From Wired News: House Votes to Outlaw All Cloning. This is really bad news. I mean, who among us here hasn’t used Carbon Copy Cloner at some point? Damn, back to ditto I guess…
Well, I finally did get jabberd running under Linux yesterday, it was just a matter of fixing a line in the config file. I found this after googling… er, I mean, searching the web for the problem I was having.
Next on the list is Net::Jabber, which ultimately should provide a nice little notification framework. We hope.
Of course being that perl is so damn powerful, it can also be a powerful headache. More to come…
Says Dave of one of my old hang-outs:
There would be some closure to stopping in Madison on the way back east. When I moved to California in 1979, my departure point was East Johnson Street in Madison.
Johnson Street, ah the memories… It almost brings a tear to me eye…
(Hey Dave, as you leave Madtown start waving, if I see you an hour later, I’ll wave back…)
We went to the Apple Store last weekend. It was actually Emma’s idea. (I’m a proud dad!) So while the girls played Barbie games on the eMacs (under OS 9 interestingly enough) I checked out all the hardware. Damn technolust!
That iPod. Wow. 20 Gigs. Tiny. And it plays music. Out of my price range.
12″ PowerBook. Nice. Very nice. Tiny. Out of my price range.
17″ PowerBook… oh, not out yet… Pretty sure it’s out of my price range.
So I was using a nice shiny new PowerMac G4 and I tooled around iPhoto a bit, and got the spinning beachball, or lollypop, or whatever it is in Jaguar. I thought, “Well, no surprise, I get that a lot on my G3/250mhz Wallstreet, and my G4/400mhz at work, and even my G4/733mhz at home.” So I looked at the little sign, and realize I’m using a PowerMac G4 with dual 1 Gig processors.. and 1 Gig of RAM.
But I’m not worried, any day now Apple will come out with faster hardware, with more processors, and more RAM slots, and someday my friends, the spinning beachball, or lollypop, or whatever it is in the current version of the Mac OS, will be a distant memory…
Of this I am sure. Maybe.
Now this makes me peeved… I’ve been trying to install jabberd, the Jabber server. Now, I try on Mac OS X, no luck, I try on Yellow Dog Linux, no luck, but that’s a whole other problem involving GCC that I won’t get into. I then try under Red Hat Linux, and while things seem to work, there are some firewall issues I haven’t resolved yet. I decide, against my better judgement, to try the Windows version. It works. And, it was easy. Damn. I hate you Windows…
Officially the Windows version is ‘unsupported’ and I don’t plan to use it for anything more than testing… So there.
And yes, I’m once again looking into Jabber as a presence and IM platform.
(Try me at rasterboy@jabber.org if you must…)
It’s nice to see that Mark is now providing a mobile edition. It’s a good thing he didn’t decide to provide a Mobile Edition, or we might have had to unleash the lawyers…
We installed ethernet in the house recently. For those of you unfamiliar with network cabling, here’s some background: In the old days networks had to be built using ‘wires’ to carry data from one point to another. I know, it sound strange, but I swear it’s true. While today you might be able to just open your iBook and be on the internet, some of us actually have to plug a ‘network cable’ into the back of an old Wallstreet in order to connect it to other computers or download RSS feeds…
So luckily I got an electrician friend of ours to help. Beside having the right equipment, he also had a spool of Cat5 cable. That helped quite a bit. Another friend supplied a jack crimping tool, and after spending somewhere under $15 for jacks and connectors, and way too much time trying to make our own network cables, we’re wired. (Or weird, depending on who you ask.)
Yes, now we can send email from the basement to the bedroom, we can run an aggregator and alert others to our presence while on the couch. It’s all quite amazing, and fairly affordable as well. (Not to mention the 100Mbit speed of it all…)
The next step is to move the office back into the basement. I don’t even want to calculate how many times we’ve moved the office, but I’m guessing it’s well into the double digits…
My children got to see their first anti-war protesters over the weekend.
(That’s something I wished I would never have to say…)
Time to break things around here, and by that we mean new features. Or is it new bugs. Or Both.
Anyway, we’ve added a strip of photos on the main page. We’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but haven’t quite gotten around to it. So like most things, we’ll throw it out there and refine it as it goes. Things of note. It’s not done but that’s ok, things on the web are never really done, right? Also, it looks like things are borked in Netscape 4.x in a most peculiar way, which might be just fine, though it is a puzzle as to how the borking manifests itself.
On the bright side, you’ll start seeing more photos around here. Yay.
In other news, I’m close to patching ht://Dig 3.1.6 to produce valid XHTML output. Just… need.. more… time…
Ok, on with the show…
Forwarding Address: OS X talks about designers, OS 9, and QuarkXPress:
In many cases this is the only thing binding design pros to OS 9. They want to migrate to OS X, but they can’t.
One of my designer friends recently told me that his shop was moving to OS X and InDesign. Granted, it’s a small shop, but still, it’s a start. I’m not sure how the other design shop I’m familiar with is handling the OS X transition.
As for my own experince, when Safari was released, I told a few people, and one person was heard to ask “Does it require OS X?” which tells me a little about the view from the design/OS 9 trenches around these parts…
Teoma appears to be as good a search engine as Google.
I’ve looked at Teoma a bit, as I’m just as nervous as the next cat about Google being the only game in town. (Competitions is a good thing, remember that!) Currently if you go to Teoma and attempt to submit a url, you are sent to ask.ineedhits.com where you are presented with an order form you can fill out, and pay to be included. This is not how the web works. This is not about equality. This is about money. From what I can tell, unless I’m missing something, a new site can’t just say to Temoa “please index me” unless they pony up some cash, or get some other site to link to them so the indexer follows the link. Though it takes a few click to find, Google has a simple (and free) way to submit a site for indexing.
Also of interest, from the About Teoma page:
Search results appearing under the heading “Sponsored Links” are provided by Google®, a third party provider of pay for performance search listings.
I’m not even sure what to make of that, besides the fact that Teoma seems dependant on Google for some things…
Around our household we really don’t go in much for the ‘reality’ type shows, I mean, I try to live in a fantasy world of my own creation as much as possible… Anyway, as luck (bad or otherwise) would have it, we actually watched part of Joe Millionaire last night. My familiarity with the show comes from commercials, and the discussions about it that take place on the wacky morning show on Lazer 103. Still, I predicted that ‘Joe’ would be given one million dollars about two weeks ago. This was the simplest explanation as to him being a poor millionaire chap.
And really, a million is pretty cheap. The main cast of Friends each gets one million per episode, and there’s six of them. So that’s 6 million per episode just for the stars. Fox had this Joe guy, and all the women, and probably 13 episodes, and I’m sure it cost much less than 6 million… And from what I hear it was a popular show.
This brings up two important points. Reality shows won’t go away, and, this is just the beginning…
Can I get a collective Argh! (thanks…)
Just like webgraphics, I too am exited about the new text formatting options out there. Brad gives us MT-Textile, which I adapted to a system I’m working on pretty darn quickly. Brad says he’ll generalize it away from MT and put it on CPAN soon. Also on the radar is Tiki which I haven’t look at yet, but you can bet I will.
The cool thing about this is, you may be able to add the new Movable Type Simple and Powerful Text Formatting feature to any home-brew system quite easily…
I’ve got this magazine advertisement for a Microsoft product that promises to get you out of something they call “DLL hell.” My question is, who put you into this “DLL hell” thing? Wasn’t that Microsoft? Won’t they just put you into some other type of hell? With Microsoft it seems every version instantly makes the previous version a piece of crap.
Seen on a mailing list:
This is a known bug. I plan on addressing it eventually.
Excellent…
