December 17, 2006
a case for justice

the other day joe and i were talking about the good old days, when the T cost a mere 85 cents. he then claimed it was even less than that when we first moved, to which i disagreed. after some investagative googling tonight, i present my case. a case for justice. i call to the stands the mit tech:

In September 2000, the MBTA raised T fares by 25 percent. The rate hike was the first since 1991.

-- the tech

this establishes that there was in fact a rate increase in 2000, which wasn't really disputed. however, there was only one, and it was late in the year, and not, as i believe joe mentioned, february or march. by september, we were all using monthly passes provided by work.

...MBTA fare increases in 2000, which raised bus fares from $0.60 to $0.75 and subway fares from $0.85 to $1.00...

-- the tech, again

this is really the nutmeat of my argument. along with the previous quote, it implies that T fare was 85 cents when we first moved to boston in january 2000.

in the interest of full disclosure, joe was spot on about phil kessel.

December 20, 2006
time wrap

i greatly prefer working debuggers over non-working ones. at cfs, i learned a trick to get gdb to work a little better: build stuff with -O0. this was pretty simple while working on hula, since it was a single source tree, but i've had to fix a couple of nautilus bugs in the last week, and that has a huge stack, which i don't want to just build all of.

So, i set my CFLAGS in .bashrc and changed the flags in .rpmrc as well to include -O0. this way, i figure, i can still enjoy using rpms and all the downstream patches, and actually debug things in gdb.

so i built a bunch of things... gtk, nautilus, etc. and things were going well. a couple builds failed, complaining that LC_ALL was undefined. that's weird, src rpms should just build. so i made a couple of patches, but when it happened a third time, i went to check it out a little more closely.

turns out, <libintl.h> includes <locale.h> automatically... but only if optimization is on. since apparently i'm the only person who knows how to make gdb work, i'm the only one getting failed builds. that's simple enough; i'll just add a -include locale.h to my CFLAGS, and move on.

a few days go by, and something is failing to build because F_SETSIG is undefined. 30 seconds of research shows that you need to define _GNU_SOURCE to get that, but hmm the C file has that. let's see... <fcntl.h> is including <features.h>, which defines __USE_GNU if _GNU_SOURCE is defined... but still not working.

cutting to the chase, <locale.h> is pulling in <features.h> before _GNU_SOURCE is defined. that's easy, another option in CFLAGS.

but of course it's not quite that simple... now _GNU_SOURCE gets redefined in the source. oh well. i didn't really want to actually get anything done today, anyway.

December 29, 2006
if i had a slingbox i could quote super trivia

if at trivia, you happen upon a category involving band names inspired by railroads, keep in mind graham central station and grand funk railroad. why isn't there already a category for these on wikipedia?