I really don't understand how Opera expects to get any sympathy by saying "if you don't do things my way, I'm taking all my toys and going home!" Especially considering there's not much incentive to use their toys.
January 2003 Archives
So I've now released KDE final to dports and to Fink unstable. The only things that are missing or incomplete are:
- kdeadmin - mostly 'cause it's a low priority, not much applies to osx
- kdeaddons - bits of it depend on kdebindings and/or act kind of wiggy
- kdebindings - the mozilla xpart doesn't work, and I'm not sure why
I'd also like to port the kdeextragear stuff that's ready. That'd be a nice bonus. The vim editor part would rock. =)
Just saw this on the TriLUG mailing list:
From: "H. Wade Minter" <minter@lunenburg.org>
Date: Sun Jan 26, 2003 2:53:09 PM America/New_York
To: trilug@trilug.org
Subject: [TriLUG] fork(); exec("/usr/bin/baby");
Reply-To: trilug@trilug.org
There's a new Open Source user in town. My wife and I spawned our first child process, Hayley Anne-Marie Minter, on Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at Rex Hospital.
She's 7 pounds, 15 ounces, 18" long, and quite the looker.
Baby pictures can be found at http://www.lunenburg.org/hayley/
We now return you to your regularly scheduled Linux discussion.
--Wade
Congrats!
So I e-mailed my buddy Coplan (the guy behind SceneSpot) about a thought I had.
I'm finally annoyed enough to do something about this. I really want to write some music again, but I've got so much I need to do before I can. I'd love to have a modern tracker for Linux or preferably MacOSX. Here's what I wrote:
I've got something either for you to put in Static Line, or for your demo group, if you want something to work on... =)
The thing that keeps me from tracking right now is inertia. I had to base my Windows box a while ago and I pretty much lost everything I had been working on. I've got no samples, I've got none of my half-finished songs, I've got nothing but what I've already released and made downloadable. Nothing sucks the muse out of you more than having all your tools die. Every time I even feel the slightest desire to track, I can feel the heavy weight of a week of putting a #$*&@# machine back together and trying to get enough samples together to do something interesting. And even when I'm done, it'll still be a Windows box, which I have no desire to run. It's only a means to an end, and as time goes on, just the fact that all the tools I'm familiar with are on Windows just makes it harder to even want to boot the thing up.
I'm looking for a truly portable tracker that will run on Linux and MacOSX. The state of tracking on either platform is horrendous. The closest thing to a real tracker is Cheesetracker, with SoundTracker not too far behind, but both of them are buggy and incomplete, and are not terribly portable. I've got cheesetracker building on MacOSX, but it dies a horrible death as soon as you try to load a module. There's issues in the code, but it looks like the author doesn't have much desire to work on it.
I'm willing to chip in money to someone willing to put together a decent tracker that's portable across Linux and MacOSX that isn't abandonware or out-of-date. Hell, I'm willing to put $300 up if it means I can do what I used to do in MacOSX. I bet there are others who feel the same way, and would be willing to put money into a fund for someone to do it.
Think that's doable?
So what do you think? Any of you reading this willing to take me up on my offer? It may very well be enough to make some updates to cheesetracker. I'm serious about the money. Inertia is a powerful force. It's worth $300 to me to not need to learn a whole new set of tools, especially when tracking is much more suited to the way I write than the standard audio tools out there, which are much more geared towards linear editing, or sequencing fixed-sized chunks of audio.
My newest MP3 is dated April 14th of 2002 (my birthday, incidentally). Help me get that date updated. =)
I've got the KDE DarwinPorts packages put together for everything that's stable. Have to wait for the tarballs to get released and I'll check everything in. Yay!
So we've got a bit of a snow day today. <sarcasm>There's nearly 2 inches of snow out there!</sarcasm>
C'mon, people! It's only 2 inches! You can barely make a decent snowman out of that! Sure, you need to drive a bit more carefully... You'll live. =)
Looks like there was another security issue found in kdelibs, so another tarball is being made. It sounds like it may be another week, but it's not clear yet. Urgh.
In other news, David Leimbach and I got Qt3 updated in darwinports, and I'm working now on getting the other base KDE stuff working. Should have something halfway usable in the next couple of days.
For the first time ever, I think, staging over to a new server worked just perfectly for me. I upgraded our mail server to a new system for work over the weekend, and it looks like everything worked the first time.
We're going from a single- to dual-cpu system, with a much nicer raid setup. Load has dropped dramatically, and response-time is much nicer. Other than when I'm running backups, load is staying around 10% (well, this is Sunday, probably 15% tomorrow), which gives us plenty of room to grow.
Helped my buddy Tarus over at Sortova Consulting put together Solaris packages for OpenNMS. It's the first time I've made packages on Solaris, it's suprisingly easy. There's a little file that describes the metadata, one that contains a list of the files' ownership and stuff, and then you run a program from the root of your built tree and it packs everything up.
In KDE news, I've built everything from RC7 now (which is looking a lot like it will be final) that I'll be releasing, so things are looking pretty good. Still need to test printing though.
The RC7 I imported wasn't the *real* RC7, so I'm importing it all again. =)
Hopefully I'll have them worked out tonight.
In other news, the tibook came in. Man this thing is sweet. Ahhhhhhh....
I've got RC7 imported into KDE-Darwin, I'm going through and doing the final work of getting info files updated right now.
