Maybe I’m a curmudgeon, but I’m getting heartily sick of the exhortation to “save the planet” (and even the debate about cretinous comments by Rep. Michele Bachmann about salvation).

But here’s the deal — when people say “save the planet,” they don’t mean that. Come on. We puny humans can’t destroy the planet. Sure, we can poison the surface, and make it inhospitable for many of the species who presently inhabit the place (ourselves included). Yes, we can wipe out forests and cause extinctions. But the planet’s been through worse — much worse — and probably will go through worse again.

So let’s can the “save the planet” talk and say what we really mean: preserving conditions that keep us comfortable.

Rant over.

Edited with an introduction by Charles Neider, Da Capo Press, 1998.

(This book is only 798 pages, but I’ve been reading it for over a year. And you thought I’d just given up on posting about books.)

Washington Irving is known for a number of things: being the first professional literary writer of North America, creating of the character Diedrich Knickerbocker (for whom New York is called the Knickerbocker State), originating numerous popular legends (e.g., people though the earth flat until Columbus), and, of course, authoring a few famous stories such as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip van Winkel, and The Devil and Tom Walker. According to Neider, there was an anti-Irving backlash in the 1930s, which is probably why I was only familiar with the three tales mentioned above.

Irving is an amazing storyteller. Even given nearly two hundred years’ gap, his writing is still crystal clear and humorous and evocative and beautiful. He sketches out the Kentucky frontier, ghost-plagued swamps of New England, pre-Revolutionary War Dutch settlements in New York, medieval Spain, the mountains of Italy, and more with equal skill, each believable and very visually rendered. He tells rip-roaring adventures, satires, or fairy tales in those contexts. Some are simple — predictable, even, twee or corny to the modern reader — and yet the enthusiasm and charm with which he writes them makes it easy to forgive.

What really shines through in this collection of sixty some-odd tales, however, is how much Irving loves storytelling. He likes it so much that many of them are really framing stories, wherein the narrator meets up with some other character who tells a story — which may well itself be a framing story. Sometimes, I found myself popping out of a story-stack five or six deep.

Don’t let Hollywood’s pathetic interpretations sell Irving short. These are a lot of fun to read.

Well,not really. This is just one example of a bad approach.

The problem: an HTML file is read, but needs to be entity-escaped. However, not all entities need escaping. Specifically, double quotes with anchor tags need to be left alone.

The right solution: process the HTML via a DOM parser, escape nodes that are not anchor tags. Oh, but did I mention these HTML files may be crappy, non-validating files, or even snippets?

The next solution: Use a regular expression. Yes, this is ugly. Yes, it also works 🙂

Originally, I tried using variable-length lookahead, but ran into problems (PHP 4.x). But PHP provides another solution which is perfect for this sort of thing. Here’s the code:

function pre_esc_quotes($inner)
{
return preg_replace('/"/','QUOTE',$inner[0]);
}
function post_esc_quotes($inner)
{
return preg_replace('/QUOTE/','"',$inner[0]);
}
$tmp=preg_replace_callback('/<a([^>]*?)>/s','pre_esc_quotes',$raw_html);
$tmp = html_entities($tmp);
echo preg_replace_callback(('/</a><a([^>]*?)>/s','post_esc_quotes',$tmp);


This, of course, presumes that the string “QUOTE” won’t show up anywhere in your raw html. Consider replacing it with an opaque string (like “JHG54JHGH76699597569” or something creative and long that will choke the interpreter).

This code is furthermore inefficient in a number of ways. It’s not something you should use. But it does show how preg_replace_callback avoids some scary regex work.

The need arose to have a specific email address round-robin (e.g., cycle through a collection of destination email addresses).

A solution was achieved through use of procmail and a little perl script. It probably could be done more easily and/or better, but I figured other people might find this interesting.

So, first, an alias was created in /etc/aliases (used by postfix in this case, but it should work for sendmail, and variants should work for other MTAs):

rrtest:         |"/usr/bin/procmail -m /etc/postfix/roundrobin_procmail.rc"

Then, the following file was saved as /etc/postfix/roundrobin_procmail.rc:

:0 w:/tmp/rrlock
{
        :0
                dest=|/etc/postfix/rr.pl
        :0
                ! ${dest}
}

And then, of course, we need the perl program. Here’s /etc/postfix/rr.pl:

#!/bin/perl
# ----------------------------------------------------------
@recipients = (
'address1@sample.com',
'address2@sample.com',
'address3@sample.com'
);

$index_file = 'rr-index.txt';

# ----------------------------------------------------------

$index_exists = 1;
open(IN,";
        close(IN);
        $index++;
        }
else
        {
        $index = 0;
        }


if ($index > $#recipients)
        {
        $index = 0;
        }
open(OUT,">/tmp/${index_file}");
print OUT "$index\n";
close(OUT);

print STDOUT $recipients[$index];

exit 0;

Elegant? Not really. But it seems to work 🙂

As in, zero. Gar nichts. Zero posts in April, to match the zero posts for February. You might just figure that I’m lacking initiative on this writing stuff.

Chalk it up to:

• Being busy at work.
• Writing code on the side.
• Playing with Photoshop Javascripts to create strange flower Mandalas.
• Having shoulder pain (due to inexplicable adhesive capsulitis — an ailment typically found among diabetic women aged 5-70 [!?]).
• Reading very slowly through massive anthologies rather than shorter works (currently about half way through the collected stories of Washington Irving).
• General Springtime ennui.

Perhaps May will see more activity. Perhaps not.