15 Sep 2001 kahlage   » (Journeyer)

06:55 GMT+5 ==

Anyone reading this should know; I am a US citizen who lives in Texas. The recent terrorist activity has affected me quite deeply and I'm still figuring out what to feel about it. Complicating matters, I have relatives who are Iranian and people are throwing crap at his house because of his ethnicity.

I can't educate everyone about the political situation in the Middle East, simply because I'm ignorant to a large degree myself. However, down here in the Bible Belt it seems to be alright to turn on your bigotry when horrible things happen. (Or alternately, when your football team looses, or you've taken another breath, etc...) I find myself short-tempered when dealing with the public. I feel the urge to yell about their stupidity to them, or just avoid them altogether. I think the later is my best course of action, and it will be what I pursue until I sort my own emotional state out.

Now, on to other things!

Sorcerer GNU/Linux has turned out to be really cool. I wasn't getting it to boot after the installation because the creator has reservations about having his distro over-write the boot sector of the harddrive it's installed on. Whether this is a personal fetish or a serious concern of releasing a new distribution onto your hardware I haven't figured out yet... But once I understood this, it was a simple matter to edit /etc/lilo.conf and make it boot the correct way. Sorcerer has some serious features that other distros don't (including my precious Slackware), to whit:

  • automatic dependancy tracking
  • automatic dependancy recovery -- just type cast --fix
  • automatic package installation -- if you call a program that doesn't already exist on the box, it will find, download, compile, install, and run it for you. You can turn this off, if you like.
  • all software is optimized for your hardware

It's really quite pretty. It uses SysV init scripts, but that's alright. They're not too hard to tinker with. I'd recommend anyone who's had a little experience to tinker with it. It's a kicker distro that's quite powerful.

In other news, I've begun helping Michael Louka (of MacWeb3D and VRML on the Macintosh fame) with a new program. His dxf2vrml convertor is pretty cool, but my autoconf / automake scripts are leaving a little to be desired. Why does GNU Darwin and IRIX want the linker flags at the end of the commandline? I need to buy the Goat Book...

Well, I have to go to work. Robots aren't behaving and the deadlines are drawing ever nearer.

<dexter-voice intensity=100%>Stupid robots!</dexter-voice>

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