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

Interesting weekend, even though (especially in contrast to the previous two weekends) I didn't really get out much.

Not too long ago at some dictator555-orchestrated event, new-to-town xartofnothingx offered to loan us some of her Google Ad-wrangling expertise. So Saturday afternoon we all sat down around 1 Volity Towers' fabulous oak conference table and I pressed the button that dimmed the candelabra and lowered the 20-foot Internets screen so that we could go over it together. As predicted it was mostly a conversation between her and daerr coz it's not like Zarf or I know anything about this stuff.

After doing lots of keyword tuning, we modified the website to let Google catch Gamut downloads. If we set everything up right, we should be able to tell how many people who see our ads end up not just clicking on them but going all the way to installing our software. Looking forward to seeing what those numbers look like in another week or so.

Other than that I set up all the Jmac's Arcade stuff. And I wanted to make a second episode about Asteroids, except that my making-movies-from-what's-happening-on-the-screen software can't capture it! MacMAME's vector-graphics emulation pegs the CPU (even though it's a G5), and running 10-fps screen-capture on top of that just kills everything. I am bummed.

Wrote the output part of the ledger-display component. This is what you will look at when you want to see a report on the credits you've earned with your games, and from whom, or a report on how you've been spending your credits.

Tonight I got a burst of energy for a strange reason because I almost took a random opportunity to meet a couple of new friends-of-a-friend. Due to a benign miscue I ended up not being able to go, but for some reason the fact I almost did made me go wheeeee for like two hours after. Huh?! Yeah I dunno. I guess with all of everything going on I'm feeling socially adventurous again, as socially adventurous as I am able to get, anyway. Well, good.

Then I cleaned up Whitey, the old iBook, which is to say I attacked it with fingernail and Brillo pad until its lid was (almost) clean of stickers. I have moved past being the sort of person who has a sticker-covered latoptop, I suppose. I chose, however, to leave the Jim's Big Ego vinyl sticker that cthulhia gave me a long time ago. For some reason, advertising local geekish folkrock is still within the bounds.

There also remains a little grinning bat inside, over the screen, a memoir of the time when doctor_atomic was a housemate. And there's an extremely deteriorated Tirade sticker on the bottom, probably from a Looney Labs order from early 2002 or thenabouts.

The only thing I didn't hit on today's to-do list was fixing the toys on jmac.org, which have been broken for god knows how long, probably since I switched servers last year. How embarrassing! The toys, mostly stuff that all dates pre-2002, really serves no purpose other than impressing people exploring my site for the first time, but that's a pretty good reason by itself to keep them propped up. I'll have to get to that this week.

My entire iBook seems morbidly broken, inside and out. Bits of the system seem to have forgotten who 'jmac' is, which is a bad sign. I foolishly tried cycling my login only to find... that I cannot log in to my own computer, now.

La, la. I allegedly have some system CDs lying around somewhere, but I certainly haven't used them since months before my move, so that's not very feasible. Time to call up some friends, I guess. Grunt.

Update

One way to tell that you've been spoiled by OS X: You've forgotten that sometimes just restarting the silly machine can work wonders. Furrfu

I have been in and around the realm of IT support long enough to appreciate the miracle of PMFI. Well, the Problem, in this case, didn't really Magically Fix Itself; after making the previous cathartic post, I performed some intuitive experimentation, and saw that, aha, putting the iBook to sleep and then opening it partway made the screen happy, but then quickly opening it up fully darkened it again. Sleepified it again, then tried opening it up slo-o-o-owly. That kept it happy, and that's where it is now. I haven't messed with it further, to determine whether this problem was a one-time fluke or something I'll have to continually deal with.

Well, whatever. I am a friend to all workarounds.

I made a long todo list this morning, and checked off all but two items. Some of the stuff I put down are pain-in-kiester tasks I've been putting off for days or weeks, and I got everything done except one social email, and some artwork I wanna make for a local gaming splinter group's website, the creation of hosting of which I've taken charge. The Wasn't review was the last thing I checked off. It's now tomorrow, so I stop now.

This is unusual behavior for me, but it seems to be more common lately, just the same. It definitely feels pretty good, going to bed with proof, proof!, notarized by my sometimes flaky but always honest past selves, that I have done things today. I tell you god's own truth when I say that the pleasure I get in ticking off a task is the same as that I get when I accomplish some task in a computer game that lets me buy the magic sword or gains my Sim a better job or whatever. Can I continue to exploit this? Can I do so indefinitely?

I'll also let you know that am so easy to amuse that I can make myself giggle just by reading my own todo lists aloud, even though I know perfectly well the context of each entry.

The notebook in which the list ended up may hold some tangential interest, though. It has notes to a paper or something I must have written eight years ago or so. Actually, I've come across a fair amount of older writing lately, and much of it is surprisingly opaque to me. Perhaps I shall electronically transcribe bits of it someday, for the amusement of myself and others. Perhaps.

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At some point during the evening, the iBook leapt off my lap in order to chase the cat, and bumped its little head. Now the CD/DVD drive won't close. So I duct-taped it shut. Since I figure I don't want to pay many many dollars to replace a 7-cent snapped latch, the tape is there to stay, and so I went ahead and started customizing, since I've now officially blown it. So all the stickers I got for Epiphany are now stuck to the lid of my computer (except the "FUCK WORK" one which I put on the case's underside). Yes, I made sure they were right-side up. Then I put orders in to Looney Labs and ThinkGeek for more stickers. Yee haw.

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.)