Taking Out the Trash

Once a month, I take our recycling to the road. This is something far more annoying than most city-dwellers may suspect.

For one thing, the road is about 1/4 mile away. Over a month, we fill up at least three large plastic trash cans full of recycling. If I walked each of those there to be picked up, then walked them back to the house after, I’d have walked 3 miles.

So, I use our $75 pickup to get the trash to the road. The process is a long one, and it starts two days before the recycling is due to be picked up.

Monday, 5:30PM: Find an outdoor extension cord in the basement. Put on snow-suitable shoes. Go outside, plug the extension cord in at the elevator. Grab the battery charger, hook it up to the pickup. Unfurl and untangle the extension cord, plug it in.

Blog about it if desired.

Tuesday, 5:30PM: Go outside. Disconnect the battery charger, coil up the extension cord. Plug in the air compressor and get it going. Run the hose to the tire that keeps going flat and hope it reaches. Fill up the tire. Return the air compressor hose to the elevator, turn off the air compressor.

Go to pickup and actually get in. Remove the bungee cord from the brake pedal that is holding it up, preventing the brake lights from being on 100% of the time and draining the battery even faster.

Start pumping the accelerator. It’s not a fuel-injected engine, after all. Crank the engine. Stop cranking, pump some more, trying to avoid the hole in the floor under the accelerator. Eventually get it started, hopefully.

Roll down the windows to prevent the exhaust fumes from getting too strong.

Drive the stuff to the road. Unload the three cans, plus all the extra cardboard from Christmas that didn’t fit in them and is now soggy and snow-covered. Drive the pickup back to the yard. Park it. Replace the bungee cord on the brake pedal so it’ll start again tomorrow.

Wednesday, 5:30PM: Dress warmly yet again. Go to the pickup, hoping the tire is still inflated and the battery is still charged. I’m going to be optimistic and assume they are. Hope that the pickup starts after only a few minutes of pumping. Go back to the road, only to find that the Kansas wind has scattered the trash cans and their lid all over the county. With luck, I’ll be able to find them on foot. Sometimes, I have had to get in the pickup and drive down the road to find all my lids. Stash all of this in the pickup, drive it back to the yard, park, replace the bungee cord, and close it up for another month.

I’m promising myself that when I upgrade to a better pickup, it’ll be one worth at least $200.

A Poem for the Rich

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
“The wonders of my hand.” The City’s gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

—Horace Smith

Many of us that can afford an Internet connection still qualify as exceedingly rich compared to, for example, many poor people in Africa. On a scale of centuries, the ancient centers of civilization and wealth tend to collapse. Even Rome, with over a million inhabitants in its day of ancient prominence, shrank to only 20,000 over the course of history. Some other ancient cities no longer dot our maps.

It helps us, perhaps, to have some perspective. Those magnificent working monuments to wealth in New York, London, or Tokyo probably won’t be there 1000 years from now. What will?

My Reading List for 2010

I can hear the question now: “What kind of guy puts The Iliad and War and Peace on a list of things to read for fun?” Well, me. I think that reading things by authors I’ve never read before, people that take positions I haven’t heard of before or don’t agree with, or works that are challenging, will teach me something. And learning is fun.

My entire list for 2010 is at Goodreads. I’ve highlighted a few below. I don’t expect to read all 34 books on the Goodreads list necessarily, but there is the chance.

The Iliad by Homer [done 1/11], 750BC, trans. by Alexander Pope, 704 pages. A recent NPR story kindled my interest in this work. I’m looking forward to it.

The Oxford History of the Classical World by Boardman, Griffin, and Murray, 1986, 882 pages. It covers ancient Greece and Rome up through the fall of the Roman empire.

The Fires of Heaven (Wheel of Time #5) by Robert Jordan, 1994, 912 pages [done 9/2010]. I’ve read books 1 through 4 already, and would like to continue on the series.

War and Peace by Lev “Leo” Nikolayevich Tolstoy, 1869, 1392 pages. Been on my list for way too long. Time to get to it. Haven’t read anything by Tolstoy before.

The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder, 1972, 2nd ed., 270 pages. Aims to dispel the notion of Jesus as apolitical.

An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin, 1996, 496 pages. Picked this up at Powell’s in Portland on a whim, and it’s about time I get to it.

