A Picture Share!

In oregon. Near Stanfield.

A Picture Share!

Thumbs up! With shellen and merlin.

A Picture Share!

New fancy swiss aluminum water bottles courtesy of Uncle Google. They're encouraging us to reuse.

libevent 1.1 on Solaris 10

If you're trying to build libevent 1.1a on Solaris 10, you will run into a few problems:

Step 1) gcc 3.4 is installed but not in your $PATH. Fix this by adding /usr/sfw/bin to your $PATH

Step 2) The Makefile generated by autoconf is hardcoded to use make. Just edit it and set the MAKE variable to gmake.

Step 3) The link step will fail with the following error:

false cru .libs/libevent.a  event.o buffer.o evbuffer.o log.o select.o poll.o devpoll.o signal.o
gmake[2]: *** [libevent.la] Error 1

You will shake your head and ask wtf? What's happened is that ar can't be found and so the value false has been put in it's place. You can tell this happened by looking at the configure output. The offending line is:

checking for ar... false

d'oh!

Answer: add /usr/ccs/bin to your $PATH and re-run configure. Actually, if you had added this to your $PATH initially, you could've skipped Step 2. Both make and ar would have been found.

If I was smart enough, I would send some patches in. Things seem to work otherwise, I'm currently running plb successfully.

Oh yeah, so I'm running Solaris 10 on a Thinkpad A31p and I'm impressed that it recognized my video card and I could configure it to display at 1600x1200x32 without editing a single freaking config file. I wrote a small C++ program with a few subtle flaws to exercise dtrace but sofar my bugs aren't complicated enough to warrant dtrace; gdb would've done fine. We'll see.

Hey Solaris gurus, what do you use in Solaris that rivals epoll on Linux or kqueue on FreeBSD/OS X?

A Picture Share!

Flickr! This shirt was first made in flash but recently converted into dhtml.

Zero-Install Software for Linux

The Zero Install system makes software installation not merely easy, but unnecessary. Users run their applications directly from the Internet from the software author's pages. Caching makes this as fast as running a normal application after the first time, and allows off-line use.

Rails Day

Rails Day sounded like fun. I've been sick so I didn't participate. (Plus, what's up with the fact that if you want to use a database then you have to use MySQL?)

I did write something, though. It's a small ruby class intended to be required in CGI scripts that can install an at_exit handler to pick up whichever stray Exception killed your program and output it as nice HTML. It's pretty similar to what Python's cgitb module provides.

Anybody interested in being a guinea pig? Err, I mean beta tester.