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.

summer pudding

An easy one, and just the thing to use up lots of ripe fruit.

You need some bread, half a loaf or so, commercial cotton bread if that’s all you have, and 4 – 6 cups of fruit. Your choice of raspberries, strawberries, blackberries (any variety), peaches, nectarines, plums, whatever. Skin the peaches, nectarines, plums. Frozen fruit is fine as well.

Take a large bowl/pudding basin, and line it with de-crusted slices of the bread, cut to fit like a jigsaw puzzle, in a single layer. Put all the fruit in a large saucepan with 1 cup sugar and 3 tbsp of lemon juice and bring to a gentle boil, then simmer a few minutes.

Pour a third of the fruit mixture into the bowl, and top with more bread slices, again cutting to fit in a single layer. Repeat twice more.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and cover with a pan that will fit inside the inner diameter of the bowl. A cake pan should work if you have the right size. Press it down firmly, add 2 pounds of weight to it (2 lbs rice or sugar in a bag is fine).

Refrigerate overnight, or up to 24 hours.

Remove the weight and pan, and unmold onto a plate. It may take some persuading: the recipe I used suggested lining the bowl with plastic first, but I didn’t need it.

Variations: for bread, substitute angel food cake or ladyfingers.

Adapted from The Joy of Cooking.

faces

gladwell dot com / The Naked Face

That’s when I realized, “I’ve got to unpack the face.’

Fascinating article. I’m trying to understand the relationship between that and this.

From bradandkathy.com: Chernoff faces are simplified, cartoon-like faces that can be used to graphically display complex multivariate data. They draw upon the human mind’s innate ability to recognize small differences in facial characteristics and to assimilate many facial characteristics at once.

from Frank

tidying up old cruft

In the process of hosting the Oblique Strategies stuff, I found that the randomizer wasn’t very random. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff you find on the Internet is out of date: this is an example. This code dates from 1996, an eternity ago.

From the srand page at www.perldoc.com:

Note that you need something much more random than the default seed for cryptographic purposes. Checksumming the compressed output of one or more rapidly changing operating system status programs is the usual method. For example:

srand (time ^ $$ ^ unpack “%L*”, `ps axww | gzip`);

Seems to work much better now.