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Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
A real scorcher today -- mid-to-high ninties. God bless air conditioning ;=)
And yes, I'm still living on the "dark side"™. Too many oars in the water right now to change boats or streams. Such is life.
I'm pleased to say the front yard is finally finished to our satisfaction. Well, finished in that all the big stuff is complete (is yard work ever done?). The ugly soil is gone, the beds have all been mixed with peat, the anuals are in and growing happily, the lawn is weed-n-feeded and cut, the dandilions are in check, the edges have been trimmed, and yes, the partridge is in its pear tree. The downside of all this is that I feel like I've been playing rugby for three weeks with a bunch of awfully big Austrailians. And I have more scratches, cuts, and scraps than I did when I was wrenching for a living. If anyone told me that gardening was this much work, I wasn't listening at the time...
On a lighter topic: Why do we teach our children the importance of listening to us, as parents, and then when they try to tell us something important, we ignore them? I'm cutting up some potatoes for dinner on a mandolin. Danielle's watching me. She tells me I should be using the little plastic holder thingy. I say that it's faster they way I'm doing it. She says, "yes Dad, but you could cut your finger that way." Bah and hurrumph. Three strokes later I cut my finger.
I've been toying with Dreamweaver MX for a couple days now. So far I like it. A lot. Powerful, extensible, and the program doesn't get "in your face" like some others I know. And for the most part, most things are intuitive. I'm sure I could learn some cool things by walking through one of the enclosed tutorials, but so far that's not been necessary. If you're shopping for a good industrial strength HTML/XML editor, check out Dreamweaver MX. There's a free 30 day trail available on the Macromedia Site. One minor annoyance. Yesterday I had the program set to display my code "auto line wrap"; today that setting seems to have vanished and nothing I do can bring it back. Mmmm. Cosmic.
I've also been tinkering with the latest Mulberry alpha (3.0a2). It's shaping up rather nicely, I must say. New features include a preview pane (no links to hooks to IE, thank you very much), and a tab that allows you to quickly switch to your contacts folder (or in my case, ACAP address book). At the alpha stage, this is definitely a product in flux and transition, but as noted, I like where Cyrus is going with this major update. *NIX users will have to wait a bit; so far the 3.0 alpha is only available for Win32 and Mac OS/X platforms. Other platforms are promised soon.
Forgive me father, for I have sinned... ;-)
Please understand that I'm not poking fun at anyone's religion or beliefs, but I've truly had a torturous few days, and I did some things I not proud of, but IHMO, were necessary.
As most of my regular readers know, I've pretty much been a "Linux Convert" of late. I've been working and living in Linux on a daily basis, using the Gentoo distribution, for about two months now. Yesterday, I "fell down".
I rec'd a shiny new WAP and PC Card from Linksys to replace the defective units I'd been fighting with for two months now. Man, was I excited. Computing without wires again (once you get used to wireless, it's REALLY hard to go back to CAT5 cables). I set up and configured the WAP without incident. I then set about configuring the PC Card under Linux. To make a very long story short, No Joy. I tried everything my wireless experiences have taught me. Nothing worked. The card refused to be recognized. The power LED would not shine. No talky-talky. Damnation and Bother. So I plugged my battered Dell TrueMobile card back in, and it worked but would not route through to my second hub. Which meant I had inadvertently clobbered a config file somewhere over the course of the last two months, and no, I wasn't intelligent enough to have a current (current as in, "last time it worked") backup. Bleh.
So I left things as is, and tried to refocus on the task at hand -- completing the IBM tutorial I had been working on all week. I can't tell you what happened, what brought it on, but I suddenly realized I was most unhappy with the XML/HTML editing tools I was using/had tried/had discarded... I've been using 'jedit' for the most part, and while it's truly a feature-rich editor and has all the bells and whistles I needed for daily work (syntax highlighting, tag completion, etc.), the program is written in Java. Translation: It's SSSLLOOWWW (in contrast to a compiled program). I type reasonably fast, and have a bad habit of watching the text unfold as I type. I'd be a word or two ahead of jedit at times. And when I needed to erase, I'd hit the backspace key and wait for a response from the screen. When I got one, I'd typically find several 'extra' words had bitten the dust. Bleh. CTRL-Z would undo everything, but then I'd have to redo the correction and hopefully anticipate better.
