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Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
Good morning. This will be brief; I've got a plane to catch in a hour and while I'm packed and ready to "rock and roll", I still need to triple check all my lists to ensure I haven't forgotten anything. This trip is especially mission critical -- I need to ensure everything I need to do is done to perfection, without error, and both servers I'm configuring are running like fine-tuned swiss watches before I leave. If I forget anything I need, I'll have to improvise or buy it, and I don't want to have to do either unless absolutely necessary. I've thought through all possible WTF scenarios and put backup plans in place for them all. Hopefully I can out-maneuvour Murphy for the next six days.
Despite my expressed reservations, I went ahead and emerged KDE 3.1 RC3 the other night. I based my decision on positive results from a number of people, and the fact that I haven't had any "show stopper" problems with KDE 3.1 since I started using it three months ago. Everything built without a hitch. RC3 is as stable as a rock, and while I haven't noticed any dramatic changes to speak of, overall this release has a very polished feel to it. If you're using Gentoo, you have to back off libxml2 one rev to 2.4.24 to get KDE to compile with error, but other than that everything builds/works as advertised.
Time to fly, so to speak. A reminder: I don't plan on posting here next week. Unless, of course, I get everything installed and configured without a single problem and I end up with time on my hands I don't know what to do with -- possible, but given the complexity of what I need to pull off, highly unlikely.
Be well and be safe. See you next weekend.
For all who dropped in earlier today, no, I'm not starting a porn site ;-) It was a placeholder and as far as I got this morning... header, div class at the bottom, a set of 'p' tags, and the phone rang. And rang. And rang again. Then there was a set of CD's to make. Yada and yada. You get the picture I'm sure.
I've been mucking about with Emacs again for the past day or so. I was inspired by an article I read last night (here if you're interested; it's not particularly well written, but the content is good -- a primer on creating "portable" documents with SGML/XML using Emacs). Yes, I puttered with Emacs a year or so ago, but something more pressing blew onto my desk and I put aside my efforts never to return again until now. I still find the keystrokes very unnatural and obtuse to memorize, but I guess it's like any other editor -- it's just a matter of training the fingers.
In order to harness the innate power of Emacs you have to add some LISP macros and DTD's, but it's a relatively simple process under Gentoo. The aforementioned article mentions the stuff you need. Pretty cool, actually. I'm writing this in Emacs now, complete with syntax highlighting. Can't find the module for tag completion, but I haven't looked too hard. They say after you've mastered a handful of important keystrokes for Emacs and get a handle on SGML/DocBook, you'll never turn back. We'll see. I can tell yo u this: The further down the writing path I journey, the more I understand the importance of separating content from layout and format.
If anyone knows how to go about enabling tag completion under Emacs (or even IF I can), please drop me a line.
I'm sitting here this morning, chuckling quietly to myself (which is a good thing, I suppose, considering it's Wednesday, it feels like Friday, and with my upcoming trip to Indy Saturday, I don't get a weekend -- humor is a Good Thing on mornings like this... ). Two years ago I can remember vividly trying desperately to get my mind and fingers around Linux. I'd dutifully fire up the distro of the week, and try to accomplish something productive. Alas, two hours was about my time limit before frustration set in and I'd grudgingly boot back into Windows. Last night I had a couple CD's to make, and the files were on my XP partition. I decided relocating the files was silly, as once I had them on CD I could access them from any machine, under any OS. So I booted into XP and went to work. My patience quotient lasted all of about two hours. I felt like I was trying to shuffle through mud a foot deep. In the end, I moved the files I needed to Hydras, booted back into Gentoo, and had the CD's I needed in less than twenty minutes. Ironic, don't you think? Now please don't misconscrue my above musings as Windows bashing. It's not. Windows is a perfectly capable OS for a lot of people. HW detection and configuration is light-years ahead of Linux, and if you need Office, well... you need Office. But I don't need Windows any more, and using it frustrates me just like Linux used to (albeit in different ways). My experiences last night, however, provided me with some very powerful and subtle insights in to just how far Linux (and my skillset for effectively using Linux) has developed in the last two years.
I see KDE has released 3.1 RC3 -- it's in the Gentoo Portage tree if you're so inclined. I'll pass on this one, at least for the moment. I unmasked the appropriate section in package.mask and ran an emerge -up kde, but I don't like what I see regarding dependencies. I had to drop into the RC2 section and unmask a couple entries there (qt and another I don't remember) to make the "pretend" check come up clean. Mmm. While I have a lot of confidence in KDE 3.1 and Gentoo devs, I simply cannot afford to bork my desktop this week so I'll let someone else experiment with this one...
My plate is piled high for the next three days as I gather, organize, and prep for my upcoming trip. I'll do what I can to post every day thru Saturday AM, but I won't be posting next week until at least the weekend.
I haven't been within 6 feet of a computer -- or any other electronic device for that matter -- since Saturday morning. Other than the 400 or so emails CommuniGate has graciously sorted and filed away for me over the weekend, and an increased level of sabre-rattling / diplomatic gloating from my Southern neighbors, the world appears to be much like I left it two days ago.
All hell broke loose late last week work-wise, and it appears that the hurry-up-and-wait mode we've been in for the last three weeks is over. For all intents and purposes, the project proposal we've been working on for six months is going ahead. Which means I'm going to be a very busy little beaver through the end of January, and probably (depending on how negitiations go for future planned phases) well into late next year. Which is why I needed to take some downtime this weekend and spend some focused time with family. This coming Saturday I fly to Indy for six days. The balance of this week will be consumed with prepping for my journey. Next week's toast. And when I return, I'll be head's down writing about everything. Yippee.
Other than the usual weekend chores, Saturday and Sunday were spent shopping. Leah and I agreed that given our schedules for the next 6 weeks, we could not afford to leave our Christmas shopping/preparation until the last minute as we have so often done in the past. So we picked up some decorations for the house, got a tree ordered, and browsed the shelfs for gift ideas. Exhausting stuff, but better done now rather than a month down the road when the stores and busy and stock is limited or non-existent. We're already having a hard time locating the outside lights we want for the house. Leah got 3 boxes of blue and white icicles 10 days ago, but we need three more to cover the eves the length of house, and we can't find the same brand/color combination anywhere. Bleh.
Most of my comments last week regarding an SMP notebook and iMacs were made tongue-in-cheek. Definiately the former. Current technology makes SMP notebooks unrealistic. While I work with my notebook plugged in most of the time, I'm probably in the minority. Battery life would be probably all of twenty minutes with dual processors, and the heat problem would make using such a device akin to placing a hot frying pan in your lap. Plus component failure rates from the heat would be astronomical, and I have enough problems with component failure already :=(. As far as iBooks go, as noted, the price point for Macs is still too high in contrast to x86 products. And I don't see that changing any time in the near future. Besides, with the current state of Linux distributions and the refinement/tweakability of the KDE, why? Given my knowledge of Linux, there's nothing I can't do that I need to do with the Dell that's currently resting in my lap. Yeah, wireless can be a little tricky, but once you learn a few tricks, it's not brain surgery. Time consuming and frustrating, but not brain surgery. And once it's working, it stays working providing you avoid mucking with certain key network components.
Guess I'd better get on with my day. But first some more java...
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