clear one-line red flag. This is a close approximation:

John C. has been giving me a very slightly hard time about my new phone habit. Honestly, I hate getting new phones, and I wish I could just get one that would last until it fell apart. Then I would re-buy the same model and use that. If possible, I’d buy in bulk. This is what I do with shoes.

You defaced the ABE.pm wiki yet again, removing information useful only to a handful of people. You bypassed the security, which consists of requiring that users have internet connections, and hacked the software by creating a page called “DaRkNeSs” containin the line “HACKED BY DARKNESS” repeated 43 times.

For months, I have been getting driven up the wall by some stupid Vim behavior. When run on Linux, filename completion is case sensitive. When run on Mac OS, it is not. This is despite the fact that I’m running it on a case-sensitive filesystem.

Some people really want to see fancy HTML mail. They want italics and inline images and all sorts of nonsense that makes my teeth itch. I used to ignore any such mail that I got, because it was mostly from people from whom I didn’t expect good mail. Then I started getting more mail like that from my family, and I groaned and set up a mailcap entry to make Mutt dump the HTML messages to text with w3m or lynx and it was bearable again.

Just a note to myself, since I always forget: this is the order of the Fletch books by Gregory McDonald:

Dear Speakeasy Members,

Today is an historic and exciting day for Speakeasy.

I am pleased to announce that Speakeasy has been acquired by Best Buy, an innovative and growing Fortune 100 company and the top consumer electronics retailer in North America.

About two weeks ago, I was singing the praises of mutt, patting myself on the back for improving my mail toolchain configuration, and complaining that GUI mail apps always make me feel stifled. I was asked to elaborate, so here goes.

We’ve had a lot of people tell us that they really like Martha’s name. I’m not sure whether this is usual and meaningless, but I like to think it’s because Martha Josephine is a good name. It’s not weird, it’s not boring, and it’s classical without being archaic. Quite a few of my friends asked me how we chose it, so I’m giving a little explanation.