“My children are Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Russian, Jew, Mormons, descended from conquistadors, Vikings, cowboys, pioneers, and prophets, and we had Indian food for dinner last night before watching a Japanese TV show while I glued together pieces of a Spanish war game. My ancestors introduced the chili pepper to Thailand and my wife’s ancestors were legal to shoot on sight in Missouri. Who the hell do you think you are to tell an American not to culturally appropriate stuff?”
— The International Lord of Hate explains it all
Dear Open Source community,
This is the sort of attitude that makes me want to bitch-slap some sense into the lot of you.
Dear 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)
