A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

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.)