The Time Sink

Update on the move from 7.04 to 7.1: the AMD64 bleeding edge box (this one) is liking things just fine. Automatix has reworked their place in the Ubuntu universe and seems to be shining brightly once again. The i386 laptop is happy too, but it wants my old wireless router back because the PCMCIA NIC I put in back when I first started playing with switching it to Linux is lonely for its own family. That NIC may go in the trash with that router after I try out another router to see what it can see...

...and the Intel 64 bit box at work took the change on nicely today. VMware is having a hissy, but everything else seems to be working okay. Oh, and I tried something there that I applied here: Use Automatix to nuke the old Swiftweasel install and then use it again to put Swiftweasel 2.0.0.7 on. Yeah, my Firefox-based memory leak is gone from both boxen. Coolness.

...ever wonder what it's like to miss a day or two of work at my place?

Upgrades, continued (continuous?): Swiftweasel is out at 2.0.0.8 to match the Firefox update; Firefox on Ubuntu bounces up automatically on the repos (and I'm keeping it installed: less library problems.). OTOH, VM-Ware won't take the upgrade from Fiesty to Gutsy: it's known and documented enough now to have it dialed in a bit: the choice is to wait for VM-Ware to update the repos over at Canonical or to do a manual uninstall and reinstall from the VM-Ware 1.04 tarball/whatever. The kicker for me is that I'm unsure of what will happen to my XP virtual machine if I don't go through the "inline" process. Logic says the image is there and any new install will find it; paranoia born of experience says to just wait...

Oh, and if you installed from the VM-Ware download rather than through Automatix and such, there's a decent inline fix available with one patch and a config file update. Hmmm... What was that line from the old days? Oh, yeah:

So... What games do you play? I don't. ...much. ...directly. Oh, I used to be somewhat of a white rabbit, just diving down that rabbit hole know as Zork. ...but times change and time disappears and my gaming became putting together boxes that would run that wretched operating system from Redmond. Oh, I don't mean DOS, although I was a DR-DOS user as much as I could be; I mean that cobbled up pile of DLLs, stuck together with registry glue and layered over with a GUI ripped off from.... Ah, heck, I digress...

...but it was a challenge there for a while, linking up cities through server port expanders and getting modems to even ACKnowledge one another. ...and I got pretty good at it. ...and Windows got good enough at it to make it pretty much a done deal. Fortunately Linux came along...

...'cause I do like sandboxes (sandboxen?), and I do like to see if I can do whatever it takes to make things work in OpenSourceLand (full disclosure: I paid the licensing fee for the modem driver on the work box). ...and hey, it's a game to me, to see if I can get things running well enough to have a full work suite functioning at both home and at work. ...and the latest of that has been the Linux box that's been running at the office. ...and the two boxen running here (stable and bleeding).

So why the gaming allusion? ...because the latest challenge was to see what it would take to get World of Warcrack up and running on Ubuntu. (ref: never mention l33t skilz to a teen; the challenge will be immediate). Oh, sooo the anti-climax: pull a full install from a Windows box (yes, I'm lazy), set up Wine, tweak the video (maybe), and both the 64 bit Intel box and the 64 bit AMD box are just cruising along with the game playing as one more program. ...with different video setups. ...and hey, I made Level 2!

...and ol' Tiffany? Several years back, my sister Ann ended up with a mannequin from some transaction or other. She had a damaged hand and was rather 'plain vanilla'. In the time since, she's been repaired and spruced up rather nicely. Tiffany spent her first Christmas in the household dressed up as one of Santa's elves. ...and by summertime, she was ready for Margaritaville.

By the next year, Tiffany had outfits for more seasons and more holidays. ...and I'd published a few photographs from visits to Ann's place and a few photos that Ann had sent me; and Tiffany was starting to develop a bit of a fan base. ...and things have expanded enough to have some fun on-line with what Tiff might be wearing for Halloween...

Ummm... No, "poor girl" wasn't an option... I mean, come on, it's a costume contest, not a nude mannequin contest <g>! Really, if you saw the larger version of that shot, you'd see she's using a glove and a cat toy as coverups. ...and I had to airbrush a pumpkin shape in below her waist because she couldn't even afford the basics. So, no, folks...

Hey, we got some rain here in the valley tonight! There's a storm off the coast that's cooling things off overall, and it spun off a cell that came all the way across to the East side.

Let's just call it a slow start to the day... I didn't think I'd overdone it yesterday, but the aches this morning are sending another message; then again, that may just be the low pressure system that's passing through hitting up the ol' arthritis.

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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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