the classical humour of Mark Twain

the other day I was reading this Adventures of Hucklebery Finn by Mark Twain
after a long long time and couldn't but help appreciate his subtle humour.
Here's a piece of conversation between Huck and the pig headed, good hearted
nigger - Jim ....

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"Well, I don't know. Some of them gets on the police, and some of them learns people how to talk French."
"Why, Huck, doan' de French people talk de same way we does?"
"NO, Jim; you couldn't understand a word they said -- not a single word."
"Well, now, I be ding-busted! How do dat come?"
"I don't know; but it's so. I got some of their jabber out of a book. S'pose a man was to come to you and say Polly-voo-franzy -- what would you think?"
"I wouldn' think nuff'n; I'd take en bust him over de head -- dat is, if he warn't white. I wouldn't 'low no nigger to call me dat."
"Shucks, it ain't calling you anything. It's only saying, do you know how to talk French?"
"Well, den, why couldn't he SAY it?"
"Why, he IS a-saying it. That's a Frenchman's WAY of saying it."
"Well, it's a blame ridicklous way, en I doan' want to hear no mo' 'bout it. Dey ain' no sense in it."
"Looky here, Jim; does a cat talk like we do?"
"No, a cat don't."
"Well, does a cow?"
"No, a cow don't, nuther."
"Does a cat talk like a cow, or a cow talk like a cat?"
"No, dey don't."
"It's natural and right for 'em to talk different from each other, ain't it?"
"Course."
"And ain't it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk different from us?"
"Why, mos' sholy it is."
"Well, then, why ain't it natural and right for a FRENCHMAN to talk different from us? You answer me that."
"Is a cat a man, Huck?"
"No."
"Well, den, dey ain't no sense in a cat talkin' like a man. Is a cow a man? -- er is a cow a cat?"
"No, she ain't either of them."
"Well, den, she ain't got no business to talk like either one er the yuther of 'em. Is a Frenchman a man?"
"Yes."
"WELL, den ... Dad blame it, why doan' he TALK like a man? You answer me DAT!"

I see it warn't no use wasting words -- you can't learn a nigger to argue. So I quit.
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This is the sort of humour that makes u feel pleasent about life and its mundane subtleities.
You wouldn't be rolling on your bed catching your stomach and laughing out loud .. but it
makes your mind smile .. as one of my friends put it to me some years back.

the dbus daemon

funny thing we don't seem to care exactly about those things that we use so often.
software is no exception to this general statement made above.
It was just a week back that I knew about piece of software called dbus,
which seemingly is responsibel for a hell lot of nice things that happen on a desktop.
Not an uncommon sight in open source, it's current version is not even stable.
the API's are not complete (dbus-0.5). Yet there are loads of things that depend on it ..
There is a library called 'libnotify' that uses dbus very tightly. Some of the desktops
like GNOME and KDE run 2 instances of this daemon - one for system use and another
for user. ok now .. all that hype apart ... what is dbus ?
to put it raw - a message passing type of IPC system and a lot lot more than that.
when I said desktops use a dbus daemon for system - i meant things such as event
occurences ... (like .. "new USB device detected", "keyboard unplugged" so on and so forth)
the next question that comes to a logical mind is why .... why ..... WHY dbus ?
(a little more knowledgeable mind spits out words like CORBA, IPC, RPC, SOAP)
the thing is ... dbus is tailorcoded (if i may borrow the expression) for talks between
desktop applications *in a session*. open source CORBA or bonobo is an overkill for
such type of applications....
lot of "nice" things can be done over a desktop with dbus API. should find some time
to poke around this a bit ... hmm...

testing gnome-blog-poster

this post is for testing the working of gnome-blog-poster

love to see it work .. :-)