CarlSeibert

I see in tomorrow's news that Vicki's employer has won (more or less) it's dust up with the beachside NIMBYs. I don't much care for NIMBYs, generally.

Progress report: It's going pretty well with Fedora 17. I was quite impressed with how all the hardware gets probed and "just works". The only piece that didn't was my old monitor that doesn't report its modes properly. It worked, but at 1024 x 768 resolution. I generated an xorg.conf and put the known-good values from my old setup in the appropriate places and that fixed that. I have no idea how they chose which programs install enabled and which ones don't. You'd think that checking "Windows file server"in the install would be a hint that I might like Samba active. On the other hand, I didn't much appreciate finding out the hard way that iptables was active and fairly paranoid. SELinux was active, too. But for some reason I saw that one coming. You think I would have looked for the firewall at that same moment of enlightenment. Oops. Everything I have needed to install thus far has been dead easy. I had to add a symlink to an newer library in one case. VMWare may put up a fight, though. The new KDE Plasma desktop is way different. It kind of threw me for a little while. I'm growing to like it. And what's up with systemctl? it took me forever to learn to type "service [whatever]" and now it's something different. And I have to run the command again to get to see the reassuring green type return. I'm liking that the machine is new and fast and spiffy. I guess ten years on, you would expect some progress to have been made. Dusty - there are those who complain the KDE is too Windows-like. So I guess any distro that supports KDE would do for your friend. The new version seems quite Windows 7 -ish to me. (And I actually quite like Windows 7, despite being well prepared to hate it.)

Went out for a sandwich. Nasty downpour with street flooding downtown. Eight or ten inches deep. A block or so from our building one a parked Nissan Cube looked like it was taking water through the bottom of the doors on the curb side. Why is it that when there's street flooding, there is always some chowderhead in a pickup trying to make as large a wave as possible?

Dan nailed it. Particularly for the woman the whole run up to the wedding tends to be an unbearable load of unreasonable expectations and anxiety - if she doesn't have her own, family, friends and society at large will contribute so no one goes without. It really should be more fun. Sometimes, there's post-stress unpleasantness afterwards to boot. If you cut each other a massive amount of slack it can be survivable. And what Al said, too.

Damn Jacob. That sucks. What Dan said. Stay calm. Carry on. I spent the better part of the day migrating the family server (which is also my home desktop) to a new box and a new OS. My butt is numb and my eyes are bleary. I don't know why I get tense over this stuff. In the end I always learn what I have to and make the damned thing work. But I'm always terrified the whole thing will go sideways until the very end. Now that I can relax and enjoy it a little, the new machine is very nice.

Ooops.

There's an ongoing CLI rant in it.

Most excellent, Dusty! I went to the ENT doctor and had the wax removed from my ears. She dragged a blob of grossness that looked like a squashed horsefly from my right ear. Yuck! I don't know how this affects my audiophile credibility, but my ears sound considerably upgraded.

This.

I looked at CentOS's site. They're kind of circumspect and I was scratching my head about "why?" So let me know if I've surmised this correctly..... When Red Hat forked off Fedora, that somehow obviated the need for them to release a free (both upper and lower case) edition, so the equivalent of the Novell/SLED community edition doesn't exist. Therefore at some point somebody decided to build Red Hat from the sources, which I assume HAVE to be available and that's why CentOS came to be? Is that more or less the story? I picked up the new box today. I've officially changed my mind and will try Fedora 17 in it. When I get VMWare back up and running, I'll give CentOS a spin with an eye to next time. CJ - Have you read Neal Stephenson's 'Cryptonomicon'?

I've wanted to go to RMAF every year since before it gobbled up CanJam. It's a realty tough week for me to get away. Maybe this year will be the charm.

I'm starting to lean in the Fedora direction. I've been curious about Gentoo a couple times. Never have given CentOS any thought. They're probably too much a of a jump from the familiar to be candidates this time, but as soon as I get the machine back up and going, I should give them both a look in virtual machines. I have to say Mandriva has been stable and trouble free except when I've wanted some desktop program for which there's no RPM. The only times I've really had to reboot have been hardware issues. I guess that explains why I haven't been on the edge of my seat keeping up with what's been going on with the distribution for the last few years. The organization has changed, though, and I'm not getting quite the warm and fuzzy vibe I've been used to. So, barring somebody having a Fedora horror story, I'll probably go that way. I'll be careful to make all my partitions big enough to let me back out and change my mind, though. Thanks guys!

