Month: May 2007

Dallas – News – The Cult of Ole – dallasobserver.com:

Have you ever read The Door magazine? Watched the “God Stuff” segments that used to be on the Daily Show back in the old Craig Kilborne days? Seen biting exposes of televangelists or mail-order evangelists?

You were probably enjoying the work of the Trinity Foundation.

You might want to learn a little more about these guys, and their leader, Ole Anthony. After reading about the Trinity Foundation, I’m finding the sleaziest televangelist downright cuddly in comparison.

The tale of Doug and Wendy Duncan’s involvement with the Trinity Foundation and Ole Anthony (Wendy wrote a book about it) is eerily reminiscent of the tale of Adam and Maria Brooks’ involvement with the Remnant Fellowship of Christian weight-loss guru Gwen Shamblin.

Review of Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert.

The gist of the book is that human beings are very bad at accurately predicting their future happiness.

It’s absolutely right: for example, I predicted when I bought it that I would enjoy the book.

Whedonesque:

I don’t know how to summarize this. Well worth reading. Via Body Impolitic, which quotes it in context of a discussion of the truly frightening comments that the Internet reserves for women bloggers.

At work I’ve had to compile a lot of extremely heavyweight Perl extensions for OS X. I have had a lot of trouble with it when I try to make Universal Binaries. I thought this was a problem with Perl or with the GUI toolkit I was trying to use, but just now I’ve run into some serious trouble trying to compile some simple extensions for a Universal Binary of Ruby. Ruby compiled OK, but I could not for the life of me compile the SQLite extension for it — which was absolutely trivial to compile and install when I was using a non-Universal-Binary Ruby.

I tracked down what was stopping me and it was this:

“gcc -E -I. -I/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/i686-darwin8.9.1 -I. -I/usr/local/include -O -g -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -arch i386 -arch ppc -pipe -fno-common conftest.c -o conftest.i”
gcc: -E, -S, -save-temps and -M options are not allowed with multiple -arch flags

I looked up what the -E flag is and it’s “Stop after the preprocessing stage; do not run the compiler proper. The output is in the form of preprocessed source code, which is sent to the standard output.”

Well… as far as I can tell, running GCC with the -E flag is a fairly standard method to determine whether you’ve got a library installed. If I can’t do that with a universal binary Ruby because of the build flags that it carries along with it, I’m not going to be able to build *any* native extensions without huge headaches, and to be honest, if I wanted huge headaches, I’d be using Perl.

I may be missing something here — there may be a way to suppress those flags, and get on with life. But I sure don’t know what it is, and the Ruby extension build mechanism doesn’t know what it is either, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s time to kiss my universal-binary Ruby goodbye, and with it my dreams of putting together RubyCocoa applications which will work equally well on PPC and Intel macs.

Ah well.

Salt Lake Tribune – Dr. Laura son linked to lurid Web page:

Dr. Laura Schlessinger: “We raised our son to be a warrior.”

Dr. Laura’s Son Deryk’s Myspace Page: “Yes . . . F—ING Yes!!! I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don’t.”

From the article:

The MySpace page, publicly available until Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned “My Sweet Little Habib”; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets.

An Army spokesperson suggests that “our enemies” may have slyly created a fake myspace page to make Dr. Laura’s son look bad.