Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I've often wondered if those who interpret the Bible literally are aware of how it destroys the beauty and transcendence of a work of literature, whether ecclesiastically sanctified or a book you snag in the grocery aisle, to attempt to apprehend it from the dullest perspective possible. At worst it's blasphemous, at best it's an appalling lack of taste." -- supiluliumas, 2005-10-07

Hmph! I had my QotD queue filled in through mid-April, and last night I whacked it with 'vi'[*] to change all the "www.livejournal.com/users/whatever" URLs to the "whatever.livejournal.com" format ... and when I copied all those URLs out to a separate file to turn into a test script to make sure I hadn't bollixed anything, I discovered that a couple of people had taken previously-visible entries and locked them down (made them private or friends-only) sometime after I had copied them to the file my QotD script reads. One entry is no longer visible to me at all. Another is visible to me but no longer public (so it wasn't visible to a not-logged-in instance of 'lynx', which made the change of privacy status easy to spot).

I'm guessing the authors would've gotten upset if I hadn't noticed this before those quotes got posted. While I copied them in good faith from publically viewable journal entries, having them appear in my journal weeks or months after the authors changed their minds would probably have been somewhat alarming. But it's mere luck that I noticed in time. (If anyone else makes a quoted entry private between my writing this and the next couple days' quotes being posted, the irony will be positively painful.)

Now to go rearrange the queue again. Since I did notice in time ...

Right now I edit the queue file by hand, cutting and pasting lines to reschedule a quotation. At some point (awaiting the elusive Round Tuit), I'd like to increase the amount of automation. I'd like to switch from a straight text file to some sort of database, so that I can drop some new quotations in with a "schedule this whenever" flag (perhaps with some "theme" codes so that the "whenever" quotes don't wind up being four political ones in a row or a straight week of religion), and add others with instructions to tie them to specific dates. At the very least, it'd be nice to be able to move quotes around as atomic objects rather than sets of lines in an editor buffer, and to be able to say, "bump everything from here on forward a day to make room for this new topical quote, except for the ones tied to holidays and anniversaries".

Ifwhen I ever get around to doing that, I guess I'd better add some code to check whether referenced journal entries are still public and whether URLs for newspaper articles are still valid.

And if I ever do put together a streamlined, user friendly quote-management-and-scheduling database system, I wonder whether anyone else would have any use for my code, or if it'd be a very D'Glenn-specific tool. Does Ugol's Law apply to software requirements?

[*] I love using a Real Editor (and I'll concede that even those heretics who prefer Emacs are at least using a Real Editor as well). Anybody who uses a decently powerful editor -- probably more than half my friendslist at a wild-ass guess -- already knows why it's a good thing, and most likely already knows how to do this in whatever editor they use. But just in case anyone who doesn't is curious what the fuss is about power tools, when I say I "whacked the file with 'vi'" I mean that I used a single command in the editor

:%s=www.livejournal.com/users/\([^/]*\)/=\1.livejournal.com/=

[**] Which isn't to say that there can't be a Real Editor that's also Extremely Mouse Friendly that I just haven't run into yet... (not that I'm particularly looking for one, being so accustomed to 'vi').