88 years ago today, the first League of Nations General Assembly was held in Geneva, with representatives from 41 countries in attendance. Wikipedia summarizes:
At its greatest extent from 28 September 1934 to the 23 February 1935, it had 58 members. The League's goals included disarmament, preventing war through collective security, settling disputes between countries through negotiation, diplomacy and improving global quality of life. The diplomatic philosophy behind the League represented a fundamental shift in thought from the preceding hundred years. The League lacked its own armed force and so depended on the Great Powers to enforce its resolutions, keep to economic sanctions which the League ordered, or provide an army, when needed, for the League to use. However, they were often reluctant to do so. Sanctions could also hurt the League members imposing the sanctions and given the pacifist attitude following World War I, countries were reluctant to take military action. Benito Mussolini stated that "The League is very well when sparrows shout, but no good at all when eagles fall out."
The onset of the Second World War suggested that the League had failed in its primary purpose, which was to avoid any future world war. Punch magazine seems to have done a good job at the time explaining why.
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Today, even though it's the weekend, enough things distract me from doing anything big with November. So I've been herding documentation files and applying pmichaud++'s un-noisifying patch from Thursday night. You have to admit it's an improvement. ☺
Beyond that, I have an essay for my course due tomorrow, so I'll have to spend some time one that this weekend. But given enough time, what I would most like to do today is to implement the game Druid in Rakudo. I mean, look at that board! Aren't you just itching to try that game? I am.
Tell you what; since I've promised myself to blog every day about November in November, I'll postpone the implementation of this game until December. But if you, dear reader, feel that you'd like to try your hand at implementing Druid in Rakudo, feel free to drop me a note at #perl6 (@ irc.freenode.net) or #parrot (@ irc.perl.org), and I'll be happy to give implementation advice. How to cope with Rakudo's current ticks, and stuff. I'm masak on those channels.
I'd sure like to implement this all by myself, but I also don't mind someone else taking charge of the implementation. It's a win-win situation; either we'll be able to play Druid by early December, or we'll be able to play it even earlier than that. ☺
In the meantime, I'll contact the author of Druid and make sure he's cool with me or someone else implementing his game.
Oh, oh, and I forgot to mention: as I write this, pmichaud++ is seemingly fixing #58392, the only RT ticket whose number I've learned by heart so far. (For those who don't know, which I guess is most of you, #58392 is a lexicals bug which essentially prevents all kinds of traversing through trees in Rakudo. I wrote about it in "Rakudo: the good, the cool, the awesome, the bad, the ugly and the weird". It's right there in the 'weird' section.)
This is a big thing. Simply put, it means that we can un-freeze the new-html-template branch, and hopefully merge it with master fairly soon.
Yay! May the gods shine on pmichaud on the final few steps along this path. He only has 5 failing spectests to fix, he says.