I've got up to kdebase built, and am hoping the rest will be done by tomorrow evening. I won't have much chance to check it though, D&D is tomorrow night. =)
I couldn't help but notice shantonu over at #opendarwin is doing a lot of work on making fat binaries automatically build in Darwin. Wonder if this is in an official capacity, or if he's just doing it for the 3 darwin/x86 users out there. I really hate Apple/x86 rumors, but hey, maybe it's just because normally I don't make them! <grin>
3.1 rc7 is kind of here. Looks like there's more changes to go into it, but we're in theory going for a final release next week. In theory.
The more I learn about it, the more impressed I am.
I updated my main site to XHTML 1.1 tonight. Didn't have to do much to make it validate.
I'm considering totally reworking my blog layout now that I'm starting to understand how it works. Right now I'm basically using MovableType's default layout with some minor stylesheet changes, but I'd like to come up with something a bit more unique.
I'm considering making something based on my little alien dude theme (you can see it in the background of some of my screenshots). There's just something spiffy about it. =)
Looks like printing dies in a different place at random (but still in kmcupsmanager.cpp), which implies fun with null pointers or thread synchronization! Whee!
Building with Qt/Mac is not as simple as I'd hoped. There's a lot of X11-isms in the code up to the point you need konq to build, and I'm not sure how to get around them. I may hold off on that for now.
In other news, got a report, and confirmed, that trying to print crashes with the infamous EXC_BAD_ACCESS... :(
I'm re-putting-together my debugging qt and kdelibs so I can get a handle on it, hopefully it won't be too bad. Other than that, KDE is kicking butt.
So, of course, the "sleeper" MacWorld that everyone expected was nothing of the kind.
Lots of great stuff came down the pipeline, including new laptops. The biggest news of all (for me anyways) was something that didn't even get announced: a freakin' native X server! It's based on XFree86 and includes native GL (like XFree86 CVS), display postscript, and a window manager called quartz-wm that makes OroborOSX's integration look like when I draw on my cell walls with my own blood. Err. I mean. Uhhh... Anyways.
The most amazing thing is -- THEY USE QUARTZ FONT RENDERING! That's right. X11 now has rendering as beautiful as the rest of OSX.
But I am going to try building konqueror with Qt/Mac.
I'll let you know how it goes. =)
If you haven't seen it, there's a great RSS feed-reading tool called NetNewsWire that can read many blogs' RSS feeds, as well as other stuff like slashdot. The new version (still in beta) has support for blog editing built in, for a lot of popular blogs, including Movable Type, which is what I use.
It's pretty darn cool just as a reader, but I'm giving the editor a shot. If it's as good as the rest of the program, I expect I'll be registering it pretty soon. It's a nice bit of software.
[update] I guess it worked. =)
I've also made a script that generates two new rss feeds, which list the new packages released in the last 7 days, in stable and unstable. If you're RSS-enabled, go ahead and check them out. They're at http://www.finkproject.org/news/fink-stable.rdf and http://www.finkproject.org/news/fink-unstable.rdf. Pretty cool, I can get new fink packages in NetNewsWire. =)
I made an RSS feed for the Fink news page. You can now subscribe to Fink news by pointing any RSS-compliant thingy at http://www.finkproject.org/news/news.rdf. Spiffy!
Welp, I must say, Chimera has come a long way since I last played with it (and that was only a month or two ago!!)
It's finally hit the point where it basically replaces everything I do in Mozilla, but does it faster. I must say, I'm very impressed. Way to go, Chimera team!
As soon as I released KDE 3.1rc5 to unstable, you knew this would happen. Didn't you?
I'm doing the imports of rc6 right now. It looks like if all goes well, rc6 will be final, with release on the 13th. Cross your fingers, and hope for no bugs!
So it turns out I'm referenced in the commentary of the famous so-called "Halloween Documents," an annotated response to a set of leaked memos from Microsoft on their plans for taking down Linux.
In the Halloween 5 page, there's a footnote pointing to a parody of a Microsoft interview on Linux's low value proposition that I made long ago on Slashdot. I've gone ahead and put it up on my site cleaned up, since their layout has gone through a couple years of bitrot.
It just totally took me off guard. Thought it was kinda cool. =)
So I spent half a day trying to figure out unix ODBC stuff, and it turns out the PostgreSQL folks have a totally brainless MSI installer that gives perfect access to PostgreSQL remotely, without any fuss at all.
Not only that, but this is the first time I've looked into access control, and it's dead easy. We can have a public interface on our database that's locked down so most users will only have read-only access to a view we control.
Every time I look into this kind of stuff, I expect a whole lot of trouble, and then I'm suprised by the fact that it will only take 5 minutes of work to get things all set up.
Hooray for Open Source!
Welp, I went and released KDE 3.1rc5 to Fink unstable, minus a few things.
It went smoother than I thought it would. Only a few small issues, mostly removing things I shouldn't have released, and the like. Also had to change qt3 to bomb if it didn't have the december 2002 dev tools, since it needs -single_module for qt designer not to freak out.
Now I've just gotta wait for 3.1 final. Oh, and my new tibook coming in the mail. =)
OK, I think Tasty Pirate has to be one of the funniest things I've seen since bash.org. They basically have a daily list of weird search engine search strings, and there's all kinds of whacky stuff in there.
So far, my favorite is "i am just looking for evil clown pictures". Something about that just cracks me up.
Oh, and uhhh... Happy new year. =)