Then Moz went on the fritz, and for no good reason (I'd done no emerges or updates for days), started displaying fonts all kittywonkers, and taking great long pauses in looking up hosts. This, incidently, was right in the middle of my quest to review all the HTML/XML editor for Linux I could find ; I wanted to ensure I hadn't missed one, or an upgrade to one I had tried, that might make my things tolerable to the work I need to accomplish every day.
Mmmm.
Bottom line: In a fit of rage, I vanquished Linux from my notebook and installed Windows 2000. I'm currently typing this in Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, and thoroughly enjoying the experience.
Please don't draw any conclusions from my rash behavior. It's just been one of those weeks. And I still believe in the "Open Source paradigm". But I've got work to do, and currently there's no Open Source program that allows me to accomplish it without a lot of stress and frustration.
PS: The irony in all this is that my new Linksys PC Card still doesn't work. It would appear that BOTH (one has been defunct for two months now) my PCMCIA slots are non-functional (tried my Dell wireless card in both, and it does not work now either...). Yep, that is indeed another Grand Bother. I love my Dell notebook, but at this stage of the game I'd be hard pressed to continue recommending the product. Dell are great when it comes to warranty, but that doesn't resolve the problem that every time something goes amiss, I have to send it to Toronto for repair. More on this topic another day when I'm not quite so vexed.
I plan on living with my decision for a day or two, and then re-evaluate when my current attitude brightens.
As for today, Landon is going in for surgery shortly to have a new set of ear tubes put in -- the first didn't do the job, so we're going to try again before considering more drastic measures.
Be good, and be well. I'll write more this weekend as time permits.
It finally rained in Saskatoon last night. It's been raining all around us -- off and on -- for weeks now, but we managed to somehow escape any precipitation. And with the wind we've been having of late, the result was a landscape as dry as a popcorn fart (<-- er, Prairie term :-). Suffice to say the plants and grass were not happy campers. That's changed dramatically over the last 24 hours. The grass is greening up, my herb garden is smiling... Unfortunately the rain arrived on top of a rather nasty front and at times today the temperature dropped into the mid-forties. The wind hasn't let up much either, which makes it less than pleasant to be outside, but heh, I'm not going to complain. We REALLY need the moisture around here.
I've been twiddling around with Linux email clients the last few days, mostly late at night when my brain's shutdown and I've lost the ability to type coherent sentences. So far, on top of my 'ole faithful, Mulberry, I've also been exploring Evolution, KMail, and Aethera.
Mulberry's my workhorse. I use it all day, everyday, and it's one of the best IMAP clients I know. There's also builds for Windoz, Solaris, Linux (i86), Linux (PPC), and if memory serves, Mac OS/X. Cross platform is nice, especially when they all work and act the same. However Mulberry's address book facilities SUCK, and recently I find myself with an ever-increasing need for a good contact manager.
So I tried Evolution. Evolution's getting there, but it still has an incrediby irritating GUI in some regards. I increase the font size in an open message window but it doesn't "stick". I like my message "reverse sorted" (yeah, I know... reverse is a relative term, which is why it's in quotes) -- new messages at the top of the window, newest first. Then when I open a window (mailbox), I want my cursor on the oldest-new message, and as I read them, I want the cursor to move up toward the latest-newest. I can set Evolution to reverse sort, but when I open a mailbox what I see are the oldest messages and my cursor is positioned out of sight. Hard to describe, but trust me, it's most annoying. I also haven't found a way to change the font/font-size displayed. The end result is I squint too much, and spend too much time diddling around to get things as I want them, only to have all my settings disappear every time I close a window. On a positive note, Evolution has come a very long way over the course of the last six months, and will in all likelihood, one day, be a damn fine solution.
