Comic punting

I am a big fan of Christopher Baldwin's various works. His current strip, Spacetrawler, is being tremendously entertaining - the madcap nature is very well summed up by this strip. Well worth the read.

comics

Because they both throughly amused me today, and I have not punted either here previously:

Freefall.

Irregular webcomic. (warning, combine irregular webcomic and tvtropes at your own risk)

Both are well worth following.

Webcomic discovery

Websnark has recently started writing about webcomics again, which introduced me to the most promising Skin Horse, Shaenon "Narbonic" Garrity's new strip, which I somehow managed to completely miss beforehand.

Misc Geekery

(or wasting time with elementtree)

Like many people, I have attempted and pretty much utterly failed to maintain the classic list of links style web-page. This is most notable example is my list of web-comics I read, which is both out of date, and horribly incomplete.

Part of this, is, of course, the effort to manually create the webpages needed, and fill in the content. However, since galeon's bookmark are stored in nicely structured xml, and I group the comics I follow in a not completely broken manner, I hit on the bright idea of pulling the bookmarks out using elementtree, and, furthermore, I can use galeon's bookmark notes to do the documenting about the comics.

So, after a couple of hours of prodding (much of it spent trying to get an overly complex design working before an important light-bulb went on), I now have a little python script that pulls all the data out, and writes a nice, standards conforming html file with all details - Now I just need to actually go through and sort out my comics bookmarks a bit, and I'll actually have a much more maintainable way of generating the list.

Of course, when I eventually move away from galeon (I've been using epiphany exclusively on my laptop for a while now, so it's likely to be not too far off), I'll have to tweak the script, and probably fiddle with the bookmark's conversion a bit to get all the comments across properly, but such is progress.

ah, the idle amusements of a life around computers.
(and to think I'd planned to spent the evening working on Sutekh)

Comics

I don't punt PhD comics nearly enough. The characters and situations are instantly recognisable to anyone who's been in grad school.

And, frankly, anyone who doesn't find this funny, is going to understand half my conversations.

Then there's xkcd, which I also need to punt more often. The latest example of why is here.

Upgrading debian

I don't think I've mentioned recently just how much I adore debian's easy upgrades.

Considering that I upgraded our file server yesterday, with the only major hiccup being due to carelessness on my part (a stupid error on the kernel command line), and everything seems to be working fine now, with almost no additional tweaking required, I think it's time a corrected that lack.

I am truly a fan of the work and effort that goes into knocking the rough edges off the entire process.

No further comment

Arguably the best explanation of Facebook.

(PhD comics is a recent, but much enjoyed discovery)