Cheap Knock-offs

My math class is doing derivatives via basic differentiation rules after suffering through doing them “the long way” (the limit process that apparently produces many groans and bad test grades).

So Mr. Riley taught us a cute math rhyme for doing the derivative of (u/v):

> Lo-dee-hi minus hi-dee-lo,
> Over the square of what goes below.
>
> derivative formula for u/v

So totally awesome.

The Third Commandment

MySQL went onto OS X without much of a hitch using DarwinPorts, as did updated versions of PHP, Perl, and various modules therein. PostgreSQL seems to be working, but something about Movable Type causes it to not be accessible via ObjectDriver–a stub program I wrote in Perl can access the data in a test database via DBD::Pg just fine, but MT chokes on the same username/password/database combination in mt.cfg.

Math::Pari can kiss my grits. Crypt::DSA made me cry. I despair of ever making sense of that mess of hacks, patches, and recompiles.

ImageMagick can take a hike. I gritted my teeth and installed NetPBM instead. Maybe I’ll use the DarwinPorts version of ImageMagick and see if it plays nicely with PHP; other than that, though, I’m sick of it.

I’d hoped to get MT3.01D working in a PostgreSQL environment, but ended up using MySQL for it instead. It’s installed, however, and working nicely.

Having root is overrated.

Learning Experience

I will confess, I have never installed software on a Unix system before today. (Content management systems don’t count.) This is largely because I have never had root access, but never mind that.

I am hating every minute of this.

“So, how long is this going to take?”, I asked Matthew as I watched my terminal screen hang a few lines after typing “sudo port install ‘ImageMagick'”.

“Depends… what’s it hanging on?”

“It says, ‘Building XFree86 with target World’.”

“Um… you’re going to be doing that for a couple of hours.”

As Marcus would say, “Dagnabbit.”