Recently, it seems I must've been dropping random things of mine all over town -- a piece of paper I lost regarding my credit union account at CMU showed up, sans envelope, in my CMU mailbox, and my copy of the book of mormon and a letter both showed up sitting in my chair at work. A few other documents I know I've recieved before have shown up in my mailbox at home. I don't think I've ever had this happen to me before, and I'm certainly grateful to the people who must be picking up after me and returning my stuff..

I recently was talking with a friend on database issues and the delay of the next version of Windows, and the conversation drifted into databases in filesystems, and in general how nice an interface databases provide to data, and why it would be cool to be able to query your email from any app, if it were in a database. It reminds me of a design addition in Postgres that I'd like to see -- suitcase databases. Normally in Postgres, databases live in a weird format inside of the postgres user's homedir, and people need permission to create databases, and it's hard for them to manage them. Suitcase databases would be a single-file self-contained databases that people could copy around and manage all the file aspects of themselves. pgsql and the postgres libraries would need to be extended to be able to connect to files, and thus postgres could be entirely user-side for such connections (instead of a standard daemon). The database would ideally be in a format that wouldn't break between versions of postgres. This would make it easy for people to, for example, keep their mail in a real SQL database but still easily be able to move it just as they can move their Inbox around, with no need to do a dump and a restore and the like, and with actually no need for a systemwide postgres install. Thinking about it, the idea of using a nice SQL database to store all the data for any program one might want to run, it's not a bad idea.

I recently switched from rxvt to rxvt-unicode. Redhat's move to unicode broke rxvt in some apps, meaning that manpages and curses-based applications don't work right. rxvt-unicode .. it does fix the unicode-related problems in rxvt, but introduces new ones. The most noticable are that text that's supposed to be bold ends up being reverse-coloured, and that the code is a lot more fragile (I tried to fix the bolding myself, but it appears to have branched in a bad way from rxvt).. It also relies on yodl, a documentation format that's long been abandoned by it's authors (who tell us to use something else on their webpage), so I need to comment out where it tries to make its manpages or it won't build.

This makes me really angry. Fortunately, there are sites like TheocracyWatch around, so we can at least be aware of the things that need to be fixed once power is pried from republican hands. Either that, or we can use this site to fantasize about meteors hitting D.C.