argh!

me and thor made this thing out of icecubes at quentin’s the other night
i have spent half the weekend figuring out how to install scode for moveable type.
okay here is the list of dependencies (top down):

• moveable type (blog software)
• scode (image-comment verification system)
• GD (Gif or Graphic Designer) and GD.pm (Perl Module)
• zlib (compression library), libpng (ping image generation library), libjpeg (you guess what this is), freetype2 (typing on graphics generation tool)
• fink, apt-get, cpan (application-getters and installers)

inherently if there is something wrong with the code in one of the bottom items, it’s going to cascade upwards into the other items.
some notes:

1. fink is sorta broken. by sorta i mean sometimes it searches and installs out-of-date software that is incompatible with everything you’re trying to do.
2. this is not easy to attempt at 3 a.m.
3. some of this software that fink, cpan and apt-get retrieve requires patching, and the patches have to be current otherwise they are not going to work. they did not work. help pages like this are nice to find, however it is out of date, so the instructions no longer work.
4. this is not easy to attempt at 5 a.m.
5. GD says it installed. GD.pm says it did too, but with some cryptic errors that I have not seen documented anywhere. scode sayz ‘no, it is not installed and i hate you!’ ahem.
6. this is not easy to attempt at 8 a.m.

i’d really like to get GD and GD.pm working properly on my system because it would be fun to play with graphics generation. especially cool considering i can use my existing truetype font library (it’s huge, trust me) to generate graphics with php commands. that will be leet.
so i slept for a while, spent from 2 until about 30 minutes ago trying to get it to work. i think it is fair to say i got nowhere with it and i have uninstalled the scode (which has prevented you from leaving comments).
blah.
so the blog is obviously back. what happened was that a DNS server moved to another IP and I guess they aren’t supposed to do that, since they’re the ones telling everybody where everything is. hooray for the new dns1.davin.ws. all rejoice.
pictures will appear later when i am not so sick of computers! these things are supposed to serve us, not the other way around ..