I went up to The City today and went notebook shopping. Ran into Seth and Nick on MUNI. Most stores were closed, but I got to see and fondle a PictureBook. Nice machine, although the keyboard will take a little getting used to. Now to arrange with my bank to let me buy one via card.

After getting back home, I spent a good hour raving insanely as I tried to make MakeMaker work. Don't do it, it's not worth your sanity. In my work as a Debian developer, I have had experience with how approximatly 200 software packages handle "make install". MakeMaker's method is, without a doubt, the absolute most convoluted, arcane, and inflexible of any of them. For a simple task like "install into foo/tmp, keeping the same directory tree as if you were installing into a normal system tree in there, and install into usr/, not usr/local", I have to write a make command line that has 6 lines of variable settings. Contrast to a more typical "./configure --prefix=/usr ;make install DESTDIR=foo/tmp". Am I missing something? I sincerely hope so.

Now I want to reread "True Names". It's been at least 5 years. I had no clue Vinge was involved in the FSF!