Month: August 2002

Zoe on FreeBSD means Java

To make Zoe (hmm, how to do an umlaut on an X display?) work, I needed Java to work, and as it turns out, it had to be 1.3.1, not 1.4.

The FreeBSD Ports Collection makes this a snap. cd /usr/ports/java/linux-sun-jdk13 and run make.

You'll need to agree to Sun's Community License and download the source from them.


===> linux-sun-jdk-1.3.1.04_1 You must manually fetch the Java 2 Development Kit 1.3.1.04 archive (j2sdk-1_3_1_04-linux-i586.bin) from http://java.sun.com/Download5?config-file=j2sdk-1_3_1_04.config&platform=linux-i586&Download=download, download the Linux GNUZIP Tar shell script into /usr/ports/distfiles and then run make again.

Couple of potential problems I found:


  • This will require the Linux compatibility stuff so you may find a raft of dependencies need to be resolved. If you have already handled this for some prior install, you'll skip it this time.
    You might want to make a link from /usr/compat/linux/var/lib/rpm to /var/lib.
  • You'll need to make link from where the java stuff gets installed to someplace where you can find it:
    rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 38 Aug 22 07:41 /usr/local/bin/java -> /usr/local/linux-sun-jdk1.3.1/bin/java

    The benefit to this is that you can then upgrade to the 1.4 release and simply move the link to point to it: if you need to roll back swap the link back.

When 1.4 failed to work, I filed a bug report with Sun and they suggested I try an RC they're making available. More on that later . . . .

another look at Zoë

Yesterday’s comments were spare and unclear: I could blame this hellish cold, but anyone reading the other entries here will wonder what my excuse is for those.

So I have thought about Zoë and what it might mean, with the aid of store-brand TheraFlu. I like the possibilities it offers for seeing your email as another kind of content that you can navigate non-linearly. I like how it pulls out information like contributors’ names, mailing list names, threads. It views email as an organic, unending thing, as opposed to a bunch of separate artifacts.

It eschews filters, which I’m not sure I like. I think we all get some email (perhaps administrative mail from some process or updates from services) which we filter out of our inbox: Zoë doesn’t support that.

I haven’t lived in it yet, so I can’t say anything about stability, but it is an early release (version 0.2.2).

Added benefit: take the rdf file that Zoë creates and let NetNewsWire handle it for you.

The whole shebang is licensable under Apple’s Apple Public Source License version 1.2. I am not a lawyer, so I won’t presume to know more than where to find it, but even if the terms are not as unencumbered as the BSD and GNU licences, sorta free is a good start. I’m not seeing that kind of openness from The Leading Brand. Their notion of licensing is a little different.

intertwingledness

Zoë

Zoë is a combination of Google and the fundamental building block of the web: the hyperlink. First Google. [ . . ] But once again, the only UI manifestation of it is this humbly looking text field saying: “Do you need something?”.

I am late to get on the Zoë train, but I guess that has a lot to do with it’s hard-to-define nature. It’s like the 5 blind men and the elephant . . . to one, it’s an email server, to another it’s a search engine, to the third an email client . .. .

I wish I had some of my massive email archives from CNN or FizzyLab to dump into it . . . . but even the small amount of stuff I have on hand is enough to see what it can do.

If I was writing the brochure copy, how would I define Zoë?

It’s a web application that enables you to navigate, search, and explore your email with an easy to understand interface and a lot of parsing intelligence.

But seeing is believing: it’s so easy to set up and run (I got it running on OS X and FreeBSD in minutes), you ought to take a look.

obituary

Obituaries (07/30/02)
BEARD, K. Anne K. Anne Beard (nee Hennessey), age 64 years, after a short battle with cancer. Survived by her daughter Sarah and relatives from the U.K. A past member of the Real Estate and Property Management community for over 30 years. A Memorial Service will be held at the Pinecrest Cemetery Chapel (2500 Baseline Rd., Ottawa) on Wednesday, July 31, at 7 p.m. A reception wil follow at the Pinecrest Cemetery Reception Centre. Donations to Ferne Animal Sanctuary, Warmbrook, Chard, Somerset, England TA20 3DH, e-mail: ferne@eurobell.co.uk
The Ottawa Citizen, Area Code 613

I’m not surprised to be omitted.

another of nature’s perfect foods

McVitie’s Milk Chocolate Ginger Nuts – Review

Another interesting attempt from the team at McVitie’s – their current game plan appears to be “take any flavour of biscuit and see if sticking a layer of chocolate on the top makes it better”. It must be said that chocolate and ginger is not a combination which springs readily to mind – however, let’s see how they got on, shall we?

I thought it was just me wondering why McVities seems to do just that: add chocolate to any product. In some cases, it doesn’t work (Hob Nobs, for example, need no improvement), but these do. The mixture of ginger and chocolate seems to create an orange aroma and flavor, ever so subtle, but noticeable. But that by no means detracts from these jewels: they’re very good.

fink and LyX: resolved

Well, I got it installed, but in a roundabout way. I tried a couple of things at the suggestion of the maintainer, but nothing worked.

I found a page linked from the LyX site that mentioned using FinkCommander, a GUI for fink, to install LyX.

I had never tried FinkCommander and installed it today. Then I tried installing LyX again. Doing it this way raised more dependencies. A-ha!

The following package will be installed or updated:
lyx
The following 4 additional packages will be installed:
gv xaw3d xdvi xfree86-base

This time it worked, right down to the xfree86-base install.

It also needed to install the xforms libraries but that was easily handled.

My guess is the dependency data isn’t being handled correctly, but why the Commander succeeds where the cli version fails is beyond me.

The principal benefit to using a packaging system isn’t the ease with which you install binaries — tarballs are fine for that — but to keep track of dependencies and version issues so you can maintain your system.

FinkCommander looks useful and it seems to work well, better than the cli version. And one of my favorite uses of a GUI is to learn the cli syntax from it, and FC supports that.

document processing with LyX

LyX – What is LyX?

Many commercial word processors are based on the WYSIWYG principle: “What You See Is What You Get.” LyX, on the other hand, is based on the principle that “What You See Is What You Mean.” You type what you mean, and LyX will take care of typesetting it for you, so that the output looks nice. A Return grammatically separates paragraphs, and a Space grammatically separates words, so there is no reason to have several of them in a row; a Tab has no grammatical function at all, so LyX does not support it. Using LyX, you’ll spend more of your time worrying about the content of your document, and less time worrying about the format.

No, I didn’t get it working on OS X yet, but working with it on FreeBSD is pretty fun. It’s about time someone made an editing tool that did most of the work . . . .

MovableType and sendmail at loggerheads

For some reason, MT stopped sending me any notifications of new comments posted here: annoying, that.

I never figured out why, but I worked around it. The docs say that you can use your host machine’s sendmail daemon or install the Mail::SendMail perl module and use another mail server. I chose that and use my cable modem/ISP’s mail server and all seems well now.

I did the usual tests (sendmail -bv www, cat /etc/hosts | mail www ) and they always worked (www is the username that should get all the comments): it’s assigned to a different address in /etc/aliases that seems to work just fine.