A Funny way to Earn a Living

There seem to be quite a few foreigners in La Paz, who earn a living of some sort by doing tricks in front of cars waiting for traffic lights to turn green. I saw a guy today, who had learned how to spin a ball balanced on the end of a wooden-spoon he held in his mouth whilst juggling three skittles. After 5 seconds of this, the ball fell off the end of a stick, and then he flipped his hat off the ground with a foot, and caught it, and bowed and smiled to his audience. "What a weird and pointless skill!" I thought.

Then I realised that I had been doing something weirder and even more pointless for the past few days. I had been learning how to use GNU autoconf/automake/autoheader etc. again. I call them the GNU auto4ck tools. Really, after fifteen years of this crap, we ought to admit defeat and try again. But we don't. Who said enough monkeys banging away on type-writers couldn't write the works of Shakespeare? If a few thousand monkeys banging away on typewriters for a just a couple or three decades can make the GNU software suite, why not the works of Shakespeare too?

Now if we all started thinking instead of just banging away on our typers, then we might be able to make better software. But we haven't time to think, because we're so occupied looking for obscure and stupid bugs introduced by using a 'language' which, for example, can't detect an 'error' caused by putting a space between the name of a function and the parentheses containing its arguments. Or by indenting the arguments to a nested if/then/else block, in an attempt to make it more readable. I despair!

But the upshot is, maybe Red October will build on Linux boxes other than my own. Maybe someone will try cloning the repository now, and typing

cd src  
autoreconf -vif

then

./configure --help

and following the instructions.