KMail I still find rather primative. Silly little things, actually, and again mostly interface centered. When I open an existing message (or start a new one), the window insists on opening in the lower left of my screen. So I pull it up, expand the window so I can read the contents, and close the window when I'm done. Next time I open another message, it opens in the lower left corner. BAH, I say. When I take the time to move and resize a window, that damn well means that's where I want it. Here's another bit of pettiness... I open a message. No toolbar or anything visible (pertinent to that window). I finally figure out one right-clicks on the open window for a context menu, and lo, there's the delete command. I select the command to delete the message. Nothing happens. Well, I shouldn't say that... the message disappears from the main client window, but the message I just deleted remains open until I close it. Totally non-intuitive to my way of thinking. I know, there's probably good reasons for all the above quirkiness... I guess I'm just spoiled by Mulberry's well-thought-out and useable interface design.
Then there's Aethera. Caution Will Robinson! The program is buggy and unstable. But I can kinda-sorta make it work without segfaulting, for a bit. Until I close it and reopen again, at which time all my configuration settings are gone and I have to start from scratch again. Then when I re-enter all my pertients, it segfaults and I'm back to square one. I can *sometime* make things work by entering my config info as root, then starting up the program again as a regular user. That's a hit-n-miss solution, though. But to the program's credit, I see a lot of potential in Aethera. They're developing some very kewl pluggins for it (which is how the developers plan to make money -- you can download the base product for free, then buy any pluggins you desire), and the interface is relatively easy to work with. Reminds me a lot of LookOut.
I'm still in need of a semi-integrated address book solution, however, and I've yet to find a program that gives me a decent interace to my IMAP server, plus an extensible, functional contact manager. So I'll simply build my own. My next project is going to be an LDAP directory customized for storing contact info. Then I can point Mulberry (or whatever the email client du jour is) to said directory and I have the best of all worlds. I can extend and customize the data store, I can point a diverse range of programs to the directory for info/authentication/etc., and the data I store there is not tied to a specific program or proprietary format. Stay tuned...
I took the weekend away from 'puters. Between writing and researching I've been putting in the some very long days over the last few weeks, and my tolerance level was growing noticably thin for too many things. In retrospect, two whole days away from my desk was probably not such a good idea. Cuz' instead of working at the keyboard I ended up out in the yard moving a huge pile of dirt, chopping out a dead tree and replacing it with a small pine, and cutting back the grass to the edge of the walks. Bleh. I can hardly move tonight. Round about the end of September I should have everything yard-wise ship-shape; yep, just in time for the weather to change and the snow to arrive ;-)
My boxed copy of RH 7.3 arrived last week, and Friday night I needed to do a quick-n-dirty Linux installation on my development server to check out some file locations for a friend. Red Hat certainly has become a polished distribution over the last few releases. While I prefer the bleeding-edge nature and ports-based flexibility of Gentoo, I do like Red Hat 7.3 a lot. It's about as simple as they come -- drop in the install CD, answer a few questions, and go get a cup of coffee. I'm confident that I could pass the install disks to someone with no Linux experience whatsoever, tell them how to answer some of the setup screens, and walk away. An hour later they'd have a working, functional Linux installation. Couple the polished and mature nature of most distros these days with the quality of OpenOffice 1.0 and the rock solid performance of Moz 1.0, and it's now entirely possible to a "non-geek" to replace their Windows desktop with Linux. What a difference a year makes!
I'm off to parse my Inbox and assemble a TODO list for the week. I'll be crafting up a tutorial on "Performance Tuning your RH Installation, so I'll be pretty much head's down until Friday, but I'll do my best to jot a few words here every day.
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