Monday, Nov 17
Dear Log,
For a day going on a week going on a year, that achy consternation feeling keeps sidling up to me whenever I open an editor and start trying to sketch out code for doing the pod2html batch conversion. So last night I tried an oblique attack: just scribbling code on post-its. It worked -- what I had been dreading for ages because it would be long and horrible, ended up fitting on just three post-its. This morning I got up, keyed it in and fleshed out the "..." parts, and it works. The trick was realizing that Pod::Find can be gotten to do the hard work. Altho actually, Pod::Find ends up doing a lot more work than necessary; I'm thinking of just adapting its code, which should speed things up by a factor of five, I think.
But for the most part, it's just a matter of adding some cosmetic options, mostly just folded in from code that Graham cooked up for search.cpan.org.
Tuesday, Nov 18
Dear Log,
The time I spent months ago going thru the docs on SMIL and RealText, apparently pointlessly, have merrily paid off -- without much bother, today I was able to crank out this -- a ~300KB presentation that knits together a few short MP3s of a paragraph in Haida. It's just a demo, and next time I won't hand-coded the SMIL and RealText, but will autogenerate them with a bit of Perl. (And the mp3s will be a fraction of the size next time, too.)
I think this is the first time I've ever heard of anyone ever doing anything useful using the SMIL features in RealPlayer/RealOne (as opposed to just using the player for a single RealAudio or RealVideo object). I'm not saying it's never been done -- I've just never heard of it.
What the hell else did I do today? It's all a blur. Ohyeah, I stayed inside because the weather outside was wicked -- rain, sleet, and then what I think was the first snow of the season here.
I have sighted my first MACRO-SLUG, a horrible local creature that makes me want to call in some tactical nuclear strikes to sterilize the whole area. Or maybe just tactical salt strikes would do it. The cat is oblivious to the macro-slug, and instead prefers to play with pens.
