Shouting Into Space

Entries from February 2008

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Tuesday, February 26. 2008

Fink on Leopard With Blocked CVS Port Posted by Latcarf in Mac OS X at 16:05

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Fink on Leopard With Blocked CVS Port

Recently I wanted to use Fink on my Leopard machine at work. This sounds simple but there are a few complicating factors. First, there are no Fink binaries for Leopard as of this writing. Ok, so that's not a big deal, I can compile it easy enough, Fink made an easy to use bootstrap script for that purpose. Secondly, as far as I know, as of this writing, we can't use rsync mode during Fink's self update on Leopard. So, the solution is to use fink selfupdate-cvs. This leads to the third problem which comes from the fact that my company is strict about blocking ports. Unfortunately the cvs port 2401 is blocked. Fortunately however, SSH (port 22) is not. So my solution is to temporarily port-forward cvs through ssh to my home server so I can run fink selfupdate-cvs to pull down all the great package descriptions I need for my fink install.

Here's are my notes on what I did:

# I needed to find where the cvs urls were set so I grepped in /sw
cd /sw
grep -R fink.cvs.sourceforge.net *

# That eventually turned up the following potential places to make changes:
lib/fink/URL/anonymous-cvs:fink.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fink
lib/fink/URL/cvs-repository:fink.cvs.sourceforge.net
lib/fink/URL/developer-cvs:fink.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fink
lib/perl5/Fink/SelfUpdate/CVS.pm: my $cvsrepository = "fink.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fink";

# Since I only needed to get package descriptions I figured /sw/lib/fink/URL/anonymous-cvs
# was the file I wanted change to handle my port-forward solution.
cd /sw/lib/fink/URL/
sudo cp anonymous-cvs anonymous-cvs.orig
nano -wz anonymous-cvs

# Here I changed: fink.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fink to: localhost:/cvsroot/fink

# Then it was a simple matter to create an ssh tunnel to an external server where I have
# the ability to login and its port 2401 is not blocked.
ssh login@domian.example -L 2401:fink.cvs.sourceforge.net:2401

# Finally, I ran the fink update command:
fink selfupdate-cvs

# Hooray. Now everything works as expected and I probaly don't need to use it again unless I need
# to update package descriptions sometime in the future. So, I changed things back:
cd /sw/lib/fink/URL/
sudo mv anonymous-cvs anonymous-cvs.custom
sudo mv anonymous-cvs.orig anonymous-cvs

# Probably I should create a shell alias like: finkselfupdatecvs to handle it all when I
# I find I want to update package descriptions again. But I'm too lazy and besides, that's
# why I've put it in my blog.

Wednesday, February 20. 2008

Fractal Wrongness Posted by Latcarf in Generality at 09:15

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Fractal Wrongness

Definition:

fractal wrongness

    The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person's worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person's worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.

    Debating with a person who is fractally wrong leads to infinite regress, as every refutation you make of that person's opinions will lead to a rejoinder, full of half-truths, leaps of logic, and outright lies, that requires just as much refutation to debunk as the first one. It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time.

    If you ever get embroiled in a discussion with a fractally wrong person on the Internet--in mailing lists, newsgroups, or website forums--your best bet is to say your piece once and ignore any replies, thus saving yourself time.

Taken from Keunwoo Lee : Lexicon 2