sawyl | Matplotlib, backfill, syllables and all sorts...

I'm so glad today's a rest day: what with all the early mornings and busy evenings I'm more than a little in need of a quite evening of inactivity and a timely retreat to bed. So in lieu of any real content, here are five things:

I've discovered a workaround for a minor but annoying bug in matplotlib that causes a set of rotated text elements to overlay each other when written out to a PNG; simply changing the format to SVG is sufficient to fix the problem
my toy backfill model is more or less finished, although I still need a sensible way to build a representative population of jobs. I think wikipedia's page on gamma distributions has everything I need
syllables, it transpires, are much trickier than they seem
thanks to yet another torn fingernail — which I initially caused climbing and worstened by catching on a bit of furniture — coupled with an bout of mouth ulcers that, given their usual inexorable development, promise to get worse before they get better, I'm feeling just a bit sorry for myself
I'm really enjoying Rachel Aaron's Eli Monpress novels, especially the way the tone has gradually darkened from the light-hearted caper of the first book to the point where something positively apocalyptic seems to be waiting in the wings

ETA: Posted from the future because I forgot to put it up on the day itself...