The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church by Gregory A. Boyd, 2007, 224 pages. An argument that the American evangelical church allowed itself to be co-opted by the political right (and some on the left) and argues this is harmful to the church. Also challenges the notion that America ever was “a Christian nation.”

Daily Life in Ancient Rome: The People and the City at the Height of the Empire, by Jerome Carcopino, 2003, 368 pages. I’ve always been fascinated with how things were “on the ground” rather than at the perspective of generals and kings, and this promises to be interesting.

Slavery, Sabbath, War, and Women: Case Issues in Biblical Interpretation (Conrad Grebel Lectures) by Willard M. Swartley, 1983, 368 pages. Looking at how people have argued from different Biblical perspectives about various issues over the years.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, 1927, 252 pages. I can’t believe I’ve never read Woolf before. Yet another one I’m really looking forward to.

Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922, 319 pages. Per Goodreads: “This book of five confessional essays from the 1930s follows Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda from the height of their celebrity as the darlings of the 1920s to years of rapid decline leading to the self-proclaimed ‘Crack Up’ in 1936.”

Ulysses by James Joyce, 1922 (1961 unabridged version), 783 pages.

The Future of Faith by Harvey Cox, 2009, 256 pages. [done 3/2010] Per Goodreads, “Cox explains why Christian beliefs and dogma are giving way to new grassroots movements rooted in social justice and spiritual experience.” Heard about this one in an interview with Diane Rehm.

Being There by Jerzy Kosiński, 1970, 128 pages.

Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary by Marcus Borg, 2006, 352 pages. Whether or not you agree with Borg, this has got to be a thought-provoking title.

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, 1844, 640 pages.

The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura, 1906, 154 pages. Per Goodreads: “In 1906 in turn-of-the century Boston, a small, esoteric book about tea was written with the intention of being read aloud in the famous salon of Isabella Gardner. It was authored by Okakura Kakuzo, a Japanese philosopher, art expert, and curator. Little known at the time, Kakuzo would emerge as one of the great thinkers of the early 20th century, a genius who was insightful, witty—and greatly responsible for bridging Western and Eastern cultures. Nearly a century later, Kakuzo’s The Book of Tea is still beloved the world over. Interwoven with a rich history of tea and its place in Japanese society is poignant commentary on Eastern culture and our ongoing fascination with it, as well as illuminating essays on art, spirituality, poetry, and more.”

More of my list is at Goodreads.

Tunnels and Slippers

“Dad! Shall we play tunnels and slippers?”

If you spend much time in our house, chances are you’ll hear Jacob, our 3-year-old, ask me that question. It might sound a bit mysterious, but in 3-year-old logic, it totally works.

One day, Jacob and I accidentally invented “tunnels”. I would sit on the couch, the footstool a foot or two away, with my legs on it. Jacob started crawling underneath the resulting “tunnel”, then got excited about crawling on top of it, crashing down off of it, or slowly sliding down. Sometimes I would take one leg off, and he would “fix” the tunnel. Afterwards, he’d excitedly tell me, “Dad! I fixed the tunnel all by myself!”

This being winter, I usually wear slippers around the house to keep my feet warm. Jacob steadfastly refuses to wear anything but bare feet, maintaining his feet are warm when asked.

One day while we were playing tunnels, Jacob started trying to steal my slipper. I defended it by using my other foot to tickle him. He eventually got it, much to his delight. Then he’d try to get the other slipper. If you were to listen to a CD of this, you’d hear a frenzy of cackling, laughter from both of us, and eventual shrieks of delight as he steals the second slipper.

At this point, what’s a 3-year-old to do with two ill-gotten slippers? Why, put them on and try to run off with them, of course! So Jacob puts them on, and if I am too slow trying to recover them, will helpfully prompt me with “Shall you get the slippers back?” When I stand up, he’ll shriek, and waddle off at top speed — which isn’t that fast, considering he’s wearing slippers that won’t fit his feet for another 15 years.

Eventually I will make a big show of having very cold feet and wanting my slippers back. He will laugh in delight, and continue trying to escape. Eventually I’ll catch him, lift him up high, and shake his legs until the slippers fall off. Then it’s a mad dash to see which one of us will get them back on first. If I do, then it’s back to the couch for more tunnels and slippers.

