So Thomas and I were granted a Y-Combinator interview. I can’t help but feel that this is a good thing, but I am getting a little nervous about the process. Working on the demo stuff now — it’s hard to do solo, but I persevere.

For some reason related to my encroaching Google-paranoia, I have decided that my IM system will be Jabber; and the server will be one I run and pay for myself. This is not merely paranoia; it borders on disassociative psychosis. But nothing stupid and pointless ventured, no holes punched in drywall gained.

Software: it all really, really, really sucks. I decided that I’d use “Prosody“, because hey why not, it’s less monstrous than installing Erlang just to fucking chat. But, never one to do things easily, I maintain a separate build root that’s not /usr/local (which for reasons that are lost to me in the dim mists of time, I hate). But! In order to install “Prosody” one has to install Lua — NOTE TO SELF: INSTALLING A LANGUAGE INTERPRETER WHO’S DOCUMENTATION IS IN PORTUGESE IS THE FIRST SIGN THAT YOU’VE MADE A GRIEVOUS MISTAKE — and then a whole giant whack of dependencies, like sockets (apparently, Brazilians don’t care for their sockets) and, more depressingly, expat. Yes, this process involves XML.

There are many things I hate, most if not all of them software related, but there is little I detest quite so pointedly as XML. And now I have to go find a stupid goddamn XML library so this IM system can talk to other people? Is this protocol not self-describing? Are we not men? Have we fallen to the level of dumb beasts? And then, as if I hadn’t been worked over enough by the preceeding, I have patch Makefiles to get the fucking Lua expat wrappers to build.

Why? Why? Why?

Usually at this point I give up, but I had some strong Oolong before bed so I powered through it. I even went to a certificate authority and got a signed XMPP certificate! Yes, I am part of this oily web of XML based trust.

sigh

The strict aceticism of the world of Dijkstra becomes more attractive with each passing softwaer-related blow these days. Those of you interested, however, can reach me here.

Yesterday we got started a little late — I didn’t rewake until 8:30 or so, so we didn’t get to the office and started until 9:30. Still, we made good progress on the application. Future directions are starting to become clearer. Some conceptual fuzziness I was grappling with has receded. Seeing other people’s successful y-combinator applications was very helpful.

For lunch we went to a BBQ place around the corner: I had some pretty delicious pork:

Mmmmmm rich in porkly goodness. The restaurant was totally awesome, too; we got seated, Thomas ordered, we got the food — all in 30 seconds. I wolfed down my plate and ordered some extra BBQ; a Yakult was definitely in order, but man was it delicious.

Then, back to the grind. The office is tiny and way too cold, but they’re turning off the A/C this weekend, so it’s going to get a lot warmer. I’m hoping to get the answers in our app tightened up a bit so I can go to the beach on the day after we submit it.

After work, we had a bowl of noodles and then hit the Cocoaheads meeting at a local Mac reseller. I have to apologize to George the speaker, because I was disassociating from jetlag and basically incapable of standing up straight. But I met some of the local nerdery, who seemed cool, and learnt some about the app advertising business on the iPhone — not directly relevant to what I want to do, but useful and intelligently presented. What I can remember of it, that is. I made Thomas take me back to my room, because in my fugue state I was as likely to end up in Macau as the Yesinn if I wasn’t being shepherded about. But now I have the route back from the MTR burnt into my brain, so I’ll be OK.

Last night went much better vis á vis the sleeping; I powered through until about 10:15 and slept to 6am. Gonna take a shower and go get a coffee and a paper.

I build Emacs obsessively; running it as I do on OS X, which is a supported but honestly not really first class platform, there are often niggling little fixes that appear in the CVS tree for annoyances that are more apparent on OS X than say Lixnuxis or whatever.

So I wrote a script. My Emacs setup is as follows:

• the .app bundle is in ~/Applications;
• Emacs is built --disable-ns-self-contained, because I want a stable site-lisp — I have a bunch of third-party packages that I don’t want to have to reinstall into a self-contained app bundle each time;
• I have a /usr/gnu hierarchy wherein I build GNUish stuff like “aspell” &c.

Ths may come in handy, or maybe not. Regardless, here you go: build-emacs.zsh

Right. You’ll have noticed tags, too. Soon, of course, this blog will be able to receive mail.

