YetAnotherPersonalHomepage

I have some things to do in LaTeX but, not having XEmacs and being lazy (you know what’s coming…), I thought I’d use Fink and pull down TeTeX and LyX. I had Apple’s X11 installed from the Panther CDs so I could run OpenOffice.Org. Figuring I’d need it sooner or later, I had also installed the X11SDK at the same time and had used Fink to build a new release of Perl. So with everything working it should have been a no-brainer.

In a nutshell, the X11user package shipped with Panther appears slightly broken. Get the disk image from Apple’s X11 site and install from it.

I killed an evening trying to get the prerequisites built because Fink would not recognize Apple’s X11 and register the virtual packages for “system-xfree86″ and the libraries. I tried the suggestions in the FAQ- rebuild with the latest Fink, clear out the X11 packages and reinstall. Lather, rinse, repeat. On a hunch, I checked Apple’s site for a suggestion and, not finding one, wondered if the disk image held a different package than the one shipped. It seems that the one on the CD doesn’t symlink the libraries in /usr/X11R6/lib correctly. I can’t find anything on the search engines so maybe it’s just me.

It’s late in the season for my annual restlessness and the turning of my thoughts to doing something- anything- else. My recurring daydream is to build a boat. Specifically, a coastal cruiser. I’ll motor down the Eastern seaboard, along the Gulf of Mexico and swing back into the Caribbean for the return.

Follies like this need fuel so I pulled off my bookshelf two texts for a re-reading: * The Troller Yacht by George Buehler * Voyaging Under Power by Robert Beebe

Adding to the collection, I recently picked up from a roadside junk store a copy of Nigel Calder’s Marine Diesel Engines. What’s odd about finding it is that the book isn’t vintage- it was published in 1992- and that the no-man’s land of weird zoning between Coeymans and Ravenna isn’t where I’d ordinarily go looking for books on boating. Who knew. I also ordered a used copy of Buehler’s Backyard Boatbuilding. I’m looking forward to reading it.

I may not get farther than looking over the Hudson (or soon the East) river but at least I have something to occupy my thoughts.

I was reading through Jim Clark’s blog and he commented on John Gruber’s Markdown. The idea is that you just write, forgetting about most of the mark up, and let a preprocessor handle it. There are a minimum of tags that are fairly email-like and, if not intuitive, simple. It’s a good idea and a convenient execution. It plugs into Movable Type without any effort.

Signed the contract of sale for the apartment and still no house yet. At least it looks like it was the right time to sell. We’re looking into rentals, a market that, thankfully, is pretty flat. Not quite what we intended but we need a place to live. A sixty-odd day window isn’t enough to gamble on finding and closing on a house.

I just read the Unredacted Report on Judiciary Committee Computer System on Cryptome.org. It’s a dull read.

Well, all except for the alarming part about two-thirds through where you learn that every one of the administrators of the Senate Judiciary computers was really a member of a troop of microcephalic gibbons. I can only guess that they were so proud of their opposable thumbs and lack of tails that they just forgot everything told to them in those NT4 MCSE classes. They left 144 home directories openly accessible to anyone with an account and this resulted in the "breach" of which a few ethically-flexible staffers took advantage.

In my estimation, what the staffers did was wrong- they should not have snooped and stolen other people’s files for eighteen months (and then been caught, it is politics)- but what the scat-throwing tree-climbers posing as administrators did was at best unprofessional and at worst negligent bordering on the criminal. The administrators have an obligation to manage the system and that includes auditing its use and implementing and enforcing security. Did it not occur to any of them that some modicum of security was recommended?