Kasperian Moving Parts

kinda like batman, but with a wife and 3 kids

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Posts by: Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

I have a 13″ MacBook Pro that I use for my personal and non-work shtuff. I resized OS X down, installed Linux (Kubuntu), and set up a shared partition so that I can keep files there that I want to access from both OS X and Linux. Things like my music and video collection, Snooker [...]

I recently blogged about Desktop Linux possibly having some core/fundamental problems that might be keeping it from enjoying mainstream adoption and 3rd party developer attention as compared to, say, OS X. To my immediate defense, I’ll say that it was actually more of a brain dump and rant (True Story!) than a well-thought-out dissertation on all [...]

It’s a shame that my first blog post in months is something so antithetical to my normal posts as this, but 1) I haven’t blogged in forever (darned Twitter/Identi.ca/Facebook!!!) and 2) I just bought a MacBook Pro and am really happy with it thus far. So bear with me. Or don’t. I don’t care. If you’re [...]

Woot, I got one! I’ll post again once I get the pictures off of the camera, but I got to the local Sprint store at 7:00 (AM!!!!) this last Saturday, waited for an hour, and managed to snarf up 2 Palm Pres– one each for my beautiful bride and I.
I realize I need to put [...]

I believe I am one of the last few die-hard nutjobs on the face of this earth who still use (and “use” here is a highly subjective word meaning that I have a bunch of Palm devices lying around, am currently the only semi-active (and “semi-active” means that I get probably a good 2 hours [...]

Dear Lazyweb,
I need to buy a laptop for personal use. I’ve been using Thinkpads as work laptops for so long that I think I’d like to try something else out for a change. It needs to be Dual Core/Core 2 Duo/whatever. Would be nice if it had a fast 200+GB drive in it. And it [...]

I pray a lot for my kids. I always have. I ask God to protect them, shield them, guide them, and watch over them when I cannot. Watching your oldest child reach 18 years of age, start college, start driving, and be out of your line of sight and protection for large parts of the [...]

<kergoth> anyone messed with protobuf?
<vanRijn> kergoth: i once had a hamster i named protobuf, does that help?
<kergoth> fraid not
<vanRijn> actually, it was a guinea pig
<vanRijn> and it was named Squeaker
<vanRijn> but still
<darth_mall> vanRijn: that’s practically the same thing!
<kergoth> hehe
<vanRijn> darth_mall: I KNOW RIGHT!
I think I’m getting too in touch with my emotions as of late. [...]

I’m excited. I love learning stuff, I really do. I just did  a 12-minute screencast for work, and I think I’ve finally figured out how to get everything to fit together nicely. I’d never done a screencast before–not on any platform–but being that I needed to showcase some development work that I’ve done for the [...]

Woohoo! KDE 4.2 is released!! I only wish the last few KPilot bug fixes would have made it into the 4.2.0 release, but we were too late. Still, if you think you knew what KDE4 was all about, think again. Check out KDE 4.2.0. =:)

I just sent this to the KDE PIM mailing lists, but I know not everyone who uses KPilot subscribes, so I’ll re-post it here…
Howdy all,
I just wanted to get a note out to as wide a distribution list as possible to spread some important news about the upcoming KDE 4.2 release and KPilot’s (exciting!!) part [...]

I spent a crapload of time this weekend, going through all the old and crufty KPilot bugs we’ve done a really horrible job of keeping up-to-date on, and triaged the bejeebers out of the list. I think we had ~ 150+ a few months ago. I went through the last 100 of them individually today, [...]

I discovered a nasty little data corruption bug in KPilot last night and have put some fixes in for it just this morning. The good news is that we didn’t lose any data. We just gave you a lot more data. =:) So, if you’re helping to test KPilot for our KDE 4.2 release looming [...]

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged (I blame Twitter), and I had an interesting week, this last, so I figured I’d blog about it. Probably should be a bunch of individual posts, but blef and here goes….
Yesterday was an awesome end to an otherwise already pretty good week. I got to play Tetrinet with [...]

Stark contrast to my last post, I know, but I felt it was only fair to blog about the wonders of OpenSUSE 11.1, even/especially with my little nVidia chip. First off, I still think there’s something wonky going on with X and/or nVidia’s driver in taking so long to start that kdm ends up giving [...]

So, first off, OpenSUSE 11.1 has to be the sweetest, best put together distro, like ever. Really amazing, quality stuff.  The new installer has some excellent improvements, and package management has never felt zippier (zyppier??) However, there are a few problems that I’ve hit that I’m still trying to figure out after 2 days of [...]

I installed OpenSUSE 11.1 yesterday and there’s some… challenges… that have kept me busy for the last 2 days. But I’ll cover those in a different post…
Most relevant to the title is this: OpenSUSE 11.1 doesn’t come with blackbox or bbkeys, so I set about compiling them myself and hit some problems. Blackbox, of course, [...]

I happened to see this amazing shoryuken.com post that has an awesome video about Keystone II and the next *drool* version *salivate* of the most awesome fighting game ever *slobber*: Street Fighter IV. I was also excited to see my fellow VMwarian, Tom Cannon, in the video. DANG I wish I was back in Cali [...]

I hate leaving things on my mental To-Do list, no matter how trivial or stupid they are. But I’ve had it on my mental to do list for like 4 years now to move all of the images I had in /bimages/ and /images/ on my web server to flickr and update the content in [...]

I use KOrganizer to view and manage my personal calendar. My employer uses Microsoft Exchange *spit* for its calendaring solution, so I also have a calendar on the Exchange server that holds all of my work meetings and reminders. I would really like to keep everything on my Google Calendar too, so I can share [...]

That’s my prediction. Of course, the truth of the matter is that KDE 4.2 (trunk) flat out rocks today. Seriously. I have never been more excited about the Linux desktop than I am right now. And this, 2+ months out from our actual KDE 4.2 release. I’ve been running OpenSUSE 11 for a couple of [...]

I’m out in California this week (belated warning) again, WOOT! I got to spend another awesome weekend at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit. This year, Leo and I were the official KDE representatives, but Thiago, Simon, Ariya, and Olivier got to join in on the fun too. And then today and tomorrow are [...]

Let me tell you a (short) tale, my children. In the dark but awesome olden days, before KDE and GNOME were but glimmers in the eyes of their current communities, there existed a bunch of scrappy hackers who would take the best X applications out there and hack them into submission to their will. Why, [...]

I just read Alexander Dymo (adymo)’s blog post “KDE4 performance on NVidia 8600GT: problem solved by bying ATI” and am quite sad because I’m pretty sure that it’s impossible to rip out the nVidia Quadro NVS 140M that’s crammed into the motherboard on my laptop and replace it with an ATI (or Intel?) chip. I [...]

Holy crap. KDE 4.2 frickin’ flies! And contrary to my previous post, now if I set IPP=2, everything’s blazing fast and I’m actually able to resize konsole again! WooooooT!!!  YAY progress!!!
[[ UPDATE ]] : Added link to my previous post. I had already posted my xorg.conf settings and since then, the only thing I’ve changed [...]