Swan on the Windowsill

I started to install the Perl6 compiler and interpreter pugs yesterday, but in the process of installing either that and later the Python Imaging Library, something went extremely wrong with Cygwin. It was probably my forced compilation procedure of PIL that did it (though it did work, at least), but in any case it led to me having to completely reinstall Cygwin.

Thankfully it went well, following the instructions, and it's actually faster now than it was previously. All of the problems are gone and the architecture feels cleaner now with less of the clutter. Whilst I was working on it, I also thought about my filesystem organisation, which is a common thread with me, and one I often talk to Javier Candeira about. I've been working on figuring out the best way of making it easy to backup and archive whilst allowing an expressive and realistic workflow and process model. I've managed to identify that with a few simple changes I might be able to improve both, but especially the former, to a rather decent extent.

I also published lots of my configuration files including my rather valuable .emacs and .zshrc files, with a fair few neat hacks in them that people might want to borrow. I also came up with some ideas for how to represent my homepage: I want it to be simpler and more focussed on the content and setting up a narrative. I've been a bit unhappy with my homepage for a while now since it doesn't really reflect what I do very well, so I get to thinking that people will get a false impression of what I do, which is kinda sad. People keep telling me it's too rigid, too, so I don't think it's just my fretting pedantic viewpoint. I'm constantly revising it anyway, and I like to do it as an interesting presentational exercise.

It's a bit of an extension of the Semantic Web writeup that I mentioned previously. I figured that since the narration on that went so well, I'd try to extend the principle to other things. And it's all keeping me writing, which helps a little towards the Book of Dreck that I have going on as a project at the moment, that Cody and Christopher and the other inhabitants of #d8uv.com (the official channel of d8uv.org [sic]) already know about. In fact, Cody's been helping me with the artwork for it, including some rather nifty bits of design that will hopefully make it quite æsthetically pleasing, depending on the quality of the Lulu printing.

On a completely different note, I've got into playing a play-by-post game of Ninja Burger, which somehow got integrated with a discussion about haberdashery and millinery. Again, it's another writing thing, and I got a free and rather good PDF book out of it too.