|
|
|
Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
The weather remains blustery, dark, and damp. A good day to focus on inside chores, me-thinks. Fortunately, we never have any shortage of those around here...
Not much to report on the computing front. I still haven't resolved my LDAP problem. And all my systems are working just as they should. Rather boring, eh? I had a most interesting request from my wife last night. She was trying to do something on Windoz and couldn't figure it out. When she asked me how to accomplish said task, I was working under Gentoo at the time and very innocently answered: "Simple. Just do this..." and showed her -- using Linux, of course. Turns out accomplishing the same thing under Windoz is not quite so straightforward, nor does the change carry across logins and/or reboots.
This morning I found Leah sitting at my desk, surfing, using Moz under Red Hat 8.0. I showed her a few nuances of the KDE desktop and left her to play. About an hour later she approached me and asked if I could install... are you ready?... drumroll, please... LINUX on her computer. "It's so much faster, and seems so much more well-mannered than Windows". Yes, dear, we can do that for you (he said, grinning inwardly). That will leave exactly one Windows partition in our house. The one I keep on my notebook, which I need around for various work-related chore; I'll also need it around when my Office 11 Beta package arrives.
Speaking of Office 11, it sounds like O'Reilly wants to go ahead with an Outlook in a Nutshell, 2nd Ed. No details yet, but the news from Sebastapol is so far encouraging.
09:30 hrs... I know, I know... Liar, liar, pants on fire...
We had some "issues" getting the kids to bed last night; they wanted to say up and eat with us (Uh, Not!). By the time we got them off to la-la land, and our dinner cooked, served, and enjoyed, it was well after 10 and I was toast.
Our anniversary meal was beyond excellent -- one of the best we've put together in a very long time. I did a mushroom risotto with garlic, thyme, and parsley to go with the chicken we had marinating in yogurt, lime, and rosemary for 36 hours. Leah whipped up a baby spinach, fresh pea, and feta cheese salad. The wine was Moonstone Chardonnay Semillon, vintage 1999 (Austrailian). Every was superb. The wine was especially good -- dry with just a hint of fruit and lots of body.
It's a blustery day here in the Hundred-Acre Wood. I've got to go batten down a few hatches, and attack the day ahead.
12:00 hrs... Spent the morning clearing my desktop of the week's activities. With that out of way, I plan to spend some time this afternoon sorting through/troubleshooting a niggly and persistent problem I'm having with an LDAP schema. I'm not looking forward to this one, as I don't have the background to sort out the problem using intellect and/or experience. Which leaves brute force ;-)
I've reflected several times today on just how delighted I am with my current Gentoo install. An update to ALSA the other day fixes all minor lingering problems I've been trying to resolve with sound. Everything now works as advertised, no boot/configuration errors, etc. Listening to a KFOG Live7 CD Brian sent me last year as I write this. Great tunes. I finally got all KDE-CVS modules to compile without error. I re-emerged Mosfet Liquid and for the first time in months, menus, stippling... all the eye-candy... displays as it should. Very, very nice. KDE 3.1 is dazzling in more ways than one. It's the fastest version yet (IMHO, and this from a CVS perspective), my desktop is sharp and bright, menus work as they should, the kicker hasn't given me an ounce of trouble (one aspect of earlier KDE betas, under a variety of distros, that always gave me grief), all apps I'm running (KDE and otherwise) are "apping" without incident. Stellar stuff, folks. This weekend I plan to check out a couple CDR/W-based options to ensure that, should disaster strike, I can restore my current configuration without two weeks work.
Ya' know, for a couple novices we sure did get a nice crop of vegetables this year from our garden. Lot's of fresh herbs, tomatoes, potatoes, beets, TONS of green peppers, and our peas should be ready for plucking in another week (baring any frost). Speaking of frost, I'd like to pull out one of our green pepper plants and try to keep it alive over the winter. If anyone out there can advise how to best do this, cautions, caveats, etc., I'd really appreciate the advice.
Have a great Friday.
Ten years today. Yikes. How time flies when you're having fun... Today is our anniversary and I have to do my due diligence in the kitchen tonight, so this is going to be brief for the moment.
My Gentoo installation recieved a full does of "emerge" updates last night. Everything continues to run like a top. I'm pleased. And I had a cursory look at DB2 this morning. Man, talk about a monstrosity! 334 MB compressed. Clearly this puppy is a VERY industrial strength, enterprise targeted DBMS. Lots of nooks and crannies to explore over the coming weeks. Why DB2 8.1? Cuz DB2 7.2 currently underpins IBM's WebSphere Portal product, and I'll be doing some extensive work with WSP over the coming months. I have no doubt IBM will shoehorn DB2 8 into the mix, even if it's in some dumbed-down form, somewhere down the road, so research and product knowledge on this front will eventually be mandatory. Might as well have a look under the hood now in preparation.
I'm off to find some fresh herbs and greens for dinner. I promise to return later and add some more ramblings as time permits.
I think I spent all my writing chi yesterday. Try as I might, I can' think of anything terribly useful to say today...
