Kasperian Moving Parts

Getting Excited about KDE4 All Over Again

Tuesday April 15, 2008

It started to hit me yesterday as I spent 3.5 hours in this year’s KDE Google Summer of Code mentor’s meeting (thanks again sebr!!). KDE4 just plain rocks, and it feels good to start getting excited about it again. And I don’t just mean KDE 4.0. Don’t get me wrong, KDE4.0 is a nice little release. It’s not perfect and there are some things that are irritating about it and keep me from using it as my main DE. But like Aaron has been saying over and over and over again, KDE4.0 is not KDE4. KDE4.0 is more of a preview of things to come, and what I see coming just plain kicks butt. I am finally getting excited about Read more…

Life in General

How To Drink Water

Monday April 14, 2008

I know I need to drink more water, and after the recent health disturbances, I knew I had to get serious about it. But I also knew that unless I had something unique and stylish and cool, it would be a chore to me and I’ve no hope of being consistent on something that’s irritating. And I proved that by spending a couple of weeks just drinking out of whatever glass I grab in the morning. I could never remember how many 12 ounce glasses of water I’d taken at the end of the day and normal drinkware is just so… normal. Enter the Sigg Lifestyle Loop Top Water Bottle that I found from a local EMS store. It has Read more…

Books

Current Book List: Chess, Chess, Chess

Although I was never fortunate enough to take part of the chess club… anywhere… I have always loved the game intensely. Some of my fondest growing up memories are of me and my dad playing chess for long hours at a time. However, I’ve never really progressed much through the years, and haven’t taken the time to try to improve. Well, having gotten my clock cleaned a few times on FICS, I’ve decided it’s time to read a bit. So I started out with the deprecatingly-titled Complete Idiot’s Guide to Chess. Definitely a good book and I recommend it as a good first read. Towards the end, the author recommended some good “next” books to read. I was painfully aware Read more…

KDE, KPilot

KPilot Hackery of Sorts (or How To Sync Your Work’s Exchange Calendar To Your Palm, Part III)

Wednesday April 9, 2008

It felt darned good to hack on KPilot just a wee bit today! Actually, it was less hacking on KPilot directly and more on some utility code that I’ve written that allows me to sync my work Exchange calendar into my personal calendar and subsequently to my Palm. I’ve blogged previously about this, but since my last post, I’ve switched employers (YAY!!!) and I now have to deal with Exchange 2007 OWA, with Forms-Based Authentication (FBA). FBA has managed to break the nifty little Ruby Exchange (RExchange) code that I’d been using, since RExchange doesn’t do FBA. So, I’ve gone back to Graham Cobb’s tremendously useful little OWASync package which has been updated to handle Exchange 2007’s schema and FBA, Read more…

Desktop

Looking for: Parental Controls Virtual Machine (or something)

Monday April 7, 2008

Dear Lazyweb, Having paid a decent amount of money yearly to Linksys for their nice little Parental Controls feature which ties in really well with my WRT54GS wireless router, I am surprised and dismayed to find that Linksys is no longer going to allow me to do so. They’re discontinuing their Parental Controls feature (a site-wide proxy, if you will) and have no replacement product. And having looked for the same service available from anyone/anywhere else, I am also shocked and dismayed to find that I can’t locate a viable replacement for said service. So, dear reader, if you happen to know of a good product/service that allows multiple logins per site (home) and configurable levels of allow/blocking, and doesn’t Read more…

Movies, Music, Video Games

Stream This!

Last in our series of “when will that Jason kid shut up?!?” is this short, little ditty wherein I extol the wonders of an ancient Linux file server in my basement with a 250GB drive, my shiny (SHINY!!!) new PS3, my PSP, and the nifty little Open Source project of MediaTomb. Being out of the “being able to spend mad money on Geek toys” for a while (having a family will do that to ya), I was ill-prepared for this new-fangled UPnP thing. As I was setting up my (DANGED AWESOME!!!) PS3, I breezed by the UPnP settings (I don’t need no steenking directions!) with nary a second glance. However, after reading up on the PS3’s media streaming abilities a Read more…

Life in General

I Am More Geek Than You

Old Geek Receipt! Originally uploaded by vanRijn I finally broke down and bought an HP C5180 all-in-one printer/scanner/copier dealie. It’s a sweet little device, I must admit. Very Linux-friendly, comes network-ready, and now all of our computers at home can scan and print via network, out of the box. So, said new scanner has enabled me to pull some of my geekly receipts of yesteryear and scan them in, thereby throwing the gauntlet down for this year’s “You Can’t Be Geekier Than Me” competition. As one item of proof, I offer this receipt from 1996, wherein yours truly laid down $279.07 for a state of the art, Megahertz 28.8 PCMCIA modem. Also of note is a receipt from January, 1996 Read more…

Books

A New Sherrif In Town

As I might have mentioned previously, I love a good book. And so I was delighted to discover Ted Dekker’s books recently. I first read his “Skin” book which totally freaked me out and made me think that I couldn’t handle any more of his books. But I took a chance on Saint next and absolutely loved it. Looking for more, I found Showdown, which turns out to be the previous book in Dekker’s excellent Paradise series. The third book, Sinner, comes out soon and I’m totally looking forward to it. So, excellent author: yes! But what really impressed me about Showdown was the intensity of the story that Dekker weaved and the underlying parallels that he was subtly building. Read more…

Books, Movies

Susan Cooper, Please Kick Someone’s Butt!

One of my favorite memories of all my growing-up years happened in my 7th grade. It centered around a very under-appreciated teacher of mine named Robin Avant who did something simple and inventive and refreshing and stirring with her class. I wish I knew how to contact her today because I can honestly say that she affected me in a deep, deep way and I’d love to thank her for it. I know it’s hard to believe, dear reader, but I was a most uncomfortable geek in school at all levels. I didn’t fit in, to say the least. I was geek before geek was cool. =:) I was an avid reader, an Apple ][ hacker, and more socially inept Read more…

Life in General

Remote-Working Geeks, Unite!

Saturday April 5, 2008

I just sent off an e-mail about some of the challenges and surprises that I’ve hit as a Remote-Working Geek and it occurred to me that not only have I not blogged as of late (I suck, what can I say–but I have a list of like 10 things I need to blog about), but that the contents of my e-mail were downright blog-worthy. Here it is, minor edits notwithstanding: So… I’m not sure what your background is, but I came from 10+ years of in-corporate-office worker-ville. And there’s some things that I didn’t expect to be challenging that turned out to be, and there’s things that I didn’t even think of that have surprised me. And there’s things that Read more…