So there you have it: tunnels and slippers.

Interestingly, I asked Jacob the other day if he wanted to wear HIS slippers. He predictably said no. I pointed out that if he wears his, he’d be just like me. He said, “Here they are. Shall you help me put them on?” I did. He walked around proudly. I asked him if his feet were warm. Yes, they were, he said. “So you won’t need to steal my slippers anymore?” A brief look of panic crept across his face! I felt bad, until he replied with, “No, my feet still VERY VERY cold, dad! Shall we play tunnels and slippers right now?”

Review: Those new-fangled paper books

Everyone seems to be familiar with ebooks these days. I own a Kindle 2, and of course we’ve spent weeks hearing how great the Nook will be, then weeks hearing how terrible it turned out to be. But nobody seems to be casting an eye back towards paper, so I thought I’d rectify that here, especially since paper books have some serious stability issues that are often overlooked!

Before I begin, I feel it wise to offer this hint to the reader: this review should not be taken too literally. If you have an uncontrollable urge to heave a volume of the Oxford English Dictionary at me as if I am some European prime minister, please plant your tongue more firmly in your cheek and begin again.

Today I picked up a paper book to read just for fun — The Happiest Days of Our Lives by Wil Wheaton. Long-time (since this spring!) Kindle user that I am, I immediately noticed the dashing use of color on its front cover, but when I opened it, I was disappointed that I couldn’t scale the font size down from the default. It seems that paper books have only one font option — what are all these Kindle forum posters complaining about with its six sizes of a single font?

On the very first page, I encountered a word I wasn’t familiar with (Namaste). I thought I knew what it meant from the context clues, and even had the thought that on the Kindle, I could just highlight it and confirm my guess. But my paper dictionary was in the basement, so I didn’t bother looking it up until I wrote this post. (My hunch was reasonably correct.)

Interface-wise, the paper book is solid, and crashes, lockups, or other malfunctions are rare. I have, however, noted severe stability problems when attempting to read outdoors, especially when it’s windy (which, since I live in Kansas, is pretty much always). Pages start turning themselves, even without me making the “turn page” gesture. Sometimes the book will even lose its memory of my last page read. This is rather annoying, and might even involve a lengthy search for a suitable temporary replacement bookmark. Also, I haven’t tried it, but I suspect that the trick of putting a Kindle in a ziplock bag to read at the beach or in the tub without risk of getting it wet would be impractical with a paper book.

Paper does have its advantages. For one, it’s faster to flip rapidly through pages on paper than on an ebook reader. If you know roughly where in the book something was written, but not the precise wording, searching can be faster on paper. On the other had, if you are looking for a particular word or phrase, the ebook reader may win hands-down, especially if the paper book has no index.

Paper is so stable that some would argue that the extreme impracticality of making good backups isn’t really a problem at all. But on the other hand, paper books degrade slightly each time they are used, and this condition can be aggravated by placement in bags for transport. Eventually, they will wear out. If my Kindle wears out, I can always restore David Copperfield from my backup copy to a new one. If my printed edition (all two volumes) of it wear out, then I have to hope that the used bookstore will still sell me another one for $10. Otherwise I’d have to either drive 45 miles to find one for sale, attempt to deal with the DRM for paper books at a library, or wait a couple of days for Amazon to get it to my door. A fire or flood could be devastating.

Paper books also have some advantages for showing photos; no ebook reader is close to the size and resolution of glossy paper photos books in a reasonable price.

The contrast on most paper books is better than that of my Kindle, but some older ones are actually worse, smell dusty, and suffer from occasional display corruption as bits of them actually break off of the book device.

As to cost, it is a mixed bag. Out of copyright classics are free as ebooks from Project Gutenberg and the like, while still costing money on paper. I have found that the accuracy of some of these paper editions can be rather questionable — people have sometimes manually removed important bits of the story to save on printing costs, rather than let Google Books OCR mangle it for them automatically. On the other hand, used paper editions of more current works can be found for a fraction of the cost of the new ebook edition — though you are often limited in selection of these bargains. But you can usually browse a paper book for a few minutes before buying it, which is rarely available for an ebook.

