Don’t know what made me think of it this morning, but I was remembering something my first programming teacher said. He was teaching a course in introductory C programming for engineering applications and we were using gcc as our compiler. At the time, he claimed GCC stood for Good C Compiler. Seems pretty suspect since the gcc most everyone knows is actually the GNU C Compiler since it’s been developed by the GNU organization which was founded back in 1984 (although the first release of gcc wasn’t until 1987, but that was long before I took this course). So either my memory is faulty, or that guy was a dumbass. Hard to tell which is the case since both are likely. 
Monthly Archive for February, 2005
Function: noun
1 : the flinging of a corrosive substance (e.g. sulphuric acid) at the face of an enemy with intent to disfigure or maim
Ran across this in the book I’m currently reading, The Difference Engine.
Pronunciation: (")dE-"fe-n&-'strA-sh&n
Function: noun
Etymology: de- + Latin fenestra window
1 : a throwing of a person or thing out of a window
- de·fen·es·trate /(")dE-'fe-n&-"strAt/ transitive verb
For some reason, this word apparently came up in conversation over at the Buck house…
I’ve switched IM clients already. Fire just wasn’t as featureful/configurable as I would like, so I’ve started using Adium X. Got Firefox for the pages that don’t work right in Safari. Fink of course for additional Unix goodies (mostly extra compilation stuff). SSHKeychain provides a convenient interface to ssh-agent and simplifies key management. DoubleCommand lets me remap some keys (ie I can make my Ctrl key act like an Apple Command key), and the next version should differentiate between left and right keys allowing me to have both a Ctrl and a Command key (since Ctrl is sorta essential for emacs). That reminds me, I’ve also come up with a nicely packaged copy of emacs (from cvs).
On the Unix/server side of things, I’ve got postfix enabled so I can send and receive email from the mini. Installed Complete MySQL from ServerLogistics (nicely packaged and includes a preferences panel) in preparation for serving up php/mysql webpages. I got lighttpd installed since I figured it would perform better than apache since I don’t need all of the features present in apache (although it looks like it’ll support just about everything I need… php, fastcgi, ssi, authentication, compression, etc). Since I had to build that from source (many thanks to The Exciter for documenting the build on OSX and providing a path to get it to build), I got encap’s epkg utility to build under OSX. Encap is a tool developed at UIUC that facilitates sane Unix package management. From the Encap FAQ:
Encap is a package management system for handling third-party package management on a Unix system. Through the magic of symbolic links, it allows you to install each package in its own directory, but still have everything accessible via the traditional location in /usr/local.
If you ever build Unix packages from source, I’d highly recommend it. I’m not sure whether I just wasn’t finding/setting the right configure option, but I had to manually hack a Makefile to get it to build under OSX (found a hardwired “-arch i386″ in there somewhere).
I’m still looking for a slick FTP/SFTP app. I’ve tried Fetch that’s been around since the dawn of time. It was nice, but I’d rather find freeware/opensource if I can. And at some point I should get gnupg set up and integrate it with Apple’s Mail.app.
So the pages feature looks like it’ll be pretty slick. I’ve managed to set up the main frontpage for the site so that it loads up the page I created inside of WP. I’m not sure it’s the most efficient way to do it, but it does work. Definitely looks like WP is well on it’s way to being a fairly complete CMS (content management system). Will have to see if I can differentiate between blog pages and normal content pages so that I can have a reduced sidebar for all things not blog.
Slowly making progress on the transition to 1.5. You’ll note I sorta have the links back up in the header, but they aren’t formatted like the rest of the site quite yet… And I still need to integrate the rest of the site with the new theme code instead of having to keep around the old blog code.
I’ve made a mock-up of the malkier frontpage that you can see here. The style is mostly on target, but I need to figure out how to hack the title of the page (currently showing up as “Malkier: Blog >>”), and how to make it come up from the main page for the site (and hopefully have the url formatted like the main page as opposed to linking into the blog). Surprisingly simple to add the page in though.
Oh, and I’ve noticed my list of monthly archives is getting a little long (and likely to get quite long if I leave it this way). Should look into alternatives (small calendar-like monthly view with forward/back buttons or month/year pulldown menus or something like that).
As you may notice, I’m in the middle of upgrading my WordPress install for the blog. I thought I’d gotten the key stuff translated over to the new setup, so I switched over to the new stuff. While my blog looks mostly right (sans access buttons in the header), I’d forgotten that a lot of the rest of my site was using chunks of old blog code for their appearance. Hence, when I swapped them out, the rest of the stuff tanked. Looks like it’s going to take me a while to see if I can integrate my site with the new blog code, but at least it’s viewable at the moment (as opposed to last night when I completely broke everything). Perhaps if I get a moment, I’ll point things at the old blog code so that things look mostly right until I can get things set up properly.
EDIT: It’s thoroughly kludged together now. So the site should largely look ok, but the backend’s a little messy. Hopefully I’ll get some time to take a look at it this weekend.
Our kitties are silly! Apparently, one of our fuzzy blankets reminds Spooky an awful lot of his mama, because he’s taken to kneading, suckling, and lapping on it. I was petting him this morning (in an attempt to keep him from completely waking me up) when he started in on the blanket. He had to be going at that thing for at least half an hour. Silly kitty.
Even worse… Miss Merry was getting a little old when we adopted her, but I thought vaccinations should be top priority. That involved two visits to the vet (one for initial shot, one for a booster). You then have to wait a couple of weeks before having surgery. Of course, little Spooky got her sick (kitty conjunctivitis… from Spooky sneezing in her face repeatedly) a few days before she was scheduled to go in. So we had to put it on hold until she was better. Turns out, she decided to go into her first heat around that time too. She was running around all crazy like, and wrestling a whole lot more with Spooky. We even saw him grab her ear on occasion which would cause her to quit fighting and present herself… confusing Spooky to no end. At first, we weren’t too concerned since we figured “Spooky’s not even three months old, there’s no way he’s old enough.” Then we watched him wiggle around on top of her and I made some rude comment about having to clean her coat. So Amanda decided to separate them and his little Willy Wonka was staring back at us! Turns out he’s old enough, but not long enough to grab her neck and do the deed at the same time. Well, she’s finished with her antibiotics now and is definitely back in heat. Guess we’re back to keeping them separate until Merry’s had surgery…
I’ve had the mini for a couple of days now, and so far I have to say I’m impressed. Cute little box and so far I’ve largely been impressed with the speed and “fluidity” of it. OS X seems awful slick so far, barring the inevitable learning curve. In fairly short order I’d found the Terminal and was greeted with a familiar bash prompt and even things like emacs (text-only) and ssh out of the box. Installed the Apple X server pretty painlessly, and it integrates pretty nicely into OS X. I’ve even installed fairly slick equivalents of some of my must-have apps (multi-network IM: Fire, remote desktop: OSXvnc, virtual desktops: Desktop Manager). I’ll probably get around to setting up fink at some point to make use of other unixy software.
Like a lot of people, mine appears to come with a 5400rpm Seagate notebook drive (as opposed to the advertised 4200rpm) and PC3200 RAM (although I’m sure it’s only running at the advertised PC2700). I’ll have to take some pics at some point comparing it against my old full tower box.
Biggest issue I’m running into at this point is keyboard shortcuts. I don’t have any apple keys, or even windows keys on my keyboard, so I’m not quite sure how to access any of the shortcuts at this point…
Looks like my Mac mini is finally on its way! Granted, it looks like it’s just been picked up in China today (Shenzhen?), so it’ll likely be a while. But still very cool!
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