October 2000

Zope, Zope, Zope... I've been digging into Zope lately. It's nice. I'm trying to figure out how I can make it work as a publishing system and CMS. The features of Zope are quite attractive, WebDAV, versioning and rollback, transactions, odb, and lots of other fancy words most people don't care about. Want to see an early draft of a Zope book? Or maybe a tutorial? Perhaps just a simple introduction...

Don't just vote against Gore... Don't just vote against Bush... Vote against both of them!

I'm beginning to think that you can try to choose a CMS and really freakin' hope it does what you want, or that you can try to make it do what you want it to do, probably by paying consultants a ton... or you can educate the heck out of yourself, and your staff (well, you'll have to do that anyway) and possibly hire a few really smart people, and try to glue together various pieces of software (open source would probably work best) and then really, really hope that what you create works... I think you're doomed either way, so what to do? I'm just rambling on of course, this will happen to you too once you start seriously looking at the CMS options out there.... argh...

Today I heard someone say "It works in both browsers." Hoo! Is that rich or what!? Both! as if there are only two browsers. That's like saying there are only two political parties. I tried to explain what HTML is, what compliance is, what validation is... oh, I tell you, these kids today...

MacInTouch had a note about Tim Gill leaving Quark. Supposedly Tim was quoted in an email saying "For me, my passion has moved on to philanthropy. You can't take it with you. And giving it away has been consuming more and more of my time ..." Hey Tim, glad you've got so much damn money to give away, I guess overcharging for XPress for so many years has paid off quite well. If the Gill Foundation would like to contribute any money to Rasterboy Enterprises, feel free to contact me.

Also from MacInTouch, this story about the Blue Man Group being featured in the latest Intel commercials. Is this the same Blue Man Group featured on Apple's web site? Sure... Comes as no surprise to the people old enough to remember the Pentium commercials of about 7 years ago, that were edited on Macs...

I just started digging into Python again, lucky for me MacPython 2.0 came out pretty recently. I also loaded ActiveState's ActivePython 2.0 last week. Which reminds me, if you too are forced to use some Windows machine, you really need to install Cygwin. Really...

If anyone wants to tell me about their choice of mailing list software that works on NT with a migration path to unix, I'd appreciate it... Let me know...

While you're at it, if you know of a good, open, standards-based, affordable, flexible CMS... oh, forget it...

Wahoo! My ear infection is gone. I had Aspergillus Nigrans, a fungal infection in the ear, for the last two months or so. I was on probably five different medications and at least four different kinds of drops. I need to use drops for another week and a half, and I'm done... My advice to you is, try to avoid fungal infections. (You probably already knew that...)

Still need a Halloween costume? I'm here to help! Ok, first get yourself an old white t-shirt and a black magic marker, now write the word 'UNIX' on the front of the shirt, done? Ok... now get a really nice button up dress shirt, the kind you'd wear to some fancy event, make sure it's cleaned and pressed, now, get the words 'Mac OS' embroidered onto it, in bluish letters would be best, and if you can somehow make the embroidery glow or throb, that's a plus. Now, put on the old t-shirt, then put the nice shirt over it, leave a few buttons undone, depending on your personal preference... congratulations, you're now Mac OS X! (For an added bonus find a pair of Dockers ;)

What a weird weekend, I ended up having to search a house with a Deputy on Saturday night, that was interesting... it might even deserve a full story at some point...

Crud. We've had a string of bad luck around here lately, starting with the Slave1 problems of last week. What else happened? Well, our nice, large, color television seems to have lost power, and won't turn back on. I've hauled the old small set up from the basement so we could watch Toy Story 2, and while we thoroughly enjoyed it, it really sucked seeing it on the little tv...

I forgot my lunch today... crap...

We've still not got a serious offer on our house, we got one joke offer, for less than what we paid for it, which wasn't even formally presented... What's wrong with people?

I tend to respect people more when they know the difference between 'hacker' and 'cracker'

I found my old Moral Disgust tape (circa 1986!) and was amused by it on the ride home last night, the line that most amused me was "I'd kill myself, but I ain't got the time" - oh, that's rich...

Mac OS X Haiku's?

Dave sez: Money is boring, well, gee, I suppose if you have lots of it, money could be boring. I don't know. I have very little of it, and when I do get it, there's plenty of companies lined up to take their piece of it. If I had more money, maybe I could do some exciting and interesting things. That would be nice... Hmmm, maybe not having any money is exciting! Yeah, when you're not sure if you'll make the mortgage or car payment, or if you're phone might get disconnected, well that's anything but boring, it's damn exciting!

I'm really not anti-Dave, I sort of like Dave actually. My problem is with the phrase "Money is boring." I'm just reading too much into it. No biggie... My own take would be "There's more to life/your career/anything than money" or maybe "Money is a neccesary evil in today's evil society, which we must put forth every effort to destroy..." yeah, I like that one better...

I've always sort of prided myself on the clarity and excellence of my email correspondence. I've discovered that some people can do less work and be very successful in slowing down a project just by being vague and general. I'm getting email from someone who is doing work for me, and every message is somewhat cryptic, and by the time I write them back asking for a better explanation, and then get a better explanation, it's a day later... argh...

WebTrends sucks... Windows NT sucks... Active Server Pages sucks... (sorry, had to be said...)