What’s more, libraries might let you borrow paper books for free. But you often have to expel greenhouse gases to get to them, and then they enforce DRM on you — you only get to read it a certain amount of time before they start adding fees. You could easily wind up paying $2 if you keep it a week longer than you should have. With ebooks, of course, there is no free borrowing (and the Nook feature it too limited to count.) And you of course know that most libraries are run by the government, so they have your address. Trying to circumvent a library’s DRM could wind up involving the police, so you had best comply.

Making copies of a paper book is expensive and requires specialized equipment, even if you just want a copy for backup.

Compatibility problems with paper books are rare, and are usually found among readers with poor eyesight. A few works can be found in “large font editions,” but most can’t, so those readers are left needing expensive specialty magnifiers.

All in all, I prefer reading books on my Kindle, but still read on paper when that’s how I have a book.

Review: A Christmas Carol

I guess you can say that A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens has been a success. It was published in 1843 and has never been out of print since then. It’s spawned all manner of plays, films, adaptations, and spoofs. It’s been adapted at least twice by Disney, once featuring Mickey Mouse and another time featuring Jim Carey. We’re almost inundated with the story — I’m not sure how many ways I’ve seen it. Yet I had never read the original story by Dickens until just now.

And I must say, what a treat it was. Despite knowing the plot in advance, it was a very good read. The 19th century London setting was done well. It wasn’t some idealized London as is often portrayed in film adaptations. It had depth, as did the characters. Dickens’ Scrooge had a troubled childhood, the son of poor and apparently abusive parents. He turned to business, with which he was successful. Along the way, he lost sight of family, and really of his humanity in general, striving to be a richer and more successful businessman at the cost of all else.

How apropos this story is for us in the 21st century. Our large banks define success in terms of profits made for their shareholders, while adding more gotchas to the terms of the credit cards held by their customers. Our governments play geopolitical games over weapons, oil, and gas, while unwilling to sacrifice anything to prevent a climate disaster. Our politicians, even in the season of Christmas, turn a blind eye and a cold heart to the suffering of those that can’t afford health care for naught but political reasons, rather than trying their hardest to make a plan that will help them reality as soon as possible.

And what of us, the citizens of the 21st century? We consume ever flashier cars, houses, computers, and cellphones with data plans, while poverty intensifies across the globe in this economic downturn.

Well, count me among those many inspired and reminded by Dickens to be a more empathetic person, to remember how good even many of the poor in the West have it compared to other parts of the world, and to try to do more for others.

And that, perhaps, is part of the genius of Dickens. He inspired a complete change of how people looked at Christmas in his time. And his work is no less relevant today; perhaps it hits even closer to home these days. He invites us to carefully consider the question: what does it mean to achieve success in life? And he deftly illustrates that “wealth” is wrong answer. Here’s hoping that many others will also learn a small bit about life from Dickens.

How to find it:

A Christmas Carol is available for free from Project Gutenberg for reading online, printing, or reading on an ebook reader such as the Kindle.

Be careful when buying printed editions. Many have been abridged or “improved for a modern audience”, and thus lose a lot of the quality of the original. I found at least one edition that looks true to the original; I’m sure there are others.

[This review also posted to Goodreads]

Apache Update

Thanks everyone for the helpful comments yesterday on Apache vs. lighttpd. I’ve taken the first few steps towards improving things. I’ve eliminated mod_php5, switched all PHP to FastCGI, and switched from the prefork to the event MPM.

The event MPM docs say that it’s incompatible with mod_ssl, but it worked, and googling for that turned up mailing list posts from 2006 saying it was fixed.

The only real glitch was that egroupware inexplicably depends on libapache2-mod-php5. It works fine without it, but I had to create a fakelibapache2-mod-php5 that provides libapache2-mod-php5 to convince the system not to remove egroupware when I switched to the event MPM.

I went from 28 Apache processes to 4 Apache processes plus an average of around 2 php5-cgi processes — which, despite the name, actually do grok FastCGI. Three of my Apache processes now have an RSS of about 20M, and the other of about 30M. The php5-cgi processes are at around 40M. My old Apache processes ranged from 18M to over 40M. So there is some memory savings here, though not drastic.

My Redmine processes, two of them, each use over 50M. Ruby on Rails still is leaving me with a bad taste. At least it’s not a Java app; it seems a lot of those allocate 2GB before they ever start accepting connections.

