Touch of Melancholy

Winter is dying down, the days get longer, but the cold winds still blow. We had some snow yesterday. Can't wait for the warmer weather. There is still much to do with work and class. Feels like running a marathon, hiking a half century or cycling a full one. Can't help feeling a little worn down. While programming and listening to music, Robert Plant & Alisson Krauss cover of Townes Van Zandt's "Nothin'" happened to play.

Managed to get the essential programming utilities reinstalled on the new home machine. The install was fairly straight forward. Thought about using the GNU tools via Darwin Port or MacPorts, but decided just use the XCode install from a download disk-image. Yes that means its a ADC (Apple Developer Center) install, not quite Open Source like I'm used to but it is close enough for classwork. The annoying thing about the target machine, which is the final arbiter of program correctness, is that it does not have rsync on it. Since it is not one I have admin rights on, a different way had to be found. That makes file transfers a bit more painful, but no worry. A bit of minor scripting with scp solves the problem nicely. Even did a bit of sanity checking and remote target directory inference based on the present working directory to minimize housekeeping and prevent copy foul ups. Now the environment is a bit more comfortable. That should speed up the development cycle.