High Light
2023-08-26   dejbug.github.io

High Light

We had a thunderstorm this morning and the air is breathable again. Some storms are more civilized than others. I like those. Nice storms. Real enough to be pleasantly disturbing on a subconscious level but not violent enough to inconvenience.

Susurrous

The sounds are noticeably different after an event. Like something's missing. What is missing is the noise. The carelessness and arrogancethat's right! of the biosphere going through the motions of its biochemical existence — only partially coreographed and mostly made up on the spot. People are animals who enjoy creative freedoms. I am very much an animal like that of course and so today I need to come up with a little tasklet for myself. Something small enough to be finishable in a couple hours. Because tonight is club night and I have not seriously looked at chess in weeks.

Tasuke-te

I have been thinking about what Kernighen & Plauger wrote in the first pages of their book Software Tools (1976) and in their article of the same title:
Building on the work of others is the only way to make substantial progress in any field. Yet computer programming continues as a cottage industry because programmers insist on reinventing programs for each new application, instead of using what already exists. dl.acm.org scholar:G
I have read something like this before. unep.org oneearth.org wiki wiki The thing is that we love reinventing the wheel wiki. Given the somewhat pointless, undirected leisure that comes with long-term unemployment nami.org and if you're lucky enough to derive some pleasure from looking at screenfuls of pretty-colored text. After all, with anything a bit more complex than a wheel, it's a perfect learning experience. A perfect time-passing experience at that. And there's the nagging feeling that you may be able to do it better wiki wiki. What else are you to do with lots of time and no liquidity?

Tools

So I've been looking through the GNU docs gnu and was reminded of M4 gnu but was totally surprised by gnu! Obvious that I had to add it to my little quick-and-dirty render script. Remind me to take a look at the noref "color" gnu later #todo but first the mise-en-scene: 
$ source-highlight --outlang-list | head -n 3
docbook = docbook.outlang
esc = esc.outlang
esc256 = esc256.outlang
$ expac -H M "%F" source-highlight | tr -s ' ' '\n' | xargs dirname | uniq | tail -n 3
usr/share/man/man1
usr/share
usr/share/source-highlight
$ cp /usr/share/source-highlight/default.style .
$ vim default.style
$ source-highlight --out-format=esc256 --style-file=./default.style -i known.py

Actions

It seems that GNU's source-highlight gnu is not preinstalled docs:gh on the GH build server I use gh (Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish). Which means back to fiddling with the workspace config. It was a bit frustrating writing one more or less blindly and it took a couple of first runs to get it right, but adding little things like this should be straight-forward. Here goes nothing! Whaddayaknow! I've managed to make an error but it works now. Hurts to be so greedy that the list of preinstalled tools wasn't enough for this stupid little blog to render, but hey ho. Grab what you can get.

TIL

In early aviation, the Wright brothers held patents on certain aspects of aircraft, while Glenn Curtiss held patents on ailerons wiki which was an advance on the Wrights' system, but antipathy between the patent holders wiki prevented their use. The government was forced to step in and create a patent pool wiki during World War I. — wiki
Initially sales were not negatively affected; in a September 1985 interview, the president of the company that manufactured it stated that, in fact, sales had increased as a result of this connection. wiki Early in 1986, another executive of the manufacturer was quoted, "The product has been around for 45 years. Let the disease change its name." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayds#cite_note-11 — wiki