darkness

Spent at least 2.5 hours hacking out some working Emacs settings for Perl. cperl-mode is not compatible with my indentation style. I’ll try and remember to post my final configuration tomorrow. Basically a cheap function for autoindent (very cheap) followed by some cperl-internal-voodoo to turn on syntax highlighting. Very, very tired now; only got around four hours sleep last night, if I’m lucky. To bed.

I’m actively avoiding posting here. I intend to make some modifications to MT ASAP to make posts use a Wiki-like markup. I guess I’ll fix auto line break mode too. Maybe I’ll end up with a whole filter infrastructure of sorts. Delved into CSS today: this page looks well enough in IE 5.5 and Mozilla 1.1, at least. Only the front page, archives still to come. Actually, I think I’ll work on code before I lay into those.

Quick note for the night: I like the XFree86 Font De-uglification HOWTO . It makes my fonts very pretty. I got the fonts from http://nuoriso.hel.fi/__files/ms_truetype_core_fonts_for_the_web/Win95-98-NT/index.html and extracted them with a quick compile of cabextract . Don’t forget to use the -L flag to cabextract to get lowercase filenames. Also, with Red Hat (at least 7.3 i386), ignore anything that says to modify /etc/XF86Config* ; instead play with /etc/X11/fs/config and /etc/X11/XftConfig . I uncommented the “experimental” aliases in XftConfig. I turned on the LCD pixel hinting-or-whatever and it didn’t seem to do much good, but I’ll play with things like Verdana more in the morning.

Started doing some Perl in Emacs because TRAMP is so cool. Started using cperl-mode too. It’s not bad, but it’s got some weird stuff that I’ll have to get used to. For example, it shows you extra whitespace on a line – including as you type it. So, for example, when a line is first indented, all whitespace between the first column and point is underlined. After you type any non-whitespace character, the underline goes away. Additionally, there was a small problem in cperl-perldoc where it searched cperl-small-docs case insensitively. Made a patch and sent it to the author:

--- cperl-mode.el.4.32	Wed May 31 01:14:42 2000
+++ cperl-mode.el	Fri Sep 20 14:47:49 2002
@@ -8075,7 +8075,8 @@
                    (error "No perldoc args given")
                  default-entry)
              input))))
-  (let* ((is-func (and 
+  (let* ((case-fold-search nil)
+         (is-func (and 
 		   (string-match "^[a-z]+$" word)
 		   (string-match (concat "^" word "\>")
 				 (documentation-property

The author, Ilya Zakharevich, is a nice guy. He dispelled any notion I had that the “Unbalanced parenthesis” messages whenever I started typing, for example, an s// expression were bugs. Indeed, until I finish it, the expression is unbalanced.

Doing network stuff in Perl is so easy with things like libnet and libwww-perl . Even file uploads via HTTP aren’t a hassle on either end.

I still need to get a decent template put on this web log (not “blog”, damnit). Maybe I’ll get a chance to do it today. Right now I have to go to work and fix a server that I suspect is overheating. We’re going to try and get more A/C put in on Monday — I hope. It could be SMP problems, but I don’t think the box is under much load and it just started happening; no major software or hardware configuration changes since I-can’t-remember-when.

Just bugfixed the PSGML explicit fixed attribute patch. Attribute edit mode didn’t insert fixed attributes properly. I think I should also take this time to mention that I haven’t tested this patch very much, so it quite likely breaks down pretty easily. Furthermore, if this screw up your computer, files, data, marriage, or thread in space-time I’m totally not responsible. (Just ask anyone.) Further furthermore, this is not at all an official patch, since I’m sure the people that wrote PSGML could do a better job at this than me; if there are any problems, please report them to me, not to the PSGML folks.