In the Navy

So it was finally time for me, too, to do my mandatory civil service of 13 months (well, the other options are 6, 9 or 12 months in the army or 197 days in jail), just like some friends of mine. Last tuesday I came away from the pseudo-educational thing Lapinjärvi, and yesterday I started my work at UIAH's Media Laboratory (where, apparently, Ilya of Suodatin just did his 12 months too.)

So for the next year, I'll be getting better acquainted with Zope, as I'll be working on Fle3. This will be interesting, and hopefully in a positive sense.

Maxwell Smart

Here's a smart bookmark (works at least in Galeon) for CLiki lookups: CLiki

Comments

Jarno just removed the comment feature from his blog. I've been thinking about this a bit (and I know I'm not the only one, I just saw someone talking about this, too, wish I remember who it was) and I believe Jarno did the right thing: the comment systems undermine the idea of blogs. On John Wiseman's blog, Alex Moffat commented on Paul Graham. But I read Alex's blog occasionally, too, and his comments on the subject (which is quite on-topic for the general theme of his weblog) won't be found there.

I feel that usually if you are commenting on subject such as Graham's papers, it's better to do it on your own blog. If you want to comment on something said on someone else's blog, do it on your blog, make a link and hope that the person you are linking to reads his referrer logs. Ego boosting isn't the only thing they are useful for.

Boxy but good

I finally got around to downloading Common Lisp HyperSpec 6.0. It was slightly prettier than the previous version, but still needed some cleaning up for my tastes – I prefer a reference I'm consulting often not to have superfluous images and overlarge formatting. Tidy, Perl (!) and CSS help a bit.

First, I run tidy:


$ tidy -q -w 10000 -asxml -c -m Body/*.htm Front/*.htm Issues/*.htm


tidy gives some errors, but now we have mostly valid XHTML files with
some CSS. Next, we use Perl to modify the documents a bit more. I call
the following reformat.pl:


#!/usr/bin/perl -wpi

s{<img.+?alt="(.+?)".*?>}{$1}mg;
s{(</title>)}
{$1\n<link rel="stylesheet"
href="../style.css"
type="text/css"
media="screen" />}g;
s{</h1>}{}g;
s{(\QSpec (TM)]</a>\E)}{$1</h1><br />\n}g;
s{\QXANALYS]</a>\E}{Xanalys]</a> }g;



$ ./reformat.pl Body/*.htm Front/*.htm Issues/*.htm


(The regexp substitution which was broken to multiple lines should be all on one line.) After this, just put a stylesheet with the name style.css in the HyperSpec root, something like this:


body {
color: black;
background: white;
margin-left: 3%;
margin-right: 3%;
}
a:hover { color: #aa1050; }
h1 {
border-width: 1px;
border-color: black black black black;
border-style: solid;
padding: 3px;
width: 100%;
background-color: #dddddd;
font-size: 1.3em;
}
h2 { font-size: 1.2em; }


And the CLHS experience is so much more pleasant.

(Note: The files in the CLHS tarball are mode 444 by default, so you need to change that before doing any modifications. tidy's -m flag fails silently if it's unable to overwrite the file it's working on.)

Lizard

Dave Hyatt doesn't make Gecko sound too good. The scary thing is, he knows what he's talking about.