Tom at 16

Week of June 3rd, 2002

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Thursday June 6, 2002

A "heavy" day here, as my Grandmother would say -- as in humid heavy. We had rain early this morning, followed by hot, intense sunshine for a few hours. Now it's overcast and you can almost cut the air with a knife. So it goes. There's a storm blowing in, and the temperature is falling rapidly, so the world outside my window will no doubt be a very different place in short order.

My efforts last night resulting in a batting average of about .500. No bad in context, I suppose... I gave up on 2.5.20; too many unresolved symbols and key software packages that wouldn't fly without huge effort on my part. And with my schedule the way it is these days, I have to carefully measure all effort against the resultant output. When I'm researching a new project, often the hours and hours of effort pay off in the form of a useable or unique insight into a given product/process. Spending four hours trying to get a development kernel to work on my system has a rather low "insight-margin" to me. Especially when a new release could potentially show its face a day after I get the existing one to work.

I'm now running 2.4.19-gentoo-r7 as my default kernel. It's stable, and noticeably "crisper" that r5. I never did manage to get ACPI working as it did under r5, but the standard PM stuff works, and that's Good Enough for me just now.

I spent a fair bit of time with Mozilla 1.0 this morning. A decided improvement over the RC versions, probably due to the fact all the debugging code is now vanquished. Moz 1.0 is now on par with my experiences with Netscape 7-Preview. Given so many KDE and Gnome apps "hook" into Moz, and the Netscape code-base is just different enough to cause some programs to bork in unexpected places, I removed NS7; I'll stick with Moz now the performance has improved.

--oOo--

Only in Saskatchewan. As noted, we had a heavy rain this morning, followed by blistering sunshine, which turned the air into a furnace. Tonight we've got a major windstorm happening outside, and the temp has dropped into the high-40's. Tomorrow's supposed to be a pleasant 70-75 degrees. Sheeh. Oh well... on a positive note, our grass is very happy.

I intended to post something insightful here tonight, but I've been culling my Inbox(s) for three hours now so I haven't had time to break and/or fix anything. Tomorrow, I promise. Be well. I'm headed for the pillow...

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Wednesday June 5, 2002

Whew. What a week. Not a lot to tell, actually... I've been nose to the grindstone hammering out outlines and fleshing out some research for two more tutorials for developerWorks. And trying to keep up to the yardword (when the sun finally gets some heat to it here in Saskatchewan, all manner of plant life goes nuts). And trying to keep up to two terrorist children who both have a nasty habit of leaving a horrendous stream of destruction/mess in their wake. And cooking. And then there's the routine housework/chores. Man, I'm getting tired just writing about it all... ;-)

Tonight was the first night in almost a week I had an hour or two to just "tinker". I finally got GNUCash installed. The final solution was to open the ebuild for the program and 'unmerge' every single dependency listed. I then unmerge GNUCash, did an emerge rsync, followed by an emerge -up world update to bring in some updated bits and pieces, and finally I simply did an emerge gnucash and let Portage bring in all the programs and dependencies it needed. This time around, it worked. I have a funny feeling my troubles with GNUCash over the last two or three weeks were a result of some "not ready for primetime" code lingering around from my experiments with Gnome2. Don't know for sure, and at this point, I don't care. I have GNUCash installed and working, which was the primary mission throughout. I just didn't expect it to take as long as it did, nor give me the heartburn it did. Bother and Oh-Well.

I'm now in the process of 'emerging' Mozilla 1.0 in one console, and building kernels in another. Multi-tasking son-of-a-gun I am...

I say kernels as there's a new Gentoo 2.4.19-r7 release out tonight that apparently cleans up several stray ends. Unfortunately, it also breaks all ACPI kernel functions to the point where it won't boot. Bah. So I tinkered with that for a while, and subsequently decided to have another peek at the 2.5.x development tree (currently at 2.5.20). I can get the kernel to build, but neither my Gentoo ebuild for the nVidia drivers nor the Gentoo ebuild for pcmcia-cs likes 2.5.20. So here I sit, twiddling and tweaking while the world sleeps... Grand life, this bleeding-edge stuff.

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