Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Sunday, 1 June 2003

# 6 AM

And, for the third and last time, up far too early to catch a plane. It is apparently now U.S. policy to make you go through customs and immigration before leaving the country you're coming from, which is a bit obnoxious; on the other hand, it does get that out of the way at the beginning of the trip.

Sitting in Minneapolis, decided to dig through the Debian package list to see if I could find an MTA for disconnected operation. Sure enough, masqmail is what you want. But it's a bit late to know that now, and in any case it is unlikely that a precompiled package for Red Hat 6.2 can be found.

I've been working off and on all trip, on an enhancement to Python to permit multi-statement anonymous blocks. The language has anonymous functions already but they're limited to a single expression, rather like Fortran statement functions. It's deeply disappointing to report that this is a lot harder than I thought; my attempts to date have done nothing but introduce nasty grammar ambiguities. (A fair chunk of the difficulty is that Python uses its own idiosyncratic parser generator which is poorly documented and doesn't give helpful diagnostics. I can write down in English what I want; explaining it to the machine is harder.)

Got home around 3PM (yay airport shuttles!) and have approximately 3,000 email messages to slog through.