I’ll see how this goes for awhile, but for now I doubt that moving to lighttpd (or similar) will yield enough benefit to make it worth the effort. But there may be some benefit in inserting a caching proxy in front of Apache, so I may yet do that.

Apache vs. lighttpd

I’ve had a somewhat recurring problem that Apache on my server is a memory hog. The machine has a full GB of RAM now, but even so, heavy activity from spidering bots or reddit can bring it to its knees.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about it. I run Apache on there, and here’s an idea of what it hosts:

  • This blog, and two others like it, using WordPress
  • Several sites that are nothing but static files
  • gitweb
  • A redmine (ruby on rails) site
  • Several sites running MoinMoin
  • A set of tens of thousands of redirects from mailing list archives I used to host over to gmane (this had negligible impact on resource use when I added it)
  • A few other smaller PHP apps

Due to PHP limitations, it will only work with the Apache prefork or itk MPMs. That constrains the entire rest of the system to those particular MPMs. Other than PHP, most of the rest of these sites are running using FastCGI — that includes redmine and MoinMoin, although gitweb is a plain cgi. Many of these sites, such as this blog, have changed underlying software over the years, and I use mod_rewrite to issue permanent redirects from old URLs to their corresponding new ones as much as possible.

I do have two IPs allocated to the server, and so I can run multiple webservers if desired.

lighttpd is a lightweight webserver. I’ve browsed their documentation some, and I’m having a lot of trouble figuring out whether it would help me any. The way I see it, I have four options:

  1. Keep everything as it is now
  2. Stick with Apache, discard mod_php and use FastCGI for PHP, and pick some better MPM (whatever that might be)
  3. Keep Apache for PHP and move the rest to lighttpd
  4. Move everything to lighttpd, with FastCGI for PHP

I know Apache pretty well, and lighttpd not at all, so if all else is equal, I’d want to stick with Apache. But I’m certainly not above trying something else.

One other wrinkle is that right now everything runs as www-data — PHP, MoinMoin, static sites, everything. That makes me nervous, and I’d like to run some sites under different users for security. I’m not sure if Apache or lighttpd is better for that.

If anybody has thoughts, I’m all ears.

Ahh, updates…

It’s been awhile since I’ve made a blog post, and it will probably soon be evident why.

For myself, I am taking two college classes — philosophy and gerontology — this semester, and still working full time. That’s busy right there. I’m really enjoying them, and in particular enjoying the philosophy class. I will, at long last, graduate this December.

Oliver is about 3 months old now. He’s starting to smile at us more, make his cute little baby noises more, and is very interested in taking in all of his surroundings. He has his opinions about things, but isn’t expressing them too loudly just yet.

Jacob, on the other hand, is sometimes.

Our person from Parents As Teachers was talking to him for his 3-year-old evaluation. She said, “Jacob, are you a boy or a girl?” “I a kitty.” “Are you a boy kitty or a girl kitty?” “I just a PLAIN kitty. Meow.”

He seems to delight in catching someone saying or doing something in a manner he considers wrong. “No, not like THAT!” is heard a lot in our house these days. Or perhaps, “No, not RAILROAD tracks. They TRAIN tracks, dad!”

Jacob’s imagination is very active. Sometimes if it is time to go use the potty, he will insist that we all stop because a freight train is going through the kitchen, the crossing guard lights are flashing, so we have to STOP. He pretends to be kitties, runaway bunnies (he has a book called Runaway Bunny), and occasionally other things.

MoinMoin as a Personal Wiki, Zen To Done, And A Bit of Ikiwiki

Since I last evaluated and complained about wikis last year, I’ve been using moinmoin for two sites: a public one and a personal one.

The personal site has notes on various projects, and my task lists. I’ve been starting out with the Zen To Done (ebook, PDF, paper) idea. It sounds great, by the way; a nice improvement on the better-known GTD.

My To Do Page

Anyhow, in MoinMoin, I have a ToDos page. At the top are links to pages with different tasks: personal, work, yard, etc. Below that, are the three “big rocks” (as ZTD calls them) for the day: three main goals for the day. I edit that section every day.

