Category: it could be called work

Interviewed today at a startup doing some interesting and very complicated work. Lots of opportunities for process automation and monitoring/system health stuff so that would be fun.

Can’t say a lot more now, but I hope there’ll be more later.

Hmm, out of a clear blue sky comes an invitation to come talk about a job opportunity. Could the income drought be near its end?

I’ve met with this outfit before and it was unclear why we didn’t go further last time. But in the meantime, they’ve stayed in business for a year. Nothing wrong with that.

SpamCon Foundation: to reduce spam (junk email)

I’m toying with the idea of displaying these somehow. I wish they fit the MT design templates (some design to fit the right-hand column would do nicely).

It turns out the ISO image may have been corrupt (checksumming, anyone?). Some helpful fellow in e-academy’s tech support area said he had found the bug and was testing a fix.

I think OpenDarwin looks to be an interesting project to watch. There are lots of areas in which to work, many loose or un[der]documented components, but a the same time, it’s pretty mature and robust. It’s not a pre-1.0 release.

It’s already platform agnostic, since it runs on x86 and PPC hardware. With the XPostFacto hacks, it will support PPC Macs dating back to 1995, so it’s not like you need a super modern box to get in and play.

And of course having Jordan Hubbard on the core team helps: interesting interview with him here.

It cleared up some of the vagueness about why Linux exploded instead of the BSDs. It’s not so much a quality issue, which is not to denigrate Linux — it did get to where it is today w/o the CSRG legacy to build on. It was a leadership void on the BSD front, versus Linus Torvalds’ well-documented blend of charm and laziness (lazy like a cat, I mean).

Perhaps we don’t really need another flavor of BSD (this makes five, I think) but a more accessible one is worth pursuing. And I think OpenDarwin aims for accessibility while still retaining high-performance and stability.

LPD Nifty-HOWTO

Thank goodness for online howtos. I had to print out some stuff and discovered I hadn’t ever set up a printcap file on this laptop.

I took a stab at cleaning up this page: not sure I like it. I need to understand the way the tags and stylesheets all work, but there’s an awful lot of perl in there.

I also added a PayPal link: my Amazon wish list is nowhere near as pressing as the need for the Real Thing.

I reverted to OS 9 on our kitchen iMac today. Sad but true: it just didn’t work as well I would have liked.

• It was slow which is hard to take on a 500 MHz machine, especially when you see how zippy OS 9 is.
  
• It was less compatible with little things like the world wide web. One of its uses is for some relaxing game play, and that means Java in many cases. Java support is nowhere near as good on OS X as it is on OS 9, and it’s lousy on OS 9. Also, there may be a lot more browsers (OmniWeb, iCab, Chimera/Navigator, as well as IE, Netscape and Mozilla), but they’re all weak in some way or other. IE 5 on OS 9 is hard to beat with anything on OS X.
  
• Energy Saver won’t wake the machine up at a specific time each day: a small thing, but upgrades should never mean losing features.
  

I’ll give it another look when Jaguar/10.2 is released.

I took advantage of the downtime and the fact I have a spiffy new power screwdriver to rebuild some of the furniture all the machines sit on, hang all the power strips up off the floor (they have hanger holes so I got happy with the screwdriver), hung the KVM switch up where I can actually reach it without scrambing under stuff, and otherwise straightened things up. Tie-wraps were even employed at one point.

My AT&T Broadband link went out last night at 07/Jul/2002:21:57:45. Their tech support acknowledged there was an outage when I called this morning.

We did have a hard rain last night, with thunder and lightning (rare for Seattle). Perhaps there’s a link.

UPDATE: the outage ended about 1600 PDT.