In the Northern Hemisphere, today is the Winter Solstice (plus or minus a few hours), the day around which all the winter holidays are built. It’s the shortest day/longest night, making it a rather natural night for parties and solidarity. Parties and solidarity are a bit harder, this year, with a pandemic keeping people at home to prevent further spread, but as I mentioned last year, it’s not a coincidence that there are so many similar holidays at this time.

Amaterasu emerging from a cave

Anyway, unsurprisingly, it’s been another slow week.

Library Updates

As with the end of last week, RenewDB and generic-board-game—neither of which does anything, yet—had some libraries that needed to be brought up to date, so I did that.

New Issues

I also continued creating placeholder issues for future work, such as…

  • Fix the Build for the Common Calendar project. Specifically, the library used to parse the command line arguments no longer builds, so the application no longer builds. It’s probably easy to fix, but I haven’t written enough rust, recently, to know what to use instead without research.
  • Seeking Refuge also could stand to have the e-book construction automated. Currently, when I release a new version, I run pandoc manually to create a LibreOffice document, used to make some final formatting changes, and export that to PDF and other formats. Surely, that can be done from a script, so that books can be “continuously published.”

Bicker

I noticed some “rogue” code related to fixing the check of whether the current Bicker user is an administrator, so I committed that to make sure it doesn’t get lost. The old code works, but this seems to be the currently accepted syntax.

Entropy Arbitrage

Each blog post’s tags (as you can presumably see below) now have a little tag icon in front of the name, to clarify what’s happening. I also tore out some discussion in the mailing list sign-up panel (over 👉 to the right) that’s no longer relevant and no longer particularly funny.

Translations

I’ve started re-proofreading my translation of Le Mulâtre, finding a few small issues.

Other

I checked in an example script to find the number of days until a target date in my SmallThings repository.

Next

I have another small project that I expect to go out and will continue fixing the Le Mulâtre translation. Other than that, with the holidays, it’ll probably just be more minor work.

Credits: The header image is Japanese Sun goddess Amaterasu emerging from a cave, one East Asian version of the rebirth symbolism of the day.