Sp v9

2009-11-22 02:28

The ninth incarnation of the sp theme for Habari blogs is available with a git(1) clone or pull from git://labs.utopian.net/sp.git. It works atop the latest developer revisions of Habari. An irregularly-attended gzipped tar archive exists.

v9 scrapes away the “GessoCSS framework in favor of using the latest (r18) Boilerplate sources directly. Print styles developed in the fork survive in print.css. Larger fonts in the sidebar are the most noticeable of visible changes that also include minute differences in vertical spacing.

Worth Explaining

2009-10-30 05:51

My politics are simple and mulishly dull these days. An unjust war on two fronts has been for six years the ugly avatar of our arrogance, and it lies recursively at the root of almost every other major problem in the United States. As infrastructure totters on aging legs, as basic health care is treated as a luxury whose expense cannot possibly be ensured, and as the largest debt in the history of the world mounts, nearly a trillion dollars have been allocated for two wars of illegitimate initiation and illegal prosecution. New York’s Senator Schumer informed the Congress more than a year ago that the two-pronged invasions and eternal occupations were rented at a rate of some four hundred and thirty million dollars a day.

Right now more than one person very close to me is suffering from a minor illness, or a dental discomfort, or some other small problem from which they will certainly recover but for which they won’t see a doctor, because they don’t have basic health insurance. To a man, they work their jobs and somehow manage to pay bills, but the one from Blue Cross or whichever insurer-cum-acturial care dictator is one they can’t afford to add, or to maintain. All across the country, each of those cases is a minor tragedy. Too many of those cases are major catastrophes. In the agregate, they are an offense to the industry and faithfulness of we, the people. We deserve better, if only in return for our most base national service, as we, the producers.

The myriad compromise and complexity of the unfolding debate about health care is not surprising; it is a complicated issue with so many interests vested. But it rankles when considered with the cost of these doomed wars we began on the barest lies and continue even in the face of their foregone strategic, and increasing tactical, failure. Perhaps greater change than I expect can still emerge — on any matter I might entertain here. President Obama is in large part responsible for renewing the health care argument, and I won’t deprive him of that credit.

In the last two months, I have spoken determinedly and harshly against this President, for whom I hopefully voted. The war — one war, in two places specifically brought low, Iraq and Afghanistan, but more than that, the war as the general posture of an enduring and corrosive aggressiveness — is the defining matter. This President needs loyal and insistent opposition, because for the moment he remains the best chance we have. That is why I insist he do better. Every other compromise may be accepted, but the war must stop.

Check back in nine months for my next cheerful column on current events.

Scrub Jay

2009-09-25 10:35

scrubjay.jpg

On the table

2009-08-08 17:35

I’d heard 1 or 2 wishes for such a feature, so it’s worth noting that Parsons added syntax for defining HTML table elements to Discount 1.5.1. This Markdown extension was inspired by table support in PHP Markdown Extra.

Tables are specified with a pipe (|) and dash (-) marking. The markdown text

header0|header1
-------|-------
  textA|textB
  textC|textD

will produce an HTML table of two columns and three rows. A header row is designated by “underlining” with dashes. Declare a column’s alignment by affixing a colon (:) to the left or right end of the dashes underlining its header. In the output, this yields the corresponding value for the align attribute on each td cell in the column. A colon at both ends of a column’s header dashes indicates center alignment.

Pull-ed Bare (then quickly restored)

2009-08-01 00:50

I recovered from a sources meltdown simultaneous with an incautious replica/pull on a Plan 9 machine, an event that can scythe a wide swath through a file system. This total restoration from archive is a shorter process than recovery from a disk failure or similar catastrophe, because the venti store, the partition structure, and the fossil config branded at the start of the partition are all intact. See Steve Simon’s much more complete Venti rescue reference if you need a deeper vac score than the most recent one, if you have hardware problems, or other more serious trouble.

  1. Boot from Plan 9 ISO.

  2. Run fossil/last (in fossil(4)) to get the most recent archive score, as below, where On is the {drive letter partition number} combo designating the location of your fossil:

    % fossil/last /dev/sdOn/fossil
    abcdef00...00
    
  3. Assign the score to a variable, or redirect output to a file. Trim the vac: prefix from the score:

    % score=abcdef00...00
    
  4. Start some form of network so you can talk to venti:

    % ip/ipconfig ether /net/ether0 192.168.2.99 255.255.255.0
    
  5. Start venti by pointing it to the partition on which its config is branded:

    % venti/venti -c /dev/sdOn/arenas[.0]
    
  6. Initialize the fossil with the last score’s tree, including (from an archive dump) active/ snapshot/ archive/:

    % fossil/flfmt -h 192.168.2.99 -v $score /dev/sdOn/fossil
    

The final step of “restoring” data on fossil takes no time. It is not a file copy, but a kind of pointer assignment.

Cross fingers and fshalt -r back in time.

Discount adds Plan 9 platform

2009-06-17 14:19

Version 1.4.3 of Parsons’s Discount is out, and with it, Plan 9 support becomes part of the official distribution. The Plan9 subdirectory added to the source contains a mkfile that drives Discount’s own scripts and APE’s make(1) to build the code, optionally copying the results to locations appropriate for system-wide use. Man(6)-format manual pages are also included for the markdown tool and syntax.

To build it, fetch the latest source archive from the Discount site (currently 1.4.3), extract it, then:

% cd discount-1.4.3/Plan9
% mk config && mk
% ../markdown -V
markdown: discount 1.4.3

Configuration options can be set in a CONFIG variable to mk config. Install the binaries and/or manual pages with a few other mk(1) targets; see mkfile and README for details.



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