Ok, I know one person writing code by themselves through the night does not a real fest make (otherwise, we'd probably all be festing every other day or so), but I just had to say it, cause of the nice ring.

I awoke thinking it must be around 0500 or 0600, cause daylight wasn't coming in, but I felt rested, and was actually quite surprised I hadn't slept longer. I was in for an even bigger surprise than I thought: upon deactivating my screen saver, the binary clock read exactly 0100. Wow! The effects of those energy drinks are not only very potent, but quite long term in comparison with good ole caffeinated Mountain Dew. Or at least that's what I'm assuming. No wonder the clerk at the store says they've been selling a lot of em. :) I wonder how long before the FDA/DEA decides to get their greasy hands into things and gum it up by turning that shit into a controlled substance. Not long, I would imagine. Better stock up now while we still can. Of course, that's what I said about Josta too. :(

So I checked my email, and found that Scott was eager for a more efficient search page, and only wanted 13 results displayed. I decided to mess with that over deciphering the box code, for similar reasons as those outlined in the Megafest rambling about it being easier to write new code than maintain old. So, with my brain still feeling wacked out, nerves buzzing, I proceeded to crank some Metallica through my headphones and examined possible ways to go about improving things.

This time, the only beverage consumed, after taking a few sips of Pepsi before putting it out of easy reach in the closet, was H2O.

I also found an ingenious use of my new keyboard's fold up cover feature. Taking the idea of resting papers on it a step further, I decided to create little printed tables of various vi commands my brain hadn't yet learned, and tape them to the surface. This was prompted by my woeful lack of knowledge regarding the various methods to specify ranges. Instead of flipping to the proper section of my pocket sized O'Reilly book all the time, I decided I need it right there to look off of during editing.

How sad would my process of learning Dvorak (or Qwerty, for that matter) been, had I kept the keyboard layout information in a little book next to the desk that needed to be opened whenever I forgot the location of a particular key? I don't think so! So why should it be any different with vi?

So anyway, I transcribed a few of the little sections out of my pocked book verbatum into AbiWord. It's a very nice and promising, although still very young, word processors. I just wish they'd do less of trying to clone the (mis)features of MS Word, and implement some of Word Perfect's best ideas. Puleeeaze, give me Reveal Codes! (If you're wondering why I don't just use the real Word Perfect, the reason is: a) I'm stupid, b) the widgets it uses in the X version are an absolute abomination (if choosing a word processor based on its widget set makes me a geeky lunatic, so be it), c) closed source = bad, and d) no nice Debian package. If those reasons sound lame, I'm sure I could think of a few to add, given time. Do lots of lame reasons add up to the equivilant of one valid reason?)

Well, anyway, I did a number on the Search.pm file, and came up with something that allows much quicker access, but doesn't return the number of potential hits initially. Too bad, so sad. It seems like a worthy tradeoff. Eventually, I may even discover some hack to figure out the number of hits without the query taking years to process.

Well, there's my summary, in keeping with this week's established convention. Have fun, all.