A few minor tidbits: The Mulberry problem I mentioned yesterday occurs only when you exit the program using the GTK widget in the upper right corner; by using the File-->Close menu option screen sizing is saved and the program exits as it should. If you forget and exit using the widget button, simple open a terminal window and kill any running mulberry processes. The program will then start again without exiting and restarting X/KDE. Cyrus is aware of the problem and it's already been fixed for the next release.
Time to go install DB2 beta 8.1...
My old pal Murphy did not just sit on my shoulder yesterday; he wrapped his legs around my neck and pulled hard on my ears until I finally called it quits around midnight. What could go wrong, did, and with great aplomb. Sigh. Onward and upward I 'pose...
My experiences with OO yesterday left me more than a little miffed. While I've used OpenOffice Write for numerous writing projects over the last few months, I'd never used the HTML components of Write. The consequences were nothing short of disasterous. I finally ended up cutting the text portions of my post from the badly mangled OO document and starting over with a fresh copy in JEdit. OO is most devious in what it does with HTML documents -- everything looks swell until you hit 'Save'; then OO merry reformats everything changing tag case to upper, chopping lines off at a predetermined wrap point, and replacing DOCTYPE header information with what it determines to be 'correct' (I use XHTML 1.0 Strict; OO changed this to non-strict HTML). Caveat Emptor. No, I didn't rip OO out by the roots as I still need something to read/edit the odd non-critical Word document, but I was definately tempted. I certainly won't be editing any HTML files with OO anytime in the near future...
Two further "software topics" I intended to cover yesterday... Cyrus, the man behind Mulberry, is busy working up a new 3.0 release. There's currently a beta available for Windows/Mac and an alpha for Linux (RedHat and Yellow Dog PPC) and Solaris. If you've tried Mulberry in the past but didn't like the product's unique "multiple window" layout, take a few minutes and check out this new release. You can now choose between an "integrated" layout (similar to Outlook; mailboxes and their respective folders listed in the left pane, contents and a preview panel on the right) and the old independent window layout. Cyrus has also added several other noteable features to Mulberry 3.0. My favorite: each time you open a mailbox folder a tab is added to the top of the right-hand mailbox contents window, which also you to quickly switch between folders without constantly returning to the left tree-view. As in previous releases, open folders in the tree-view are shown in green. I run the Linux alpha on my dev system all day yesterday and was impressed enough with the products stability I installed it on my notebook this morning. One minor bug you should be aware of (RH 6x x86 alpha-4 release)... if you close Mulberry and try to restart it, it won't. Solution: exit out of X, and restart a session; Mulberry will then start.
Topic two: I recv'd an email yesterday from the Microsoft Office 11 Beta coordinators. It appears I have been "accepted" into the program. CD's should be shipping within a month. Oh joy, oh rapture ;-)
It's Leah's birthday today, so I'm off to whip her up something tasty for lunch. Cheers.
Top of the mornin' to you all... Busy, busy day yesterday. On top of the usual weekend housework/chores, we took in a company picnic hosted by Leah's new employer, London Drugs. A good time was had by all. They had one of those huge air-filed jumping toys set up for the kids and lot's of fun games arranged for both young and old[ish] alike. Leah won the sack race (prize: a nice fleece vest) and the egg toss (prize: a very expensive bottle of perfume), and the kids came home with several bags of candy and what-nots. On our arrival home, we were greeted by a huge box of crab apples left on our doorstep -- compliments of our back-fence neighbor. I promptly stored them away in the coolness of our garage, and now our basement is filled with the wonderful smell of fresh apples. Yuummm. We plan to can a bunch for winter snacking, and Leah's going to make some of her famous apple crisp. For those unaware, crab apples make the best apple crisp known to man.
Lot's of fun news on the software front this morning...
I decided, for a change of pace, to take a fresh look at OpenOffice and use it to craft today's post (I typically use JEdit under Linux or Dreamweaver MX under XP for this task). I'm suitably impressed. My only bitch so far: Despite an exhaustive search through the menus and Options dialog, I can't for the life of me find a way to turn line-wrap on under HTML-source view, which is my preferred edit mode. If someone knows something I don't, please drop me a line. Two other minor annoyances. OpenOffice insists on reformatting my code when switching from code view to preview mode (bad form, IMHO) and OO gleefully converts my lower cast tags to upper case. None of the above are show-stoppers, but in principle I object to any program that messes with my format preferences without asking. The product is definitely usable, though, despite the above niggles.
I finally got all the WTF's sorted out regarding Gentoo's KDE-CVS ebuild. It's building now on Phaedrus. The problem lay the ebuild script, which Dan Armak (the Gentoo KDE maintainer) promptly addressed yesterday afternoon. For anyone so inclined:
And... FLASH UPDATE... I withdraw my above "suitably impressed" comment regarding OpenOffice. The program not only messed with my tags and layout, but it took the liberty of changing my head information. Again, without asking. In short, OO messed with almost every single component of my document. Very Ungood. Time to fire up JEdit and sort this mess out... I'll be back later to finish up.
Send questions or comments about this site to
webmaster@syroidmanor.com.
Copyright © 1998-2002 Tom Syroid. All Rights Reserved
