How to sell more computers

German computer magazine c't had the following in an article about computer sales numbers:

Die höchste PC-Dichte der Haushalte gibt es laut Nielsen/Netratings übrigens weder im Silicon Valley noch in New York, sondern in Salt Lake City (73 Prozent in [sic] Jahre 2000). Die Mormonen treiben halt intensive Ahnenforschung — und dafür sind PCs samt Internet eben sehr nützlich.

My translation:

Incidentally, the highest density of PC owners by household, according to Nielsen/Netratings, is neither in Silicon Valley nor in New York, but in Salt Lake City (73 percent of households in the year 2000). You see, Mormons are heavily into genealogical research — and PCs, especially with an Internet connection, come in very handy for this.

I should think the conclusion is obvious: if you want to sell more PCs into a nearly-saturated market, convert all your potential customers to Mormonism :D

finding file(1)

Phew!

I wanted to get a new version of the Unix command file(1) to install locally on our workstation at work.

It was quite a job finding it, let me tell you. (The fact that "file" is a common word didn't help, either.) It's not a GNU project, so it's not on any of their servers. It popped up in a couple of distributions, but as an RPM, which I can't read on a Hockey-PUX machine. I found a source archive (.tar.bz2) at a Cygnus mirror, but it required autoconf and stuff like that, which I (a) didn't have and (b) didn't want to download just for this. I found a reference on the Linux-from-scratch project but I preferred something from "the horse's mouth", as far as I could determine that.

Finally, after a bit of googling (now including a little tagline from the package description), I saw a pointer at Freshmeat which pointed to what looked like an authoritative distribution source at ftp.gw.com: http://freshmeat.net/releases/90188/ . This was also a newer release (3.39) than the ones I had previously found (typically 3.37). So, I downloaded this version.

...and it also required automake. WTF? Pretty much all software I had downloaded previously which used automake had a ready-make configure while which did all the stuff for you, so the poor chap downloading the archive doesn't have need any extra modules.

However, there was also a file called "Makefile.std" which looked like one of the good old "here, customize this Makefile to suit your system" files. So I did exactly that.

Compiling brought out a bunch of errors, mostly casts between "char *" and "unsigned char *". Hey, if you're going to mix the two, please cast explicitly, OK? (Or better still, make a design decision and use the one that is correct in a given place. Most of this was when calling private subroutines rather than C library ones.) And one warning baffled me ("casting pointer to integer") since it looked like an integer to me... but it was hidden behind a couple of layers of macros. Still, it compiled, so I ignored it (and it was in the ELF code, which I probably shan't need too often on the Hockey-PUX machine). During compiling, I also incrementally added some -DHAS_FOO macros to the Makefile as needed to prevent the header file from defining stuff my system already had.

And finally I had a brand sparkling new file! I installed it in ~/bin (and ~/etc/magic and ~/man/man[14]/*) and now am set to go. I hope :)

Noooooo! I knew it! All this work was for nothing. Argg! *tears hair out*

I thought I'd post a little addendum to this entry saying "I wonder if this utility was already available pre-compiled for HPUX systems -- nah, probably not". But then I had a look. Took a couple of searches till I had the HP-UX Porting and Archive Centre, but then, there it was -- http://hpux.asknet.de/hppd/hpux/Editors/file-3.38/ . Ready-made for easy installation into /opt/file. *sniff*

Still -- at least I have a newer version. Still, a minor consolation only. Oh, sigh. Now I'm peeved.