MOTD

Hooray for Uncle Bad!

So, my niece didn't arrive until Saturday morning around 5AM. My sister-in-law was in labor for like 24 hours before they admitted her to the hospital, and after that it was another 8 or so hours before the niece made her appearance.

Her name is <b>Elena Priscilla Prodromou</b>, she's healthy and happy, and the first member of her generation in my family. We're all stupid giddy about her.

My brothers and I all assembled at the hospital waiting room and watched DVDs all night until the baby came. An excellent sleepover. We were therefore the first people to get the birth announcement, and we were in the birthing room about 45 minutes after the whole thing went down. I got a <a href="http://zork.net/~mrbad/evelena1.jpg">picture</a> of me with the little bundle. Heh.

So, I'm going to see "The History (and Mystery) of the Universe", the one-man play about the life and work of Buckminster Fuller, currently in San Francisco at <a href='http://www.artaud.org/theater/'>The Project Artaud Theater</a>. I saw it a couple of years ago before I left The City, and I really liked it.

Anyways, my sister-in-law was due to give birth last Saturday, and we've all been anxious to see her actually pop. I've got the cigarette-at-the-bus-stop theory: as soon as you stop waiting and start doing something else enjoyable, the thing you were waiting for will happen.

On that principle, I got tickets for me, all 3 of my brothers, my sister-in-law, my mom (who loves Fuller) and my dad. Wouldn't you know it: my brother called this afternoon to say that my sister-in-law is having a lot of 'activity' and they think they might be going to the hospital instead of the theater.

I'm so damn good.

Man, there's a reason that software release and sexual release both use the word 'release'. There's something exhilirating about making your first release of a piece of software you've been working on for a while.

Anyways, I uploaded the first (0.01) version of <a href="http://joap-perl.jabberstudio.org">joap-perl</a> today. Beaujolais for me!

Evan, try setting the environment variable REPLYTO. It's listed in the mailx man page.

My internal heating unit is broken. Mister Bad shaved my head. I told people at the lnx-bbc party that that was why my head was shaved. Because Mister Bad did it. People in San Francisco love Mister Bad. They were all "You saw Mister Bad!!!" Yes I did.

I keep sweating because my body is trying to compensate for the loss of heat retaining hair on my head. I think I may get a tuke to wear while I sleep so that my head doesn't freeze at night.

So, I'm hungover today and I still have bits of sam's hair in my socks, which is itchy. And my botheredness with mailx is getting me down.

So I'm begging someone to tell me: is there any way to trick <a href='http://packages.debian.org/unstable/mail/mailx.html'>mailx</a> into using my real email address instead of user@hostname? Some kind of env variable or .mailrc setting or something? Or is that just Wrong and Bad and not to be done?

It's not like I use mailx to do all my email stuff. I'm using a program (<a href="http://arch.fifthvision.net/">arch</a>) that spawns off mailx for mail notification of, umm, _stuff_. So it's gotta be mailx, it's preferably an env var or config file setting, and it's gotta be easy.

Everyone do my homework for me.

I will respect <a href="http://www.glug.org/">Guile</a>. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.

You know, I think nick gives short shrift to the fine <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/guile.html">Guile</a> Scheme implementation. I mean, hey, sure, there's problems, but it _is_ the GNU extension language. It deserves some respect.

Did I mention JOAP? I mentioned JOAP. Anyways, after I got the JOAP spec working, I realized that nobody was going to use it unless there was some accompanying software. And I also realized that nobody was going to build that software except for me.

So I started working on a <a href="http://joap-perl.jabberstudio.org">Perl package</a> for JOAP. Specifically, it lets you expose Perl classes on the Jabber network through JOAP, without a lot of hassle -- just a bit of metadata specification. And it lets you use JOAP objects someone else exposed in your Perl code in a completely transparent way. You just do some set up, and then you've got JOAP objects as Perl objects.

This is the most Perl coding I've done in like 7-8 years. It's frustrating, of course, but it does remind me of all the fun parts of Perl. It _is_ a modifiable language, like Scheme or Forth, but the modification is so secret and strange as to be totally abstruse. That kind of makes it fun, though.

Of course, after joap-perl goes 0.1, I'll be starting on joap-python. Then joap-java. It's like I did something really wrong and now I have to pay for it in programming hell forever.

So, I've been interested in <a href="http://www.jabber.org/">Jabber</a> for a while. My interest flagged for a bit, but when we needed to have on-line meetings for the Pigdog <a href="http://www.burningman.com">Burning Man</a> trip, I figured Jabber was a natural fit.

Since then, I've been dicking around with various Jabber coding, and it's kind of become a madness. I now maintain a <a href="http://jabberx.jabberstudio.org">console-mode Jabber client</a> as well as its accompanying <a href="http://iksemel.jabberstudio.org">C library</a>.

After delving into Jabber so much, I got fixated on the idea of using Jabber as distributed object framework. After a while, I wrote a spec for the protocol I thought up, called <a href="http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0075.html">JOAP</a>. It's been about all I've been doing for the last 4 months, and it's been fun. Check it out.

Man, I would definitely include all of Paul Graham's Web site in any hacker reading group.