17 April, 1998

Real World, The n.:

1. In programming, those institutions at which programming may be used in the same sentence as FORTRAN, COBOL, RPG, IBM, etc.
2. To programmers, the location of non-programmers and activities not related to programming.
3. A universe in which the standard dress is shirt and tie and in which a person's working hours are defined as 9 to 5.
4. The location of the status quo.
5. Anywhere outside a university. "Poor fellow, he's left MIT and gone into the real world." Used pejoratively by those not in residence there. In conversation, talking of someone who has entered the real world is not unlike talking about a deceased person.

fortune

Thu Apr 16 23:28:03 CDT 1998

Work

Just got back from coffeehouse. I have been extraordinarily lazy today. Lunch consisted of rye toast with peanut butter, a macaroon, and orange juice and water. the idea was maybe it would give my stomach a chance to calm, but the rest of the evening degenerated into junk food topped off with coffeehouse.

of course, my body does seem to respond well to a little variety now and then, so for all i know, today's weird diet may be just the thing to give a good shake-out to the kinks in the system.

I'm waiting off another day on the Mozilla News Release. I got some word back that there's actually been some activity within Netscape in response to a draft I sent out. If I hear something constructive from them tomorrow - a colleague at Netscape gave me some contacts - then that will help.

This weekend, the Release should be sent out by then, and I can finish off the NASO thank-you letters, MP5 for CS 321, and English 382 I'm doing a presentation on SGML for Tuesday. I may attend a thing on sending relief to Iraqi children this Saturday

A man named Bob

Fri Apr 17 00:24:14 CDT 1998

I'm tentatively scheduled to eat lunch with Bob Casey, who just told me that Pios will be releasing an Amiga-compatible machine running multiple G3 processors, and that it will be able to run Amiga and MacOS simultaneously, as well as BeOS, Linux PPC, and other stuff with additional x86 and Alpha daughtercards. Hard-core, and really really cool in a geeky sort of way.

The guy sitting next to me, a CS major, speaketh but Java. It's a changing world we code in.

evidence that I need a life

Fri Apr 17 23:34:18 CDT 1998

# Just to be sure anything mailed TO me aint filtered elsewhere ... 
# (after deleting duplicates)
:0 c: .msgids.lock
* ^Message-Id: *\/[^ ].*
| formail -D 16384 .msgids

:0 e:
* ^TO(dannyman|djhoward)
$DEFAULT

That's what I spent my evening hashing about. that's a procmail recipe which I wrote because often when someone responds to a mailing list that I'm on, I get two copies of the message - one sent to me, and one sent to the list. That recipe will send the first copy of a message that I receive to my INBOX if it is appropriately addressed. Subsequent copies will not be placed in my INBOX, the net effect being that if someone responds to me and a list I'm on, then that email will go once to my INBOX, and subsequently to the list folder. This keeps my INBOX slightly less cluttered - which with 207 messages sitting in it is a bit crowded, and will help in keeping context in a message thread on a mailing list.

Personally, I think it's a very very cool thing.

Tomorrow, for sure, I'll do work. I've got senioritis something wacky when I think I'm going to waste my Friday evening working and instead write an innovative new procmail recipe ... actually, what you see above contains only four lines of code written tonight, and one line that was modified. Context is important though. Oh, I did optimize the TO line ... but who cares?

I don't know why, but lately when I've jumped into this journal here, my mind ends up drawing blank ... grrr!

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