2017-06-08 h16 -- Three Endings And Three Beginnings

Some notes on closure today, as the get-a-job self-marketing campaign winds down (or rather, transmutes into an ongoing spew-for-fun-if-not-profit practice)...

Firstly, all the site directory index files (that I generate for this site) are now ‘.xhtml’. This completes the WIP mentioned previously. The other major class of files that I generate are these trip log entries. Although their content is proper XHTML, they are still named ‘.html’ on disk and will remain that way until I get around to transitioning the information model from “trip log as series of files” to “trip log as series of nodes (aka directories)”. More on that later.

Secondly, the GitLab folks were able to reproduce the sign-up weirdness I experienced a bit back. Gist of the problem: No cookies, no party. Hopefully they will take my suggestion and state this requirement explicitly and clearly in the sign-up flow. As soon as I'm able to sign up (probably today or tomorrow), I'll push for it here, not only for EU folks, but for everyone.

Lastly, I was able yesterday to find the gumption to ensure all the ‘.texh’ and ‘.texi’ (documentation source) files for projects I maintain are encoded and declared as UTF-8. This effort spanned quite a bit of time:

Unofficial Guile  2017-06-07  2011-12-27
   THUD              2017-06-07  2011-12-27
   ETRACK            2017-06-07  2011-12-27
   RPX               2017-06-07
   ELIP              2017-06-07
   EDB               2017-04-10
   ZOW               2017-03-24
   Guile-BAUX        2014-01-09  2011-12-27
   xdgdirs           2013-09-07
   ttn-do            2013-08-22  2011-12-27
   IXIN              2012-12-13
   GNU Guile-SDL     2012-11-08
   GNU Serveez       2012-11-04  2011-12-27
   WIKID             2012-08-18
   GNU Alive         2012-08-01
   GNU RCS           2012-01-13  2011-12-27
   Guile-WWW         2011-12-27
   CMOD-PLAY         2011-12-27
   Mixp              2011-07-30
   Guile-PG          2011-05-15
   Guile-GDBM        2011-04-26
   Tastiera Dura     2008-04-28

This table is sorted most-recent-first. The entries w/ two dates show the correction date first, followed by that of the initial (botched) attempt. “But ttn, how can you botch something so simple as this?” Haha! Lemme 'splain it t'ya...

As you might notice, the botches all occurred on 2011-12-27 and are basically the same two mistakes stupidly repeated: adding ‘@documentencoding utf-8’ prior to ‘@setfilename’. First mistake: order — ‘@documentencoding’ should follow ‘@setfilename’. Second mistake: case in the value of encoding — it should be uppercase (‘UTF-8’ is correct). For example, see GNU Serveez botch and fix.

Anyway, the crux of the matter is that I failed to read and understand the Texinfo manual, which, in my (partial) defense, only says that ‘@documentencoding’ should be placed “near the beginning of the file”. Too, that ‘@setfilename’ must be first is easy to overlook, especially when the example beginning of file misleadingly makes no mention of it. Va beh — non è mai troppo tardi per imparare. I suppose this points to an opportunity to contribute a clarifying patch upstream. Cool!

Trip Log 2017-06-08 h16 -- Three Endings And Three Beginnings