Archives for 2008

A Buzz Lightyear … dildo?

April 21, 2008 by 5 Comments

My wife went to a swap meet tonight, where folks bring things they want to get rid of and exchange it for stuff that others are trying to dump. As a goof, she saw this and knew I’d want to blog a picture of it:

Buzz Lightyear dildo

Yeah, seriously, WTF is that? Is that really a Buzz Lightyear dildo? I don’t think this is what Buzz meant when he said, “To infinity, and beyond!” Hell, look at his crossed arms and disinterested look as he tries not to look downward.

Of course, this is one of those stupid “turn it on and the top spins around with lights” toys, but if you flick the switch and hold the top, the shaft rotates … hello?! Even my 8 year old daughter asked me, “Daddy, what’s the green thing at the bottom do?” All I could do was shake my head sadly and say, “Nothing, honey. Now go upstairs and brush your teeth and go to bed.”

You just can’t make this stuff up.

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Filed Under: Believe it, or not 5 Comments

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April 21, 2008 by Leave a Comment

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No, your kid is NOT the cutest …

April 16, 2008 by 4 Comments

Todd Jordan carries on the discussion of “why is it not cool to submit your own content to link sharing sites?” Here’s my answer that I left as a comment:

Submitting links to your own works is the “of course my kid is the cutest” problem. Let me explain …

Content sharing sites thrive because of the signal-to-noise ratio: high quality, low volume (compared to “the web at large”). As you point out, nobody has time to visit every page on the web. Social link sharing sites (Digg, Stumble, etc.) work because someone else’s effort (submitting a link) results in your being able to visit a subset of the web, presumably of hand-selected better-than-average quality.

So, of course you’d want to submit links to your own stuff, because, you know, it’s better-than-average, right?

WRONG. Of course your kid is the cutest. But, if other people also think your kid is cute, maybe you’re on to something.

If everyone starts submitting links to their own stuff–intsead of someone else who also thinks your stuff is worth sharing with others–then these social link sharing sites’ signal-to-noise ratio will plummet and finding the worthwhile links amongst the crap will make them less useful and usable.

If you can’t find at least one or two people who think your content is worth submitting somewhere, then maybe you have to just accept that maybe it is, indeed, crap.

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Filed Under: Blogging 4 Comments

Sun is finally moving MySQL to the next phase

April 16, 2008 by 2 Comments

I love it when I can go against the angry mob!

Marten & Jonathan: Good for you! Take those bits closed-source, make customers pay for the functionality, and use that money to hire talented QA engineers. Let companies pay for the stuff and demand actual timely bug fixes to the real problems that linger in the MySQL code base.

Of course, I wholly expect that 18-24 months later, you re-open the source for these products, once they’ve been polished up. The companies will be pissed, but we all benefit from higher quality products.

Look around, folks … this is the cycle we’ve observed many times of open source software. The fact that Sun is making these changes now is a good sign for MySQL’s longevity as a technology and product and that is only good for the open source community.

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Filed Under: Open Source 2 Comments

Kiek in de Kök, not what you might think

April 14, 2008 by 2 Comments

One of the many blogs I read belongs to Trading Goddess, who seems to find some of the best pictures to use with her blog entries, like this one:

Kiek in de Kok street sign

Being an American who only speaks English and has a juvenile sense of humor to boot, I got a good chuckle out of this picture. Of course, I couldn’t leave well enough alone and had to find out what this actually meant (it couldn’t really mean what I thought it meant, could it?) and Wikipedia comes to the rescue. It turns out, “Kiek in de Kök” is “an old German language nickname for towers, mainly those which were parts of town fortifications.”

So, the next time you ask someone, “what’s cooking,” you might just be asking them for a Kiek in de Kök. Watch out. :-)

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Filed Under: Believe it, or not, Blogging 2 Comments

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April 14, 2008 by Leave a Comment

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Fedora 8 RPM of character counting plugin for Pidgin

April 10, 2008 by 7 Comments

After Callum let me know that the Linux binary of the character counting plugin for Pidgin worked on Fedora 8, I decided to spin a RPM built on Fedora 8 proper. After a bit of reading and hackery, I have produced a x86 RPM for Fedora 8. Here’s the source, which includes the patch and the .spec file, as well as the RPM:

I’ve also spun a new Debian binary, as well:

And, if you’re looking for the Win32 binary, you can still get it off this page.

I’m glad so many of you out there who use Pidgin find this plugin useful. Thanks for all the positive feedback.

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Filed Under: Geeking out, Open Source 7 Comments

del.icio.us/dossy links since March 24, 2008 at 09:00 AM

April 7, 2008 by Leave a Comment

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March 24, 2008 by Leave a Comment

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pkg-config and glib, chicken and egg, same thing

March 20, 2008 by 6 Comments

I’m setting up a virtual machine using VirtualBox on Ubuntu Gutsy, running Win2000 as the guest OS. I’ve gone and installed Cygwin and MinGW and MSYS in order to build Gnash on Win32. I came across a funny bootstrapping problem trying to install pkg-config: pkg-config 0.22 requires glib 2.x in order to compile. No sweat, I go and download glib 2.13.6 and configure it … and the configure script stops with an error when it can’t find pkg-config installed!

Circular dependencies suck.

Of course, in the README.win32 for pkg-config, Tor Lillqvist acknowledges this at the end of the document:

On Unix, pkg-config is built using its own copy of GLib 1.2.8. On Windows, we use the normal GLib available for Windows (2.0.x). Yes, this does introduce a kind of circular dependency. But, that can be worked around. The circular dependency only appears if one uses the configure mechanism to build GLib. GLib’s configure script checks for pkg-config. pkg-config depends on GLib. Thus, starting from scratch, with no GLib and no pkg-config, using configure, there would indeed be a Catch-22 situation. However, GLib can be built just fine using the manually written makefiles for mingw or MSVC. And if somebody does want to build GLib on Win32 using configure, she can first install a prebuilt pkgconfig.

Unfortunately, as of glib 2.13.6 at least, only the automake files are included–no ordinary makefiles for Win32, either MinGW or MSVC, even. Fortunately, older releases of pkg-config source are still available, and glib 2.13.6 will build with pkg-config 0.14 or newer. pkg-config 0.14 includes glib 1.2.8 and tries to build it as part of its build, so I went ahead and tried to build pkg-config 0.14. Since nothing is ever easy, I ended up having to make a slight change to glib 1.2.8 to get it to compile, adding these lines to the top of glib.h, after the #include <glibconfig.h>:

#undef G_MAXINT
#define G_MAXINT 0xFFFF
#define SIGCHLD 17
#define g_ascii_strcasecmp(a, b) strcmp(a, b)
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <winsock.h>

I also discovered that gthread.o wouldn’t compile right due to some libtool weirdness, so I had to compile everything somewhat manually with this:

$ cd glib-1.2.8/gthread
$ gcc -I.. -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -DG_OS_WIN32 -o gthread.o -c gthread.c
$ touch gthread.lo
$ cd ..
$ make libglib.la
$ cd ..
$ make CFLAGS="-DG_OS_WIN32" parse.o
$ make pkg-config.exe
$ cp pkg-config.exe /mingw/bin

After all that, I finally had a compiled and installed pkg-config 0.14! I went ahead and used it to build glib 2.13.6 and installed that, then went and built pkg-config 0.22 with it.

So, which came first? The chicken or the egg? :-)

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Filed Under: Geeking out, Open Source 6 Comments
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