Archive for May, 2006

Compiling gdbm-1.8.3 on OSX

Published by Yuletide on May 22, 2006 in OSX, Software and Troubleshooting. 0 Comments

Well, I’m very proud of myself… after having downloaded the source code for gdbm (needed to build the Rhyming Dictionary, @freshmeat), I received an error during installation:

/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 -o bin -g bin gdbm.h \
/usr/local/include/gdbm.h
install: bin: Invalid argument
make: *** [install] Error 67

So a quick look inside the makefile and some fiddling around later, I got everything working! All you have to do is change the BINOWN and BINGRP values from bin to the following:

# File ownership and group
BINOWN = root
BINGRP = wheel

Works like a charm!
Yayyyy!
Now time to install the rest of the dictionary…

Alright, problem number 2 came when doing “make install” for the rhyming dictionary itself:

install –mode=755 rhyme /usr/local/bin
install: illegal option — -

Is this just the result of Rhyme not using autoconf? Anyways, I went into the makefile and edited the lines under “install: all” from install –mode=755 rhyme $(BINPATH) to install -m 755 rhyme $(BINPATH)
Worked again! I’m on a rollll!

U-666

Published by Yuletide on May 22, 2006 in Funny and Reading. 0 Comments

People in my office chuckled a little last week when I told them I had the current winning bid for an old German u-boat that was being hawked on Ebay.

It was a really good deal, $7,000 for some still seaworthy rust bucket that smelled like 27 trolls had filmed 200 porno movies in there. The engine was still in fine shape, and it fired up right away when I pushed the ignition switch. The owner even let me take a test drive of it (since it was moored conveniently close, on Mare Island). A few lessons in sightless navigation later, and we were puttering around the bay at a whopping 12 knots. Despite the post-sex troll stench, I was hooked. Hell, whenever it stops raining out here, I thought, I can at least recoup my investment by donating it to some war museum or another.

…

Hehe… Read on

(via
Pigdog Journal)

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The future of our Surveillance Culture

Published by Yuletide on May 22, 2006 in Commentary, News, Policy and Politics. 0 Comments

A great post on wiretapping via Wirearchy

Via the blog Firedoglake

Little by little, chip by chip by chip, away from what we ought to be.
William Arkin’s Early Warning Blog has a profoundly disturbing post today, regarding the seamless nature of electronic surveillance in today’s intelligence agencies, their capabilities — and the fact that the full price that we may pay for the implementation of these policies is not something that has either been thought through or debated. And that long-term cost is enormous. For all of us.

Despite urban legend that NSA surveillance is a news media crusade because the majority of Americans "approve" government surveillance to protect them from terrorists, a new USA Today/Gallup poll finds that almost two-thirds of Americans are concerned that the monitoring may signal other, not-yet-disclosed efforts to gather information on the general public.
This is the central question: Are all of these NSA ingestion and digestion programs merely more efficient efforts to apprehend criminals and terrorists in the digital age, or are they the building blocks of a new seamless surveillance culture?
The government’s position is that if you are "innocent," you have nothing to hide. It is a new version of ‘you are either with us or against us.’ Massive monitoring is of course meant to find terrorists; I completely believe that this is not some 1960’s enemies list politically motivated effort. But these post 9/11 programs signal a new and different problem.
People of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent and Muslims are potential terrorists, machine selected as "of interest."

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Investing 103

Published by Yuletide on May 22, 2006 in Interest and Resources. 0 Comments

Most investors know that active trading can quickly erode profits. But to be a truly great investor, you may do well to take some advice from master investor Tony Soprano after you buy a stock: Fuhgeddaboudit.

A great article on investing and the stock market…

(via fool.com)

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LA Church Shooting

Published by Yuletide on May 22, 2006 in News. 0 Comments

Chilling…

A la NYTimes:

BATON ROUGE, La., May 21 — A man opened fire inside the Ministry of Jesus Christ Church here during a Sunday morning service, killing four in-laws and wounding another before kidnapping his wife and killing her, law enforcement officials said.

Read on…

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Qumana

Published by Yuletide on May 22, 2006 in Blogging, OSX and Software. 0 Comments

Word. This is awesome. And they even have a mac version…

(I wonder if I could turn off this thing at the bottom though… (not that I’d want to))

(ooh they use CSS for the formatting…)

my previous post on 3rd party blogging clients in which I recommended MTClient, which is now easily superseded by the effortlessness of Qumana…

AND it even links the posts to their archive (permalinked) pages!!!

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Q-Ads

Published by Yuletide on May 22, 2006 in Blogging and Services. 0 Comments

EDIT (pre-publishing… but I already wrote so much I might as well publish it all…): OKAYYYY so I was wrong… Here is their Privacy Statement… same old deal.

I saw in Qumana’s toolbar a button that says "Insert Ad", so I clicked it… and it turns out their hooked into a service called Q-Ads, which is sorta like Google Adsense but more customizable and stuff… (or something).

But being the shrewd netizen that I am, I perused their privacy policy… (since they, unlike many hip webservices nowadays, don’t have a plain language TOS…

Aaaanyways, I saw this among the legal speak and said "Hmmmmmmmmm…." (emphasis added):

17. Information Rights. Q-Ads may retain and use for its own purposes all information Client provides, including but not limited to Site demographics and contact and billing information. Client agrees that Q-Ads may transfer and disclose to third parties personally identifiable information about Client for the purpose of approving and enabling Client’s participation in the Program,including to third parties that reside in jurisdictions with less restrictive data laws. Q-Ads disclaims all responsibility, and will not be liable to for any disclosure of that information by any such third party. Q-Ads may share aggregate (i.e., not personally identifiable) information about Client with advertisers, business partners, sponsors, and other third parties. In addition, Client grants Q-Ads the right to access, index and cache the Site(s), or any portion thereof, including by automated means including Web spiders or crawlers.

Is this sketchy? Or is this typical? No sign-up from me, for now at least… (though I should go re-read the AdSense TOS before I make too much noise…)

So yeah, in light of their privacy statement, this is normal legalese (still scary though).

[p.s. MAN is this editor nice! Even gives MarsEdit a run for its money (haven’t tried it on OSX yet though)]

So yeah, I’m signing up… Seems like a neat service. Maybe I’ll try it here instead of Google? Or can I use both? (Probably will make one/both angry…?)

I’ll write more later re: how it goes

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Tuna Mercury Warning Lawsuit Faillls California loses suit to make tuna companies issue mercury warnings | Grist Magazine | Daily Grist | 15 May 2006

Published by Yuletide on May 21, 2006 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments


California loses suit to make tuna companies issue mercury warnings |
Grist Magazine | Daily Grist | 15 May 2006:

A spokesperson for California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who had sued the tuna companies seeking warning labels, said the ruling was “wrong on the law, wrong on the science, and bad for the women and children of California.”

(Via Gristmill.)

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