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I figured I'd get Linux running on my P1/MMX laptop just so that I'd have something to carry around while my other laptop is in the clutches of HP Tech Support. Debian 5 now includes LXDE in the main repository, so setting it up is a breeze: apt-get install lxde took care of not only LXDE but the installation and configuration of the entire X server, and I did a net-install so no CD burning was required.
The next order of business didn't go so well: getting Wi-Fi to work acceptably well. This particular laptop has trouble with Plug-and-Play on the...
It feels nice to have some time to spare and catch up on things. I've been quite busy recently, with family, life, work, and school, and the sheer volume of what's been going on had put me off from taking the time to write a blog entry about anything. For those that have kept up with me via e-mail, AIM/iChat, Skype, and the like, bear with me for just a moment.
Things start in mid-April, where I had been working on a series of videos for the senior comedy event at school. This was, more or less, the only time when...
…is out. I’d give it a try, but apparently PS/2 mice and Synaptics trackpads don’t get along well anymore in X. Dear Ubuntu maintainers: this is bad because Windows 7 RC1 releases next week.
If you’re wondering where I’ve been lately, no, I didn’t go to Europe again. That’s off the radar for at least another five years. I’ve just been incredibly busy the past week. There was only one day this week that I got to bed before 1AM, and having kicked my Mountain Dew habit four weeks ago, it goes without saying that I’ve been tired too. The third academic quarter is coming to a close, and of course teachers are rushing to get grades in. In this week alone I ended up plowing through three different model AP exams in...
Is it me, or does this post-install process seem a bit excessive? I took these at the first launch of IE8, so the other five or six steps in the installer itself aren’t included in these ten… I don’t even remember Netscape 6 having this many pestering install dialogs. I'm still wondering what to make of this review just yet. There's definitely been progress made, but in true Microsoft fashion, it seems to just be mostly improvements to technologies already available elsewhere. The unofficial Googlebar extension (the same one I was using way back when with Netscape 7.1, mind...
What do you get when you cross a snowstorm, Web server, webcam, and an ironing board?
At the time of this writing, the storm hasn't started yet. The photos this thing is taking are available over here, updating every five minutes, or at least while it doesn't get too dark for the camera to see anything but it's not updating anymore since it's dark out.
So I think I've kludged together a way around this problem.
Run mbox2eml on my Thunderbird mailbox
Import resulting e-mail files to Windows Mail (aka Outlook Express)
Import Outlook Express e-mail to Outlook 2007
Write a VBA macro in Outlook to open each e-mail, delete all attachments that are HTML copies of the plaintext messages, and finally remove all recipients that aren't my e-mail address, saving each message.
Import the resulting Outlook mail back into Thunderbird and EIS for Palm
...
I greatly admire the Palm OS developers right now. They were able to load phone and interface settings, 57 address book entries, my date book and task list until January, a week and a half of assignment lists, and a couple of backlogged e-mail and SMS messages... into a footprint of just 128kb of memory. Not to mention there's a (much relatively) whopping 8MB of memory available for addressing on this thing. Well done.
In other news, I now hear that the iPhone can run GLQuake... How long until Quake usurps Doom from the position of most-ported reference benchmark game? (Oh,...
In retrospect, buying a couple of CD-RWs and DVD-RWs instead of spindles of record-once media would have been a good idea. I'm in the process of getting rid of some twenty CDs worth of outdated Linux distros (Red Hat 6.2 or Mandrake 8.1, anyone?), expired time-demos (to which we can argue that Microsoft is not being environmentally conscious with Longhorn and Longhorn Server builds that expire), and free trials that I no longer have licenses to.
For the time being I'm going to keep them aside. I have a pile of burnt-out fluorescent light bulbs, dead rechargeable batteries, and the...
I'm trying out the new Firefox 3.1 betas, and noticed this while reading Antony's blog:
Antony's blog has featured CSS3 drop shadows for quite some time now, and if I'm not mistaken, even Konqueror 2 running on my Mandrake 8 (ca. 2001) machine could render them. Seems like the Mozilla guys only recently implemented this particular functionality of CSS3, which I have to say is pretty long overdue at this point.
In all honesty, I have to wonder if the internal politics of the Mozilla development hierarchy are becoming inefficient now that they've gone commercial...
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