ante-meridian (quite), EDT
on capitalism
nymia wrote:
This is the thing I like about capitalism, it simply works.
I suspect there are some people in Argentina with differing opinions. :-(
on hardware
I'm finally shifting most of my laptop operations over to the new ThinkPad T21 I bought
in September 2001. It has shown a troubling tendency to hang, however -- first the
display (magic sysrq seems to get out of that), then a really hard hang that requires
power cycling. Right now I'm trying a workaround with a 'Option ShadowStatus'
line in my XF86Config file. The 600E that belongs to the company has been running
continuously for months; I'd likewise prefer not to be forced to reboot the new one at
random intervals. Just added the option yesterday, so it's too soon to tell if it has fixed
the problem.
on VMware
I've got VMware installed on my Linux laptop, with a Win2K guest OS. It simply rocks.
It doesn't rock perfectly (The Sims can't access the CD/DVD at the low level
it wants in order to 'validate' me as a registered user, and the LEGO(tm) Mindstorms
1.5 system can't seem to properly download the RCX through the VMware->Linux->serial
port pathway), but it's excellent natheless. At least it's good enough for my main purposes,
which is parallel building of Apache on Linux and Windows so I can do the research for my
books.
testing, testing.. 1, 2, 3..
Another thing that rocks is the Apache Perl regression
test framework.
It's excellent for Apache module development, though it's more than a little difficult
to wrap your mind around the how-to aspect unless you're a Perl guru or have
futzed with the CPAN testing stuff in the past. But if you can express a module's
desired behaviour through tests for correctness, you can verify the code progress
quickly and automagically. I'm adding sections about it, and sample tests, to my
Apache modules book.