Skittle Hoarder 4 November 1998

Open source software is a good thing. I know this. It not only runs better, it's morally superior. I'm all for it. I am. I would just like to know WHY it is, that every time I try to compile any of the fucking stuff, I get lost in a sea of "Wow I've never seen it do that before, I dunno, sucks man" errors? Hmm?

More evidence for the Nazi-prison-guard-in-a-past-life theory. Of course there's always the alternate explanation, that I'm just too dim to figure it out. I feel dimmer every year so I can't rule that out either.

A reader forwards an alternate opinion on Governor The Body:

"People listen to 'The Body' and say he is no moron," said David Carr, editor of Washington City Paper and a former colleague of Ventura's at a Minneapolis radio station. "But really, he is a moron. What is wrong with these people? How can this happen in the state of Humphrey and Mondale? I suppose Ventura taps into that ambient atavism that's out there in the country."

What place more likely than the state of Humphrey and Mondale? These people are starving, they're tired of tofu politics! They want big burgers! Moooooo! I wonder if they're selling those action figures yet...

Nice to see that Jerry Brown got his strong-mayor proposition, Measure X (heh. what a name. he's so shameless sometimes.), through over in Oakland. If they start running ferry service to the new ball park here in SF, Oakland might be worth giving a look to. Though it doesn't seem much cheaper than here. Sigh. If there's a fire, I dunno. I'll have to move to Iowa or something. Better go pick those newspapers up off my floor.

Postscript to above whining: Sheesh. Ellen Ullman is right - this penny-ante toy software on Macs and Windoze makes you lazy and stupid. Fortunately, nothing has ever stopped me from being obsessive.

If you really want to know, I'm trying to get Sybase support in PHP3 working for Apache on a Solaris box. There's two kinds, regular sybase, which uses the DB libraries, and high-octane sybase-ct, which uses the CT libraries. One of them compiles and links fine, but then just doesn't work. No errors, nothing crashes, it's all very calm. Just doesn't work. "Connect to that database." "No." "What? Do it!" "No." "No? Why not?" "I dunno." It's like debugging a 3-year-old. (Ha. Typo made that "30year-old" at first. One of those too.)

The other one wouldn't compile at all, and wanted mysterious libraries that as far as I could tell didn't have a gol durned thing to do with PHP or Sybase or my mom or anything. It's always networking libraries that do that, too. Networks are too hard. I think they just change everything around once a year to keep the job supply up. Good idea.

But, so, there I was, this is the third day I've been trying to get this stuff to work. The mailing lists for PHP are all full of people getting one kind of Sybase error or another, but nobody just plain can't get it to work at all. Well, no, one guy couldn't. He posted back in September. I sent him mail saying "Hey, how'd you fix that?" He said, "I didn't! I gave up! Let me know if you find out anything!" And all the local list experts (I guess) are responding to me saying things like "Do you have SYBASE defined?" No, Grampa, I left my brain in my other butt this week. YES I have SYBASE defined, jeez. Annoying Man! I ended up making some loud complaints about how the PHP sybase-ct wouldn't even compile fer god's sakes, how lame can you get? Then I got mail from someone whose name I thought looked familiar. Oh, he kinda invented this, didn't he? Ooosp. Mmm, tasty foot.

All of which was very interesting, and I know a lot about Sybase errors on Windows NT now, but did me no good at all. That's where I came in here. But just because it was pointless and a waste of my time when I really had other work to do, that was hardly enough reason to stop picking at it.

Lo and after much picking, and looking, and reading the code, and reading the make files, and reading the manuals, and even thinking about what was going on, I found the problem. The PHP stuff is mostly used on Linux, and that's what it was set up to compile on. Which is why hardly anyone else ran into the problem. Or cared. Solaris? Fuck you guys, you have money. So I had to change the scripts to use the right libraries for Solaris. And after trying two or three times, I even got the right ones.

But by God, it works now. Well, so far.

And that was my day.

Sybase is database software that costs a lot of money and isn't Oracle. It has good documentation on-line when the site is up.

PHP is a scripting language for Web pages. It's groovy. It's open source software. You have to compile it. That can be hard.

Apache is Web server software. Most of the Web runs on it. It's open source too, so if you want to add something like PHP, you have to compile Apache too. That can also be hard. There's a theme here.

Solaris is an operating system - what MacOS and Windows9T pretend to be. It's a kind of Unix, like Linux. It's NOT open source. It costs a lot of money. I don't know much about it except that it has a lot of obscure details. Like DCE. I think we have that. I haven't the faintest idea what it is. I have a tendency to a "black box" approach to this stuff.

Willfully blind self-indulgent nebbish or amusingly quirky old coot? And how bout that local sports team? Discuss among yourselves.

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