waider dot i e

February 06: It's Six Nations season again, and the opening matches were fairly hallmark settling-in ones: Ireland v. Italy started well, got bogged down, and finished reasonably well with Ireland the victors; England v. Wales was evenly matched for most of the first half, then England pulled ahead for a bit, then basically seemed to stop playing while Wales kept pushing and eventually got their reward, but immediately lost their momentum and finished up losing. Just as well for England, given their Twickenham Centenary and all.
February 01: I am once again facing the fact that backing up ~70GB of data over a wireless link to a slow drive may take several days.

I'm a bit frustrated with the way Fink works, or fails to, on Snow Leopard. Specifically, there's this whole choice of 64-bit versus 32-bit which seems not to play nicely with the installed Perl, which appears to happily support both (through building bundles containing both architectures, as best I can tell). The reason this is annoying is that it's plainly broken on account of some design choice in Fink, because if I install a binary module from CPAN directly, Perl happily builds it in such a way that it doesn't crash the first time I try to use it, which is what the Fink version does.

Or maybe that was just a fluke with some random module I tried using. Either way, annoyance.

While looking for a useful helper for working with Ruby, I found PLEAC, which is basically an attempt to redo the Perl Cookbook for other languages. A neat idea, although serious work on it seems to have petered out some years ago, and the build system is fairly strict Linux plus My Exact Home Directory.
January 31: Cleaning up some of the loose ends of things I seldom use on the Cube and therefore haven't noticed were still broken. One peculiar one is that file sharing wasn't working, and on investigation I discovered that the AppleFileServer binary was not executable. Weird. Anyway, chmod +x and all was well again.

Having not done anything with it since I last mentioned it, I figured I'd just trash the corrupted Time Machine backup and start it again from scratch, although this time I'll try sticking to Apple protocols (afp, specifically) instead of using anything else.
January 30: Taken is a fairly straightforward action movie with little (or no) slack; and I'm almost sure I saw Liam Neeson grinning at one point at the fairly fast-paced punch-ups he was getting in to. Definitely worth watching.
January 25: Continuing to learn Ruby. Some minor features of this language seem like they were laid down as requirements in advance and then the major stuff was worked around them, which I'm not sure is a good thing.
January 24: The aforementioned plan to use a more-or-less default Apple setup for the webserver actually looks like it'll work. Neat.
January 23: Hard drive: wiped.
January 22: Swapped the new drive into the Cube, and now I'm wiping the old one so I can dismantle it and toss it in the recycling.
January 21: Odd. dovecot was broken this morning: authentication had mysteriously stopped working. This, in turn, revealed a rather irritating bug in Mail.app: the modal password input box disappeared behind the main Mail.app window, and there was no way for me to retrieve it, so I wound up using Force Quit on it. It's disappointing to see Apple making basic UI errors like this, when good UI is supposed to be their thing.
January 20: Almost all the bits are back in place. I'm toying with the idea of using a near-stock web server configuration, but it looks like the RSS toy has broken it already, so I may need to tune that. Other things that tripped me up: dovecot needs both a file in /etc/pam.d and about half an hour to regenerate its SSL parameters; postfix is bailing out and I'm not sure why; dhcpd as distributed by Fink has a broken startup file which I should probably submit a patch for; and a bunch of other Fink stuff comes with startup files that don't do shutdown.

Also: Snow Leopard meets Gentoo, produces Homebrew. I particularly like the comment that the code is optimised for Mac, because let's face it, your Mac is too slow to run this code otherwise, right?

Monsters vs. Aliens: fantastic. Where can I get a cuddly toy of Insectosaurus?