Free Software
I just read
this article from dyork's article. I
really like the point that it makes, I think it parallels a
lot more than the church ministry. For example, the boy
scouts of america do a tremendous amount of community
service work. I don't think that it's particularly good
"article", but it would be an article that I'd publish
formally. There's a lot of anti-microsoft rant in there,
which detracts from the point a bit. I'm tempted to write a
bit on the topic, but nobody is paying me to be a free
software advocate, and I know I've got other projects which
I'm going to spend my time on first.
Computers
Macintosh bigots, don't flame me, this is supposed to be
funny!
One of our professors on campus today, carrying his light
blue, semi-translucent Mac notebook (the one with a handle
on it). One of my co-workers saw him walking across campus,
and thought that it was brightly-coloured toilet seat.
We all had a good laugh over that one. His communication
skills are pretty poor, but we get a good laugh out of him
every now and then.
GNOME
I just updated a bunch of plain GNOME RPMs. There's a new
Nautilus, GConf (this one works even if you don't have the
-devel package installed), gal (another packaging fix), and
gnumeric. I think I updated a few more, but I'm not sure
what they are. The new nautilus (1.0.4) is another fairly
large improvement. Highly recomended upgrade.
Biking
I finally contacted the bikes guy about getting a track
bike, and I'm going to spring for one. I was out at the
track last night, and it was a good workout. After several
months of riding, I'm STILL in patheticly bad shape. I
think I need to find a good training book, and start doing
hard weeks and easy weeks, and get myself into decent shape.
I think a new bike will help too, because I'll be able to
put a smaller gear on it, and not have such a hard time at
the end of the night. See, I can crank that gear around,
but I don't have the physical strength to push the gear on
the rental bikes to my peak sprint spinning speed. Uhm,
yeah, that's hardly intelligible, but I'll have another shot
at it sometime when I'm not quite so fried. I love
biking.
More Computers
I don't see this any of my other diary entries, but we've
ordered new notebooks for the faculty. Celeron 800s, 128MB
of ram, 10GB hard drive, onboard 10/100 MBit network card,
onboard 56K modem, internal 10X DVD drive, internal floppy,
1024x768 14" LCD display, carrying case, mouse. They're
from Dell, a vendor I trust, which is certainly a good
thing. We had a demo machine here, which had a 700MHz
processor, but was otherwise identical. We compared it
against a very similar machine from Toshiba, except that it
had a P-III 700. The Celeron was -faster- for every test
which we performed on it. Either the P-III has absolutely
no performance edge over the Celeron (I'm slightly doubtful
of this, for a number of technical reasons), or Dell is much
better at designing machines (Uhm, yeah, this is my bet)
than is Toshiba. We were leaning towards the toshiba,
because we purchased from them last year, but they couldn't
deliver the machines that we demo'd here, and couldn't even
get us a new demo. Plus, Dell was willing to beat toshibas
price, on an identical (more or less) machine. So, I'm
pretty happy about that purchase, even though I don't get to
use one of these machines myself. Of course, my "boss" has
made sure that he gets one, the selfish bastard. :)