<< August 13, 2008 >>
the end of an erra

one of the earliest memories i have of my move to boston is having breakfast at the greenhouse cafe after opening a checking account at the bank boston branch in harvard square. i got checks w/o an address or phone number on them (since i had neither at the time), which i tried to use to buy my first laptop, that trusty n505ve. of course, compusa didn't take checks so loper paid for it and i wrote him a check.

of course, that was two mergers ago, and compusa isn't even around anymore.

anyway, i just closed my bank of america checking account. hooray!

<< August 13, 2008 >>
those ivory tower eggheads have done it again

kudos to the fine folks at suse, who have evidently reimplemented distcc + mdns, poorly. as a refresher, to enable this on a modern unix requires no invocations of sed, or learning whatever the current package manager du Tag happens to be:

what's even more ridiculous is that distcc is already open-source. what the hell, guys? multicast dns-enabled (x)inetd probably is, too. good going.

their faq is full of awful english, and even worse jokes; i will not dignify it with a link, but two elements of FUD do merit addressing:

you're changing compiler versions often and still want to speed up your compilation (see the ICECC_VERSION support)

i... i don't know why you are changing compilers often. i am not going to ask; i really don't want to know. anyway, if your company hasn't figured out how to distribute a toolchain to its developers, dag has awesome distcc compiler packages for red hat and fedora. i used to use these when i had a mini cluster in brookline, and it was the best. cross compilers were no problem, either; i also distributed x86 builds to my ppc macs.

most important: you're sitting in a office with several co-workers that do not like if you overload their workstations when they play doom (distcc doesn't have a scheduler)

it's 2008, guys. if your workstation can't handle DooM on one of its cores while the other three are compiling compilers, well, i don't even know. maybe if you had a stable kernel abi that didn't require recompilation of drivers for SMP and UP machines, you wouldn't have to spend so much time compiling? just throwing that out there.

also, it cannot go without saying that today was the first boston radiohead show of the millennium that i missed. and they played kid a and a wolf at the door! i can take some solace in the fact that i wouldn't be going to the smelly old tweeter center anyway, even if i wasn't in california.

i will also take this opportunity to mention that tickets for radiohead's show IN TOKYO ON MY BIRTHDAY (WHICH IS ALSO THOM'S BIRTHDAY) go on sale august 23. you know, if you happen to be shopping on the internet that day.