Ingrid Sequoia

Our new daughter arrived yesterday. We are all home, doing well.

Update: her middle name is inspired by this Wendell Berry poem.

Seduction and Betrayal

This is a really good op-ed. Mayhill Fowler gets just the right amount of "philosophical and epistemological" in her reflections on the recent McChrystal blow-up.

The storyteller changes reality, because the story changes our memory, personal and collective. It's always that way. It's the great lesson of the Deconstructionist school. All narrators are untrustworthy -- or rather, trust is not the same as fact. And faith is an act of trust, not fact.

CPAN test failures

SWISH::3 0.08_04 is passing all tests all over the CPAN testers universe, so that is encouraging.

However, some reports (notably on FreeBSD) report false failures because of a Wstat issue.

I've posted about it at PerlMonks and hope someone out there has an easy fix.

Swish3 progress report

There's been a ton of work on Swish3 in the last year. I've actually started planning a 1.0 release, after 5 years of work.

Lately I've been focusing on three things: (1) making the Perl bindings easier to install; (2) indexing of compressed documents; and (3) supporting XInclude of document fragments. The first is accomplished: you can install the entire library via CPAN. The last two are aimed at large doc sets where I want to keep the XML compressed on disk for space reasons, and where I want to re-use subsets of the document collections in building multiple indexes.

But Enough About Me

A brief history and reflection on the (un)popularity of the memoir. I liked this part in which the author talks about the effect changes in technology have had on the outpouring of personal narrative:

So if we're feeling assaulted or overwhelmed by a proliferation of personal narratives, it's because we are; but the greatest profusion of these life stories isn't to be found in bookstores. If anything, it's hard not to think that a lot of the outrage directed at writers and publishers lately represents a displacement of a large and genuinely new anxiety, about our ability to filter or control the plethora of unreliable narratives coming at us from all directions. In the street or in the blogosphere, there are no editors, no proofreaders, and no fact-checkers--the people at whom we can at least point an accusing finger when the old-fashioned kind of memoir betrays us.

Open Source Handbook

Open Source Handbook reviewed.

make test

Invoking make test in a project and watching as 1000s of successful tests scroll by, culminating in the All tests successful. message, gives me the same thrill of satisfaction as when I used to paint houses, and having finished a long day of sweaty labor at sanding and chipping old paint off, I could stand back and survey the structure, primed and ready for a fresh coat of paint. It's the anticipation that thrills, in the same way that a trip to the grocery store and a full fridge, or several loads of clean laundry folded and stowed safely away in drawers, thrills me. The knowing that I am prepared, belt cinched tight, all tests successful.

The Patch

John McPhee's Personal History piece is poignant and flashes like a fish in sunlight. Reminded me of the best of Annie Dillard.