I'd forgotten how really quite lovely that Mac OS X is on a reasonable-sized monitor. I usually use it on my PowerBook, and it's frustratingly chunky at 1024x768. But at 1600x1280 on my 19" LaCie Electron Blue, it looks wonderful.
I went out and bought an Athlon XP 1700+ for the Asus ACV266-E that I got in the mail today. It took me about an hour to get everything hooked up and (hopefully) correctly configured on the motherboard. Lacking the final piece -- a stick of DDR -- I can't know for sure.Debian, Debian, Debian!
My Plextor CD-RW came in the mail today, and tomorrow will bring my Asus ACV266-E motherboard. I'm very pleased. Unfortunately (as regards this particular project), I have to head out of town for the weekend on Saturday morning -- my cousin is getting married in upstate Virginia [1]. Otherwise, I'd head to my local chip shop on Saturday and buy myself an Athlon, a stick of DDR and a processor fan, and I'd be in business.Much more exciting to me, though, is that with this new computer will come Debian. I've never used Debian, but I've long known that I should. I believe that I'll start off with Debian and Mandrake 8.2, but leave lots of free space so that I can add other distributions to play with. I've never had multiple distributions on a machine, but I'm hoping that I can come up with a fairly simple partitioning scheme that allows for me to have a single home partition, a single swap partition, and then another partition for each distribution. Normally I prefer to have more partitions, but given that this isn't a server, I'm not looking for sealed-bulkhead-style isolation of / var/ from /usr/ and such. I'll look around for some howtos on the topic, but I have a feeling that this approach will work just fine.
It's been a long time since I've had a machine to tinker with. Most of my machines are PPC, which puts me a behind a bit in the programs available to me. Consequently, I use most of them for very straightforward purposes, and they don't ultimately end up as comfortable computing environments. My Intel machines (I don't own any Athlons yet) are all servers, so there's no tinkering to be done. I very much look forward to doing all of the traditional hey-I-have-a- computer things, like playing games, staying permanently logged in, getting back into learning Python, burning CDs, using IM (!) [2] hooking it up to stereo equipment and the like. It'll be fun.
[1] I refuse to say "northern Virginia," because the
residents of that beastly area of the state have
shortened it to "NoVa," which I find horrifyingly
pretentious. So I invented my own term.
[2] I've never used instant messaging. Crazy, huh? It's
just not for me...so far.
Where's Waldo?
Right over here. :)
New Computer
The parts have started to come in for my new computer. buy.com appears to be grossly irrational in their shipping practices -- they sent all three things that I bought from them in three separate boxes that are arriving over a series of days. I got my 40GB IBM 7200rpm Ultra ATA/100 from Dirt Cheap Drives first -- it was very well packaged. I haven't actually used it yet, but I'm impressed with the company, anyhow. Tomorrow I'll download Debian and the new Mandrake to put on that system when I've got all the parts later in the week.
Bynari Insight
I downloaded Bynari's InsightConnector earlier in the week, onto my Win2k machine at the office. I'm doing my best to take us away from Windows, and this seems like a good step. The problem is that Bynari's product descriptions are so confusing, particularly to somebody (ie: me) who doesn't grok Outlook, Exchange, etc. The install of InsightConnector was smooth, but then I was left with an ostensibly full-featured Outlook without any knowledge of what to do with it. There was no uninstall option, so I futzed with it for a bit and was left with a copy of Outlook entire devoid of data. Oh, well. Now I have to figure out what Outlook does with the benefit of an Exchange server vs. without one so that I know what the heck to do with InsightConnector.
Somehow I screwed up BIND so badly that reverse DNS no longer works. Which isn't too bad, except for the 60 seconds that it takes to send or check mail.
I'm sad that I've had so little time to program recently. I'm eager to gain fluency in Python, specifically so that I'll be able to teach it to others. Perhaps I'll have more time over spring break.
But I am getting a Wireless Free Charlottesville project off the ground. We need more disruptive technologies around here. :) So that's something.
After eight years of Linux use (and over a decade of FS / OS usage) I finally got my first really good chance to convert a major corporation. And I did really well.
Sure, I may have converted part of GlaxoSmithKline's web operations, but that's a little one -- I'm still waiting to bag a Big Boy. I got my first try last Thurday night. I was at a United States Liability insurance conference in Philadelphia, and we'd taken a field trip to the Flyers/Predators (hockey) game for the evening. I managed to turn the last two thirds of the game into an opportunity to expound upon the benefits of open standards and free software, and how they could reform the insurance industry. Convincing a huge insurance company to spend thousands to create a new standard and then give it away isn't easy. I've made a great start, and I get the feeling that a buzz has started over there. I'll have to keep hammering on them, but I think that it could work.
My goal is for them to store all policies in XML, issue quotes and policies via XML-RPC, and store them in a MySQL database rather than their (I kid you not) Paradox system. If they can design an API and release it to the industry to adopt, then programmers will flock to create programs that will work within their system to automate the Jurassic process that is the insurance industry.
It ain't writing code, but it's something. :)
I love Radio. It's incredible.Free Speech Chalkboard
I've constructed, for the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Freedom of Expression (you may know them for their annual Muzzle Awards), a simulation of their free speech monument. It's a discussion board, but lacking any identifying information or form -- anybody can write anything anywhere, edit others' comments, delete them, etc. It's been quite an interesting sociological experiment thus far, and has certainly proved to be an excellent simulation. Topically, it's primarily of interest to people from Charlottesville, VA (USA), so you can't expect to find much content that will interest you.
I gave up on getting Zope to work on my Mandrake machine last night, and just downloaded a Mac OS X package that somebody had kindly assembled. That install was painless (save for the mysterious non-existent administrator login and password), and I proceeded through the most-excellent built-in demo that comes with Zope. I feel like I've got a pretty good grasp of the concepts now, but I certainly don't feel like it would speed up anything that I do.
My test will be to see if I can set up a Zope-based site for my mother to replace her existing site. My mother, a regular commentator on NPR, likes to make many of her essays available on her site. I've got a little system set up for her, but I think that a Zope-based site could make it even simpler for her. We'll see.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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