I’m not surprised that Calumet K pushed all of Ayn Rand’s buttons: strong, hard-working, honest man Charlie Bannon achieves great things – construction of a two-million-bushel grain elevator – despite the interference of mediocre men.

But that’s not the reason to read it. Calumet K is a fascinating view into labor, language & manners, circa 1901. I liked the details of construction, the interesting slang, and the incredibly restrained way the characters interacted (when they weren’t assaulting each other, that is).

1901 was certainly different, but it’s mildly amusing how some things haven’t changed, a century later: management still sets insane deadlines & is a bit skimpy with praise when they’re met.

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Anyone who sees me carrying one of those styrofoam hotbar trays is invited to:

• take it away from me;
• throw it on the ground;
• say to me, “Don’t eat that [censored], you [obscene gerund] moron.”

That is all.

Made buckets of money selling naughty magazines. Then he got religion, and his magazine got less naughty. People stopped buying it. After a while, he gave up & went back to being naughty. Sales rebounded nicely.

Bob Dylan:

Famous musician. Recorded lots of albums. Then he got religion (a different one, that is), and his albums got religious. People stopped buying them. After a while, he gave up & went back to his old religion. Sales rebounded nicely.

Anne Rice:

Famous writer. Wrote lots of books about vampires, witches & other creepy things. Then she got religion (or reacquired it, she might say), and wrote lots of books about Jesus. People stopped buying them. Now, she says:

…I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

But it sounds like she might keep on writing books about Jesus. So in her case sales might not rebound after all.

There are some things about it I don’t like. The relentlessly modal user interface is a bit like a GUI-fied vi. The docked panels don’t always stay where I put them. (There appears to be a hide-all-panels keystroke, that I’ve accidentally triggered several times now. It’s rather disconcerting.) The mania for pop-up dialogs that don’t say anything useful.

But PyDev really makes up for that. Most of the problems in my Python code are caused by typos, misspelled variable names, missing imports – and PyDev catches these as they happen.

And I like the workspace idea – having all the relevant code checked out & available in one place, instead of scattered about the machine.

I think I’m getting more work done, having switched to Eclipse. (Will anyone at WRI notice?)

We think he’s ready, even though technically he’s a bit young. And he’s very excited.

Unlike Jake’s first day of kindergarten – also July 26th, but four years earlier – Sam will be riding the school bus.

Jennifer & I will be driving to school, to deliver some vital supplies and take a few pictures.

Kids are expected to bring an amazing quantity of gear to school on the first day of class. The list seems to get longer – and more expensive – every year. When I started 4th grade, I brought with me some pencils, an eraser, and maybe a compass. Jake brought two grocery bags full of…something. I never actually saw what it was.

I have to wonder how a nine-year-old with no job & no income managed to get pre-approved for a credit card.

Perhaps the approval process is faulty? Or is creditworthiness no longer one of the criteria?

It occurred to me this morning that Mercurial would be outstanding for something like this, since it doesn’t require a central server (thereby avoiding sysadmin entanglements) and can do its thing over ssh (a protocol already supported by the machines in question).

So I decided to run a little test.

I logged in to the iMac and cloned my bitbucket repository:

hg clone ssh://bitbucket.org/xxx/repo
running ssh bitbucket.org "hg -R xxx/repo serve --stdio"
destination directory: repo
requesting all changes
...

Then, on the WRI laptop, I tried to clone the repository on the iMac:

C:\Source>hg clone ssh://xxx@xxx.local/repo
Password: ...
remote: bash: hg: command not found
abort: no suitable response from remote hg!

Oops.

It seems a bit odd that I can ssh to the iMac and run hg, but not if I try to do both in one command. Clearly, there is some ssh-fu at work here I do not understand.

Fortunately, the Mercurial people have detailed & well-written documentation, answering this very question:

On the other hand, if the error message is remote: bash: line 1: hg: command not found, the problem is that the environment used by ssh does not have hg in its PATH. There are two ways to deal with this problem:

• In your ~/.hgrc file, set a remotecmd value in the [ui] section giving the exact path to hg.
• On the server, create a ~/.ssh/environment file that defines an appropriate PATH, and add PermitUserEnvironment yes to /etc/sshd_config.

I went with option #1. (On the WRI laptop, the file is named Mercurial.ini instead of .hgrc. I should probably fix that….)

C:\Source>hg clone ssh://xxx@xxx.local/repo
Password: xxx
destination directory: repo
requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 28 changesets with 114 changes to 49 files
updating to branch default
39 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
remote: 28 changesets found

…and there was joy in Muddville.

(Except that Mercurial isn’t installed on all the machines that need to use it. So I am doomed to sysadmin entanglement after all.)

WordPress can update itself: all it needs is the username & password for your account on the web server, and it can ftp the new files (from…where?). Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, but I’ve never had much luck letting WordPress ftp its own files.

This evening, I entered my username & password, clicked Proceed, and…nothing happened. I tried a few more times, and each time…nothing happened.

At some point in the (mis-) adventure, my WordPress dashboard disappeared, replaced by a blank page containing a single line of text: Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance, etc., etc.

To get back to the real dashboard, I had to log in to the Pair Lite server and deleted the .maintenance file in the WordPress directory. (As documented here – see, Mr. Rude Cygwin Developer, I do read the documentation.)

Apparently, the update didn’t take, because WordPress is still nagging me. Maybe there’s a way I can do it from a shell prompt on the server. (I’ve been updating WordPress itself that way for the last year or so; it works well.)

The last filing was on April 23, a terse filing from the Court of Appeals: Go away, kid, you’re bothering us. (I paraphrase. Even the most whimsical of federal judges wouldn’t sign his name to an order like that.)

I suppose I’ll have to find something else to do with my time.

The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Somehow, I expect all of Joe Haldeman’s books to be like The Forever War or All My Sins Remembered, so it’s a shock to read one that isn’t.

The Accidental Time Machine is a very…calm book: no big crises, no serious danger to the main characters. Even the villains aren’t very threatening. There’s just the adventure of traveling through time, and the intriguing plot device of sketching out a few hundred millennia of human history through brief visits by the time travelers.

Many questions went unanswered, including a few that the characters themselves kept bringing up. Whenever that happens, I wonder if maybe the author’s subconscious is sending him a message: Fix this!

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