Fedora Core 4 has proved unsuitable for my needs on the laptop. The choice then was between retrograding to RH9 or throwing Win2K on to the laptop. Ultimately, I decided to wimp out and throw on Win2K. Spent all of one night patching it. Here's what it's got right now ( Read more... )

morgan1 and I replaced our dead and much maligned Inkjet today. We found a pretty cheap Laer Printer, A Konica/Minolta 3500W. My feelings about it are mixed - I totally shopped price on this one, because this was in many ways a needful purchase, and while I would have preferred the cheapest OKI PagePrinter, this was about 70 bucks cheaper ( Read more... )

Well, I have configured my first blocked website. It is called whenusearch. The scumbuckets not only try to push unsolicited software to the desktops, but include instructions with pictures and arrows showing the users how to download it, encouraging them ignore Microsoft's dire warnings and just download it. So now, if anything tries to connect ( Read more... )

Thank God for Plan9 Publishing. While the good folks at the Gutenberg project are industriously converting printed and manuscript texts to electronic media, making them more accessible, and more readily searchable, Plan9 is doing work that is arguably more important: converting electronic media to print. This is important work because of the ( Read more... )

Well, last Tuesday the box I use for my art/music production stuck 4 feet in the air. It chose the all too common Death by Bulgy Capacitors. Nothing for it but to replace the MB (and while I'm at it the Power Supply and CPU fan, seeing as these were both being a bit wonky and may have contributed to the death of the Capacitors). So morgan1 and I ( Read more... )

After an evening of kitten dreidel with morgan1 and Maeve, followed by bedecking our house with the festoonery of the hap-happiest time of the year, I decided to give Cat-Tharsis' web site a facelift. I've done all the work on the staging server, and am planning to publish the changes to the production server no later than New Year's day (and possibly ( Read more... )

Well, I finally got around to fixing the calendaring bug on Cat-Tharsis where the next month/previous month links pointed to nothing at all. I was able to recycle a code snippet from another function to do most of that work. Also fixed a problem with months that begin on Sunday having their final day not fit on the calendar. So, a pat on the ( Read more... )

And productive too ( Read more... )

Well, like I said earlier, the PS in my staging server died on October 31. This was the box on which I did all my web development, and which also did nightly backups of the database backends for Good Eating in the Twin Cities and Cat-Tharsis. Then, on Thursday night, my database disappears from my ISP's servers. Well, that pretty much kills Good ( Read more... )

Well, rather than go out and buy a new PS for the Art-Box, I took a case fan out of a corpse I had lying about, and replaced the PS fan with it. Of course, I had to peel off the label that said "No User Serviceable Parts Inside" in order to service the part. but, it went smoothly and I'm typing this entry from that box. Ah but there are other ( Read more... )