News You Can Bruise for 2001 September 7

People complain about the price of gas. Not my gas! Come on down to Boyle's Gas Farm! We've got all types of gas! Gas at all temperatures! Gas at all pressures! People ask me: how do I make money with such low prices? I tell them: VOLUME!

I have that peculiar form of headache which makes me think that at some point I inadvertently held my breath for a really long time and that as a result part of my brain is now deprived of oxygen.

Thanks to Seth, I have a bunch of the bootable business cards with robotfindskitten on them. While I was playing it I found, as an NKI, a Nethack message I'd never seen before ("For a moment, you feel something in your hands, but it disappears!"). After much deliberation I correctly identified the source of that message, which is below (rot13ed in case you want to figure it out yourself).

Lbh trg gung zrffntr vs lbh znxr n jvfu gung'f vzcbffvoyr (sbe na negvsnpg nyernql trarengrq) be gbb nzovgvbhf (sbe n cyhf rvtug terl qentba fpnyr znvy).

But the point of this entry is to thank Seth for the bounty of BBCs he gave me, and to celebrate my newfound having been published on a Linux distribution's CD.

Tomorrow is Unix 1 billion second day! (qv.) Seth is hosting a celebratory dinner, which I may or may not attend due to my mother and sister being in town.

So we've *finally* tagged the 1.2 release. It always seems like the head of the tree, which I work on is great and clean, and the branch, which I have to visit to backport bug fixes, is ugly and old. This is just a reflection of the fact that the code is always improving, because as 1.2 approached tagging I became acutely aware of all the things that are still wrong with it (not nearly as many as last time, though) and that I'm going to have to be backporting fixes for for forever (how about that alliteration!).