I just tried installing a copy of Maple 10 (ancient, I know, but that’s all I get for semi-free from my university) on my unstable box, and the installer failed in some weird library loading disaster:

themel@sophokles:/cdrom$ bash  installMapleLinuxSU
Preparing to install...
Extracting the JRE from the installer archive...
Unpacking the JRE...
Extracting the installation resources from the installer archive...
Configuring the installer for this system's environment...
nawk: error while loading shared libraries: libdl.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
dirname: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
/bin/ls: error while loading shared libraries: librt.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
basename: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
dirname: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
basename: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
hostname: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Launching installer...

grep: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
/tmp/install.dir.14171/Linux/resource/jre/bin/java: error while loading shared libraries: libpthread.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Ah, yes… Luckily, it’s not necessary to analyze the entire shell script behemoth to find out how it managed to break a perfectly working environment. Since it forgets to remove the temp files when failing like that, you just need to run the installer with bash -x:

themel@sophokles:/cdrom$ bash -x installMapleLinuxSU
++ uname -m
+ PROCESSOR=i686
+ case $PROCESSOR in
+ CMD='sh ./LinuxInstaller.bin'
+ INSTALLER_DIR=Linux/Disk1/InstData/VM
++ pwd
+ PREVIOUS_PWD=/cdrom
++ dirname installMapleLinuxSU
+ SCRIPT_PATH=.
+ '[' -z . ']'
+ cd .
+ cd Linux/Disk1/InstData/VM
+ CHECK_DISPLAY=yes
+ echo sh ./LinuxInstaller.bin
+ grep -i console
+ echo sh ./LinuxInstaller.bin
+ grep -i silent
+ '[' yes = yes ']'
+ '[' -z :0.0 ']'
+ eval sh ./LinuxInstaller.bin
++ sh ./LinuxInstaller.bin

A-ha! Running that reveals the only three really relevant lines:

themel@sophokles:/cdrom/Linux/Disk1/InstData/VM$ bash -x LinuxInstaller.bin
+ CLASSPATH= [...]
+ export CLASSPATH
+ exec /tmp/install.dir.14639/Linux/resource/jre/bin/java -Djava.compiler=NONE -Xmx50331648 -Xms16777216 com.zerog.lax.LAX /tmp/install.dir.14639/temp.lax /tmp/env.properties.14639

Running these from my interactive shell installed just fine. Same goes for the upgrade. Maybe that’ll save somebody a couple of minutes, though there’s no rocket science involved.

Ha, gotta love Internet leaks. The Harry Potter Überspoiler, a single image guaranteed to ruin the suspense of 795 eagerly awaited pages. Don’t complain that I didn’t warn you. Via, I’m loth to admit, Slashdot.

It seems that my stranglehold on the family brand on the Internets is under dire threat. No longer is it just that snowboarding wannabe (who, AFAIK, is utterly unrelated to me, except that he shares my name) competing for page rank, but my junior brother as well.

In a slick marketing move, he has entirely bypassed my well-established presence in the in the text-based realms of the “old” web and moved into building his empire on YouTube. I recommend the Falco impression or the budding rock star career (though I guess they need to get a singer befor this is going to seriously take off).

There’s a preliminary schedule for the Chaos Communications Camp, and it looks tasty. All the classic ingredients of a massively fun experience are there: (w)hacky science, surveillance paranoia, bashing anything higher than C, utopian politics, geektertainment and… wait a second, where’s the Dylan talk (I’m pretty sure there was one at HAL 2001, but there’s not much left of the web site nowadays)? Bah, I’ll just have to corner Andreas Bogk personally to get my biannual dose of advocacy, then.

Before:

themel@sophokles:~$ ls | wc -l
1586

After:

themel@sophokles:~$ ls | wc -l
232

Why did I feel the necessity to prune this? It’s not much fun when it takes ten seconds to save something to your homedir because the bloated {Gtk2,KDE} file dialog takes forever to load. Note that a simple ls on a directory of 1500 files only takes 19 milliseconds on this (aging) machine, and a ls -lR on a 11000 file directory hierarchy is something like 150 milliseconds from cache. Now, I like the pretty icons and rendered previews as much as the next guy, but I’d really prefer if they were delay-loaded after the bare structure became visible so that I could move on in the 99% of visits where I just pass my home directory to enter one of its subdirectories. Am I the only person who is bitten by this? Is there a way to optimize things that doesn’t involve rewriting the GUI toolkits?

I just survived another semester. A crazy amount of work went into it, and I became rather annoyed at times with some of the less interesting courses. My attitude is starting to look dangerously like that of my school days – I even spent an evening trying to develop exploits for a couple of Xorg heap overflows in an attempt to add some spice to my boring numerical methods course by trying to take over the ITP’s computer system. Fortunately, I was distracted before I could get myself in trouble. Yeah, I need a bit of a vacation, and I need to blot out the fact that there’s yet another major exam lurking at the end of the summer.

My descent into grade-slavedom continues unabated, best evidenced by sorry episodes like this one: For reasons I can’t quite remember, I decided to take one of my exams this semester early, so I ended up trying to understand the subject from a medium-to-low quality script. Taking the exam, I was surprised by about 1.5 of the six questions posed, and I wasn’t too sure that it all went well. A few days later, the following graced my inbox:

[...]
Sie haben bei der Prüfung am 22. Mai 51 von 60 Punkten erreicht. Das reicht
für ein U2.
[...]

For a couple of minutes, I was pretty happy at the undeserved glory of an acceptable grade on a subject I didn’t feel I had fully understood. Then, I called a friend to find out that he had done better. I was slightly annoyed but still glad. 45 minutes after the first email, I got a followup:

[...]Ich gebe Ihnen eine Chance auf Verbesserung Ihrer Note – (theoretisch) ist
natürlich auch eine Verschlechterung möglich.[...]

Yeah. So I spent another two days preparing for my oral exam, got the better grade and was never again as happy as I had been for the first couple of minutes. I can’t help feeling something’s a bit wrong about this reaction, but it’s a rather typical indication of the way things go for me – I expect to do perfectly, and when it works out, I feel a short burst of relief and move on to obsess about the next problem. If it doesn’t, I’m annoyed. Note that there’s no “positive” emotion involved anywhere in this. Of course, I have my moments of epiphany when I finally see through some of the more interesting problems after some grappling, but these are pretty rare compared to the sheer amount of drudgery involved in all the lab protocols, boring coursework and silly programming exercises.

I suppose it can only get better later on, since the amount of required coursework is looking like it’s going down, but I’m the last person to fall into premature optimism (plus I’ve been told that it’ll get better later for every semester after the first now).

Tired of my ranting? Good, so am I. As I said above, I think a bit of vacation might do me some good, though rationally I don’t quite see how not doing anything about the heaps of work I have ahead of me for a week is going to make things easier. Maybe denial is the way? I have a hard time approving of that, but whatever, let’s give it a try.