Hey, I got a new machine! After I finally realized that my old machine "junkyard" which wouldn't run FreeBSD, OpenBSD or The Hurd was actually flaking out on me, I splurged and got a dual-Athlon system.

I purchased one from KC Computers almost exactly like raph's box, Spectre. My processors are a little faster and I got an ATI Radeon video card, but otherwise it's the same. I have no use for such a powerful machine, really. I'm not a gamer. I told myself I wanted to learn more about SMP, but maybe it's my geek equivalent of a mid-life crisis sports car. (By that measure, it's damn cheap!).

I came up with the coolest name for my dual-processor machine -- "gemini". I'm sure hundreds of people must have taken the same train of thought, but I still think the choice was inspired.

So, I'm still configuring this beast. It took me a while to get X working, because I had to figure out that I needed to compile framebuffer support into the kernel. Unlike raph, I got the onboard networking to work without any difficulty (I guess spectre may have hardware problem). OTOH, I'm having a hell of a time getting sound working. The alsa modules install fine, but xmms tells me ** WARNING **: oss_open(): Failed to open audio device (/dev/dsp): No such device and mpg321 says Can't find a suitable libao driver. (Is device in use?)

I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually.

A friend unexpectedly gave me his Sharp Zaurus, too! He's kind of a gadget collecter and realized he didn't have time for it. It's a SL-5000D, the original "developer's model" (which came out before the official product release and has less memory). I guess he got it off of eBay.

So now I have a reason to try to get USB working on gemini: that's how to talk to the Zaurus when it's in its cradle.

All this is really cool, but it kind of makes me worry that I'll be configuring stuff for days and not get any programming done. I've got a perl module VMS::Logical which is really useful to VMS folk, and it just needs a little tweaking to make it CPAN-worthy. Maybe I'll just have to make time for that, even if my sound's still not working.

The HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux which has received some attention around here is certainly ... well ... strange. It states right at the beginning "This HOWTO is definitely not intended to help male Linux geeks find female Linux geeks to date." Well, why would you have a gender-specific focus like this if it doesn't relate to the one place where gender matters? (Yes, some people have different preferences, and for some people gender may not be the most important consideration in dating, but that's a side issue.) I know I was very happy to find a programmer to marry (albeit not a Linux one -- yet) because she can relate to my interests. That's important.

The document goes on to offer some very unflattering female stereotypes: there's actually a section entitled Women are less confident. Sheesh. There's a power in words: that's how spelling in the mundane sense is related to magickal spells. If you label women as "less confident", you will selectively recognize their failures of confidence and fail to see their boldness. In that way, the document itself is what it most wants not to be: patronizingly sexist.

That said, I don't really have a problem with it being in the HOWTOs. If I want to get USB going, I'll read the USB HOWTO, and if I want to "Encourage Women in Linux", I'll read this document. If there get to be too many "social HOWTOs" mixed in with the technical ones, they could be seperated. Still, every HOWTO is just the author's opinion; that's fine.