Month: November 2002

where are we going? and why are we in this handbasket?

Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.

If you protest effectively against Microsoft abuse, you are not against Microsoft; you are more pro-Microsoft than Bill Gates.

Interesting article. I’d like to see the claims corroborated.

If the points raised are valid, I would have to question the judgment of any IT executive who chose software like “Windows XP [that] makes your computer dependent on Microsoft computers.”

As Mr Gates himself said, “New versions aren’t there to fix bugs. I have never heard of such a twisted reason to bring a new version onto the market.”

the pain of childbirth with none of the rewards

At 1 AM this morning I awoke in severe abdominal pain, located just behind and above my navel. My first thought was food poisoning (I had made ravioli for dinner and both fillings I used had eggs: did they cook through?), but I had no nausea or any symptoms. I tried Aleve to mitigate the pain and PeptoBismol to counter what I thought was stomach pain, to no avail.

Finally at 5 AM I went the ER and was diagnosed with gastritis or dyspepia: a cocktail of Mylanta and lidocaine had produced some results, so I was discharged.

I made it as far as my car when I threw up the cocktail and went straight back in the ER. This time, the testing was more rigorous: I had ultrasounds, CT scans, bloodwork, and morphine (that helped a lot).

Turns out I have my third kidney stone, and the staff seemed to think it was a large-ish one. I was sent off with a prescription for percocet and the hopes and wishes of my attending physician that the thing will pass by itself.

Three of these is three too many, so I have been doing a little research on why they form and what to do about them.
Continue reading “the pain of childbirth with none of the rewards”

what hath Ford wrought?

The automobile, triumphant

Let me offer a revised marker. "For eons a primordial forest stood here, intersected by nearby Native American trails. With the arrival of European settlers, it first became farmland, then was incorporated into an inconsequential small city upon which a small shop was built. In that shop, Henry Ford, a man of checkered genius, began a career that would change the world with his method of producing cars. His ideas so prospered the city that his historic shop was eventually cleared away to make way for a large and elegant cinema. Ultimately the consequences of his inventions would doom the cinema and building housing it to obsolescence, such that it became necessary to turn the cinema into a parking lot to try to save the building.".

open source calendar protocol

Calendar – Standards Based Calendar Client Project

I’m intrigued by this. I am using iCal to make and share calendars and the Mozilla calendar uses the same file format and supports the same publish and subscribe protocols (.mac or webDAV).

Add PHPiCalendar to your toolbox and you can do this.

And it creates RSS feeds of all its calendars. I like it.

I finally got in installed with mozilla in FreeBSD and I like it a lot. The file format is truly cross platform: calendars I have created in iCal on the Mac are readable in Calendar (even after being published to a third machine).

This is what I was hoping for when iCal was released: it’s not an Outlook-killer but it negates the calendar server requirement.

The Imperial Mayor

The Seattle Times: Local News: The note that saved Nickels’ budget

Seattle Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis threatened to yank the funding for a Green Lake fire engine if the City Council didn’t let Mayor Greg Nickels keep a big increase in his office budget.

The note, written by Dwight Dively, the city finance director, said: “Because of the Council’s vote on the Mayor’s office budget, we can’t promise the money for Attack 16 now. Sorry.”

“Attack 16” is the Fire Department’s term for the Green Lake fire engine.

Not a lot to say about this: I’m not sure who the Mayor resembles more, Nero or John Gotti.

I’d say a recall is in order for anyone who cares more about the size of his personal entourage than public safety.

new project

I made a suggestion to a FreeBSD team member that laptop HOWTO information was a little sparse, and could they use some help, along with some ideas of what I’d like to see.

Looks like I’ll be doing it. First step is to get a copy of the source for the documentation (source code for docs?Yup, in SGML as well). Second step is to resume my struggle with emacs.

learning more about FreeBSD

quotidian: FreeBSD on a laptop I did get sound working today (6/19) by rebuilding with the pcm and csa devices enabled. To use xmms and KDE I needed to build and install the xmms-arts plugin.

Well, as it turned out I spoke too soon there. And I did things exactly wrong as well. Ever since I got sound to work, I found it was only good until I suspended my laptop: after it resumed, the driver wouldn’t work. It turns out I should have kept the driver as a module and used kldload(8) and kldunload(8) to manage this. I got some help from orion at FreeBSD dot org on this today. I should have realized this was the problem: I remember the same thing happening with the ethernet device driver when I ran Linux on this laptop. After a suspend/resume, networking wouldn’t work for the same reason. The module would never reload since it had never been unloaded. D’oh.

I have updated the kernel config file to reflect these changes and when I figure out how to load and unload the module (it’s something in apmd‘s configuration, I think), I’ll post something about that.

how not to design and build products

Working with CSS – CSS Hints for Internet Explorer 5

the Windows and Macintosh builds of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5 are based on different rendering engines and therefore react differently to the same HTML or CSS.

So let me see if I understand this: MSFT supports two rendering engines for the two browsers it ships. And the one that *isn’t* integrated into their OS does a better job.

Have I mentioned the big ball of mud lately?

Internet Printing requires a Local Port?

So for some giddy reason, I decided to see if I could get Internet Printing to work: WIN2K supports it, I understand, but none of the other OSes I use do.

It’s not as easy as it might be . . . . . for reasons I can’t fathom, you need to create a new printer instance and within that instance, create a new port for the IP connection. A Local Port to make a TCP/IP protocol work?

Internet Printing Protocol (IPP)
You can use IPP to print directly to a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) over an intranet or the Internet.
[ . . . . ]
Continue the wizard and install the appropriate driver for the device.
Method 2: Install a suitable driver on the client computer and redirect the printer to the appropriate IPP URL.
Click Start, point to Settings, click Printers.
Double-click Add Printer, and then click Next.
Click Local Printer, and then click Next.
Click Create a new port.
In the Type box, click Standard Port Monitor, and then click Next.
Type the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the IPP print server.
Continue the Add Printer wizard and install the appropriate driver.

And I still have no idea it will work. I ran my battery down getting all the service packs I supposedly need. Perhaps the IPP driver will be among them.

thunder and lightning??

We just don’t get violent weather here: this is very unusual, but as long as I don’t lose power, I’m OK with it.

Horizontal rain, I’m used to, and I’m getting plenty of that tonight.