Bleargh... Friday the 13th was a bad, bad day... a day that ended in some bad, bad disk problems with Slave1, the main axe of RasterWeb. By Sunday we were back up and running (pretty smoothly) again, and experienced no real data loss. But now I really have to wonder about this Friday the 13th mumbo-jumbo...

Not to mention that the cd-rom tray of Decstar got whacked out of alignment and isn't working properly anymore... arrghhh.... so now that I actually have an ethernet card, I can't actually test it out...

We carved up our pumpkins over the weekend, I don't know if I'll get pictures up this year, here's 1998's pumpkins and 1997's offering.

"It is okay to use an NT box as an X terminal but nothing mission-critical can depend on anything authored or sold by Microsoft..." I agree...

our friend over at the angry red planet is now running Red Hat Linux 6.2 (!) and... our friend also managed to send us an ethernet card... that's right...

The new job is working out quite well. Hacking perl code is a good way to spend a day. Battling with NT or IIS issues is *not* a good way to spend any amount of time, so I avoid doing such things when possible.

I'm starting to fear Mac OS X. If it's as reliable as it should be, I'll never get a break. See, at least once or twice a day my Mac crashes and I'm reminded to get up, walk around, maybe go outside or just otherwise stretch the muscles... It's a good thing. With a rock-solid, stable core like BSD underneath OS X, I'd be forced to sit at my desk all day, with no excuse as to why I'm taking a break. Damn you Mac OS X!

Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I've decided to give BSD another chance, but not just any BSD, NetBSD, and not just NetBSD, but the mac68k port of NetBSD. I tried this about 4 years ago, with no success, which wasn't surprising for the time. Now, with this spiffy looking NetBSD Macintosh Install Guide, I'm willing to try again... I'll put that Centris to good use yet! Lookout, Road to Linux, there may be a detour down an alley called "BSD"

Speaking of unix related things, while I prefer Elm to Pine, I actually live on Pine Street, and Elm Street is just a few blocks away... Sure that's nice, but did I mention Root Avenue is a few blocks in the other direction? (Hard as I try, I still can't find Emacs Lane or Vi Boulevard anywhere near my house though...)

I don't understand why Windows NT isn't called Windows N'T. Why? Well these words best describe NT - can't, won't, isn't, shouldn't, doesn't... need I go on?

I picked up an old Apple 14" color monitor over the weekend, it was at the same rummage sale where I got my Centris. I got it for $7.50. The guys said, "This is for an Apple" and I said "Good" because Apple tends to make good monitors. this one's from 1994, and it's in great condition. I put it on Slave1 and put the old 14" from Slave1 on the Centris. There were also some Mac Classic's and Plus's I wish I could have rescued as well, but I'm not made out of money you know. Maybe next time they'll have Quadras, and by 2003 they might have PowerMac 6100's!

Wow, it's always a great thing when someone I knew long, long, ago stumbles across this site and actually decides to email me. I got a nice little message from Patrick Hotlen (aka Pat Hotlen) over the weekend. He had some updates, that should soon appear on the W.A.T.N. page...

Hmmm, what could be just as cool as hearing from an old pal? Well, another old pal (who I hear from pretty often) delivered news of the birth of a new child... Now the Chase-Doboiash's have 3... (they're outnumbered!)

Looking into WebDAV a bit, and am very interested in what I found. There's a nice Mac OS client called Goliath. (very cool!)

Aha! So the Mac OS X public beta does have Apache installed. Mystery solved! I'm actually getting more excited about the combination of the Mac OS and a solid BSD core... what mac/unix geek doesn't dream of such a system...

Hey, I noticed that MacInTouch mentioned my Barcode Fun page on it's CueCat Report page...

At my new position I've got one of those optical mice and fancy keyboards that now comes standard with your new G4. I must admit, the feel of the mouse is almost... well, sensual... it's so damn smooth, and transparent, and optical... part of me (computer geek part) says "it's just a freakin' mouse, who cares how it looks!" while the other part of me (artist/designer) says "this is a thing of beauty, in form and function!" I don't like the keyboard as much, though it's a drastic improvement over the old iMac style mini-keyboards, I don't like the feel of it very much. It looks real nice, and I do sort of like the black keys, but there is one problem - because I'm in an office environment, those brain-killing fluorescent lights tend to cause a glare on the keys. I've fashioned a monitor hood that helps a bit, but it's still in alpha, I'll end up building a new one soon...

The angryredplanet.org joins me on The Road To Linux... go there, read saucemaster's report. If you can help him... please do...

Did you know you could get Sendmail for NT? I suppose that's a good thing... for shops that have to use NT anyway... I wonder what the cost of purchasing Sendmail for NT to put on your existing NT server is, versus the cost of adding an additional *nix server that would have Sendmail already on it at no cost...

Good gosh, it's rOctober already! I've been doing way too much work lately for way too many people besides myself. While this equates to some monetary value, it's draining physically, emotionally, and artistically. My creative energy is suffering a bit.

I've always heard these stories about people who firmly believe, with all their heart that Microsoft is the one true way. I'll admit, I doubted such people really existed. I mean, I've never met one... well, now I have... yes, it's a bit scary... hopefully I'll learn the meta-language needed to communicate with this person...

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