Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I've been sleeping extremely poorly (this morning I got as much sleep as the previous two days combined, and it was still only four hours), so I haven't been much good for anything lately. I did toss a few more photos onto Flickr, including a picture of Perrine that I especially like, and I got around to finding out how long one of the scavenged UPSs downstairs will keep the rackmount Ubuntu machine going (47 minutes, with a single SCSI drive installed), but have not managed much else. Mostly alternating between reading and trying to get comfortable enough to fall asleep, with occasional bursts of photo editing in between.

Anyhow, whether it's really so amusing or just a symptom of sleep deprivation, I found myself grinning at the description, "it has conditionals and recursion but not loops; it is accidentally Turing-complete" applied to troff(1).

I may have to seek out excuses to use the phrase "accidentally Turing-complete". Maybe as an album title for a geek-rock band?

It also provoked more serious thoughts about the foundations built by those whose names we invoke whenever we discuss fundamental concepts of various fields (including those whose names became units of measurement), but I'm really not feeling combobulated enough to beat the chaotic thought into coherence, so I'll add it to my list of entries to write Someday.

Er ... and reading about troff (I was, once upon a time, a pretty heavy nroff user) reminds me that one of these days I should get around to learning TeX. I'm currently using HTML for most of the things I should be doing in TeX or troff.