Matthew Todd

Update: The Perquackey site works a lot better now—I’ve just switched to a better word list and made the dictionary lookup much faster!

Valerie’s parents were here visiting for a few weeks, during which time her mom and I played Perquackey every chance we got.

Perquackey, pictured above, is a word-spelling game like Boggle, except word length matters, so you take more time to think.

Update: My bad. Alan Hensel points out that word length does matter in Boggle. What’s additionally true about Perquackey is that it limits you to spelling just 5 words of a given length.

Smack

Which, apparently, gives you more time for trash-talking. Weeks before their arrival, I started getting gems like this in my inbox:

Perquackey players like you don’t grow on trees. They swing from them.

And, well, you just can’t let something like that slide. After the inevitable escalation, we’d raised the medium to an art form:

In the great wild Serengett,
A dik dik grazes, ’till he’s met in
Millisecond lightning flash,
Tim-tumbled over, turned to
Hash.

Eaten live by
Powerful beast,

Eviscerated
Raw, deceased.

Quite the scene
Under the sun,
Although another “death” shall
Come, when self-appointed Queen Per-
Kathy, unsuspecting,
Minces daftly,
Aligning letters one by one,
Slowly, surely, not much fun.

Then sit I in to take my turn
Egads! How did this kid here learn?
Round one completed, so the game,
Your skills shown up to be quite lame.

Ouch.

The alert reader will note the first letters of each line spell out “I am the perquackmaster, yo.”

Style

Sadly, though, age and treachery won out over youth and intelligence. But I held my own spelling interesting words. Between the two of us, “style points” were awarded for archaic, aplomb, axioms, eclipse, imbues, poseur, pundit, urethra.

perquackey.matthewtodd.org

Finally, when the time runs out, you always wonder what you missed, so I’ve written a Perquackey word looker-upper.

It’s a little slow, but I’m working on it. (On a geek note, the best change so far has been splitting a string into letters with unpack 'c*' instead of split //—that way, I’m comparing letters as integers rather than strings of length 1.)

Yesterday I had a fair bit of difficulty because the app server I was setting up with deprec lives behind an http proxy.

Normally, you’d hope to just set an HTTP_PROXY environment variable and be done, but it’s a little tricky to figure out where, since (1) commands run over ssh receive a somewhat limited set of environment variables, and (2) deprec runs wget inside the even more limited environment of sh -c.

Here’s what I did:

Set Up ssh Environment

Create ~/.ssh/environment on the server, chmod 600, with the line

HTTP_PROXY=http://proxy:8080

And in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, set

PermitUserEnvironment yes

This’ll take care of apt-get and gem’s proxy needs, but then you’ll still need to:

Configure wget

Modify /etc/wgetrc so that it contains

http_proxy = http://proxy:8080

Done!

It seems like everything is easy, once you find the right 3 lines of code…