I went to a ham radio club meeting tonight and it got me to think about club dynamics. Sometimes things go smoothly, but there’s often someone coming in and trying to change the power structure. They want more power, sometimes without knowing why they want it. I can describe a lot of things using the “club model,” including Open Source programming projects and politics.

I don’t know how this got me to think about this odd “Ivy League Plus” mailing list I bailed out of. They even have a disclaimer and refused to start the list until their lawyers looked over the disclaimer. I left after seeing too many people chastised for asking innocent questions. The final straw for me was when the list queen slapped some people down who wanted to meet to discuss politics. She demanded that the list not be used to make political statements, even when no one had made any statement other than what Chinese restaurant they were going to meet in. Come on. What a control freak.

Of course, when I left, I made a comment about how I, “enjoyed watching yuppies in their natural habitat, a list made by lawyers for lawyers,” and that really cheesed the yuppies off.

I didn’t think anything about the Ivy league freaks until I got an email from a guy who got kicked off the list. Someone asked for “Humane Rat Catchers” and he replied that rats usually got poison (describing the actions of Warfarin in less detail than my biochemistry teacher) and then described prairie dog hunting. Come on. Everyone west of the Mississippi knows about prairie dog hunting, don’t they? They kicked him off for being intolerant and disrespectful.

I’ve come to find that the guy who got kicked off the list is the President of a large, visible local company (and possibly a bit of a redneck). How can you live in Oregon without tolerating rednecks?

So I volunteered to try AxKit, and XML to web framework, for the Fink Project. I’ve now spent four weeks trying to get it to work. Here’s what I think I’ve figured out about installing AxKit:

On RH9 or Fedora:

• Don’t use apache2. Use apache1. That means install from source, and install mod_perl first.
1. extract the extract the “apache source”
2. extract the mod_perl source
3. configure mod_perl with: “perl Makefile.PL APACHE_SRC=../apache_1.3.29/src DO_HTTPD=1 USE_APACI=1 EVERYTHING=1”
4. in mod_perl, do a “make && make test && make install”
5. cd to ../apache_1.3.29 and do a “make install”
• install Apache-Test by hand
• install Apache-Request by hand
• install the JavaScript binary
• install Sablotron and Sablotron-devel binaries. This does not build well, from what I’ve found.
• install XML-Sablotron from source.
• install libghttp (and probably libghttp-devel) from your RH install media
• start cpan (perl -MCPAN -e shell) and install:

• Time::Piece
• HTTP::GHTTP
• AxKit
• AxKit::XSP::Util

On FreeBSD

AxKit can also be installed quite easily on FreeBSD 4.9 using the ports system IF YOU UPDATE FIRST However, it doesn’t seem to work well after it installs.

And that sums up a lot of what I’ve been doing for the past several weeks.

BTW, CPAN sucks, mainly because there’s a series of dependencies that can’t be resolved automatically when everyone is changing their packages all the time.

I’ve also found that the Compaq Presario 5360 is a horrible POS.

RedHat Fedora won’t install properly with CDs because of disk errors. I had to do a “linux net” boot from an http server using install floppies.

NetBSD and FreeBSD boot floppies don’t work, either. I had to move the hard drive to another computer to install FreeBSD.

I should have taken pictures. It was the “Bald for the Boob Benefit” for Megan at the White Eagle Tavern. Megan’s brother and mom got their heads shaved, Dale (a regular at the pub) shaved his beard for the first time in 30 years, and lots of friends were shorn as well.

Megan and her mom look fabulous, and Megan’s mom isn’t bothered at all about the lack of hair. The next day, at the McMenamin’s Tavern where Megan’s brother Craig works, a guy from George Morlan Plumbing donated $100 on the stipulation that Craig cut off his soul patch.

Craig, Megan, and their mom look quite alike. The biggest difference is that Craig has a giant melon and it frightens me.

Megan’s friends Marcie and Michelle came up with her from the Bay Area. The lovely Marcie takes care of Megan when the chemo has her down. It was fun to see them all again.

And, I suppose that’s all I can think of for now. I spent the whole day trying to get AxKit installed on a web server. Oh, how I hate it. I’m writing down notes so I can post them if I ever get it working.

I was supposed to go to a “speed dating” party today, but some of my old classmates from Portland State convinced me it it wasn’t a great idea. At best I’m not sure I can make a good impression in only a couple of minutes. At worst I could get more repeated rejections than I can handle.

Well, I suppose I’m a little tired from helping at the 2003 ACM Pacific Northwest Regional Programming Contest. It was enlightening seeing all the whining. Not from the teams, either, but from the coaches. I hope the link to the scores still works. You can also try this.

No one was willing to host the contest this year, so Jason Wilcox from Portland State arranged everything in a month and a half. Unfortunately, the largest computer lab at Portland State is nowhere close to a large classroom, and the contest needs a meeting area as well as access to computers. So the classrooms were in a different building than the lab.

I’m not sure if the coach from a state school was joking, but I’m not a big fan of their athletic programs, so I’m willing to think he was just a whiner. “Do you think they had to walk in the rain in Fresno?” If they were outside I’m pretty sure they did. The contestants ended up holding their group discussions in the hallway. Anyway, if it’s not good enough for the coach, he can host the contest at his school.

The worst loon was a coach from a local private school. I don’t want to go into excruciating detail, but the leading team was from University of British Columbia and were German exchange students. The lunatic coach ranted, “In Germany, you have to take a test to stay in high school or to go on, if you’re not good enough, you’re out. … Here, any drug dealer can get into college.” He really didn’t appreciate my comment that MIT and Caltech are highly rated (deservedly) in both undergraduate and graduate education, and if they didn’t win International Computer competitions, it probably meant the competitions don’t mean all that much. He also seemed to think the big competitive power came from Taiwan and Russia and I don’t see those countries at the forefront of Computer Science. Before I left, he spent some time bad-mouthing Portland State.

Oh, well. I’m not sure I agree, but as they say, “It takes all kinds.”

So what did I get out of this?

• A chance to help a friend out.
• A t-shirt that’s too large for me.
  
• Some IBM swag.
  
• 2 1/2 hours of work on Friday, and 9 1/2 hours of work on Saturday, all unpaid.
• Some ranting from crazy college professors.

All in all, just another day in my life.

It’s my sister’s last day here, so she was trying to fit in a lot of crap into one day.

• First she made a quick trip to the yarn store “Lint” with Mrs. Harris,
• then a trip downtown to Nordstrom’s, Moonstruck Chocolatier, and Kitchen Kaboodle with the Slabs,
• then dinner with family friends at the Japanese restaurant “Ikenohana,”
• and finally dessert with her friend Wendy.

Unfortunately, she got a migraine headache just before dinner and had to sleep in the car instead of eating. Her dessert trip was also canceled.

After we got home, my father wandered around the house aimlessly, threatening to wake my sister to see if she was OK. So instead of going to my friend Darrell’s final birthday party (he’s decided that 29 is old enough) I had to stay home and run interference.

I hope she’s feeling better since she’s on a plane back for home tomorrow.

I guess my grandmother in Japan is now bedridden and has some form of inoperable cancer. Surgery is mainly not an option because she’s 98. Last year at this time, she was still taking care of her garden, even though she lost her sight years ago.

Now she doesn’t worry about much, but does still make requests for what she wants to eat. It doesn’t matter to my grandmother who comes or goes. She didn’t ask about my aunt, when my mother took over the caretaking duties for the two weeks she was there. But my grandmother still had food requests. I’m happy she still has something to look forward to.

I’m the last unmarried grandchild and it looks like that won’t change.