Something
Emporium

• I haven't seen them on TV recently, but remember 'Food in a Minute'? Well, that was Godfrey De Grut, my old Saxophone tutor, playing tenor for the theme music.
• Tmesis is fanfuckingtastically cool in both spelling and meaning. Unfreakingbelievably cool.
• quondam/quondamly/quondamship
• C

I've been using Cygwin utilities for a little while now - I seem to use Windows 'Run...' and the command line quite a bit, and it's handy to have friendly old 'ls' available for those times I can't remember which operating system I'm using.

I'll say this here, in case someone has the same problem and comes across this in a Google search: If you're looking to use Cygwin's 'make', you have to do it from a Cygwin shell. That's why, if you don't use a managed make project in Eclipse with CDT, Eclipse can find make but make can't find gcc. It's a weird situation where you can access make and gcc from the command line, but one can't access the other. It's because make ignores Windows' PATH, and goes with the Cygwin one (which isn't set outside of a Cygwin shell). The solution is to change the build settings in Eclipse from 'make' to 'sh -c make'. Easy.

Torus Trooper is a great game. There's a request to add it upstream to Debian, but most of the instructions I've seen seem to require compilation with the non-free dmd compiler. Here's how to get ttrooper going with the lovely (and completely free) gdc front-end to gcc. Tested under Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake).

1. apt-get the build-essential package - make sure you've got a working copy of gcc that compiles C++, and check you've got your kernel headers.
2. Grab the libsdl-mixer1.2 and libsdl-mixer1.2-dev packages from apt. Get the libgl-dev package corresponding you your graphics setup too.
3. Go grab the gcc-core tarball from one of these ftp servers. You'll find it under 'gnu' then 'gcc'.
4. Grab the gdc tarball from their Sourceforge site.
5. Finally, grab Evil Mr Henry's Linux port from his site.
6. That's the easy bit done! Now unpack all the tarballs. Move the directory 'd' that gdc creates into the 'gcc' subfolder in gcc's source directory.
7. From gcc's source directory, run ./gcc/d/setup-gcc.sh. (Yes, you have to do it from there)
8. Change to another directory (otherwise gcc bitches) and run <gcc's source directory>/configure --enable-languages=c,d
9. Contrary to what the gdc install instructions say, don't enable C++. gdc seems to cope without it and won't configure with it!
10. Now make from the directory where you were when you configured. Then make install. gdc will be installed in /usr/local/... Yay!
11. Now for ttrooper itself. Change to the lib/bulletml subdirectory of the ttrooper folder. Make.
12. Now back to the main ttrooper folder. Edit build.xml. Change the ${dmd} variable to point to 'gdmd' - gdc's answer to dmd.
13. Now 'ant'.
14. The build will probably fail, but try to run ./ttrooper now - it works!

See: easy!

I've been listening to Andy Guthrie recently. Jazz/blues influenced guitar and piano, that slightly overused voice sound, great songwriting and insightful lyrics - he also plays the Wurlitzer (it's not just a jukebox brand). Unfortunately, your options for listening to his work online are limited - iTunes isn't in New Zealand (yet, and I won't complain any less when it is) - so, while I'm in the process of buying his CDs from the (seriously cool) CD Baby (three of them - $5 each!), here's a way to listen to the very cool You Be King for free:

1. Download the sample mp3 from Andy Guthrie's discography.
2. Go download Escape Pod - episode 58. (MP3 link) - It's a hefty download, but the upside is that you get the audio of the very very awesome Shadowboxer by Paul Di Filippo, a creepy present-day scifi whatifilicious story (Cory Doctorow liked it, but if you know who he is you'll have listened to it already).
3. Listen to the first two minutes of the first mp3 and the last six minutes of the second mp3.

I'd tell you to open them in your favourite audio editor but that would, of course, be making an illegal derivative of both mp3s (Escape Pod is CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs).

Oh, man, I laughed so freaking hard when I saw this.

Wow, hi.

So - news. The Westlake Schools Combined Production 2006 is........ FOOTLOOSE! Yes indeedy, the great 80's movie is in fact a musical, and we're putting on the first ever production of it in New Zealand.

Details!
When: 17 - 21 July
Where: The BRAND SPANKING NEW WBHS Auditiorium
Time: 7 pm
Tickets? Email, MSN or text me: 0275425992, with dates and whether you want Balcony ($10) or Ground level ($8)

Hope you can come - its going to be awesome!