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.