doit, doit now!

Get out of my tent! Originally uploaded by hodulik.

That’s right folks, it’s not “hih-muh-LAY-uh”! We were corrected several times by the natives.

I just got back from a trek into the Himalayas of Utteranchal via Haridwar and Rishikesh (where the Beatles went to visit the Maharishi). We took the train from Delhi up north and met up with our guide Rajinder at the lovely Camp Hammock.

We stayed overnight there and the following day made our way to Teva village which served as our base camp for the trek up to the 3500m peak of Nagtiba (variously Nagtibba, Nag Tiba, or Nag Tibba, take your pick). Teva sits in a moist deciduous forest, which is apparrently different than a temperate rain forest. All I know is that it was very, very wet, and very, very beautiful.

Anyway more later, but photosets are up on my Flickr page.

I recently launched the LungBlog, a daily compendium of all things lung-cancer related, for the lung cancer foundation on whose board I sit. Yes, I know that “The Bonnie J. Addario A Breath Away From The Cure Foundation” isn’t at all descriptive (I have yet to meet someone who knows what it is upon hearing it) but we are considering changing it to something simpler, easier to type, and MUCH better for search engine optimization, like, oh, I don’t know, THE LUNG CANCER FOUNDATION. In any event, take a look!

So the Ride begins on Sunday, and I am super excited. I got me some Ambien, I got me some cola-flavored energy gel, I got me some spandex, and I am good to go. Thanks to generous folks I managed to raise over $5,000!

I have been extremely busy trying to wrap life up before I leave on Sunday, but I wanted to share this page. Through it you can send messages to any Rider which will be printed out every day and posted on a message board. Send me stuff!

Other than that I managed to score a solar charger for my Treo/digicam/GPS and got a blogging client for the Treo, as well, so I will actually be able to post pictures and whatnot here wirelessly whenever I get into data transmission range. I will not, however, be checking email or phone messages. I’m disconnecting for the week, and I think it might be the longest I have ever gone without a computer.

Anyway much to do, watch here for updates!

If you’ve ever tried to install Ruby, Ruby On Rails, MySQL 5, and the Ruby C bindings via DarwinPorts on Mac OS X, you might find yourself running into a weird error. Or three. My particular problem was that the Ruby gem for the MySQL bindings couldn’t find the MySQL5 header files or libraries, and as such the gem would never compile. DarwinPorts uses its own weird little placement for the files, and as such it took me a few minutes to figure out how to get it to build. So, assuming you have a default install of DarwinPorts and have gone through the trouble of installing Ruby and Ruby gems, just do a

gem install mysql — –with-mysql-lib=/opt/local/lib/mysql5/mysql/ –with-mysql-include=/opt/local/include/mysql5/mysql/

and everything should work swimmingly.

Sometimes I read things on other people’s sites that I already had mentally composed, just never put down in any tangible form. I swear people steal them straight out of my head.

In any case, Peter Dubuque has written an amazingly succint, well-put letter to some Democratic congresspeople detailing the absurdity of the past few years, and how the Dems are just as responsible for the horrendous transformation of American life during the Bush Ascendancy as the Republicans are.

As Peter quoting Edmund Burke puts it: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Just an awesome read.

Cringely has written a fascinating article on Paul Allen, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and the history and future of Microsoft. I haven’t read anything like it in a long time. Cringely is usually on point, so it’ll be interesting to see if his history lesson plays out in the way he thinks it does.

Poor Tuttle, OK– they have Jerry Taylor as their City Manager. It seems his hosting provider installed CentOS, an excellent Linux distribution, on the computers used to host Tuttle’s web site, but never configured the computers after the initial install. The web site thus simply showed the default CentOS web page, which includes instructions as to how to configure it. Jerry Taylor instead wrote the CentOS team and threatened to call the FBI unless they “removed their website from his website.”

The CentOS guys were extremely nice about it, even as they became exasperated with how dense this guy was. They had no obligation to provide any support to this guy, but they did, and every time they asked him for the information they needed he became more irate and ignorant. Finally they just went ahead and figured out who the guy’s ISP was for him and told him to go ask the ISP, and after the ISP resolved it, Jerry had the audacity to tell the CentOS guys that it would have been better for them to solve the problem for him more quickly.

Hats off to Jerry Taylor, the most smartest man in Tuttle, OK!

I was tooling around looking for a Gallery2 export plugin for iPhoto to make it easy for my Dad to upload pictures of his new restaurant, Stella’s Restaurant and Bar, to his website. I found a couple examples, but none of them had been compiled for Intel Macs. Luckily the source is available for Gallery2Export, so I just downloaded it and compiled it with XCode. I’ve done this with a few other FOSS packages lately in order to make Intel-native versions, and generally have met with excellent success.

Here’s the file if you’re interested.

Here are some DVD’s that Iraqi insurgents use as both training and recruitment tools. It’s quite graphic.

If this doesn’t make it plainly obvious that Iraq is another Vietnam, I don’t know what does.

This war isn’t going anywhere.

Why don’t we lower taxes for the rich and then spend some more money we don’t have on the war?