Today is Whyday! One year ago today, the man behind _why suddenly completely removed the persona and all of his works from the net.

So I just read Zed Shaw’s new post about health concerns for programmers and it sparked a new notion that I was able to quickly follow through on. In his post he describes the bad habits and neglectful behavior common to programmers that can lead to health problems, mild and severe.

I’m going to open this up with some blunt honesty. Every time I see someone I like or respect say something admiring about the iPad, I feel a little embarrassed for them. It’s like finding out your parents were duped by a 409 scam, or an acquaintance discussing the medical benefits of proximity to certain crystals.

There was an innocuous-seeming update to Wine a few days ago, and upon attempting to play the one game I have installed via Wine, Runic Games’ astonishingly awesome dungeon-crawler, Torchlight, I found it suddenly mute. Which is not really how I like to play it. So I was perturbed.

I was trying to mount a shared folder in an Arch Linux guest OS under VirtualBox and kept receiving the same enigmatic error.

The problem turned out to be, believe it or not, that the shared folder and the mount location had the same name.

Savorous, as well as killthe.net, is built on the Sinatra framework and served via Apache and the Passenger extension, with Rack somewhere in the middle.

In trying to expand and solidify my facility with Ruby and related things, as well as scratching my own itch, I’ve started a new project: Savorous.

Why Make It

The problem it’s meant to solve is filling in the missing data in feeds that only deliver bare links without the associated summary or meta-data. It’s made specifically with Delicious feeds in mind, but it could be any feed that is basically just a list of links.

Really rough, but easy to drop in and get working with something else, either as an external script or by integrating directly into a larger code base.

The code:

PHP: Gist 214887

Last week I spent a few minutes over lunch cleaning up the code behind killthe.net and posting the results to GitHub.

So it’s been awhile since I checked in with any HYDRAtweet news. Things are still going on in the background: