A procession of one

One the many hilarious phrases by P.G. Wodehouse that I remember is ``a dignified procession of one'' describing the butler entering a room. It appeared in ``Leave it to Psmith'' which was first published in the UK in 1923. See also PG Wodehouse's creative writing lessons from the Guardian's PG Wodehouse Reading group.

The other day, I read about another novel, ``I live under a black sun'' by Edith Sitwell, in ``Facades: Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell'' by John George Pearson. There, on page 324, is a quote from ``I live under a black sun'' describing a character, based on her father, as ``pacing around the house like a procession of one person''.

This aroused my curiosity about who used this funny expression first: clearly it was not Edith Sitwell because ``I live under a black sun'' was first published in 1937, well after ``Leave it to Psmith'' (1923).

However, it turns out that the expression is much older: thanks to Project Gutenberg , it is easy to find an e-book version of ``The Diary of a Goose Girl'' published in 1902 by the author of children's stories Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin where it occurs in the following sentence about a cock:

In short, I dislike him; his swagger, his autocratic strut, his greed, his irritating self-consciousness, his endless parading of himself up and down in a procession of one.

It should be noted that there is also a relatively recent (2000) book with the title ``A Procession of One'' by Evelyn Hood.

I wonder whether Edith Sitwell picked up the phrase from P.G. Wodehouse or from Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin, and whether P.G. Wodehouse was inspired by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin. Not that it matters, of the 3 books, ``Leave it to Psmith'' is probably the only one that stood the test of time and is still strongly recommended reading, as are most books by P.G. Wodehouse.

Viewing markdown files in chrome or chromium

You would think that this feature, formatting marked down texts as HTML,  would be built in, i.e. going to

         file:///home/me/project/README.md

would transform markdown "lightweight markup" to HTML. E.g. the marked down text below

---

# Scripts and Makefile to install tools

Just typing
```
make
```
will install the packages x, y and z globally, 
i.e. in [/usr/local/bin](/usr/local/bin) and friends. You can install
things separately as well, e.g. the following will all work as expected.
``` bash
make x
make y
make z
```
[Make](https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html) is a very old 
but extremely powerful tool to manage (re)creating things that have 
dependencies.

---

should result in a nicely formatted html page like so:

Unfortunately, chrome does not do that. So we look for an extension that will do the job of converting every file with a name ending with ".md" to html as illustrated above. Pointing your browser to chrome://extensions/ will show you the extensions that you already have installed. At the end there is a link "Get more extensions"  that points to the Chrome web store. The upper left corner there contains an input text area to specify what you are looking for. Thus searching for "markdown" yields -- at the time of writing this post -- exactly 2 candidate extensions, namely "Markdown Preview Plus" by www.ooso.net   and "Markdown Preview" by Boris Smus.

Both are free and claim exactly the same: "Converts and previews markdown files (.md, .markdown) to HTML right inside Chrome.".

The difference is that the first one, "Markdown Preview Plus" works while the other one doesn't. Moreover, it seems that the "Plus" one is actively developed on GitHub. In fact, we can safely assume that the "Plus" version is the successor of the other one which had a last commit on github in 2013. On the "Plus" github site, it is explicitly stated that the extension is a fork of the original one by Boris Smus.

Anyway, problem solved.

PS The first release of Make dates from 1977, thus it is 40 years old at the time of this writing. It must do something good, compare to many other 'tools/languages/..' of the day that quickly fade into oblivion.