I know I should probably be reading Japanese manga by now, and I have a few on my desk already, but so far have not really tried to dig into them. Instead, I got myself the first volume of a much celebrated American comics series, The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. Eight episodes (much different from each other in style, I suppose the series will become more consistent in its tone in later volumes) tell the story of how Morpheus, the Sandman, Master of Dreams, gets entrapped by a group of magicians in 1916, and how, after escaping seventies years later, has to reclaim his kingdom and restore order to the World of Dreams, a quest that leads him through the mortal world, the Dream World, and Hell.

The series is suggested for mature readers, and I have to admit I found some parts uncomfortably morbid (especially 24 Hours, wherein an escaped madmen who stole Morpheus' Dreamstone artefact pushes the world into chaos by inducing nightmares). I am also not particularly fond of the artwork (the covers are cool, though). But of course, I know next to nothing about comics, and even in a graphic novel the main thing is the story, which is intriguing. Neil Gaiman, by the way, is the writer, and seven other people collaborated as artists, letterers, and colourists. I liked the last episode most. The Sound of Her Wings is an epilogue: Nothing much happens, but we meet The Sandman's sister (Death), and the two contemplate their role in the universe.

Now here is an interesting game. PerlNomic is a Perl version of Nomic, which describes itself like this:

Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed. (Peter Suber, The Paradox of Self-Amendment, Appendix 3, p. 362)

So, PerlNomic is a set of CGI scripts that allow users to create and vote on proposals. A proposal is an arbitrary Perl code fragment, that, if accepted by a majority of users, gets executed. New users are created using proposals. A proposal could change, add or delete files (including program files), thereby changing the rules of the game itself. If someone breaks the game, all players lose. You can win the game by proposing yourself to be the winner. At the moment, you can also win by getting 1000 points: You get points for making proposals and for voting, and extra points for voting against the majority. You lose points by having proposals rejected. I expect this point system to be one of the first things to be modified or scrapped as the game evolves.

I am waiting now for the (currently only two) active users to accept my proposal to join the game.

What woke us this morning was the first earthquake in the new house. Having bought an apartment (and no earthquake insurance) we have a whole new sensibility to these things. Of course, there is not really much to worry about, as the building has been constructed with tremors in mind. It rests on pillars that extend fifty metres into the ground and the ferro-concrete structure itself can absorb the shock waves quite well.

Hardly anyone ever gets injured by being thrown on the ground by earthquakes (unless they happen to stand on a ladder at the time). Most harm is caused by stuff falling on top of people, and by fires. The closets in our flat have a mechanism that makes them lock up when they shake, so that the doors cannot open and nothing can fall out. And the gas metre on our porch also shuts down if shaken. If that happens, we can just go there after the quake, press a button which will start a self-check sequence to confirm the absence of leaks (takes about two minutes) and if all is well, the gas will work again. Only if the pipes are damaged will it refuse to open the valve.

None of this happened this morning. The magnitude at the epicentre (N 35.7, E 140.7, sixty kilometres underground) was 6.1 and at most in the fours at our place. Safe.

Wil Wheaton, who hated Wesley Crusher even more than everyone else did, has become a true geek idol. After his Hollywood career peaked when he was fourteen and basically ended when he left Star Trek, he has since turned into a writer. Just a Geek is the autobiography that details this phase, which started when Wheaton launched his weblog (which he writes, designs, and even runs by himself, as opposed to other celebrity blogs that are handled by publicists), and by now he has published two books with O'Reilly (beloved by IT people everywhere), got Neil Gaiman to write the foreword to one of them, has himself been asked to write a foreword for the Knights of the Dinner Table (which reminds me that I have to start an inquiry about the whereabouts of my copies of KODT [*]), has a clever nick name on Slashdot, where he has been interviewed (twice!), is a welcome speaker on conventions for all three big topics (Science Fiction, Role Playing Games, Linux), does voicework for and writes reviews about video games, and in the meantime seems to have even made his peace with Wesley Crusher.

[*] If you know what I am talking about, then I am talking directly to you!

Our new refrigerator has just been delivered. It will need about five hours to warm up (cool down, actually), but then our eighty-two days of being in clear and present danger of food poisoning are over and we will be able to store 384 litres of all things cold.

In related news from the opposite end of the temperature scale, gas was also installed this morning, so that we can now turn on the heat as well.

Next on the list are curtains that cover the full length of our impressive ceiling-to-floor window front (the old ones end at about knee-level), a bed, a home stereo, dust bins, and a dining table.

I finally managed to install mod_parrot (and Apache2, on which it depends). So the latest version of my Polly example is now being served not as a CGI script, but as an Apache handler written in Parrot IMC.

I have this plan to supplement the Budgie templating system with a small web application framework (BudgieWebApp), that would hide the fact whether the code is executed as CGI or using mod_parrot. The initial version of BudgieWebApp can only show a single page, and there is no support for application logic or filling the page template with data, but it can already rely on some nifty features of the templating engine itself, such as conditional output depending on query parameters, or dynamic server-side includes.

With the amazingly fast progress of the wonderful Pugs project (just two months old, Pugs can already run the over twenty CPAN modules that have been ported to Perl 6, and there is an experimental compiler now, that compiles the Mandelbrot example into Parrot bytecode which, even though still totally unoptimised, runs at the same speed as the equivalent Perl 5 code) I am increasingly unsure if writing Parrot assembler by hand makes any sense at all, but it is nice to see how things come together.