I like MT, but...

i really wish it would actually rebuild pages when i explicitly tell it to do so.

i just messed with the sort ordering on my archive pages to get them back the way i like it (i must have screwed that up in one of my upgrades), and i had to go through and edit an entry on each damn month's page to get it to actually update the page because just rebuilding didn't actually change anything.

if i was a better person, i might try updating to a newer MT (if there is one, i'm not sure), or poking through the code, but i've spent too much time looking at source code today and i'm tired of it.

Recommended Reading

so i just finished reading Software Configuration Management Patterns. it's definately recommended reading for anyone working on any real world programming projects.

like most other 'patterns' books, it tends to cover a lot of things that are basically common sense, but also touches on a lot of stuff that isn't immediately obvious. plus, even 'common sense' ideas have sides to them that you don't notice until they're laid on on paper in front of you.

i've been thinking a lot about how we do things in my group at work, and how we could make them better, and this book has really crystalized a lot of those ideas.

Streams

it would be nice if subversion had code to let you wrap one svn_stream_t in another svn_stream_t that would do keyword and eol translation on it, so you'd end up with a stream that translates everything you write to it.

as it is, i'm stuck writing the stream out to a temp file, then reopening it and creating a new stream, which i pass to the function we have that does the translation on it.

i think this is acceptable, since 'svn cat' isn't exactly a core bit of our functionality, but it's still irritating.

me: 1, make: 0

it's an ugly, evil hack, but it seems to work.

and can i just say that it's damn annoying that solaris make doesn't do macro substitution inside a command substitution, so to get data from the makefile to the shell command you're using to generate another macro, you have to do evil evil things.

if someone knows of a way to export an environment variable inside a makefile, that would also solve my problem, but i can't seem to find a way to do that either. i'm sure my o'reilly's book on make would have some kind of answer for me, but i left it in CT... so i'm stuck with the evil solution...

oh well, at least it seems to work...

Turning 30

i hope that when i turn 30, it's at least as interesting as this.

Damn...

it costs entirely too much to frame prints...

on the bright side though, i will soon have "The Face of Aphrodite" and "Reptiles" hanging in my apartment.

of course, this requires a fairly liberal interpretation of the word "soon", since there is a 3 week wait at the local framing shop...

consol^H^H^Hsomething else

just picked up mac os x for unix geeks, which seemed appropriate, since i use mac os x, and i am a unix geek.

so far, it looks pretty cool.

(ok, so i was originally going to write about something else, and i forgot to change the title to match this post. it's fixed now.)

Peter Jackson is God

the new extended edition of the fellowship of the ring movie is too cool for words.

they added everything i had hoped for, plus a few other things i hadn't even remembered from the book.

the only question i've got is "how am i going to find time to watch all the special features if i've still got all these babylon 5 DVD's to watch!"

Progress...

so i've been making progress on the subversion ruby bindings... the client bindings build and even seem to work, and the working copy stuff is coming along (although there have been annoying changes to the svn libs since these were last touched that make some of the behaviour difficult to recreate).

i'm questioning whether i should even be working on this, since it might be more practical to contribute to the SWIG bindings, but we've already got these native bindings here, and i like working with native ruby bindings a hell of a lot more than i like working with SWIG (it gives me a headache to read it), so i think i'll work on these for now.

Let's Take a Trip...

back in time...

it looks like the internet archive wayback machine has some of my old pages archived.

wow, that's a blast from the past...

Weird

so MT doesn't seem to be updating the comment counts on my index page...

i wonder if posting a new article will trigger it, since rebuilding the index didn't...

Argh!

so i was in borders today, looking for some book, and i got a call on my cell phone from a friend, and i proceeded to become one of those people i hate, the ones talking too loudly and for too long on a cell phone in a public place.

so thank you cara, for helping to complete my transition into that which i loathe...

Must Resist Urge To...

watch 22 consecutive hours of Babylon 5!

i got the last copy of season one from tower records, and it even turned out to be on sale!

Time and Motivation

or really, the lack of both....

i've got a ton of stuff i really should be working on, for a variety of different projects, but i never seem to have any free time, and when i do have time i don't seem to have motivation. i end up sitting around watching bad tv and surfing the web.

does anyone have any time/motivation they could lend me? it would really help...