Glom tries to always show dates with 4-digit years, in your locale’s appropriate format. Nobody needs the option for it to only show 2 digits years. It just works.

I had been using C++’s insanely complex std::time_put and std::time_get thingies to do this, but for some reason the en_GB locale wants to use 2-digit years for the strftime() ‘x’ format, and there’s no way to generically specify a sane date format for the current locale. That even makes it impossible to parse any dates after 1999, because time_get parses _only_ that ‘x’ format.

That’s broken, and of no conceivable benefit to anyone, six years after Y2K. I worked around it by allowing translators to change the display format if necessary, and always using the Glib::Date fallback for parsing when they’ve done that.

I never read Linux Journal so I’d never heard of Don Marti until Jeff pointed out that his old nagazine has abandoned its future by giving the crayons to Nicholas Petreley (repellently irritating like a very stupid, spoilt, hyperactive child). But I’m glad to have discovered this Don Marti guy. What a sensible, constructive guy, and an insightful blog too. I’m too late to read the magazine, but at least I have that.

I’ve always had trouble sleeping. For my whole life, I’ve often had those insomniac nights when I can’t get to sleep, but feel sleepy enough to keep trying. Often my mind refuses to stop thinking about stuff, so I end up giving up at 5am and doing some programming or emailing. That’s at least been productive but tends to get me out of sync with my side of the planet.

But I think I’ve found a solution. Now whenever I can’t sleep I listen to a Pimsleurs Spanish course that I’ve ripped to ogg files. Because I find foreign languages very difficult, it actually distracts me and tires my mind out enough to sleep. When I stop hearing the words after an hour or so, I turn off my audio player and go to sleep. When I try that with a book, I just keep reading until the sun comes up.

As a pleasant side-effect, the Pimsleurs courses are also just easy enough that I actually learn from them. They move along very slowly, repeating lots of stuff, and saying every phrase possible by combining the vocabulary being covered at the time, and stressing how to say individual syllables. But, at least for me, it needs to be that slow, though I can imagine that language-talented people might find it patronising. Without needing to rewind (well, very rarely), I am actually learning Spanish. So it’s not much more than restaurant-level stuff at the moment (at lesson 26 of 30 half-hours, of the first part), but that’s enough to impress me.

I’m really surprised that I can learn so much without seeing it written down, though it probably helps that I’ve seen some written spanish already, so I have an idea of how words would look. I strongly believed that I couldn’t do it without the text, but I guess brains insist on working in old-fashioned ways.

We had record amounts of snow in Munich at the weekend.

It makes everything beautiful and hands the town over to pedestrians, hiding all the ugly cars under gentle curves.

I now have DSL in the new flat and I’m getting back into things.