jfleck: You want sandhill cranes? You can have them.

Not only do they wake up the old farts around here, they get in the way of traffic; they stand in the middle of the road and refuse to move unless you get out of your car and chase them off. But Lord help you if you so much as ruffle their feathers; they're an endangered species and the EPA ain't friendly.

By the way, are the sandhill cranes over where you live the same species as the ones over here in Florida?

garym: Yeah, that's a good idea. We can only hope. (Well, those of you who actually know enough to do so can start, but I'm still trying to cure my chronic recto-cranial inversion syndrome.)

Gentoo is a good start on this front. Granted, it's got a long way to go (it does absolutely nothing with regard to the kernel), but it's better than the precompiled-binary standard.

I also agree that Unix in general isn't ready for the desktop. As a matter of fact, I'm hoping to set up a business with Windows XP clients and a headless Linux server running Samba. Ideally the Linux box will be completely hands-off from their POV, and all configuration can be done remotely.

I finally gave up on Win2k Advanced Server and decided to go with XP Professional. (Yeah, yeah, I know, but it's no worse than 2K once you turn off the Playskool theme...)

I was actually beginning to enjoy some of the XP 'new features' that Unix has had since the early seventies: the ability to have multiple users logged in at the same time (even if only one can be active), et cetera.

Then I hooked it up to a NT domain. (Samba.)

Little did I know that by doing so, I lost the biggest advantage XP has over 2K. Now, I have to log out and back in to do anything as an administrator, and we're back where we started.

The User Interface Design prof is still a moron. We have to use JavaScript for our assignments now. He was demonstrating a JS-based slideshow page (no automatic control, just next/prev buttons), and I asked what the advantage was of using JavaScript over standard HTML or serverside technologies (PHP, etc). He stammered something about being able to have bigger shows or bigger images or something. Moo, splat.

Part of good UI design is being able to back away from technologies that don't fit the task at hand. He doesn't seem to grasp that. That said, I'm going to write PHP scripts to generate most of my JavaScript. Yay.

I have a presentation in Communication for Engineers class next Saturday. I have to speak (for about four minutes or so) about the software used for this project (controlling air compressors for efficiency).

This could fit under "school", too...

In Computer Organization class, we have to learn to write in assembly language. Unfortunately, the assembler and emulator we have to use is DOS-only.

I'm attempting to write a compatible emulator (and later an assembler). According to the professor for this class, students at my level did this routinely, back in the 'good old days' when he was a student.

Even with quite a bit of documentation (the book for this class includes the 68k Programmer's Manual), I can't figure out how to break things up cleanly. For example, opcodes are of varying length, from what I can tell. Maybe it would help if I learned to use one before I tried to emulate it...

By the way, I've looked at UAE's 68k emulation... holy crap. This seems like one hell of a rite of passage...