Month: August 2002

in search of a reliable packaging system for Darwin/OS X

Well, it appears fink will need to be reinstalled if I ever want to update anything I have currently under its care.

That’s annoying, to say the least. To rebuild everything last week took 24 hours, even after I updated the stale .info file for tar.

I have today removed xfree86 with dpkg –remove –force-depends xfree86-base and then set about rebuilding it from scratch. It seemed like it was going to work, but something still not right.

I may take a look at fink’s Engine.pm, which is where the error message appears: maybe I can figure out what conditions trigger it.

There are some other contenders: perhaps the GNU-Darwin collection has matured enough to try again. Having access to the FreeBSD ports collection would be nice.

There’s also a move to port Gentoo Linux’s Portage system to Darwin/OS X. You can find out more about it here and here.

where fink doesn’t work

I have this error message:

Failed: Internal error: node for xfree86-base already exists

After a lot of wrangling and research, it looks like my fink installation is wedged in such a way as to prevent me doing further updates: I have packages installed for which newer versions exist but they are never updated when I update from CVS.

And no one on the fink team can identify the problem or suggest solutions: “do it again” seems the most common refrain, followed closely “it works for me, it’s your problem.”

I have lobbied for fink to become the default packaging system for OS X going forward, but perhaps it’s not as fully-baked as I thought it was.

This is the only page Google can find on this topic: I feel so special.
Continue reading “where fink doesn’t work”

friend of a friend web

This seems interesting . . . . .

FOAFBot: IRC Community Support Agent

A FOAFBot instance is running on the #foaf channel on the OpenProjects IRC network, irc://irc.openprojects.net/foaf

The bot can be interrogated with simple questions about the properties of community members. People can be identified either by their IRC nick, full name, or email address:


<edd> foafbot, edd’s name
<foafbot> edd’s name is ‘Edd Dumbill’, according to Dan Brickley,
Anon35, Niel Bornstein, Jo Walsh, Dave Beckett, Edd Dumbill,
Matt Biddulph, Paul Ford

So I found myself being dragged into a tedious pissing contest (please contain your surprise) on a mailing list (I have since unsubscribed: if people have nothing to contribute, why can’t they just shut up?), and in the course of it I was sent a URL from http://makeashorterlink.com/?Y22052D71. Seems my antagonist thought I could be more pleasant as I pointed out that his project’s manual pages were wrong, the documentation was lacking, and no one seemed to have any answers.

Whatever. I found this ShorterLink stuff somewhat interesting and the FOAF stuff even more so.

Perhaps a non-commercial variant of Amazon’s friends list . . . .

And now I have my own ShorterLink.

blackberry harvesting

went out this morning with 3 half-gallon berry buckets (half-gallon milk cartons with the tops cut off) and came back with 1 bucket and 2 children filled to the top.

I’m freezing a bunch of berries (like half of them) and will bake the rest in a peach or nectarine and blackberry crostada, a kind of open fruit tart/fruit pizza on a crisp pastry crust. Have I mentioned how I love summer fruit?

bike testing

LeMond Racing Cycles 2002: Bikes: Reynolds 853 Pro: Zürich

Zürich

Our best selling LeMond- and for good reason.

I rode one of these yesterday: Oh, my goodness. Just a joy to ride. I’m thinking of going back for another test ride, but do I want to torture myself? A mere nine hundred dollars stands between me and it: I could get something nice for the half that, I know, so it’s not that bad.

I also rode a Giant OCR 3 ( a mere $550), and didn’t like it as much.

the interview from Hell

A friend writes . . . . .

. . . . the [] interview was stupid. as far as answering their technical
questions, i did fine – they’re not doing anything tricky. and i had some
good talk with a few of the people i interviewed with, but i really don’t
like it when people expect me to answer questions from a stack of trivial
pursuit cards. or defend my personal choice of beer and linux
distribution.

And I thought those days were over . . . . .

spiders and threads

Nicest of the Damned: Nice spider…

The question becomes, “should everyone on the web be sending out spiders?”

Or, another way to look at it: maybe a few people run spiders and the rest of us subscribe to them? It’s another aggregator, but based on content/context, rather than novelty. You get to unravel the web and weave your own.

I’m not opposed to spiders — they’re just fast automagic browsers — but I’d be concerned if there was a lot of repetitive crawling.

Another aspect of this would having it learn or suggest keywords based on a thesaurus or even note new words in proximity with your keywords: using the EvilBot, if bin Laden drops off the index of evil, perhaps he’s replaced by someone else and their name is suggested to you as a possible additional keyword.