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March 31, 2008
Damn that Aaron Sorkin...
It started innocently enough - Dawnise suggested we watch an episode or two of West Wing.
Nearly four hours later we stopped - having held our breath through Commencement, Twenty Five, 7A WF 83429, and The Dogs of War.
Wow.
Posted by dberger at 10:06 PM | Comments (2)
March 28, 2008
WTF?
It's snowing.
It's March 28th.
In Seattle.
And it's snowing.
WTF?
Posted by dberger at 1:20 PM | Comments (1)
March 27, 2008
My Love/Hate Relationship with Contact Lenses
I've needed vision correction since I was a kid, and as soon as I was old enough, and could convince my parents, I got contact lenses. Both my folks wear lenses (or at least did while I was growing up) and I'm told that as a young child I would play with the leavings of a paper whole punch, pretending to "put in my lenses."
Continue reading "My Love/Hate Relationship with Contact Lenses"
Posted by dberger at 8:35 PM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2008
A Tale of Two Upgrades
The parts I ordered to upgrade my home machine arrived Friday - a new Motherboard, CPU, Video Card, and 4GB of DDR2-1066 RAM.
As of today, the machine seems significantly happier (and more stable) - the most conclusive evidence is that the machine is no longer reporting interrupt errors. Woo hoo.
The interesting bit is how the two operating systems (Fedora Linux and Windows XP) dealt with having their entire world ripped out from under them...
Continue reading "A Tale of Two Upgrades"
Posted by dberger at 1:58 PM | Comments (1)
March 22, 2008
Riding Season is nearly upon us
It's weird to think about riding having a season. Last year, I rode year round - rain, shine, cold, whatever. Unless there was ice or snow on the ground, I was on the bike.
Continue reading "Riding Season is nearly upon us"
Posted by dberger at 2:13 PM | Comments (0)
March 21, 2008
...To Defend The Frontier Against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada...
Got The Last Starfighter on HD-DVD from Netflix today.
It looked amazing - and when I consider that they did all this in the early 80's on a single Cray makes the technical achievement even more impressive. According to that Wikipedia article, X-MP they used to render that movie was about 1/10th the processing power of the CPU in the machine I'm typing this on. My new GeForce 9600 has five times as much memory as the high-end configuration of the Cray (128MB) - and that's just my graphics card.
Now I wanna play the game (which looks way better than did the Atari version that was plugged in the end credits).
And the theme's gonna be stuck in my head all night, I can tell.
Posted by dberger at 10:00 PM | Comments (0)
March 20, 2008
Evolution: Fool me twice, shame on me...
I've been a contributor to and user of Evolution since it was an early stage Ximian project, but I think I've run it for the last time.
A few months ago I discovered that at some point it had "forgotten" my setting to save copies of outgoing emails on my IMAP server, and was instead storing them nowhere.
As in not saving copies.
This morning, when looking for a message I sent just moments ago, I discovered it had forgotten again.
This is the worst kind of bug - data lost, no warning.
Thunderbird, here I come.
Posted by dberger at 7:24 AM | Comments (0)
March 19, 2008
Score One for Time Machine
Backups aren't a new idea - and while the cynic in me says that "all" Time Machine is is a fancy interface on top of some old ideas (like rdiff-backup), I have to hand it to Apple.
It works.
Once you get around the silly-arsed restrictions, that is.
Continue reading "Score One for Time Machine"
Posted by dberger at 8:07 PM | Comments (0)
Some Days You're The Hydrant
Today was an all around craptacular day.
Continue reading "Some Days You're The Hydrant"
Posted by dberger at 7:15 PM | Comments (0)
March 17, 2008
Credit Card Companies "Looking Out For Me"
I finally gave up trying to nurse my machine along, and put together a $600 shopping list of new parts (motherboard, CPU, RAM, video card, guided by the ArsTechnica System Guide). I placed the order with NewEgg this morning, and a couple hours later got an email from them saying that the credit card authorization was declined.
