I now remember why I hated school and left. It's that tone of voice the administrative staff, and to a lesser extent, the faculty, use when they disapprove of something you're doing. It's kind of like the "power voice" cops are trained to use. The intended effect is to make one feel as though they've trundled into some adult world with a dirty diaper, desperately needing their assistance. Really, though, in an academic setting, it amounts to nothing less than bullying and abuse of perceived power. As such, those people can go fucking rot. As I mentioned earlier, I'm doing enough "ongoing education" professionally that if school continues to include fuckwits such as those I encountered today, I'll just goddamn leave and be no worse off; I'm only in it for the pedigree (not the edification), and nothing is worth being treated that way.

Played hold'em last night with some friends. It had been a while since we got out and did anything social, since I've been gone so much. It was also the first time I'd played hold'em with anyone other than my wife. Playing with six people is so much more dynamic than playing with two. And it was a real treat to play on Jason's table, chips, and cards. I was knocked out first, after I lost an all-in A-10 to my wife's A-K hand. Chances of that happening are just so minimal that I don't feel bad about it. It was quite a learning experience, and we had a lot of fun.

Installed the excellent mediawiki at home to keep track of lots of household information. I think it will be pretty useful. An interesting install process:

• download, expand, read documentation, and install mediawiki
  
• download the mysql srpm from redhat, build and install
  
• notice that it can't write to the directory it lives in (had inadvertently done a find . -exec chmod 666 {} \;, ignoring the directories which need to be +x). fix this.
  
• now it can't talk to the database, which exists, because redhat's php was not built with mysql support, and no srpm addresses this.
  
• remove php-imap, php-ldap, php, squirrelmail rpm's.
  
• remove mysql rpm.
  
• install mysql-server, mysql-devel, and mysql-client rpm's from mysql ag. add to services and chkconfig on.
  
• download php and build against new mysql sources.
  
• mediawiki has same problem re: mysql/php; realize that --mysql does not enable mysql support in php, but rather --mysql=/usr is required. this is rather unintuitive. you'd think --with-mysql-libs=/usr/lib/mysql and --with-mysql-headers=/usr/include/mysql would be more consistent with foss convention (and for that matter most postgres software)...
  
• apache is now not php'ifying mediawiki. ah, well, I guess rpm removed my php.conf from $httpd/etc/conf.d/. it also seems to have removed the addhandler directive.
  
• add directives and re-place php.conf, and we're in business.
  

So now it's up and running and I'm more or less happy with it. I remember mediawiki being an even larger pain to install before, but mainly because of an unholy non-interaction between php3, mysql, and apache 1.3. Again I find myself wondering what somebody who hadn't debugged situations like this a million times would have done.

recentlog

mirwin, my sympathies for the wisdom teeth. had that done about ten years ago. incredibly painful. hopefully you won't get dry sockets (i had four), and you'll heal well enough. as i recall, from friends who've also had the procedure, it's about 50/50. recommend Lorcet or Lortab for pain (slightly more effective than vicodin).



xorian, that's terrific. i would have given up after the first day. maybe it's a little sad that i so enjoyed reading that story, but nonetheless, thank you for sharing it.



mjw, mod_gcj sounds like a great idea. do you know of any installations actually using it to good success? after reading about it, i'm rather surprised it hadn't been thought of before!

leaving for seattle tomorrow. will be there for next two weeks.