Syndicate Me!

by popular demand, i now have a link to this site's xml feed on the front page of this blog.

of course, if more people used rss syndicators that supported auto-discovery (like say NetNewsWire), then this would be less of a problem ;-)

New Toys

so i started playing around with darwinports. it's pretty neat so far. a little raw, still lacking a fair amount of functionality and a lot of documentation, but it works well enough that random programmer types (like me for instance) can play with it.

i put together ports for expat and neon, which haven't gone in yet, and chef, which has (since jkh has a sense of humor). hopefully i'll get subversion going soon, although it'll have to be a network only build for now, since dp has version 4.1 of berkeley db, and we don't support that yet...

unfotunately, the opendarwin.org site seems to have fallen off the net for some reason, so my progress has stalled a bit...

Third Party Software

why is it that like 80% of my problems at work can be traced to third party code i have no control over and no access to?

damn that's annoying.

doesn't anyone make software that JUST FUCKING WORKS?

sorry for shouting.

thanks.

Catch Up

i haven't written anything here in a while...

but looking back on the last few weeks, i can't think of anything especially interesting that's happened, so i guess this will be an exceptionally dull entry.

yep. pretty dull.

i'm going to get back to waiting for buffy to come on and hacking on my toy project. i'm writing a chat client/server system with apr, since there are a lot of parts of it that i don't get to use in my subversion coding. overall, i'm reasonably impressesd. there could stand to be more documentation, and the header files are a bit oddly named sometimes, but other than that, it rocks.

Free The Mouse!

a good article at wired about Laurence Lessig's career. very interesting, especially since the supreme court will be hearing his arguments in eldred v. ashcroft on oct 9.

I Am The Keymaster

it is just the coolest thing that all XUL files have the namespace http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul.

i am definately going to have to pick up the O'Reilly's Book on building applications with mozilla just based on this fact. these people have enough of a sense of humor that i feel compelled to support them by purchasing the book ;-)

Curses, Foiled Again!

so jerenkrantz tried to release apr-util-0.9.1 today, but the build is busted in at least two places.

first, it depends on the install.sh script from the apr tarball, but the release version of the apr tarball is in a different location than the cvs version would be, and the path is hardcoded.

if you rename directories to get past this hurdle, the configure script errors out. i can rebuild the script myself, and then it works, but out of the box it's fucked. i wonder what version of autoconf he used to roll the release...

anyway, at least people are making some progress on it, as it will be nice to have release versions of both apr and apr-util out there.

Will Sell Soul For Debugging Tools

i am in love with purify.

rational is general an evil company, and all their other tools i've encountered suck horribly, but this one just kicks so much ass.

i'm going to see if it's possible for us to trade ben to them for a single user license. i like ben and all, but i think purify is worth losing him. it's too bad, since we'll have to find another windows weenie to replace him, but these are the prices we have to pay...

#include <witty title here>

isn't it just a little depressing that my blog only has three categories?

work, general, and coding. is that all my life is made up of?

of course, general could be broken up into other categories...

friends. love (a rather dull category these days, unless you count ex-girlfriends who occasionally get themselves stuck in my head for no adequately explained reason (i wonder if any of them read this... maybe. probably not though...)). family. rants. i'm sure there are others.

but when i started this thing, i lumped it all into 'general'.

even more proof that i need to get a life.

i'm still not overly happy with life in stamford.

i don't have any really good reason for this, i mean i've got a good job, working with (mostly) cool people. i have some reasonably good friends (hell, they'd likely be great friends if i didn't spend most of my time succumbing to my techno-geek reclusive tendencies), there's a million things to do if i just went out to find it, but still...

i keep dwelling on the negative things about living here.

everything is really fucking expensive. i pay way too much for rent. i could solve this problem by moving somewhere cheaper, but then i'd be living in the middle of nowhere and spending my life commuting, which i would hate.

the only place you can really find something interesting to do is in the city, which means an hour there and an hour back on the train. when you move here, they tell you 'and NYC is just a short train ride away', but for me, it's a long enough ride that it makes it annoying enough that i hardly ever do it.

worst of all, most of my really close friends are elsewhere. there's godfrc, but she's got jettea, and i /hate/ doing the third wheel thing. other than her though, everyone's either back in troy, or out in/near boston, or scattered across the country here and there. i really miss them all. this becomes more and more clear every time i see them. it seems like every other weekend i end up hanging out with the old crew for one reason or another, and having a great time, and then i come back here and get annoyed that i can't do that all the time.

ok, i'll stop now, because i'm just bitching at this point, and it isn't going to solve anything.

but thanks (whoever you are) for letting me vent for a bit.

i needed that.

Weekends

it's been a reasonably slow weekend.

i didn't get the work done that i intended to, since for some reason i couldn't VPN in this afternoon. i don't know what was up with it, since i was able to connect in the morning just fine. the only thing i can think of is that i upgraded the firmware on the wireless router (which has apparently stopped it from locking up), and perhaps that is interacting oddly with the VPN stuff. i will have to investigate further, since i kind of need to be able to VPN in from home...

instead i ended up playing with subversion's build system, with the end result being that you can now turn off the building of the swig bindings. as a bonus, you can also specify an alternative swig, which i don't particularly need, but other people asked for.

i also picked up 'super mario sunshine', which has a stupid title, but is a reasonably fun game. i'm pretty bad at it, but i think i'm improving, slowly...

then i hung out at JATKINS' place tonight, and played trivial pursuit. i lost, but it was a good time. he's been having these sunday night 'games night' things for a while, and this is the first time i've been able to go. i think i'll definately be going again in the future, assuming i'm in town on sunday night.

Apache 2.0 Rocks!

and if you need further proof of this, check out this article on how to write an extension to it.

neat stuff.

Damn

i'd just like to point out that it /really/ feels like friday, but it isn't.

that really really sucks.

oh well.

Still Alive...

so it's been a while.

lets see, what's happened lately...

went to joe's wedding. that was cool. had to wear a tux. that wasn't.

started using chimera again. i like it a lot. i'm starting to see why people like tabbed browsing.

i really should get something done tonight, but i think i'll just sit here and watch tv.