So one of you what shall remain nameless — one of the, what, three of you? what read this blog — wants to know why no comments. I don’t have comments mostly because this blog is completely static; it’s compiled from data that I have locally and shipped up to my hosting service. I’m not paranoid about security, really, nearly as much as I’m irritated by complexity.

Why have a totally dynamic web application when all I’m doing is spouting gibberish, right? Well, as you may have noticed, I’ve added an RSS feed, and now I’m giving some thought as to how perhaps to add comments. Via email? Probably too much overhead, and latencies far too great to allow for actual discussions. A third-party comment system? Creepy data slurping and lame implementations, as far as I can tell. Roll one’s own? Eek. I mean, I’ve got some free time, willol having left my job on the 19th of October and all, but … really? I mean, I’m not opposed to reinvention, and I have to admit that there’s a “blog_comments” table already in the database that I store this blog in, but it seems something like a nerd too far.

If people care, I’ll get on it, I guess. This is in your hands, gentle readers.

I use only two operating systems with any degree of regularity; Mac OS and Emacs. The former, because I used to work at Apple, and still maintain a nostalgic fondness for pre-Unix Mac OS; and the latter because I have twenty years of muscle memory stored up and my fingers just can’t learn new tricks at this point. Too, I’m hooked on Gnus. However, I have been seduced by my phone (two guesses), and am now hooked on using the MobileMe-synced calendar and address book — OTA sync is just too damn useful.

To begin bridging the gap between worker and parasite then, I’ve written a hacky little script to turn my OS X address book into a BBDB database. I don’t require the contacts utility like some other solutions to this problem I could mention; I just use PyObjC to call into the AddressBook framework directly. I have to point out here that PyObjC really is the tits.

Note that this is not two-way syncing; anything that finds its way into the BBDB database will get blown away by the next invocation of the script. Two-way syncing is probably too ambitious for me; that way lies SyncServices and automagic and I think my brain probably just needs a good lie down from the thinking, to say nothing of the doing. Multiple phone numbers are supported, but they’re currently US format only. Addresses are sketchy; longish ones might break the BBDB format. Caveat emptor &c.

Still, I like it. Share and enjoy

Yeah, yeah, I went ahead and wrote a little “blogging” “system”, but I’ll still be damned if I ever actually involve a database. Or comments. Or a host anywhere but on this laptop. Or, God forbid, an “About Me” page. Remember, I’m doing this for you, dear reader.

STOP USING FTP.

In trying to find a home for this stupid blog, I’ve discovered that the hosting service I pay for (Dreamhost, if you must know) has some wildly overcomplicated Apache configuration that seems custom designed to make it as difficult as possible to just serve webpages, forcing you into the slimy grasp of PHP and MySQL and thuswise into agony and perdition and as far as I can tell sheer utter world-cracking madness.

I of course would rather eat a steaming plate of stab-me-in-the-face than have anything to do with PHP (still less MySQL) so I’m sort of at a loss. What I want is a stable system (virtual is fine) that will let me serve up static pages (and nothing else) from port 80, via HTTP. And they have to support mail, so I can maintain a homonculus.net email address that I’ll never check; and they should have Postgres installed, because I’ll be Goddamned if I use the products of a company that doesn’t recognize the utility of “ON UPDATE CASCADE”.

And, please, a pony.

One supposes that one could rent an entire virtual Linux machine from e.g. Linode, but I’m too proud to deign to actually run a machine; dammit, I want somebody to DO THIS FOR ME.

Thanks, Mark S.

Linux is only free if your time has no value

あなたの時間の値がないLinuxの場合のみ無料です

No time value of Linux is free only if your

Linuxのない時間の値は無料です場合にのみ

Linux is not only the value of the time when free

Linuxではないだけの時間の値の場合は無料です

If Linux is not only the value of time is free

もしLinuxの時間の値だけではありません無料です

If Linux is only free time value not

場合、Linuxのみの自由な時間値ではありません

If, Linux is only free in no time value

場合は、Linuxだけの時間の値に無料で

Cases, Linux on the value of free time to

場合によっては、Linuxの自由な時間にの値に

In some cases, Linux on the value of free time

Elegantly stated, intarweb!