Oh dear. I’ve been having problems with del.icio.us. Not the bookmark manager itself, though; just its daily export to Movable Type.

It exports to the XML-RPC interface built into Movable Type. Which is fine. It finds it, logs in, posts the entry, and logs off. The only problem is I’ve set it up to post to a specific category_id, so del.icio.us posts can appear in their own category… and it refuses to put them into any category. As a result, they appear in the MT system, but not on the site.

Not this site, obviously. Another site.

Anyhow. I’m using MovableType 2.661, with BerkelyDB, and it could be that del.icio.us only interfaces with the XML-RPC interface inMT3+. Or it could be something broken over here. Any ideas? Anyone read this?

After Open Science last night, we sat around discussing just what had been said earlier. Tim Hubbard, of the Human Genome Project (who spoke very well) namechecked SimCity, in reference to his desire to get people playing with simulations of the economy. After all, they might turn something up.

I realised that whilst lots of people have played SimCity, myself included, no-one is any good at it. Not one person I can think of had any degree of success with it. We all start idealistically, spending not beyond our means, paying off debts as fast as possible, piling money into public services and education, and then the big space alien comes and zaps us because we have no defence budget. Either that or rioters start fires. It’s a nightmare. Chatting with Alexandra this morning, she suggested the way to succeed was starting huge, massive zoning, huge debts, and thinking in the long-term.

She also pointed out that she did know someone who was good at SimCity: her brother. Alexandra’s brother is autistic. With all this in mind, I’d love to see him set loose on the Budget.

(I also had another idea for making world-economy-sims popular: encode the world economy into the world’s most popular spreadsheet, namely Championship Manager: Man U are China, Leyton Orient are Luxembourg. Its players love the stats, the layers; the model underneath gets changed subtly, the top end doesn’t, and you’ve got the biggest ever machine-farm for experimenting with the economy – with the single exception that Everton are far better than they have any right to be).

To cut a long story short: I’m stuck.

I’ve got PHP installed on my 10.2.8 Powerbook; it’s installed to /usr/local/php, as per the default pkg install from Marc Liyanage. I’ve been trying to get PEAR working with it.

The pear executable is in /usr/local/php/bin. I’ve set this up as a path so I can get at it anywhere. The problem is, when I run, say, pear upgrade-all it downloads all the tar.gz files entirely fine, and then terminates with the following error message:

failed to write /usr/local/php/lib/php/Net/.tmpSocket.php

Thing is, Net as a directory has permissions of 755. I’ve also tried doing this with sudo and get a different, but similar, error. What the hell’s going on? I’m completely lost. And that’s why I ask the Lazyweb for help; I don’t know where to turn.