Tom at 16

Week of April 15th, 2002

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Saturday April 20, 2002

<mmmm>

Why is it that we've had more casualties from friendly fire in six months of war than from enemy forces?

[Headline from National Post, paraphrased]: US Doesn't Appreciate Canadian Contribution to War in Afganistan. Bullshit. The war in Afganistan is an international effort. Canadians are contributing to the effort by choice; if you don't like the consequences, get out. Deaths, by any and all means, is a consequence of war.

I'm saddened by the deaths of four Canadian soldiers in Afganistan. I'm somewhat angry that they died from an American bomb. But choices were made, and life goes on. I'm confident the military enquiry will find out what went wrong, and make appropriate corrections so it doesn't happen again. But again, why so many deaths by friendly fire?

</mmmm>

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Thursday April 18, 2002

I'm a happy camper. Happy, Happy, Happy. I've been "living" in Linux all day, working, tweaking, learning... after two days I now have a desktop environment I can work with on a daily basis, which doesn't mess with, or intrude on, my personal style/preferences. Which delights me no end. Everything I did on my 'puter today was fun; it's been a long time since I felt that way.

My current configuration/load-out is as follows:

KDE 3.0 w/Mosfet Liquid 0.9.4 addon (LOVE those translucent menus... very cool
I'm tinkering with Kmail, but Mulberry currently remains my primary email client
x-Chat for IRC
Quanta for HTML/XML editing (mmm, still a little rough on the edges; the one software category I'm still not fully satisfied with)
Konsole is my terminal of choice; I usually have three or four instances running at any given time
With Greg Lincoln's help, I DL'd today's snapshot of Mozilla (RC1 was released later this afternoon and should be available as an emerge by sometime tonight) and compiled it. The difference between it and the version I was using is like night and day. Fast. Responsive. So far, my browser of choice
I also emerged Galeon. There's a lot to like about Galeon, but it crashed on me twice this afternoon. Moz has yet to bork. We'll see. That's what I love best about OSS: Choice!
I've been tinkering with Kvim. It's a KDE-centric port of the venerable vi editor. I like what they've done with it, and it's got some nifty features regarding the way the developers have integrated it with Konqueror via Kparts
I've got sound now, wireless works, I've got all my favorite aliases in place, everything loads and starts correctly, and I've got my kernel pared down to what I need/works and no more
I got GPG installed and new keys generated, and the appropriate Mulberry plugins installed. My key is here. Treat it as a test key for now until I get everything fully tested and configured
I emerged GNUCash. Haven't played with it yet or imported any data. Another day
I also emerged (again, thanks to Greg for the ebuild file) the latest Opera code. Much better. Meaning that it installs and runs. The previous build I tried wouldn't even compile. More on Opera after I've played with it for a day or three

Have I mentioned lately that I'm really happy with my Gentoo install on Phaedrus?

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Wednesday April 17, 2002

With thanks to Greg Lincoln, I now have a decent Quanta install. Relatively decent. Better than Bluefish, but still a beta nonetheless. Turns out Quanta 2.0.1 was designed around the QT2 library, and is flakey under KDE3. So I banished that, and Greg provided me instructions to get 2.2.something via CVS. For anyone interested, here's the drill:

export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.kde.org:/home/kde
cvs login
[enter]
cvs -z4 co quanta
[wait]
cd quanta
export WANT_AUTOMAKE_1_4=1
export WANT_AUTOCONF_2_1=1
make -f Makefile.cvs
make
make install

The above export WANT... commands are a workaround to a automake/autoconf problem with Gentoo.

The LDAP backend to Samba is seriously broken, so I'm off to see what I can do to remedy the situation.

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Tuesday April 16, 2002

Grrr. I had a post up earlier in the evening, and it vanished. Grand and Very Irritating Bother. It's after midnight, I've been at it since 8am, and I'm really not amused. I DO NOT like Bluefish. I've been fighting it all evening. When I go to bed I'll leave my system compiling QT2 and Quanta.

Good day. And how was your weekend? Mine was busy. Packing, sorting, blah, and blah. I also spent time yesterday ridding my notebook of Windoz XP. So far I'm very pleased with the equation. I'm running Gentoo 1.1a, KDE3, QT3, Mulberry for mail, and as noted, Bluefish for HTML/XML editing, and XChat for IRC. I'm thoroughly impressed with KDE3. It's stable, functional, and so far, stable as a rock. It also looks good. I compiled the Mosfet "Liquid" hooks, so I've got translucent menus and a very sharp looking set of window widgets. All in all, I like it. All I need to do now is get a good HTML/XML editor in place and find a browser I like. I'm not terribly impressed with Konqueror -- it seems sluggish to me -- and Mozilla is still a work in progress from what I've seen over the course of the last three hours. Onward.

Sorry I've had to be so brief of late, but I'm peddling as fast as I can.

Be well.

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