The Calendar

And below that, I use MoinMoin’s excellent MonthCalendar macro. I have three calendars in a row: this month, next month, and last month. Each day on the calendar is a link to a wiki page; for instance, ToDos/Calendar/2009-10-01. The day has a red background if the wiki page exists, and white otherwise. So when I need to do something on or by a specific day, I click on the link, click my TaskTemplate, and create a simple wiki page. When I complete all the tasks for that day, I delete that day’s wiki page (and can note what I did as the log message if I like). Very slick.

The Task Lists

My task pages are similar. They look like this:


= Personal =

<<NewPage(TaskTemplate,Create new task,@SELF)>>

<<Navigation(children,1)>>
<<BR>>

So, my personal task page has a heading, then it has an input form with a text box and a button that says “Create new task.” Type something in and that becomes the name for a wiki page, and takes you do the editor to describe it. Below the button is a list of all the sub-pages under the Personal page, which represent the tasks. When a task is done, I delete the page and off the list it goes. I can move items from one list to another by renaming the page. It works very, very nicely.

Collecting

Part of both ZTD and GTD is that it must be very easy to get your thoughts down. The idea is that if you have to think, “I’ve got to remember this,” then you’ll be stressed and worried about the things you might be forgetting. I have a “Collecting” page, like the Personal or Work pages, that new items appear on when I’m not editing my wiki. They get there by email.

MoinMoin has a nice email system. I’ve set up a secret email address. Mail sent there goes directly into MoinMoin. It does some checks on it, then looks at a combination of the From and Subject lines to decide what to do with it. If I name an existing page, it will append my message the the end. If it’s a new page, it’ll create it. I have it set up so that it takes the subject line as a page name to create/append to under ToDos/Collecting/$subject (by putting that as the “name” on the To line).

So, on my computers, I have a “newtodo” script that invokes mail(1), asks for a subject, and optionally lets me supply a body. Quick and painless.

Also, I’ve added the address to my mobile phone’s address book. That way I don’t have to carry around pen and paper. Need to get down some thought ? No problem. Hit send email, pull the last address sent to, give it a subject and maybe a body. Very slick.

Wiki Software

As a way of updating my posts from last year: I’ve been very happy with MoinMoin overall. It has some oddities, and the biggest one that concerns me is its attachment support. It doesn’t let you specify a maximum upload size, and doesn’t very well let you restrict attachment work to only certain people. But the biggest problem is that it doesn’t track history on attachments. If a vandal deletes the attachment on a page, it’s GONE. They expect to have that fixed in 2.0, coming out in approximately November, 2010.

I also looked at Ikiwiki carefully over the past few days. Several things impressed me. First, everything can be in git. This makes for a very nice offline mode, better than Moin’s offline sync. The comment module is nicer than anything in Moin, and the tagging system is as well. Ikiwiki truly could make a nice blog, and Moin just couldn’t. It also puts backlinks at the bottom of each page automatically, a nice feature. And it’s by Joey Hess, who writes very solid software.

There are also some drawbacks. Chief on that list is that ikiwiki has no built-in history of a page feature. Click History and it expects to take you to gitweb or ViewVC or some such tool. That means that reverting a page requires either git access or cut and pasting. That’s fine for me, but throwing newbies to gitweb suddenly might not be the most easy. Since ikiwiki is a (very smart) wiki compiler, its permission system is a lot less powerful than Moin’s, and notably can’t control read access to pages at all. If you need to do that, you’d have to do it at the webserver level. It does have a calendar, but not one that works like Moin’s does, though I could probably write one easily enough based on what’s there.

A few other minor nits: the email receiving feature is not as versatile as Moin’s, you can’t subscribe to get email notifications on certain pages (RSS feeds only, which would have to be manually tweaked later), and you can’t easily modify the links at the top of each page or create personal bookmarks.

Ikiwiki looks like an excellent tool, but just not quite the right fit for my needs right at the moment. I’ve also started to look at DokuWiki a bit. I was initially scared off by all the plugins I’d have to use, but it does look like a nice software.

I also re-visited MediaWiki, and once again concluded that it is way too complicated for its own good. There are something like a dozen calendar plugins for it, some of which even are thought to work. The one that looked like the one I’d use had a 7-step (2-page) installation process that involved manually running SQL commands and cutting and pasting some obscure HTML code with macros in it. No thanks.