Kasperian Moving Parts

kinda like Batman, but with a wife and 3 kids

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Category: Life in General

CNN’s stupidity (or how to alienate people)

Out of curiosity, I wanted to look at the latest, breaking news on CNN for Hurricane Rita, but CNN has apparently decided (not without precedence or companionship in this kind of decision) that it will only cater to Windows users for its streaming videos. Hm. Yeah, that’s a really nice decision. Reminds me of FEMA’s also-really-stupid decision to be lazy, slovenly, and stupid in the same way. Good job guys! Welcome to the 20th century! Hope you don’t get any reality spilt on ya….


Total Lack of Passion or Momentum

I found this blog entry from Dave Neary the other day and share his sentiments. Namely, I’m not particularly enamored with what I do for a living (Retail Pharmacy–it’s not painful to the point of death, but it’s not something that I’m passionate about, to be sure), and would absolutely LOVE to work with a company that not only embraces the Open Source desktops (GNOME, KDE, etc., etc.), but also actively participates in their development. From what I’ve seen, Redhat and Novell do this, but I’ve not been successful in getting anyone’s attention with my resume-submissions. =:/ But that’s my passion, to be sure, and I would love the opportunity to work on something during my day job that I Read more…


GMail and IMAP

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…


Fix this door

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).


Lack of time, lack of discipline

I’ve been meaning to blog about this very open and honest post from a certain KDE developer’s blog. I’ll quote some of it here and then comment below… I started rather late in my life to work for a gain, at age 23. This was so given the political organization of the place I was then in and thanks to the invaluable care of my parents, who wanted us (me and my sister) to get solid education and be nondisturbed by external difficulties of any kind in the process. Thus I carried some sort of idealism from my teen age way into my adult life. This makes that, in the last 15 years, there were only rare days in which Read more…


Hi, it’s me

Wow. Long time no blog. Life has been keeping me pretty busy lately. Work is… well, it’s work after all. I suppose that if one were to love one’s job, it would not be work, so much. I’d like that! An update on the OpenSuSE distribution I’m running…. It’s still a really nice system, especially considering the fact that it’s a beta (well, release candidate 1 now), but there are a few annoyances that I have that I’m hoping will get ironed out in the final release of SuSE 10. If they don’t get fixed, I’m going to go back to Mandrake. Annoyances: My PCMCIA wireless network card does not get re-configured automatically when I suspend and resume my laptop. Read more…


What’s going on, today

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…


KDE project activity tracker

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


Gtk+ theme changes not… changing… in SuSE

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…


OpenSuSE, one week later

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…