The Acrobat Reader 5.05 linux plugin just works with Mozilla 1.0rc3. Of course. :)
Here is an interesting article about why Eric S. Raymond likes Python. It’s an interesting read, whether you’re an esr fan or not.
My VisSym 2002 trip to Barcelona was great fun. We made good use of the time in Spain and even spend a few nights in a Parador in Cardona. This was on the pricey side, but is definitely worth it.
I’m in browser heaven. I bought Codeweavers Crossover 1.1.1 for a measly $24.95, so now my already hard-core Mozilla 1.0rc2 can also make use of all the winblows browser plugins, such as Quicktime, Windows Media Player 6.4 (ugh), Flash 6, Shockwave and so on. This is a great piece of software and it’s stable too!
Did you know that “xam = reduce(operator.add, map(operator.mul, xa, xa)) ** .5” calculates the magnitude of n-element vector xa? I had to wipe away a tear when I wrote that. It’s fast too. To run an interesting python benchmark, download this.
If it were up to some politicians, South Africa is not going to have a population to worry about in a few years time. The president’s (Thabo Mbeki’s) view on the AIDS / HIV link is disturbing and so is the racism with which he and some of his supporting members of state approach scientists who oppose them. Mbeki’s strong point has never been his intellect; unfortunately he does not seem to realise this.
Since PWM, I’d gone back to fvwm2 and then back to icewm. Seemingly, that wasn’t quite enough hopping around, so I built the latest greatest gnome 2 preview using the GARNOME distribution, which is a pretty cool BSD ports-ish way of building gnome 2. Well, gnome 2 looks good but isn’t there quite yet.
Soooooo, I thought that I should give KDE a try again, seeing that they’ve passed the 3.0 milestone. My oh my, it’s even prettier than 2.2 and the strange thing is that it’s quite a bit snappier as well! I have it running with Mosfet’s high performance liquid and it’s seriously drool-worthy. For a run-of-the-mill screenshot, click here. There are even debs for testing available (go to #debian-kde on openprojects.net to see where and how) so installing is a cinch.
That was really quick… I now have an ADSL connection to the oodles and oodles of bandwidth that the TU has lying around. :)
Too many beers last night…. ugh. Fortunately there’s soma fm for some soothing streaming music. I just can’t seem to decide between the Groove Salad and the Secret Agent (“The soundtrack for your stylish, mysterious, dangerous life”) streams, although my mysterious life does make me biased towards the latter.
Soothing music + not moving too often or too suddenly == productivity. I think.
We’ve just moved into beautiful new house in the middle of Delft. The only problem is that I’m stuck on dialup till May 7. Groan.
I found Best of Led Zeppelin I and II in a CD shop today. They’re mine now. :) They don’t make music like they used to, do they?
Every so often, I go on a trying-different-window-managers spree. This time was more depressing than usual, since I’ve tried most of the X11 window managers that are out there, even ion. By the way, I liked ION very much and I think the idea behind it does have merit, but I use too many applications that don’t play nice with ion. So, this time I was very strongly considering becoming a Pointless Window Manager hermit and have people stare at me strangely. By the way, I still am going to give PLWM a good shot, but later. It turns out that the author of ion, Tuomo Valkonen, wrote another window manager before getting the ion vision. This window manager is called pwm and it’s just what the doctor ordered…
Today on Slashdot:
I’m guessing that everyone here has a valid criticism of Microsoft’s attacks on, and approach towards the Open Source model. To me, that begs the question of what we think would be an “appropriate” reaction from Microsoft towards the Open Source model… Article here.
This always makes me grind my teeth. No, you illiterate pseudo-intellectual idiot, you can not use that phrase like that. Let me quote from the website of Prof. Paul Brians (and the same information is available from a million other places):
I was getting overly confident with my Mozilla 0.9.9 and decided to install the Blackdown Java J2RE 1.3.1 as well as Macromedia 5.0.43 flash plugins. Well well well… mozilla started crashing all over. So I started cursing like in the old days… then I remembered something: this entry in the Mozilla bug tracking system.
What it comes down to is that the Flash plugin is buggy… it simply locks up if the /dev/dsp device is busy, whereas previous versions of this plugin would just disable their sound in this case. So, if you’re playing MP3s in the background (like I am) Mozilla will just seem to crash when you go to a Flash site. However, if you kill your mp3 player, Moz will continue. It also seems that certain sound cards and drivers DO allow multiple access to the /dev/dsp, in which case you won’t have this problem.
