April 2006 – Kasperian Moving Parts

The Best Use For A Cat And A Balloon

Sunday April 30, 2006

I Have A Great Idea!, originally uploaded by vanRijn. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this like 10 years ago, but tying a helium-filled balloon to your pet (I’ve tried the cat and the dog and can vouch for the brilliance of this plan for them, but your fish I cannot recommend trying this on) is absolutely the most brilliant thing I’ve ever done in my life. As an added touch, rub the balloon like a fiend all over the cat’s back so that it makes his hair stand up on end and also so that the balloon is so static-electricity-charged that it will attach itself to said cat’s body, or anything else that is close enough (like Read more…

Apples, Desktop, Life in General, Linux

This Just In: Linux Is Better Than OS X

Thursday April 27, 2006

Well, at least it is for me. And it’s taken me $1500 to figure it out the hard way. How much is it to ask for to be able to {alt,command}-tab through ALL bloody open windows in OS X? You know… ALL of them. Like, ALL of them–including the X11 windows that all get bunched up underneath one stinking X icon. Or the 2 Firefox windows. Not just one of them. ALL of them. And yes, I do know about Witch. And no, it doesn’t work with X11 windows. And why would I want to use X11 to begin with? Because sometimes Free applications are much, much better than the ones you have to pay for. For example, kontact is Read more…

Open Source, Work Stuff

Converting a CVS Repository to Subversion

Friday April 21, 2006

I had thought that this would be a straight-forward mission, but it was not. While the front-end tools look and feel very much the same between CVS and Subversion, the back ends are VERY different. Honestly, I much-prefer the CVS approach (all flat-files, predictably placed in $CVSROOT), but since that’s probably part of the problem of CVS’s lack of flexibility with file/directory moves, etc., it’s understandable that Subversion does it differently. Anyway, in using cvs2svn to convert my existing CVS repositories, I faced a problem that was covered in cvs2svn’s FAQ:

Apples, KDE, Life in General, Linux

After All That, Back to OS X

Sunday April 16, 2006

So I’m a little disgruntled right now. I’ve rebooted back into OS X and I’ll likely stay here for a while. As it turns out, the show-stopper for me to be able to run Linux (which I’d much prefer) on this powerbook is not anything to do with Linux itself, but rather with the commercial/proprietary software that I find myself needing to run. I need to be able to use Moneydance to do my family’s financial account management and bill paying. Moneydance runs on Java. Apparently, the only full version of Java for Linux PPC is IBM’s JRE. That’s right, Sun doesn’t provide Linux-PPC users a JRE, how nice of them. And yes, I did spend a couple of hours Read more…

Apples, Life in General, Linux

Ubuntu Linux, External Speakers, Your Powerbook, and You

Saturday April 15, 2006

Yet another small blip from the life and times of a powerbook owner and Linux glutton-for-pain… I think this issue has been fixed in the Alsa 1.0.11-rc4 snd-powermac modules, but since I haven’t taken the time to recompile the kernel yet and since Ubuntu Dapper Drake still only comes with 1.0.10, I’m stuck with a workaround for a time being. So, I have a 15″ 1.5G powerbook, and I just bought some really nice Altec Lansing speakers from the local Target and would like to use them with my powerbook in Linux. Sounds simple enough of a request, no? Well, believe it or not, it doesn’t work out of the box. I plug my headphones/external speakers in and sound still Read more…

Life in General

Trouble in the land of Linux-on-powerbook

Thursday April 13, 2006

Stink. I am starting to question my sanity in buying a powerbook. There’s just some things that aren’t working and most probably are not ever going to work: Java. Duh. It’s the thing that your mom (and RMS) have been warning you about for the last 10 years. Non-free (open source) software is a problem. Why? Because if you want to run it on something that isn’t supported by the owner of said proprietary software, you CANNOT. Case in point…. I need to be able to run my financial software (Moneydance). I use Linux on a Powerbook (PPC) machine. I can’t download the Java JRE from Sun, since they only provide Java for x86 and ia64 platforms. I could use Read more…

Apples, KDE, Linux

Kubuntu On A Powerbook

Wednesday April 12, 2006

So, in an attempt to get back to hacking/programming again (since I’m definitely not getting it at work), I’ve installed Linux on my Powerbook. Actually, I’d installed SuSE 10 on it the day after I bought the powerbook 5+ months ago, but I’d never really done anything with it–partly because I really wanted to see what OS X was really like (it is REALLY, REALLY cool, but not conducive to feeling like I can start improving things/hacking/programming) and partly because neither the trackpad nor the wireless ethernet worked. But recently, the folks at the Broadcom 43xx Linux Driver project have made GREAT strides in getting the proprietary Broadcom wireless network card working in Linux. And, the kind folks with the Read more…