Usually (once every five years or so) when I upgrade my home machine/home office server I go over all the distribution options, try out candidates on virtual machines and generally make a considered affair of it. This time, since my machine has collapsed in a cloud of MCEs, I've got to just decide and go for it. I've used Mandriva and basically liked it ever since Fedora forked off from Red Hat. I like KDE and have never warmed to Gnome at all. Which is really why I moved to Mandrake at the end of consumer Red Hat. Red Hat and Fedora were anti-KDE back then. I understand that's changed since. My last upgrade was Mandriva 2007. System management tools and the like that I have been familiar with may well have changed since then. So the Mandriva-is-a-comfortable-old-shoe advantage may not still apply. My only real knock against Mandriva in all these years has been that it's not so mainstream and sometimes it's difficult to find compatible software packages. That's the appeal of Fedora. My impression is that it's very mainstream and everybody packages for it. For what it's worth, my VortexBox music server runs on Fedora and I like it just fine there. Of course there's no desktop environment there, so it's not quite the same thing. I tried Ubuntu/Kbuntu a while back and found them so stripped-down that I felt like I'd be installing stuff for the rest of my life. I don't really have any experience with a Debian-based OS either. Sometime early next week, a new box arrives and I'll load something on it straight away. Any thoughts? Oh. And the 64 bit version or 32? Would I have trouble finding drivers and software for 64 bit at this point?

One more thing that sucks this week and......well... actually since it's all stuff I can't control, it would just be more more bad thing. Ordered a replacement machine for the former household server. I dial my trusted, long-time computer salesman's number. I get a youthful New Yawk-sounding fellow. There is social awkwardness and throat clearing. I'm not thrilled about this. It turns out that Gary has quit not just the company but the mortal coil altogether. RIP Gary. He was a solid guy.

Happy Birthday!!, late-ish though I am

You too Dusty? My household file and backup server (which also serves as my home desktop) went down hard yesterday. On attempting to start it, it throws machine check errors, kernel panics, and basically says "replace me". Motherboard, probably. I can't remember how old the various components are, so I guess it's time. I'll just go with the flow and replace the machine. Still, it's going to be a ton of work and some expense at a point where more of either is vexing. <sarcasm> Maybe I should focus on how nice the desktop decorations must be now after after five OS generations. (Mandriva 2007 -> 2012) Yeah. A nicer looking penguin. That'll make it all worthwhile. </sarcasm> Grrrr!

One or the other should suffice. Looters suck.

Jazz scared the bejeebers out of me. We couldn't get her to eat or drink since her injury on Saturday. By this morning, she was not looking great. I got her in to an emergency appointment with our vet and spent the afternoon being a cat nurse. She seems on the mend now. Once she started to perk up it was clear that she was one scared little kitty. She seemed very grateful, which made three of us, and also impressed the heck out of me since gratitude is kind of an advanced concept for a cat. (And Jazz, frankly, isn't usually the sharpest knife in the drawer.) I was able to stay home with her almost until Bonnie got home from her work in West Palm.

Happy Birthday Greg!!

What a lovely location for food trucks. That looks yummy. When I have had occasion to photograph in synagogues somebody has always slipped me one of those hair pin thingies that looks like the business end of an alligator. (is that the one they call a "bobby pin"?)

Cat emergency. I was in the bathroom. Heard screams. Emerged to find jazz tangled in the string of some toy, caught under Bonnie's desk with Bonnie trying to free her. Blood everywhere. Complete pandemonium. We got the string cut to free jazz. I take Jazz to the animal hospital. Bonnie drives herself to the ER. Jazz now has bandages and booties on her injured back feet, a shot of antibiotics and is under the couch stoned to the bone on some sort of kitty morphine. Bonnie has an impressive number of bandages on her hands, arms and legs, has her own shot of antibiotics and and a scrip for painkillers of some sort. She looks like the hapless victim in a Jason Stratham movie. I just have a sort of scratch/gash that I'm not real worried about. I'm crashing post-adrenaline rush. And Enigma is all upset. What an afternoon. Moral of the story: Never underestimate the strength of a panicked house cat. And never let the little critters play unsupervised with toys with string.

Happy Birthday!!

No worries. The x9 birthdays are sticky. Happy Birthday!!

Happy Birthday Scott!!