the art of writing is discovering what you believe
With my recent fixes, core-8-4-branch of Tcl/Tk Aqua builds once again on 10.1, I don’t have time to provide a binary distro of this however.
Someone has already gotten Tcl/TK patched for Darwin 1.4.1/OS X 10.1.x. I’ll see if this makes my fink struggle unnecessary.
<UPDATE> Here are step-by-step instructions.
ongoing -· Do Databases Suck?
The Moral of the Story Databases suck. Except when they don’t
Databases don’t have to suck, but in many cases they do. Depends on how often you end up using the slowest components. Since Tim’s piece mentions bulk-loading as taking a long time, that suggests a lot of disk activity — writing records, updating indices — and that’s a performance killer.
Contrast that with this view:
“I just got a new Mac with two 2-gigahertz processors, 8 gigabytes of memory, and a half a terabyte of internal disk,” [Bill Joy] said, describing his Power Mac G5. “… So you have the ability to hold a huge simulation all in memory — a database becomes a data structure. Add 64-bit computing and I can do breathtaking visualization.”
Not that I want to plug OS X — there are other ways of doing this, of course — but this is reminiscent of the information retrieval startup I was working at 3 years ago (this is memory lane week, apparently. The salient lesson from that experience seems to be that any technology can be misused . . . . ).
RAM is always faster than disk, but more expensive, so in the context of your overall design, you end up with the age-old question: cheap, fast, or good, choose any two.
Going to an in-memory database or some way of scaling up from the limitations of a single box was the way to go. There was a recent article where Google may be hitting the 32 bit limit on article identifiers. I would guess they’re doing some really cool stuff in memory, like sharing cached results and the like.
Well, after a couple of attempts at installing tcltk (so I can install and run darwinports) the dependencies have been whittled down from 31 to 12.
The following 12 additional packages will be installed:
anacron daemonic findutils libxml2 libxml2-bin libxml2-shlibs man python-nox
tcltk-dev tcltk-shlibs xfree86-base zlib
I’m going to divide and conquer here and see what happens: I’ll see if I can get xfree86-base to build and if it fails (my suspicion is that it’s gumming up the works), I’ll install a binary version and work around it.
The other alternative is to punt on fink altogether and see if there’s a way to install tcltk from source: I tried that first but it failed and I went with fink, thinking it might be easier. That may not have been the right way to go after all. I don’t want to install a myriad of unnecessary dependencies. I should know how this all works out by the end of today.
Plain English Campaign: Annual Awards
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at press briefing in 2003. This quote was selected as the 2003 “Foot in Mouth” award winner.
This kind of obfuscated gibberish is more common than we realize. At the startup I worked at 2000, the VP of engineering referred to “unk unks” or unknown unknowns. That was my first exposure to that, but I’m guessing it’s not uncommon in the defense/aerospace establishment (that fellow was a Boeing alumnus).
94.9 KUOW: Seattle’s NPR News and Information Station
Are Liberals Too Nice?
Do liberals need to adopt more of the attack dog tactics of conservatives? Veteran strategist Democratic National Committee Ann Lewis says yes, Democrats have been too nice.
Now the official party weblog is called ”Kicking Ass”. A liberal group is closing deals on five radio stations to start their own liberal talk show network designed to counter Rush Limbaugh and his local minions. Veteran conservative organizer Paul Weyrich says Republicans had better worry because angry people are motivated to get out and vote. But does anger work for liberals? It stirs up the troops to heap invective on your opponents, but can it create backlash? Will it turn off Americans in the middle? Is there something illiberal about ceaseless aggression?
Continue reading “Democrats looking to kick ass”
Localfeeds is now working for me. I got a note from the proprietor explaining where the problem was.
I fixed the problem you were having with Localfeeds– it was partially my fault and partially yours.
Even though I don’t advertise the fact, Localfeeds reads geo.position as well as GeoURL-style ICBM. Since your geo.position comes after the ICBM, it was overriding the perfectly valid ICBM with an invalid geo.position.
Your geo.position tag is invalid because the tag is not supposed to include the compass directions “N” and “W” , as you can see with these examples:
http://geotags.com/geo/geotags2.html
What I did to make this work is make it so my script does not read geo.position if ICBM has already been defined.
I think I have a mish-mash of stuff defined in the head section of my pages, using information from different sources. But for now, it seems to be working. Thanks, Ross.