I made my first-ever international call today. Which felt weird, because of course I talk to people in other countries all day long, and yet I had no idea how to use the phone system for international calls.

Did a fun little hack today -- I modified script to output timing info, so you can play back a typescript with realistic delays.

I'm playing back a typescript of a debian upgrade right now, sped up 50x, so I can see what it'll look like on a computer a few years from now.

Someone must have done this before, but I couldn't find it.

Been up all night working on natural language parsing that I'll probably throw into the moo I've been writing for the past 2 (3?) years. Parse::RecDescent is my new favorite library of all time. My parser can deconstruct sentences as complex as "wake up, sit on the wobbly wooden chair by the table and eat the toast and nasty cheerios with milk; then go to work". Which is more or less what I should be doing (sans cheerios) if I hadn't pulled this stupid all nighter. Anyway, it sure beats lambda's parser.

Aaaaaaargh!

I've been playing with different builds of linux for the helio, and thinking about how debian could be shoehorned onto the ipaq. Linux on handhelds is definitely interesting, and I want it to be my favorite linux distribution eventually, not some hack (no offense at all intended toward the fine work of pocketlinux, vhl-tools, and others), that runs in my pocket.

But right now the high-end versions of these devices are limuted to 16mb of flash, not enough for a base debian install even. (Ipaq's can use a microdrive too, which would maybe be doable for debian). I want one with 64mb of flash, or at least 32.

I'm sorta trying to decide if I want to sink time into this now, or wait a year when hopefully, memory sizes will have doubled, and all the early adoptors will have done all the hard work.

Sounds pretty coldblooded and not in the hacker spirit, but I already have too many projects. Anyway, I'll probably find some medium -- hack on it some this year, and more when these devices get a little beefier.

The sky here in Sunny California is a wonderful shade of grey today. Not quite Ithaca Grey, but close.