MacPorts: Everything Else Sucks More

Random Bits and Pieces: MacPorts are Fatally Flawed gives a good list of reasons why MacPorts sucks.  I wanted to upgrade the Gimp to the latest and greatest, and I put the wrong flag into the upgrade command and it’s taken all damn day and upgraded nearly every port I had, so far, except the Gimp itself.  Ports I had forgotten I ever installed.  Compiling, compiling, compiling.

And I didn’t *know* I’d screwed up because sometimes even when you do everything *right* it goes nuts like that.

The big Macports thing is: you compile everything yourself.  This gives you great flexibility if you want some unusual variant of a program.  But the 95% of the time that you don’t, that you want a standard version of the program just like everybody else’s… tough.  You’re compiling it yourself no matter how long it takes.

It’d be nice if you could just download binary packages from a central repository like you can with most Linux package management systems, and not have to compile them all yourself.  It used to be possible to do that with fink, an alternative to macports, but in doing so you only got the “stable” (read: ancient and crusty) versions of the packages.  For the “unstable” (read: created this millennium) versions, you had to compile them yourself, and if you wanted *any* unstable packages, you pretty much had to use all  unstable packages… and fink’s set of packages is smaller and less up-to-date than macports’s, so you were screwed.

Now, when everything goes right with macports, it goes *really* right.  You can install a very up-to-date version of the Gimp, with a proper Mac application bundle, with some of the coolest new plugins (liquid rescale, RAW support via ufraw) and with the ability to access a wide variety of scanners via xsane, all built in.  That’s exquisitely cool.

But when things go wrong, there’s not much you can do about it, and the hassle you have to go through compiling even when things are going right is a complete pain.  This ain’t Gentoo, kids.  It’s a staid operating system for people who don’t want to invest the time and pain that a true open source operating system demands.  Does it have to be this way?

Guess it does.

The Man Has A Point:

I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

—John Cole, on seeing Republican thought processes articulated by Non-Joe the Non-Plumber, Michelle Malkin, and right-wing blogger Instapundit.

President Obama

I’m really happy for my kids, who’ve lived their whole lives in these dark years. We can stop cursing the darkness — we’ve lit a candle; let’s pass the flame around and light the place up.

The Birth of The A-Team

I don’t remember where I got the original link to the first article here; probably Metafilter or something. anyway…

Jason Scott is angered by the callousness displayed by companies to whom people have entrusted their digital lives, and posts about it.

Slashdotted, he is inundated with snotty, cynical geek responses, and lashes back, in the process conceiving of a team of amateur archivists who spring into action, and mirror those who can’t mirror themselves!

Mere days later, this team begins to coalesce into existence.

I find this all awesome.

Helpful Advice From A Benevolent Guru

There’re folks out there, see, who talk about the competent people and the incompetent people, with the intimation that they are amongst the former, and that they can help guide you to be one too so that you, like them, can enjoy your competence and laugh at the incompetents. Often they claim to represent the few true heirs of the Good Old Days, when men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

There are a lot of them in programming. The most well known, to me, is Paul Graham, a Lisp hacker who happened to sell his company to Yahoo in the middle of the first Net bubble and make millions of dollars. There is (well, was — it disappeared but appears to be cached for the moment, right here –) a wonderful parody blog, supposedly written by a dedicated Paul Graham fan, called “Lisp at Light Speed!” which illustrates the dynamic created by this kind of thing. The author of Lisp At Light Speed is absolutely convinced of the superiority of Lisp and the genius of Graham, and says the stupidest damn things ever (but many of them are only obviously stupid if you know a bit of Lisp — I know just enough to get some of the jokes).

Anyway, I just discovered one of these people outside of programming: John Kricfalusi.

In an interview conducted years ago with Tasha Robinson of the Onion, we learned that he considered himself and Ralph Bashki to be basically the only “professonal” animators working today — the heirs of a tradition of professional animation from the early to mid twentieth century. He considers basically every other animator to be ripping him off, badly. (I suppose they are ripping him off in a way — via Ren and Stimpy, he is singlehandedly responsible for the fact that children’s cartoons today consider detailed depictions of boogers to be actual comedy. Thanks, John K. Thanks a lot.)

I recently discovered he has a blog called John K Stuff, where he will teach you how to be awesome and professional like him, via secret techniques such as the “ball and tube” construction methods which you will find in every single how-to-draw comics and cartoons book ever made, of which there are about eighty thousand in my local Barnes & Noble alone. Oh, and drawing characters with big eyes, because they are more “appealing.” I kid you not, those are his secret techniques.

Encouraging you to learn how to copy images by older animators via shape construction, he says:

This won’t be easy at first, but the more you do it, the sooner it will all make sense and you will start to gain skill and confidence.

Then you can crap on the folks who refuse to learn anything traditionally and still can’t draw anything remotely professional or appealing. They will be so jealous of you. And you’ll get the better job.

That’s what it’s all about! He puts it so bluntly. But that is the attraction it offers. A secret path to greatness.

I hate this because I am a total sucker for it. I could easily be Bruce, the Lisp at Light Speed! author, or one of the eager young space cadets in the comments section of the John K Stuff blog, thanking him for dropping his nuggets of big-eyed, ball-and-tube-constructed wisdom on us all. In fact, I am indeed currently getting suckered by John K Stuff, I’m all ready to try some drawings taking his advice on Good Construction and Appealing Characters.

I hate it, I say again, because I’m a total sucker for it.

Why can’t I have the independence to believe in what I’m doing, and my ability to do it? Why do I have to look for gurus to give me the secrets?

In the comments to this blog post by Sten K Anderson, which addresses this phenomenon from another perspective (with respect to Joel Spolsky, who’s another Paul Grahamy type), a commenter named Chris Williams says:

“You will look back at what you’ve written in ten years and laugh at your naivety. Stop worrying so much about what other people might think, they’re all faking it anyway – even your ‘heroes’. Also, check your spelling.”

That might be the best guru advice you can possibly get.