Category Archive for ‘general’ at JJB Blog

Archive for the 'general' Category

How to build kdiff3 in MacPorts on OS X 10.5 Leopard

Published

on 7/6/2008

. 0 Comments

Are you getting this error message when trying to build kdiff3 in MacPorts?

i686-apple-darwin9-g++-4.0.1: /usr/X11/lib/libGL.dylib: No such file or directory make[2]: *** [libkdiff3part.la] Error 1 make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1 make: *** [all] Error 2

Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.

Here is how to solve it:

[click here for plain text]

BASH:

$ sudo mv /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.dylib /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.dylib_bak
$ sudo ln -s /System/Library/Frameworks/OpenGL.framework/Versions/A/Libraries/libGL.dylib /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.dylib
$ sudo port install kdiff3
$ sudo rm /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.dylib
$ sudo mv /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.dylib_bak /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.dylib

ShareThis

My new blog: Obama Letdown Watch

Published

John

on 6/27/2008

in general

. 2 Comments

Obama is the presumptive nominee, hooray!

BUT! Will he live up to the expectations he has set?

Will he refuse to "play the same old washington games with the same old washington players." ??

Will he let us down?

Behold, my new blog:

Obama Letdown Watch

ShareThis

Importing a Subversion (svn) repository using git

Published

John

on 6/18/2008

in general

. 0 Comments

I've been reading this excellent guide to learn a thing or two about git, specifically how to work locally with git and remotely with Subversion. After importing a repository with a command similar to this:

git svn init -t tags -b branches -T trunk http://example.com/repository

git svn fetch

I found that I had no branches and no tags. Well, the repository in question didn't have any branches at the time, but it did have tags. I knew that git must be doing something clever with the tags, because the command takes the -t option seen above. I looked through the guide and elsewhere on the web, and came up with nothing.

I emailed the author, Sam Vilain, and he kindly responded and answered my question. It turns out that, because tags can be modified after they are created in Subversion, the git importer brings them in as remote branches. They can all be viewed with the git branch -a.

I promised Sam that I would blog this solution so that others could find it (and hopefully not bug him), and he responded:

even better would be a patch to:

git-clone http://utsl.gen.nz/talks/git-svn/.git

:-)

Sam.

ShareThis

Scholars for Schools

Published

John

on 6/12/2008

in general

. 2 Comments

My girlfriend Hannah is in Valparaíso, Chile for one year, on a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship. For the past few months, she has been putting together a project that will provide literacy and technology resources for underprivileged schools in the Valparaíso region. For their first school, this means renovating an unused room, and buying books and computers for it to make it into a library.

The project is called Scholars for Schools. You can read more about it on Hannah's blog, here.

ShareThis

Obama doing more great work for government transparency

Published

John

on 6/12/2008

in general

. 0 Comments

This is fantastic.

Senators Obama and Coburn have introduced the Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008 (S. 3077), which would modify their 2006 transparency act. That first bill created USASpending.gov, a searchable web site of government outlays.

...

The new bill would expand the scope of information available via USASpending.gov, adding information about federal contracts, leases, and audit disputes, among other areas.

At some point, "Real" conservatives (even a lot of (most?) Reagan-style conservatives) are going to wake up and realize that Obama is doing radical work to make government spending more transparent and accountable, and that's a GOOD thing for more efficient government!

ShareThis

Anyone want the domain name ‘missingwiki.org’

Published

John

on 6/11/2008

in general

. 0 Comments

I'm not going to continue to develop missingwiki.org- I think the need isn't that great, and if a project doesn't have good docs, they get what they deserve. Plus the whole thing will be redundant in 18 months anyway when the Distributed Meta Git Wiki Semantic Structured Status Web solves all of our problems.

Anyone want this domain name?

ShareThis

obamasresume.org — still relevant?

Published

John

on 6/11/2008

in general

. 2 Comments

Back in March I announced a new project, obamasresume.org. The point of the project was to demonstrate that Obama's experience was significant, relevant, and impressive. There were a lot of assertions that Clinton was far more experienced than Obama, and I wanted to help set the record straight a little.

The site didn't get fleshed out nearly as much as I thought it would, both because I had anticipated having more time to contribute to the wiki, and because I thought I would get far more user contributions. (Strangely, more than half of the people who registered for an account made no changes to the wiki.)

Now that Obama is the Democratic nominee, the primary purpose of the site is no longer there. I don't think many people comparing Obama to McCain will be worried about Obama's level of experience, and if they are considering McCain in the first place, then Obama's reformist resume will probably turn them off anyway. (oh wait, McCain used to stand for campaign finance reform... I guess that's over with).

Anyway, I'm tempted to just take it down. I don't have time to contribute to it, and no one else seems to either. It's the first hit on Google for "Obama's Resume", which is a good and bad thing. Good because, in theory it is being found very quickly by exactly the people who would be looking for it, bad because there isn't much useful info on there.

What do you, dear reader, think I should do with the site? Leave it? Hype it more? Take it down?

Anyone want to take it over?

ShareThis

How to convert a software installation into a Subversion checkout

Published

John

on 6/11/2008

in general

. 0 Comments

Say you have some web software such as WordPress, MediaWiki, or Gallery installed, and you used a tarball and not Subversion. Now, you want to manage the installation using Subversion, but you don't want to jump through hoops running diffs and moving files around.

Here's how to do it (thanks to Asheesh for the recipe).