If you want something to run right...

...compile it yourself!

After learning much, much, more than I intended about rpm, I decided that the only way to fly with LogJam was to do it the "old fashioned" way... compile it.

So, eventually it dawned on me that by tracking down and stomping the reasons for various error messages obtained while running the configure script, I might be able to get a running executable.

The old skills are not that old... this post is being made with that executable.

Gotta go celebrate!

Cheers...

The Shoehorn Syndrome...

As a civilization based on paper, the focus of any kind of document-generation effort is how the final product will look once it is printed. In this regard, I still remember trying to notch the carriage of my old Smith-Corona manual typewriter a half-line up or down to do superscripts and subscripts, or trying (usually poorly) to fit a missing letter into a word by aligning the platen on the preceding letter, and then pressing and holding the space bar while typing the missing letter.

But there are only a limited number of techniques available to a typist trying to make things look right. Then again, there are only a limited number of typists left in the world, anyway.

On the other hand, there are a ton of people out there who use word processing programs, and we who must deal with their documents would be much better off if they stuck to typewriters... or maybe clay tablets.

There is a phenomenon I call the "shoehorn syndrome" whose symptoms are fairly easy to identify when looking at a victimized word processing file: despite the fact that an exemplar of the final printed product may look reasonable, any attempt to work with the actual document file causes distress in individuals who are not the originator. (Then again, who knows? Maybe it makes the originator sick, too.)

I speak here of, for example, mixed automatic/manual numbering of sections, which makes automatic Table of Contents generation well-nigh impossible. Also of centered text that is centered by spacing (or tabbing, or spacing-and-tabbing) in such a way that the desired effect is achieved... unless you have to change the size of the font, or the page margins, or any of a number of other document characteristics.

Another bugaboo in my experience is the person who emphasizes words with boxes that are drawn on a page in such a way that the slightest modification will cause the box and the words it it emphasizing to misalign. Then there is the boob who creates tables consisting of one huge row and where alignment is maintained by the Grace of God and attentiveness to detail (this fellow has a cousin, who exceeds the former's goofiness by ignoring the table feature of most modern word processors and spaces/tabs entries the way he was taught back in Typing 101).

I translated the text of the video surveillance document. Tomorrow morning, I shall have to attack the numerous figures in the document, and then go on to more disarmament text. Fortunately, today's translation was free of the gaffes cited above; the disarmament stuff makes up for it.

Off to relax and go to bed.

Cheers...