I introduced a bug, at work, while trying to fix another. That was last friday. I felt rather dumb when I managed to track it down. The thing is, the stuff I'm working on is trying to do some really really clever things that a human would normally do. As a result, it's a bit fragile, and a bit hard to understand/trace. Oh well.

It's slowly coming up on a year that I've been in Pittsburgh. This time last year, I was madly in love with Debb, and, I think, telling my boss at GoAntiques that I was leaving town in pursuit of love. I was firing my resume to all sorts of places in Pittsburgh, and, I think, had gotten a response from a local bank. Of course, I was ignoring advice from my parents to wait to move until I had a job, and was trying to find someone to assume my lease for that big, old, blue house on 16th. I might've had my old apartment on Bellefonte picked out -- I'm not sure. It's funny, how much things can change in a year. Then again, a year is a biggish unit in people's lives. Greater than 1%, for most folk :)

It's been something I've been chewing on in my mind recently.. I've come to understand, over the last few years, exactly how different the belief in deities changes one's worldview. Even a mild faith is immensely different, and changes things. There are so many things that a lot of other people partake in, that make sense to them because the basis for their beliefs about life in general involve concepts that mine don't. Living as if someone other than oneself and society were keeping score... the attribution of one's morality to others, and the divinification and externalization of that part of oneself.. the feeling of being part of some plan, or at least a pawn on a chess board. I think I understand it..

I'm listening to a random shuffle of nature sounds I like from a '500 sound effects' CD set I bought years ago. It's kind of soothing. Initially, I wasn't sure about changing from the normal random music shuffle, but this is a nice change of pace. My favorite track is 'river in a cave'. It is, quite naturally, just a recording of an underground river flowing in a cave. I can't find that CD set anywhere online, at least based on what I can remember of the title. When I get home, I might see if I can find publisher info on one of the CD cases.

Oh, here's the most irritating bug ever, in redhat. Well, it's really a design flaw, but they don't see it as a problem. It's irritating -- I've written locale-unaware replacements for stuff in libc just to prevent my static libraries from using those symbols. This is, quite naturally, for work. :)

And, just for those of you who keep emailing me,

• No, comments arn't working yet. They will be working soon, after I figure out two things. First, I need to figure out how to do authentication. It likely will be very simple, not very secure, and all that, just because I don't care that much about security for visitors to my blog. Of course, this means that you should, once it works, not use any password you don't want sniffed, nor that you wouldn't mind me seeing, on my blog. Secondly, I need to decide how redundancy/backups work. In the old system, every entry was a file in the local store on the client end, and I copied that directory around when I needed backups. Presently, the database system doesn't do backups, so I've been keeping files in a store on the server for injection. The stores are simple -- just a flat set of files, each named with their unix time. That's fine, but has no provisions for comments. I need a file-representative way to remember that something is a comment, what its immediate parent comment is (if any), and what its entry toplevel parent is, so that the database structure can be recreated. I'm too old-fashioned to consider the database to be the authoritative store, and rely soley on its backups and storage as being authoritative.... I've been thinking that perhaps comments will live in a $msgid.rep/ directory, with the filenames being $reply_timestamp(_$parent_comment_timestamp)? (pardon the perl syntax there). I think that'd hold the information I need, be decently easy to reimport if needed, and be easy to manipulate as needed. Thinking.. At some point, I'll need to backup user accounts too, but that's another matter, and probably won't be too hard.
• No RSS feed yet. Soon though. I just need to install and start playing with a RSS client (aggregator?) so I can debug, and know what makes for a good RSS feed. So, let me turn it around to you all -- for those of you on Unix, please recommend to me a good client for both major versions of RSS. I'm sure RSS will be easy once I know what to do.

Back to work..