I called the issuing bank and got the classic "our anti-fraud system declined the authorization, 'cause we're looking out for you" line of bullshit. Apparently BofA (the issuer of my Alaska card) figures I don't know that Federal Law limits my liability for unauthorized charges to $50 (zero, if I've reported the card stolen prior to the use).
Looking out for me? Not hardly.
Posted by dberger at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)
He robbed from the rich and he gave to the poor...
Since HD-DVD has officially lost, and the add-on drive for our XBox 360 will soon be as useful as the 2400 baud US Robotics modem I still have on a shelf in my office, I reordered my Netflix queue, sorting all the stuff I really wanted to see on HD-DVD to the top.
The other day we sat down and watched The Adventures of Robin Hood.
Continue reading "He robbed from the rich and he gave to the poor..."
Posted by dberger at 9:11 AM | Comments (0)
March 16, 2008
Anything You Can Do Linux Can Do Better Cheaper
Found this article last night describing using VirtualBox to run Windows apps along side linux apps ala Parallels "Coherence" or VMWare Fusions "Unity."
And if you don't need USB, it's free as in speech.
And if you do need USB, but it's only for personal use, it's free as in beer.
("speech?" "beer"? what? Try this.)
Doesn't seem to do DirectX emulation as Parallels and (to a lesser degree) VMWare do on the Mac, but given that it's open source, I can't imagine it'll be long before someone integrates the Wine D3D to OpenGL thunking code.
I haven't personally had the need to run Windows apps for a long time - since realizing that tracking personal finance in Quicken was costing me more time than it was returning in useful (actionable) information, but still - it's a neat capability.
Posted by dberger at 9:04 AM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2008
The Right Tools Make All The Difference
We're a Windows shop at work - and this is the first time in my career that I've done any real development under Windows.
I'd heard people rave about Visual Studio, and after nearly two years - please, god, give me emacs, make and gdb...
Continue reading "The Right Tools Make All The Difference"
Posted by dberger at 1:40 PM | Comments (0)
March 10, 2008
Beat It With the LEGO Stick
One of the only video games Dawnise and I have spent any serious amount of time playing is Lego Star Wars. It's an awesome game - hours of fun, great attitude, terrific.
So we're both looking forward to the release of Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Batman, both slated for release this summer.
Posted by dberger at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)
Making the Switch - Update
Hopefully Dawnise will blog about her experiences thus far using her new Mac, so I'm going to focus on "my" side of the equation - i.e. helping her adjust to her new surroundings.
Mostly that means helping her migrate her data from her Windows machine to her new Mac, and helping her find and select day-to-day use applications.
Continue reading "Making the Switch - Update"
Posted by dberger at 9:20 AM | Comments (0)
March 5, 2008
Dude(tte), You're Gettin' a Dell Mac...
It turned out to not be much of a surprise, given that we'd discussed it in advance, but Dawnise's 20" iMac (MA877LL) arrived a few minutes ago.
After looking a bunch, talking to a friend at Apple, and finding a price several hundred dollars less than anyone else (including free ground shipping and lacking in sales tax) I placed the order last week, not telling Dawnise that I'd pulled the trigger.
Between her being sick, and not generally getting excited about technology, it's still in the box, and will probably stay there for a couple hours, while I finish work and she finishes the game she's playing and cleans off her desk a bit...
Continue reading "Dude(tte), You're Gettin' a Dell Mac..."
Posted by dberger at 3:57 PM | Comments (0)
March 4, 2008
The power of words
Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons passed away today at the age of 69.
He will be missed.
Continue reading "The power of words"
Posted by dberger at 10:58 AM | Comments (1)
March 2, 2008
Low Key Weekend...
Dawnise started feeling under the weather late last week, and by Friday it was pretty clear she was headed for sick. So this weekend has been pretty quiet. As I type, she's asleep on the sofa in the game room, and Otto - our black and white cat - is asleep on her lap.
Continue reading "Low Key Weekend..."
Posted by dberger at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)