Well, comments and authentication are working, however I moved to the off-the-shelf comments module, which has it's own scheme for comment formatting, most notably substituting <br /> for newlines in the comment body.
I should merge my changes to parse HTML and include it in the comment database as CDATA. Maybe I can do that today.
Also, it's time to bring back the sidebar, with the tagcloud, linkroll, feeds, a flickr, etc.
I'm with several feeds to display, I'm going to revisit a generalized approach, with decoupled retrieval/caching and parsing/display.
Finally, I'd like to put a related tags
list on each tag
page, a feature not currently supported by the tag plugin.
When I was growing up, I wanted to read The Lord Of The Rings, but I would pick it up, plow through a few (hundred) pages, then put it back down again. I knew it would be good for me. I believed it would be fun. But somehow my attention would wander to other things, and I would end up putting LotR down again until the next time the urge struck. It is my particular idiosyncrasy that I want to start a thing from the beginning and see it through to the end, so each time I picked it back up, I started with page 1 of Fellowship of the Ring, instead of page 222 of The Two Towers, where I left off.
In the intervening months, I would occasionally browse the various encyclopedia, compendia, even the appendices with fascination. Still, though by then I knew the story pretty well, it was not until I was in my thirties before I succesfully read LotR cover to cover.
I can think of a few other things in my life that have been similar. Reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is one. Learning LISP is another.
A week or two ago, I picked up GEB:EGB again, and I've made it
farther than I have before. It's slow going, because I like to read in
bed before going to sleep. GEB veritably demands one attack it in a
fully alert state, pencil and paper ready to work the experiments,
exercises, and demonstrations. (Try it!
Argh. Thanks, Doug.)
Still, I am undaunted.
Coincidentally, several resources for learning LISP hit the link aggregators last week, so I'm kind of enthused about that too. The thing I really need to pursue LISP is a project to use it on. One thought is to start over on the Project Euler problems. I solved several of these a while back using Python, and it was a lot of fun. Chris tackled them in LISP as a refresher (and, he said, because many problems were greatly simplified by LISP's bignum type).
Speaking of
(kill (make-list N :initial-element BIRD)
(< N (length stones)))
It would be interesting to use LISP to investigate the formal systems Hofstadter discusses in GEB.
This weekend's todo list:
In other news, Microsoft and Novell have struck an agreement regarding the interoperability of Windows and SUSE Linux—or, at least, that's what it looks like on the surface. Another interpretation is that Novell is paying Microsoft protection money. As it was put in BetaNews:
So why was Microsoft so receptive when Novell approached it about such a deal in April of this year, and when the two companies sat down to discuss options in May? The answer may lie in a point quietly announced at the end of the press conference: Novell will make ongoing royalty payments to Microsoft for all open source products it ships.
[Emphasis in the original.] In other words, Novell will pay Microsoft, and Microsoft promises not to sue Novell's customers.
Slashdotters are scratching their collective heads over it, but I'm pretty sure this agreement is about shareholdings and lawyers much more than it is about technology and users, more's the pity.