powernerd

Accomplished a lot today, even though no outward progress was made. I'm sleepy, but if I don't write all this down now I'll regret it later. Warning: xtreme nerd kontent follows, until the <hr>.

So, after months of longing, my iBook is finally the programming powerhouse I've always wanted it to be: it has Apache running mod_perl, and the Gnome project's libxml2 and libxslt libraries, along with their respective Perl APIs. I realize as I write this that I still need MySQL on this thing before it's truly a full-on self-contained portable LAMP development machine, but it's now quite capable of letting me perform all the hacking I'll need to finish The Book locally, wherever I am, and that's a good thing.

mod_perl I was just too timid to try installing before this week, but after Andy forwarded me a mailing-list message from Randal Schwartz proclaiming that he got it to install after a day of tweaking, I knew it was possible. Unfortunately, I dunno what path Randal was running down; I couldn't get his methods to work, but a Google search let me to an Apple page about Mac OS X and Perl which assured me that, once I had installed mod_perl in the usual Perlish installation way, I had to simply tell my httpd.conf file to dynamically load the library on startup, and it would just work. And it was right!

Well, except for the fact that the current Apple-shipped Apache server is broken as configured and gives you scary startup errors, but the fix for that was also easy to locate. See, Google is cool.

I installed Mason on it, too, just 'cuz, and it appears to run flawlessly. Happy, happy.

On the libxml end, my membership on the perl-xml mailing list netted me this post from Paul McCann, which does an excellent (if somewhat roundabout) job describing the necessary acrobatics needed to get these sweet libraries on OS X. I let myself get held up by a typo within the instructions that I should have caught, though: "-without-iconv" should have been "--without-iconv", and so everything took a few extra compiles-through before it all came out right. The important thing is that this iBook now has the XML::LibXSLT Perl module on it, which is just awesome. Yep yep yep.

Anyway, I look forward to many near-future hours sitting in the cafe and hackhackhacking.

However, thanks to Charles' mightiness, this house has not just a working firewall again, but wireless! I've been lounging on the papasan chair downstairs all day, in fact, iBook in lap. Niiiiice.

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What is the protocol for dealing with a friend that you're used to inviting to random movies and such, but who has started to date somebody? Are you supposed to Cc: all future invites to the foofriend as well? You scoff, but I don't think this has ever happened before with a local friend. Yes, I am so removed from the dating scene (whatever that means) that I find myself comically at a loss. Eh! I'll just ask. (In effect, I just did, but I'll do it anyway.)

(What do you think of the word "foofriend"? "Significant Other" is a nice phrase for its gender-neutrality (as with "mate", but that one always seems more awkward to me) but it carries a bunch of implications that "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" don't. But, when speaking in the abstract, I hate saying "boyfriend or girlfriend" as much as I do "he or she". So I take a page from the gang at rec.games.nethack with their strategies of dealing with "foocubi", those naughty demons.)

(Now of course I'm thinking ahead to this word catching on, so that people unfamiliar with the hackish etymology of "foo" will use the word and perhaps infer that it means "a friend with whom one engages in foo", and thus grant that venerable syllable yet another geek-culture definition. Hey, it could happen.)

MySQL is go

Saying "argh" when you drop bacon on the floor makes Leslie laugh.

Anyway, got MySQL on this machine, as well as Perl APIs for it, including Andy's faboo DBIx::Abstract. I now have a full-on LAMP machine. Er, I mean DAMP -- Darwin, Apache, MySQL, Perl. Rock on. This is my prime hacking environment.

I used Marc Liyanage's MySQL for Mac OS packages, which worked great, though I had to toss in some extra symlinks to get the daemon to find the admin database correctly:

ln -s /usr/local/mysql/data/mysql /usr/local/mysql/mysql

What I really want now is bindings between Perl and Aqua. Mmmmm.

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Today Leslie/Charles/Me go shopping and I hope to get some cheap shelving and curtain rod hooks so that my bedroom will actually be usable as a work area, and not as a large closet with windows and a mattress in it, which it is now. Until then I don't at all mind hanging out downstairs and working, but several times a day one of the 2.5 other housemates bug me about playing Lost Cities with them again. Heh.

(no subject)

This is my first blog entry written in the bathroom via wireless Internet connection.

WELCOME TO THE FUTURE

Bad day, good day, Pi for supper

Yesterday was a bad day. I became very sad, and shut down early. Two true facts about me: it's hard to emotionally unbalance me, but if I do lose balance, a good night's sleep always restores it. This is likely a good thing.

Why was I sad? I was thinking about what a wash A.D. 2001 seems to me. I don't feel as if I've done much this year, especially compared to 1999 and 2000. I thought about various decisions I had made poorly, or failed to make at all, and opportunities lost due to lack of strong communication. And this isn't even getting into the bigger stuff of the layoffs and 9-11. I wanted to cry, and wondered at what age I lost the ability to will myself into doing so, or if I ever really could.

Today was a good day. Worked for a couple hours in the 1369 on chapter 7, which is due tomorrow, enough to convince myself that I can turn it in before Monday's done. I should have had it done today, but I ended up sinking half the day into a visit to Joe's. In retrospect, I think of the scenes from the film "Pi" of Max visiting his mentor. Just like this, Joe is a cranky old man (two years older than me) who works in my field, except far more experienced and published, and who gives me lots of curmudgeonly advice, but who also abandoned his most ambitious project when it got too dangerous (actually he dropped his most recent book contract because it got too boring) and enjoys having me over to play our favorite game, Go. Er, I mean Fluxx. And Settlers of Catan Card Game.

However, even though I am, right according to script, working obsessively with my own project, I failed to ride around randomly on the T while staring at a Settlers black knight token in my hand, and then have dreams about finding my brain sitting on the stairs at the Central Square station. Which is good, because eventually I'd find Joe dead in his apartment, slumped over his keyboard while half-written treatise on Man Things Was Not Meant To Know About XML-RPC glowed on his monitor, and his whole Fluxx deck laid out along pseudo-Kabbalistic patterns (his copy of "The End Is Near" would be open next to it, for reference). So that's good.

If I make a movie about XML it will be called this: <:-/>

Stayed home from Rick's housewarming so I could play with the new*new*new XML::SAX Perl module. Since I'm not very experienced with SAX, and since further it doesn't actually come with the documentation packages it's supposed to (grumble... but forgiveable, since it's only at v0.03), it took some extra time to grok, but I think I got it. Emailed Erik and Nat, asking them to sanity check my summary of the module's magic. (Basically, it seems to be just a highly intelligent parser dispatcher, and its handlers work the same as PerlSAX always has.)

Worth noting: on my walk to the cafe, a very little boy was so ecstatic over seeing the snowfall, finally normal weather, that, ignoring his parents' directions to stay put, he raced down his front steps, picked up a double-mittenful of snow, ran up with a huge grin to a total stranger, and got him good, right on the leg.

"Ouch, I've been snowballed!" I said, only slowing my pace a little, to let him scoot past and dive into a whole yardful of new snow. "Oh! Did he get you?" said his mother. I could only shrug and laugh.