“No. You can’t just make up your own words. You have to actually repeat the words that I say.”
— Android teaches Three to speak French, from Dark MatterDear Macports port maintainers,
Um, “fail”.
building 'pycurl' extension creating build/temp.macosx-10.3-i386-2.5 creating build/temp.macosx-10.3-i386-2.5/src -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -I/opt/local/include -I/opt/local/include/python2.5 -c src/pycurl.c -o build/temp.macosx-10.3-i386-2.5/src/pycurl.o unable to execute -DNDEBUG: No such file or directory error: command '-DNDEBUG' failed with exit status 1
Upgrading Movable Type
The machine this site runs on hasn’t been updated in a while. The OS is old, but it’s OpenBSD, so it’s still secure. Ditto for Movable Type; I’m running an old, stable version that has some quirks, but hasn’t needed much maintenance. I don’t even get any comment spam, thanks to a few simple tricks.
There are some warts, though. Rebuild times are getting a bit long, my templates are a bit quirky, and Unicode support is just plain flaky, both in the old version of Perl and in the MT scripts. This also bleeds over into the offline posting tool I use, Ecto, which occasionally gets confused by MT and converts kanji into garbage.
Fixing all of that on the old OS would be harder than just upgrading to the latest version of OpenBSD. That’s a project that requires a large chunk of uninterrupted time, and we’re building up to a big holiday season at work, so “not right now”.
I need an occasional diversion from work and Japanese practice, though, and redesigning this blog on a spare machine will do nicely. I can also move all of my Mason apps over, and take advantage of the improved Unicode support in modern Perl to do something interesting. (more on that later)
At least he has taste...
Danny Choo found someone who really, really wants to let people know that he’s a Mari Yaguchi fan. I confess, I didn’t even need to read her name on the armband or the “sekushii beemu” on his chest to recognize her instantly, so I can’t really criticize too much…
The DNA Experiment: Introduction
When I made my trip to Japan last year, I took a friend. He took a lot of pictures, too, but hasn’t gotten around to posting any of them. We backed everything up onto my laptop, though, and I have his permission to pick through them and post them here.
Obviously we were pretty much always at the same place at the same time, and we even used the exact same model of camera a lot of the time, but we were frequently looking at different things, and sometimes at the same thing in different ways. Today, I went through his pictures and tried to select a representative sample of what he saw in Japan.
I’m posting them in batches, generally without commentary, and for more fun, I’ve randomly shuffled them. Actually, I hadn’t planned on that part, but Aperture does a terrible job of renaming on import, and not only scrambled the file names, but also created a number of duplicates. Since they were already out of order, and I didn’t feel like starting over, I embraced this flaw and randomized the order completely. There are a few cases where pictures really do belong together, but that’s a job for another day.
So, over the next week or two, expect 16 batches of 12 pictures, with one above the fold and the rest below, to keep the page load times reasonable. They’ll all be filed under category DNA.
