Blog
Family concerns have caused me to severely expediate plans on my leaving
the dallas area. I went on vacation for 2 weeks to scope the Kansas City
area out (don’t laugh, it’s a nice place), and then moved out on Tuesday. I
have now arrived safely in Kansas City, and am getting ready to move into
my temporary quarters. Internet access right now is spotty at best, but
should be settled out in a week or so. It’s amazing how much junk you
accumulate over the years… the only things that I really didn’t bring with
me are: my books, my dog, and my bike. My brother is keeping the dog, my
books will be shipped up when I get a real address, and my bike, an
old-fashioned human powered kind, is yet to be figured out. As the bike was
built for me, a 6′5″ guy, I’m not sure how easy it would be to sell, and
getting a new one of the same caliber would be expensive, but not
prohibitively so. Anyway, I’m now a degreed person officially on the job
market. After spending 2 months tracking down brace problems and extra
semicolans in high school students’ java code, looking at some real stuff
will probably be interesting. In any case, most of my internet access time
is currently on borrowed Windows computers, so I haven’t had any access to
IRC or any form of IM. I hope everyone out there is doing well.
… to school and all that. I’m finished for the semester and summer is here!
Which means….. more time hacking on Specifix!
In any case, KDE 3.4 is packaged, built into the repository, and ready to go.
(Or at least should be at the time of this entry.) Lo ts of bugfixes are
included in this new release, so if you’re still running KDE 3.3.x you
should download and try it out.
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…although, for the past 2 months I’ve had no access to a computer at home,
besides my Mac laptop, which was at AppleCare for some of that time…. “The
great mishap” happened on Friday, February 10th. A long story short, if your
computer is freezing in linux at random intervals it’s probably a better
idea to figure out why before you get that lovely ozone/burning silicon
smell from melted components. To make matters more interesting, my file
server went down about a week later. I managed to revive (or rebuild) my
main computer a couple days ago, so I once again have rpath linux going. I
have not recovered the file server yet, which will only turn on a few
minutes before shutting itself off. As I don’t think I can really justify
having a file/print server anymore however, I’m probably going to go out and
purchase a huge hard drive and move everything unto that. Why didn’t I get
everything working again sooner? Let’s just say that student teaching is
probably the biggest time drain of all time… I had no clue what teachers
went through before, grading papers, doing lesson plans, etc… Especially
where I was working, where they have gone from teaching 5 classes to
teaching 6. My basic schedule involved getting home at around 4:30 everyday,
and then grading papers, working on lesson plans, updating worksheets,
figuring out presentations on my ibook, (not to mention all the actual
student teaching stuff), until 7:30-8:00 PM. Of course, student teaching
didn’t start out that way - they start you out observing and then teaching
preprepaired lessons and so on. Teaching in general is basically a 12 hour a
day job, the best I can figure. Of course, everyone has been telling me that
after your first year when you get everything figured out, it becomes an 8
hour a day job. I don’t see how that’s possible, but I’ll take their
experience over my own limited experience. Anyway, if you wake up at 6:00
AM everyday to get to the school at 7:30 AM, and then work solid until 7:30
PM with only a 45 minute break to drive home, it’s not exactly on your mind
to figure out how to repair a computer after that.
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So, this Friday I went into surgery, for reasons I will not post publically. First, kudos to everyone at Lake Point Hospital, they were, quiet literally, great. Excepting the exhorbitant medical fees I’ll be paying, I couldn’t ask for better. After weeks of pain, I’m finally relieved that … there is no more pain, partly due to the large amounts of perscription pain pills floating around in my bloodstream.
So, to sum up: yay for perscription pain pills, yay for good doctors, and
yay for an anesthesiologist that actually managed to put the right amount of
juice in me to be knocked out for a surgery. (Unlike last time…..)
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After spending some deal of time researching how mimetype/file associations are handled, I’ve managed to figure out how gnome and kde handle themselves. While GNOME and KDE have good user documentation, this type of thing is sadly missing. There is little documentation for packagers and distribution maintainers. I guess they expect us to be reading and contributing to the code. In any case, the good news is sometime in the future versions of Specifix the Gnome/KDE file association bug fixed.
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This time I’m doing things right, that means among other things, using real
software to do the webloging thing. I started this mostly to appease several people that would like to see how I’m doing from time to time. Also, I’ve started this so people can keep tabs on my work on Specifix Linux, specifically the state of the KDE packages - my nemesis!
So, what have I been up to you ask? First, trying to get a new job. I desperately need one that lets me work more than 10 hours a week. Even a second job that let’s me work a couple hours a week would be great right now. As I’m sure most college students know, things can get very hairy when you’re going to school, trying to maintain a car, etc…
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Wow. I’ve started getting emails/etc.. from people interested in the distro, mainly with the single question: WHERE IS IT? Just like that, the caps, bold – everything.
So here is a bit of a status update. HaX took a much needed vacation after I made him package GNOME – alone. His hair should start growing back pretty soon, and the doctors tell me the stroke did no permanent damage. While he was off, I did a foolish thing, and mangled just about all of base. Like I said before, it’s basically a completely new distro.
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Yet another day of mindless distro hacking. QT 3.0.1 was released today. Nifty. So far, LSB progressions have been pretty good, and QT 3.0.1 compiled without a hitch. Given the current status of KDE development, I’m going to start migrating all the packages to KDE-3. Now, the good news: the major portions of the base redo are done. This means that another beta is getting a lot closer.
Edit:
Sometime past 11:00
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Redid this page today. I’ve kept it optimized for us Lynx friends, so don’t
complain to me about the lack of pretty graphics, crappy banner ads, and
overuse of images. Before this page was a minimal mirror of golgotha source
code, textures, music, and not much else. I’ll be posting relevant public
updates to the distribution stuff I’m working on here. (Status and such) If
you’d like to help – give me a line, my mail is at the bottom of this page.
Any major distribution developments that I’m responsible for, and are public
info will be posted here.