elfs | Kinda down, kinda tired

Gloomy, like Eeyore.

Didn't make it to the pool this morning. I overslept and couldn't get up the energy to get out of bed anyway. By the time I climbed into the shower, it was already 6:20, much later than I usually make it out of bed. I did get onto the bus in time, which was reassuring.

Yesterday, Yamaarashi-chan came over and helped up carve up the pumpkin in anticipation of the holiday this Friday evening. That'll be fun. The girls scooped out the pumpkin innards and helped draw the commercial stencil face, then Omaha and I carved out the drawing. Omaha and I made dinner together-- she made chicken nuggets in a bread and herb sauce with honey dip for the girls, and had me cook sage-crusted chicken thighs in white wine on a bed of polenta, tomatoes, and proscuitto.

As some of you might recall a couple of months ago I posted my "Works in Progress" list for stories. Here's the sister list:

AlphaApplet: A program to teach myself Gnome2 panel applet programming.
EmacsRhyme: An extension to the emacs ispell, provides rhymes.
EmacsThesaurus: An extension to the emacs ispell, provides synonyms.
Faeryloom
GoX
ObjectiveWeb
OgreGEV: An online versions of the game, with some real-time additions and rules for things like C&C sattelites, snow, submarines, and more.
Plotlines
PyDailystrips: A rewrite of Dailystrips in Python.
PyDashboard: A rewrite of Dashboard, in Python.
PyElvin: An implementation of Elvin Federation protocol.
PyUBH: A rewrite of Usenet Binary Harvestor
Rune: A usenet news server, in C++, with indexing hacks.
SpooFarm: A toy to teach myself Linux sound programming. Overlaps several different samples of people sighing "spoo" at different speeds, thus imitating a spoo farm.

Of these, the one I'm most serious about is Plotlines; I've obviously been making progress towards getting it written, although right now that progress is stymied by resources-- the amount of time I need to dedicate to programming is much greater than that of writing.

But there are others there that I really would love to get to. ObjectiveWeb is a webserver like WebObjects, only written entirely in C++ with a Python front-end so one could write mostly HTML with some inserted logic for results, tables, and automated forms, and have it all "just work." GoX is a return to my college love of the obscure art of static databases, where the dictionary of document terms would be paralleled with a dictionary of tags, allowing incredibly fast access to static collections of heirarchal data archived for long-term storage. I've even run some test programs-- on reasonably modern hardware (a 7200 RPM hard drive and a Pentium-2 CPU) and a database crunched down to half its original size, retreiving and decompressing the target of a known XPath would be twice as fast as operating on the uncompressed original.

And last but not least, there's Faeryloom. This is strictly in the brainstorming phase, but look: GnomeVFS provides plenty of back-end features, NEON or CVS provide for collaboration and content management of sources, Gecko provides standards-compliant rendering, Conglomerate has an excellent XML-containerizing view of the document object, Bluefish has a great editing front-end for HTML text, and Denim (A java product under the BSD license) is probably the most intuitive interface for the rapid development of websites I've ever seen. Between these tools, there is no reason GTK/Gnome lacks for a Dreamweaver clone except programmer laziness.

If I had a spare lifetime...