...more recent posts
Astronomy picture of the day. Beautiful shot of the Jovian moon IO against a background of Jupiter itself.
Peep. Ping. Coming up for air. I think I've got the translation script working. This script walks the tree, starting at a given page of the old system, and translates all the posts into the new system. The hard part is that each post is itself the top node of a smaller tree which represents the downward cascading comments which may or may not be under each post. And these comments cascade down to an arbitrary and theoretically infinite depth. So that means lots of recursive functions (a loop of code that invokes another iteration of itself from inside the execution of that same loop.) This sort of thing is hard for me to grasp. And it can get out of control. (Remember way back in the day when I basically crashed that csoft server with some faulty perl code? That was a recursive function that never came out of its infundibular self invoking spiral.) There still might be some subtle bug in it, but I can't find one. This is the hardest thing I've ever written. Very interesting process. I wonder if people who are really trained work this same way. For me it's like having a conversation with the computer. Eventually I'm going to write something longer about this interesting phenomenon. I guess it's a dialectic. In any case, it lets me make things beyond myself. I don't know exactly how this script works, but I'm pretty sure it does. I figured it out, like I said, by having a conversation with the machine. Both of us (the machine and I, as it were) understand the script, but neither of us alone can understand the whole thing. Or something like that. Cool stuff.
So if I'm right, and it is working, it won't be too long now. First of May seems possible. Or, hey, the third is a Thrusday. That's a nice date.