The Lair

I’ve been the proverbial one-armed paper hanger sans tea break recently. Not altogether unsurprising, since I’ve been goofing off with distractions for the past few months and now the moment of fail (or non-fail) is looming up ominously on me. Any number of comics from PhD Comics might work for this situation…

How about light at the end of the thesis tunnel or tv is my nemesis (dammit, Heroes starts screening on the Beeb today and I want to see what the fuss is about) or supervisor meeting blues (although usually, I feel smarter when I meet with my supervisor and immediately sink into depression when I read through my references again) and most hilariously the thesis outline (yes. I have seven chapters. Then I made it eight. Then I figured I don’t need a real lit review. Then I realized if I don’t have a formal lit review, the external will nuke me from low orbit. So I put it back in. Then I decided the middle chapter was too long and wanted to splice it in half. Aaargh.)

In other news, I’ve been using the marvellous wp-recentlinks on this blog for snippets links. Habari doesn’t have an equivalent plugin. Well, I suppose I could write my own but that still wouldn’t take care of the existing snippets. Since I plan on moving from Wordpress to Habari at some point in the not-too-distant future, I decided to port all 800 odd links (over 2 years) into my del.icio.us account and write a more generic, far less challenging del.icio.us Habari plugin instead.

Unfortunately, del.icio.us only imports in Netscape Bookmark File format. I had a database table full of links. I also needed to import notes; and couldn’t find out how the bookmark import could handle that case. Answer: use the api instead. It was surprisingly painless. wp-recentlinks stores recent links (I made a few modifications to the plugin, I call them snippets) in a separate table. Export the database table as CSV. One small Perl script to parse CSV and generate curl invocations of the del.icio.us API. Run the curl calls as a separate script. About 20 minutes later, done. Now to write that del.icio.us plugin.

And in yet more entertainment related news, Rome Season 2 finished screening last weekend. I’m a huge fan of the series, not only because it is (sort of) historically accurate, but because I like the main characters. Random spoilery: they didn’t rule out a third season starting with a miraculous recovery for Lucius Vorenus after the reconciliation with his children. That was perhaps the only jarring note in the entire series (fatally stabbed yet stayed alive for weeks while he was hauled around in a cart through the desert? Hmm. ok). Oh and I’ve finally made use of my Joost invite. Not particularly impressive content so far, but I haven’t trawled all the channels just yet. I already hate the client though.