m06orama – nerdly musings from Winnipeg (Wordpress)

Um, well, in the process of having two weeks “offa mah cawull senner jeyobe” here in sleepy old Winnipeg, I decided to do several rash things.

First rash thing I did was I went out and got a 1GB RAM chip for my Mac Mini and did brain surgery on my living room table after lunch last Monday. My buddy Bob played the role of nurse, holding my putty knife when I wasn’t prying open the case, and responding to my calls for “Suction!” by turning on my vacuum cleaner. Does this sounds strange? Two old geezers in an apartment, one doing brain surgery on a computer and the other turning on a vaccum cleaner. Am I having an acid flashback or what?

Man, you sure do get a lot of dirt in all those little openings around the bottom of a Mac Mini, tho’ it was actually pretty easy to do the upgrade. The hardest part about the “case cracking” is getting the cover back on square round the back, kind of like when you give yourself a haircut with the clippers, doncha know.

This great rashness was a follow-up to putting 2GB RAM extra in my Acer AMD 3800+ along with a Seagate 230GB hard drive. The main rash thing about that was how much it cost. Like $320 including the Mac. I’m still trying to figure out what to do with a 230GB hard drive, but maybe my old Content Management project will revitalize itself some day.

Meantime, with 1GB RAM, OSX runs much better and I can leave open all the windows I want. I’m kinda lazy that way. Over in England we leave windows open all the time. Maybe close ‘em if it gets frosty some night. You get the idea.

I installed Vista under Innotek’s VirtualBox 1.4 on my Acer and it runs well. It’s true what they say. For virtualization, all you need is a chunk of memory and a $499 Vista Business license. Whoops! Darn! There went my air fare to the Bahamas! Now THAT’S what I call rash!

Since then, while on a trip to Winkler, I invented a new telephone which is bio-degradable, edible, and renewable. It’s made out of corn, which should go down big with the farmers round here.

Other than that I mostly slept and ate and rode my bike and watched a few movies.

Last rash thing I did was work on my web server on the Acer. I wanted to know why http://skyprod.net was getting so many hits on an old document about installing and configuring a Linksys WUSB54G wireless adapter on Windows XP. It turns out from my Apache2 logs that I am getting a lot of referrals from Google searches! Who’d'a thunk it? The only problem is the document in question is one I wrut back in 2004 to help me in “mah cawull senner jeyobe”, and it’s kind of out-of-date since Service Pack 2 and so on. So, I made it over (VERY rash) and added a few dire warnings like “You CAN damage your computer”, etc. Anyhoo, now my Apache2 web server’s running on Ubuntu Feisty x86_64, AND I get referrals AND the document’s sort of a bit more up-to-date too. Owzaaaaat?!

The thing about being all Open Sourcey – or Openly Saucy – or should that be Open Sorcery – I’m sure it’s also VERY, VERY rash – is that you have to use Open Office instead of MS Word and it takes a while to figure out how to do things like hyperlink the entries in your document’s table of contents. Awwwwgh! Now THAT’s what I call COUNTER-INTUITIVE! Give me good old Microsoft Word 2000 any day!

Um, well at least I still have a four-day long weekend before I go back to work.

Ya, so I read something recently about Linus Torvalds and his views on Gnome. As I recall he was deploring the dumbing down of the interface and was quoted as saying s.t. like “Why don’t they just install KDE?” So I did.

Ooops! Big mistake! Hundreds of new applications all over my Ubuntu Feisty Gnome Applications menus, all starting with the letter “K”. Ugh! I thought that “K” was a breakfast cereal, or something to do with camping or White Supremacy or cheap cars or something.

So, anyway, I just cleaned up all that mess, and now I can carry on to do whatever it was that I was thinking of doing before I got myself into being sidetracked. Except of course that now I can’t remember what it was.

Anyhoo-ha, I did start KDE one time, but I found the look and feel of it quite unpalatable. After blowing my cookies, I did try to start services-admin, user-admin, network-admin and time-admin, and whaddya know, they all worked! Once. Then they stopped working again, and went back to their usual catatonic state.

Upon restarting Gnome there was a tantalizing moment when network-admin actually showed me it’s panels. But then I clicked on the “Hosts” tab and it froze again. What a tease! “Plus ca change”, I always say. Maybe Linus was thinking about these applets?

But who really needs applets that actually work? After all, everybody knows that appearance is the only thing that’s really important these days. For those who have a big pipe and nothing else to do, below is a screenshot of my customized Gnome desktop. You will notice how crisp and clean and uncluttered it looks, and how pleasing it is to the eye. You will no doubt also notice that I am using Red Hat’s Liberation fonts and Mac OSX’s house icon for my home folder, as well as Beryl Session Manager and a tweaked version of Emerald’s “Slatehorn Red” default theme for my window decorations. Gosh, it’s handsome!