In which I am not Richard Stallman
I love the day in the autumn when it's first cold enough to put on the heating, and you find the thermostat again, and gently touch the control a few degrees to the right for the first time in six months, and from the basement comes the grind of great machinery waking up and stretching and getting out of bed, and you know winter's on its way. That was today.
Firinel and I are recovering very well from the staph infections. Most of the visible signs of the infection have gone away. We are still taking antibiotics, and we'll see the doctor on Friday. Fin said when zie was in hospital that what zie really wanted when zie got out was fried onion rings, so I brought some home today along with a cheesesteak. (Not a hat.)
The server pinkstuff is still down. I am a little concerned about this; once upon the time I was one of the admins, and then I would be full of angst about rootkits and literally lie awake worrying about whether the firewall was adequate. Now I'm just a peon user again, it's not my computer, and Dickon and Shadowphiar are going down to London tomorrow night to fix it, and Hatter has kindly fixed our secondary MX to send us all the backlog of email, and I don't have to worry right at the moment. Still, it was my computer for years, and we weren't getting any email for a while, and my personal sites are down, and I was a little concerned about this… I was rebuked by the collect:
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.I don't know whether undergraduates studying physics always build themselves Van der Graaf generators, or veterinary medicine students always sneak out to practise on marsupials, but I think almost all computer science undergrads have tried to build a C compiler at one time or another. (Come on, admit it.) Mine went reasonably well at first, until it could compile really simple programs to .COM files, but it was very unplanned, both because I lacked real-world programming experience of how necessary planning is, and because I had no idea what to plan for. It all came to pieces when I had to implement an overloaded operator— I think it was
+— and realised I had completely forgotten to implement types. Well, I tried bolting it on to the existing design, but it made things so complicated I ended up giving up.
The story came to mind today when I was working on refactoring translation at work with D_m. The class we're working on whose output needs translation has grown organically over a few years, and not really with translation in mind, so there wasn't any neat way to add the translation step: we kept ending up with translating some part twice, or translating the result of a formula, or something like that. We've got a working solution now, but it took a little over a day to get it just right, and it should have been done in a few hours. I would like to do a proper ground-up refactor of that one class, but I don't want to destabilise that part of the codebase at the moment. I'm rather pleased with how the program's shaping up for next tax season.
Speaking of refactors, I spent a couple of hours on the way home fixing a couple of memory leaks in the rewrite of FUSA's gdm communication. I'm reasonably confident that it's good enough for other people to play with, and it's been a while since we had a release, so grab 2.17.2 "Stephen's Exhibition" while it's hot (it might not be on all the mirrors yet), and let me know how you get on with it. The big changes in this release are under the surface, so if it seems to you as if nothing has changed, that's a good sign!
I am writing this in the basement, where Fin is finishing Riordon's costume for the Halloween parade. It is beautiful. It's a bluejay costume, and the wings have black and white tips, and she will have a nest made of part of an old papasan chair pulled along in a wagon.
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