Author: Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

Hah, made you look. I would pay a good $20 to see the Google boys and girls (of whom I’m simultaneously jealous and irate with, since my application/resume submission has been returned with a “thanks for applying, but there’s nothing you can do for us” e-mail) would allow GMail to be accessed via the IMAP protocol. Why? Well, that’s the whole point of GMail, right? You get TONS of storage space for your e-mails. You never have to delete them. You never run out of room. You can easily search them. What you can’t do is access it from another e-mail client when you want to and have all of your e-mail there for you. Sure, you can POP it Read more…

This, the newest home improvement project that I’ve been forced into, shall likely be just as non-fun as all the others. =:/ Some water damage (caused by the extremely old and rusted-out previous cellar door) has gotten into the door jam and drywall in the bottom, left section of my inside basement door. I’ve ripped off the corner edging and my next job will be trying to find a matching door jam thingey (the entire left side of the door frame) at the local Home Depot. Yay!! Is this why people still rent? =:) (psst! Fix this door was uploadd by: vanRijn).

Miscellany meanderings…. My lovely wifey and I and our eldest beautiful daughter finally painted our kitchen over the last couple of days. It was well overdue, and I am everytime amazed by how much of a difference a good coat of paint makes! I don’t care if it might not be from John Cleese, this Declaration of Revocation is absolutely hilarious! Aaron Seigo is a very lucky man. He has been recently hired/sponsored by Trolltech to work full-time on KDE. This is my dream job, and while I wholeheartedly wish him the absolute best of luck, I also can’t help but be extremely jealous. I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY need a bigger hard drive for the laptop that my work has Read more…

http://cia.navi.cx/stats/author/vanrijn. Sweet mama, this is cool!! =:) Dang, I need to find more time to work on code!! =:/

This one threw me for a loop. I found a nice new program to change Gtk+ themes. It seems cleaner, nicer, and more finished-er than muhri’s gtk-theme-switch programs. And it does previews nicely, etc., and the only thing that it didn’t seem to do well was actually activate the theme that I wanted to use–which was, after all, the entire point of using said program. What I found was that SuSE has done something to change gtk programs and where said gtk programs actually look for for their style configuration settings is in $HOME/.kde/share/config/gtkrc and $HOME/.kde/share/config/gtkrc-2.0. So, when I used the gtk theme switcher program, gtk programs didn’t notice the change since I was changing the standard $HOME/.gtkrc* files. Ah Read more…

Beta3 of OpenSuSE was released yesterday and I dutifully updated overnight last night. One snag I hit was a ton of conflicts from the cairo upgrade, but thanks to darix on #opensuse, I simply changed “update all with newer versions” in yast2 to “update all unconditionally” and Bob was my Uncle. And after having upgraded, the system is still remarkably stable and fast. One thing that bothers me…. I’ve read that people are getting incredibly fast boot times–one report said 20 seconds from boot to ready-to-use. I must be doing something wrong. I just timed it this morning and it took my little P4-1.9G laptop with 1G of RAM 1 minute and 20 seconds from boot to kdm login. Not Read more…

Just a quick word from the street that after a couple of days with OpenSuSE, I am still REALLY loving it. Some things that I didn’t expect: OpenSuSE comes with gcc-4, the latest version of the compiler. This caused the afore-mentioned compilation difficulties with VMWare’s kernel modules which I found a fix for yesterday. This also caused a bug in KDE’s libkcal, which caused some pretty annoying side-effects with floating calender events. However, the amazing Reinhold was extraordinarily helpful and fixed the bug immediately. A quick svn update later, I was back in business, with the bug having been fixed. Oh–also, along the way, I learned about valgrind, and was able to use it (at Reinhold’s direction) to find the Read more…