Author: Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

Honestly, they really are. I LOVE them. My lovely bride thinks I’m nuts, and I irritate her to no ends when, on rare occasion, we sit down to watch TV together. Rather than skipping through all the commercials like my bride does, I will very often insist on watching some of them *gasp*. Anyway, some of the most creative and enjoyable things you’ll see on TV are commercials. One of my favorites is the Office Max Rubberband Man commercials. During Christmas holiday, I went into Office Max and they had a DVD playing on one of their portable DVD players that had all of their Rubberband Man commercials (and the making of videos). It was hilarious! I watched them with Read more…

So, they snuck this one in on me. =:) I didn’t realize that 1.5 was released yet, but apparently, it was. I’ve taken the plunge and upgraded to a completely stock 1.5 installation, as well as cleaning up the directory structures a bit so that future upgrades are easier. This means that there will be tons of 404’s in my error_log, I’m sure, but so be it. Like a friend said, this is just a hobby.

Like many other things, sound in Linux is not nearly as easy as it should be. Briefly, the problem is that many/most sound cards in computers these days do not do hardware sound mixing. This means that they are physically unable to handle 2 or more programs trying to ask it to play sound at the same time. Windows gets around this by having software mixing built into its sound card drivers (or kernel–who knows where it actually is). I imagine that Mac OS X does this too. And of course, for these 2 commercial (read: expensive) operating systems, this all Just Works without the user having to get involved. In fact, most Windows users no doubt have absolutely no Read more…

Wow, I really need a vacation. And, curiously enough, I am now on one, thank God. Just in the nick of time, I think. Friday, Saturday and Sunday were not at all restful, for a variety of reasons. Not at all. Sunday was starting to look restful, and I had a nice little meander through the Camp Hill mall with my lovely brood and friends. Stopped by the E.B. therein and found what I thought was a pretty good deal on a really cool Lord of the Rings, Return of the King game. $9.99 for a DVD version of this game seemed like a right nice price to pay. So, thrilled at the thought of abandoning all cares of work, Read more…

Doldrums. I’ve got them. I get them more often than I’d like. Now what to do with them….

I ran across this article that discusses a total Mac newbie’s first impressions with Mac OS X. It’s pretty light and entertaining reading. And what it’s done more than anything has been to whet my appetite for a Mac OS X box myself. Truth be told, I’ve always loved the Mac OS, and Apple machines in general. I’d love to be able to buy a 17″ powerbook. But, I don’t have that kind of money, and I’m pretty sure that if I ever did, there would be something far more important (or meaningful) that would need it to be spent on. For where your treasure is…

As it turns out, after having spent far too much time trying to debug this, I found a bug in Kopete that was causing the problems with using a SOCKS proxy in KDE. Along the way, I learned that a SOCKS proxy feature is built right into SSH!!! ssh -D causes SSH to act as a SOCKS 4/5 proxy!! Now that is sweet!! Anyway, here are all the gory, copius details. Go, bug-fixer guys!! =:)

I’ve been banging my head against the wall for a good couple of hours and had to vent…. I needed to get Kopete (a REALLY good KDE IM client) to use my Squid proxy server. Well, it’s not designed to do that, so that’s one thing, but what it can do is use a SOCKS proxy server. I proceeded to set up the Dante SOCKS proxy server on my aging-but-still-ticking debian box. All that’s left is getting Kopete to use it, right? Nope, not so easy. You can’t have just Kopete use a SOCKS proxy server, like gaim can. You have to have the entire desktop environment (all of KDE) use the SOCKS server. Okay, fair enough and understandable. Ahhh, Read more…