Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Christmas, Bugs & Shortbread
So Christmas has come and gone once again. I had lots of time to sit down and write about things going on lately, but I just wasn't in the mood. In the reader's digest version of work : things have been very busy, but not as productive as I would like. I went to some potential client meetings, and I went to do work at some clients, and after arriving and setting up it was decided to push things back until the new year. I am building some new Mail servers for L&Y (Kubuntu + Kolab). We ordered dual opterons, big HDs, lots of RAM ... fun boxes to play with, but they have not arrived yet. Suppliers are always slow around Christmas, but I know they will come through for us.
Christmas was low key. I stayed in Calgary this year. I ate Christmas eve dinner with Mary Ann & Dayle. Mary Ann cooked up a fabulous meal. Old style Saskatchewan for us so we were not homesick. She even got us the Life Saver books (which are total old school Saskatchewan things). Craig came over later. We had some port and conversation. Dayle took off to head over to the house for the kids that night. I went home around 11 and opened my gifts from my mom. Christmas day I slept in. I went for dinner at Dayle's house with the family. Jan cooked another amazing spread. Two nights back to back where I got stuffed. We proceeded to have the gingerbread house contest. Dayle and his daughter Maegan versus Katy and me. It was a long fought battle, but the first set of judges split the decision. I'm thinking we got hoodwinked because the judges were Katy's boyfriend, and Maegan's boyfriend. Funny how they were all downstairs together before the judging. The tie-breakers came back from the airport later, and the best house (mine and Katy's) was triumphant. Dayle and I sat in the hot tub for a couple of hours. It was a great Christmas.
In between the regular Xmas activities, I finally got fed up with SuSE messing with my hardware. I've had sound issues since upgrading, and lately I could not run at 1280x1024 without the monitor "screeching" at me. I have the synch and everything set to the manufacturers specs. I finally decided it was time to move on. I installed Kubuntu 5.10, and updated the repositories with Jonathan Riddell's KDE 3.5 packages. I must say I am quite happier now. I have a great resolution, and the sound has never functioned better that it is now. (Goodbye to FC, and SuSE problems).
I continue to have problems with the custom menu features in KDE. I actually found a bug, and just a few short minutes after I took some screen shots, and explained things to Aaron, he had already changed the code, and sent me an SVN diff. That's why I love Aaron, and the rest of the planet should love him too. He's AWESOME! It's too bad I'm not running KDE from SVN, or I would have the fix. I do have a work around, and I guess I'll just have to live with it until the next release of packages. I also love Aaron because he added dragging windows across the pager ala bbpager style. I've been waiting for that for quite some time now. I thought I had found another bug with the font installer. It completely messed with my xorg.conf. Lots of unprintable characters included around the sections it edited. I can not seem to reproduce this. Guess I don't get to file a bug report.
Everything seems to be running much smoother in 3.5. I'm sure running a much more stable distribution is helping that as well. Everything works exactly as I expect. I even have MIDI support via Timidity now, and I modified the file associations accordingly. I did try out Amarok for playing MP3s. I found the shortcuts to change the track to be much too slow for my liking. It does have some neat eye candy. I reverted to juk though. It's still my fave. My re-installation of Apollon did not work completely. I had to get Aaron's node files in order to search the Gnutella network, the Ares plug in is still not working. I can not seem to find a nodes list to bootstrap the plug in. Oh well. I tried out KMldonkey. It connected (sort of). I couldn't stand using the interface though. I gave up on that quite quickly. I'm settled back into a working system. I still need to load my databases and configure apache for development, we I _need_ to.
I have to get my house in order for work shortly. I need to go back over the last couple of weeks and find out what I still have to do, and make my list. I just let it get away from me right before the holidays (understandably so). I've been so unmotivated to work lately, but I need to get moving again. It's time.
On the brightest note of the past few weeks Hammy's wife Hannah sent me home with a package of shortbread last night. Everyone wants Hannah's tablet (smashed tablet is like a flaky sweet fudge ... sort of). It's too sweet for my liking, but her short bread is to die for. yummmy yummmy!
Happy holidays, and Happy New Year. ¶ 2:59:00 PM
Christmas was low key. I stayed in Calgary this year. I ate Christmas eve dinner with Mary Ann & Dayle. Mary Ann cooked up a fabulous meal. Old style Saskatchewan for us so we were not homesick. She even got us the Life Saver books (which are total old school Saskatchewan things). Craig came over later. We had some port and conversation. Dayle took off to head over to the house for the kids that night. I went home around 11 and opened my gifts from my mom. Christmas day I slept in. I went for dinner at Dayle's house with the family. Jan cooked another amazing spread. Two nights back to back where I got stuffed. We proceeded to have the gingerbread house contest. Dayle and his daughter Maegan versus Katy and me. It was a long fought battle, but the first set of judges split the decision. I'm thinking we got hoodwinked because the judges were Katy's boyfriend, and Maegan's boyfriend. Funny how they were all downstairs together before the judging. The tie-breakers came back from the airport later, and the best house (mine and Katy's) was triumphant. Dayle and I sat in the hot tub for a couple of hours. It was a great Christmas.
In between the regular Xmas activities, I finally got fed up with SuSE messing with my hardware. I've had sound issues since upgrading, and lately I could not run at 1280x1024 without the monitor "screeching" at me. I have the synch and everything set to the manufacturers specs. I finally decided it was time to move on. I installed Kubuntu 5.10, and updated the repositories with Jonathan Riddell's KDE 3.5 packages. I must say I am quite happier now. I have a great resolution, and the sound has never functioned better that it is now. (Goodbye to FC, and SuSE problems).
I continue to have problems with the custom menu features in KDE. I actually found a bug, and just a few short minutes after I took some screen shots, and explained things to Aaron, he had already changed the code, and sent me an SVN diff. That's why I love Aaron, and the rest of the planet should love him too. He's AWESOME! It's too bad I'm not running KDE from SVN, or I would have the fix. I do have a work around, and I guess I'll just have to live with it until the next release of packages. I also love Aaron because he added dragging windows across the pager ala bbpager style. I've been waiting for that for quite some time now. I thought I had found another bug with the font installer. It completely messed with my xorg.conf. Lots of unprintable characters included around the sections it edited. I can not seem to reproduce this. Guess I don't get to file a bug report.
Everything seems to be running much smoother in 3.5. I'm sure running a much more stable distribution is helping that as well. Everything works exactly as I expect. I even have MIDI support via Timidity now, and I modified the file associations accordingly. I did try out Amarok for playing MP3s. I found the shortcuts to change the track to be much too slow for my liking. It does have some neat eye candy. I reverted to juk though. It's still my fave. My re-installation of Apollon did not work completely. I had to get Aaron's node files in order to search the Gnutella network, the Ares plug in is still not working. I can not seem to find a nodes list to bootstrap the plug in. Oh well. I tried out KMldonkey. It connected (sort of). I couldn't stand using the interface though. I gave up on that quite quickly. I'm settled back into a working system. I still need to load my databases and configure apache for development, we I _need_ to.
I have to get my house in order for work shortly. I need to go back over the last couple of weeks and find out what I still have to do, and make my list. I just let it get away from me right before the holidays (understandably so). I've been so unmotivated to work lately, but I need to get moving again. It's time.
On the brightest note of the past few weeks Hammy's wife Hannah sent me home with a package of shortbread last night. Everyone wants Hannah's tablet (smashed tablet is like a flaky sweet fudge ... sort of). It's too sweet for my liking, but her short bread is to die for. yummmy yummmy!
Happy holidays, and Happy New Year. ¶ 2:59:00 PM
