ALL ABOUT MARKUP

Someone complained, looking at the beta version of some new reports, that the “when” field was too precise. They didn’t need “17 days and 6 hours ago,” “17 days ago” would do. I was doing this with Sean Burke’s Time::Duration, wrapped by my own Time::Duration::Object, which just turns a number of seconds into an object with methods based on the functions provided by Time::Duration. It’s been a very useful module, but I never noticed that it had a major bug.

For a long, long time, I have thought, “It will be way cool to have better text-to-html in Rubric!” I really wanted a decent markup system for doing this, and I didn’t want to make any decisions. Decisions are hard. Instead, I punted: “I’ll figure it out later!”

I had a weird, bad dream. On my way home, I saw a couple of mentally disabled people jogging. One of them fell down and I heard a shot. Later, I was called in to talk to the police. It turned out that they had been carrying a gun and accidentally shot someone – or so everyone thought, including Dick Cheney and his bodyguard, who were there. For some reason.

I got two copies of a book that I’d wanted, for Christmas, so I returned one copy and used the credit to pick up something else I’d wanted, Paranoia: WMD. It’s a four-pack of missions (adventures) for the Paranoia RPG. I’ve liked Paranoia for a long time – back since the glorious second edition. I’ve written more entries in Alphapedia Complexia than I have in any other public wiki (I think), and I’ve been happy to see the new edition of the game do fairly well. The new edition was, at first, called “Paranoia XP,” but apparently Microsoft got grumpy, and now it’s just “PARANOIA.”

I really like the Perl Email Project, in theory. Lately it’s been getting my goat, due to weird interfaces, backwards compatibility glitches, and one particularly troublesome bug.

cheshirecat is all closed up, and basically changed over to its new configuration. My whiteboard plan was to have a five gig drive become the system disk, replacing the Caviar 22500, which was only half the size, and not large enough for my system… or so I thought. Now that I look at it, I see that my new root partition, including var, usr, and tmp, is only 2.2 gigs – which would have left me enough room for swap, too.

Last night, I was complaining that it was going to take six forevers to build my RAID. This morning, it was still going, and expecting over a day to complete. I whined about this to Dieter, who was similarly perplexed. He asked a few questions, including, “Well, of course you’re using DMA, right?”

Yesterday afternoon, I saw that my Newegg order would be “shipping soon.” I hoped I’d see my drives before Friday. This morning, I saw that it had shipped. Not only that, but it had shipped from Edison, New Jersey, and was already out for delivery to my apartment.

I’ve got nothing much to report: life continues on, and is pretty much unexciting and acceptable.