Open Source – Page 2 – Kasperian Moving Parts

That Which Takes My Time

Sunday September 24, 2006

It’s a frustrating thing to not have enough time to do that which you want. Or rather, there are so many things that I do want to do and so many things that I do need to do that there are choices that must be made to be a responsible, loving husband, Daddy, employee, hacker, game-player, and Christian. My greatest passion as a by-nature-geek is Open Source software. Specifically, the Open Source desktop. Professionally, Open Source has SO much value to companies that I am constantly finding ways of showing those at work of how the various solutions Open Source provides are the best-fitting tool for the needs we have. Personally (or “speaking from a not-getting-paid-for-stuff perspective”), I have been Read more…

KDE, Linux, Open Source

DANGIT it feels good to code!

Sunday August 20, 2006

FINALLY took a couple of hours late, late, late tonight and looked at the pesky little kpilot bug which caused a nasty little SIGSEGV with the vcal-conduitbase::slotProcess code during a “copy handheld to PC” sync. Turns out there was a single missing set for the fNextState in the case of ConduitAction::SyncMode::eCopyHHToPC, which as luck would have it, is exactly what I was trying to do. So, yay me on fixing that annoying buglet which was niggling at the back of my brain for the last couple of months. Secondarily, one of: gdb, PowerPC Linux, AAP sucks donkey elbows with regards to trying to debug this problem I was having. I could not for the life of me attach gdb to Read more…

KDE, Linux, Open Source, Work Stuff

LDAP, Microsoft Exchange, and KAddressBook or Thunderbird

Friday May 5, 2006

My current employer uses Exhange 2003 as its current groupware solution. I have on-and-off-again been beating my head against the proverbial concrete wall in trying to get it to work nicely with LDAP and addressbooks other than Evolution or Outlook, for obvious reasons. Today, my geeky noggin’ has broken through the proverbial concrete wall and I now have both KDE’s kaddressbook and Thunderbird’s address book successfully using the Exchange server here at work. Yay, me! Two things I’ve found this morning that have helped my noggin’ and I’ll list them here for future reference for myself as well as in hopes of helping some other poor concrete/geek/proverbial/noggin’-banging soul. First, I’ve found this post which lists a very helpful step-by-step approach 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, Life in General, Music, Open Source

Ecto, Amarok and Pink Floyd

Saturday December 3, 2005

I’ve long-been wanting a nice WYSIWYG editor for my WordPress blog. And, let me just say… there’s not one that I could find for Linux, which both sucks and is honestly quite a surprise. And yeah, I know there’s a partial resource in kdepim 3.5, and I had it on my TODO list to look at helping to finish it/get it working, but that’s obviously not happened yet. Oooh! Maybe that can be the itch that I need to scratch! But anyway, I’m sure I missed this killer app in my searches and there is, in fact, one out there, but I sure as heck couldn’t find it. So, it occurred to me that I now have one of those… Read more…

Open Source

Microsoft, or How to lie and still smell terrific

Wednesday September 28, 2005

I came across ruurd’s post the other day (probably found it on planet KDE originally). It’s all good, and it’s really hard not to just copy and paste the whole thing here, but I’ll try…. The following quote from this NewsForge article about Microsoft’s shady dealings with the state of Massachusetts is very well-worded and very accurate, from my experience in IT: Alan Yates’ letter reveals the worst of Microsoft’s behavior and signals their limited recourse when competition is enabled. The letter betrays many of the company’s flaws of character, its propensity to lie, and its petulant entitlement to customer fealty. And, as ruurd pointed out, the following excerpt from a letter from Microsoft gives a nice example of just Read more…

Desktop, Life in General, Open Source, Work Stuff

Total Lack of Passion or Momentum

Saturday September 24, 2005

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…

Linux, Open Source

window managers

Tuesday September 24, 2002

Well, anyway, back in the days of hanging on on undernet’s #linux for far too many hours every day, Brad Hughes (who I used to know as nyztihke, and now goes by nyz) showed me some interesting code he was playing with–hand-writing his own window manager from scratch. At the time, you had to manually edit .Xdefaults and restart his code any time you wanted to change something. =:) Anyway, I was still so enthralled with all the neato options that the seemingly countless number of window managers for X offered, that I was switching window managers about twice a week. At the time, I bounced back and forth between AfterStep, that raster kid’s enlightenment window manager, the Ice window Read more…

Linux, Open Source

the real skinny skinny

Monday September 24, 2001

Allllllllrighty then!!! Here’s the thing. =:) This page has never really been much of any use. I mean, it’s previously held nothing whatsoever of any use to anyone. So we take the big wad of uselessness and throw it right in the trash…. But OH BAYBEE, all that is going to change now!!! =:) Well, that is to say, I certainly hope that things will start to look up…. As far as computers go, I started playing with them in 5th grade (waaaaaay back when I was just this big). My first exposure to this fabulous new world was the Apple ][. =:) Ahh, it really brings back the memories…. I was always fascinated by the simple loop-programs that one Read more…