Category: Uncategorized

Hell freezes over, Darwin, Win32 OSS

Post author By Pete Prodoehl
Post date 2002-09-26

Has Hell frozen over? From Hemos at Slashdot: “Taco and I are both strongly considering beginning to use OSX as a primary laptops.” (And by that I’m assuming he means get a PowerBook and run Mac OS X… you always have to decipher SlashTalk…)

Seriously though, Apple’s Switcher ads tend to show people who aren’t exactly hardcore geeks (let alone Geeks in Space) and lately we’ve been seeing a lot of the O’Reilly folks moving to Mac OS X (including Tim I believe) and now the Slashdot crew? Apple needs some new Switcher ads featuring the geekiest of geeks and the nerdiest of nerds. “So I got a TiBook, and now I can compile Apache while running a nightly build of Mozilla and connecting to my G4 via ssh to set up a cron job to run ditto and backup my home directory to my Darwin box…” Or something like that…

Yeah, I said Darwin, and from the Darwin FAQ: “Although the BSD licenses don’t require companies to post their sources… We believe that the open source model is the most effective form of development for certain types of software”

Also from Slashdot: “I’m cooking up a CD-ROM image of excellent Win32 Open Source software…” Sounds like a good idea to me… I’ve mentioned open-source apps for Windows before, but as someone who isn’t a Windows person, my take on things is minimal. It’ll be good to see what others think are the good open-source Windows apps…

JAirlie.com has a list of Open Source Software in a Windows Environment…

Because friends shouldn’t let friends use Windows…

Tags apple, darwin, opensource, slashdot, switchers, windows

Uncategorized

West Wink, Zilla, Delivery Boy

Post author By Pete Prodoehl
Post date 2002-07-31

I’ve yet to see The West Wink, though I understand it’s a hee-larious half-hour sitcom about the President of a large corporation, played by Charlie Sheen. I heard that Chad Lowe was upset that Charlie was making more money, so he’s leaving the show. Charlie’s step-son Emelio Estevezian was unavailabe to play the role of the wacky neighbor, so I thought, who better than Bill Clinton! He’s got a lot of acting experience, most on news shows and press conferences, but he did a bunch of movies with an ape named Bongo back in the 80’s…

Today I experienced a bad Mozilla bug. In the past on the Mac OS X build I’ve had times where my sidebars disappear, but a quit and relaunch always seems to bring them back, irriting, but not devastating. So today I launched Mozilla 1.1a under Win2k and went to my Bookmarks menu, only to find there were no bookmarks. Or I should say, the bookmarks I had were all gone. This was very irritating. Luckily I had a backup of it less than two weeks old. Another reminder that those pesky ‘backups’ you always hear about are a good idea…

Bugzilla has the following classifications:

FIXED
INVALID
WONTFIX
LATER
NOTABUG
DUPLICATE
WORKSFORME
INCOMPLETE

I think I’ll start responding to people with WONTFIX and NOTABUG everyday at work and
see how things progress. As it is now, LATER is my most common response, right behind
FIXED.

Delivery Boy still needs some cleaning up and complete docs, but Delivery Boy 0.9 is now up…

Tags mozilla, opensource

Uncategorized

Broken, sshell, Tech Support…

Post author By Pete Prodoehl
Post date 2002-07-24

Well, as the old saying goes “get a second opinion.” MY partner went to an orthopedic doctor, who told her she actually did break her foot. This is after the ER doctors told her it was a ‘bad sprain’ um, yeah… thanks Doc!

Today I had to step away from my workstation, but didn’t feel like locking it up, but since I was ssh’d into one of our Very Important Remote Servers (VIRS for short) I decided to take precautions. I dug a burmese tiger pit in my cubicle and rigged up a robotic arm holding pepper spray controlled by X-10 devices, so that if anyone walked by an attemped to look at my terminal, they would be sprayed with the pepper spray, and if they got too close and thought about any sort of rm -rf action, the robotic arm would knock them into the burmese tiger pit. We take security very seriously around here.

Do you have a help desk/tech support person where you work? Are you that person? We proudly present: The life cycle of the help desk/tech support person…

I love to help people!
What can I do for you!
Um, see the little picture of a printer? Just click on it.
Remember? I showed you how to do that last week?
Yeah, I’ll get to it later today…
I showed them once, why can’t they remember!? Are these people idiots!?
Damn lusers! Do their brains even function?
RTFM! RTFM!

This can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few years, but eventually it will happen.

Tags rtfm, techsupport

Uncategorized

To Do in RSS

Post author By Pete Prodoehl
Post date 2002-07-23

I’ve mentioned my To Do list and putting it smack dab in-my-face via my browser, now I can have it show up in any RSS reader as well. It outputs HTML, OPML, and RSS. I should really implement a true template system, clean up all the code, and release it… Hmmm, one of these days…