Colin Charles Agenda

I’ve been so behind on lists, that when I finally did catch up, I found some amazingly bad news. Terry Teague, longtime OpenOffice.org Mac OS X contributor, has passed on. I met him at WWDC’04, and it was great talking to him. Little did I know he worked for Apple but kept it quiet online, till I met him, doing all sorts of amazing hardware related testing (he tends to write the Apple Hardware Test stuff you see on Disc 1 of some of your Macs). Showed me some cool things you could do, all on a floor! Didn’t get a chance to catch him at WWDC’05 this year, as he didn’t rock up, but in passing, we’re going to miss you mate.

Update: There’s a great eulogy to Terry. And his brother left a comment on this blog, mentioning if there were nice words, etc. it could be forwarded along to his e-mail address.

Proprietary software always sucks. This time its the Cisco VPN client. It refuses to compile on FC-4 with all updates applied (I even tried on the newer acpi-is-busted kernel). It probably won’t work on rawhide, but that’s not what my laptop has. Monash’s VPN doesn’t work with vpnc from Extras either, so no NetworkManager-vpnc goodness for me.

Then I try the OS X version. And lo and behold, I read that it destroys /opt where DarwinPorts tends to live. In fact, thats not the only damage that it does: it symlinks var to private/var and tmp to private/tmp. Don’t even think of moving var, as err, you’ll slowly realise your sudo options don’t work. Apple+S into single user mode, then mount -uw /, to recreate the var symlink. Bad cisco, bad 4.7.00.0510 release.

Anyone think the following is hazardous?

lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  admin  11 Sep 26 21:28 /tmp@ -> private/tmp
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  admin  11 Sep 28 01:29 /var@ -> private/var

And should I be changing it (in single user mode, none the less)?

Last few days (probably week+) have been mighty interesting. I’ve been doing everything on OS X on hermione. Its not a screamer, and I’ve seen OS X slow down to a crawl too, with heavy swapping eventually (well, 384MB of RAM isn’t anything to shout about). Having two screens, has certainly made me more productive I think - enjoying every bit of spread resolution so much so I think I might need to get another LCD screen or something. Only thing running on Linux for production use is Evolution, which I’ve got to find the time/energy to fix to Thunderbird (which seemed to have decided after the last OOM error, it would remove some of my follow-up entries).

But its not all been a bed of roses. Learning curve exists, I filed my first Apple bug today, at #4270650 - Podcast download schedule should not be fixed, instead it should allow a variance. Not having a public Bugzilla, is annoying. And the bugzilla report format is so much more intuitive (rather than me having to enter all the fields manually, like Summary, Description, etc.)

And today, Apple replied. Saying it was a known bug, and they’re looking into it. And yesterday, I got myself my new screamer, with 1.5gb of RAM… Sure, I didn’t get the hard disk upgrade I wanted, but thats okay for the moment. I’m happy to announce that some snapshot of rawhide does install on this machine, so yeah, Fedora can run on the latest iBook G4’s.

And looking at more great marketing ideas, MySQL is giving away iPod Nano’s or even trips to the MySQL conference, all for filing useful, reproducible bugs. This is something I definitely want to talk about for Fedora Marketing (re BugZappers, which has taken a bit of a chill since Jack’s at school).

Oh, caught Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo and The Dukes of Hazzard over the weekend. All fun. Did the Melbourne Showgrounds visit, and the Tulip Festival visit last week (pictures up on Flickr later…)

Caught The Shawshank Redemption. Visited the ACMI for the White Noise digital art exhibition. The Melbourne Flickr group is realistically going to have an exhibition, and I’m taking part in organising. Highly exciting. Clubbed too. Fun last weekend.

Melbourne Spring Fashion Festival 2005 is on all this week. I endeavour to visit it regularly pending free time. It was so exciting I shelled out money for a 1GB Sandisk UltraII CF card too. Conclusion is I need a faster zoom, definitely. Caught The Skeleton Key, on Tuesday, which was interesting - not too scary, and with weird hoodo crap. New Orleans pre-disaster was depicted. For it post-disaster, I suggest Jacob Appelbaum’s weblog.

Spent most of the rest of the week at the Motorola Melbourne Spring Fashion Week. In-between managed to write the Fedora Community Marketing Contacts manifesto. Initial comments seem good, but I clearly want to improve on it this coming week. Last few days saw me getting terribly tired and sick (aching bones, strained muscles) - I think gym visits in the morning at 6.30am and doing all the stuff I do daily (photographing models) is probably not a good idea. Saturday was eat ribs, drink beer, and watch the Gladiator. Oh, and bits to be proud about: Software Freedom Day in Malaysia gave away the IOSN LiveCD running Ubuntu as well as with the premiers and so on. Yum Yum.

Dinner last night was curry fish head with Anne in Box Hill. I highly recommend going to this restaurant (its a Chinese one, serving good Indian curry fish head!). Played with NetNewsWire Lite and realised its really all I need as a Liferea replacement, minus pinning an interesting article (looks like I’ll be needing some Tomboy like application to keep useful blog snippets). Seems all good feedreaders handle OPML quite well (import/export). The weather Dashboard widget needs to be set to “Melbourne, Australia(VIC)” to replace GNOME’s weather report (I still actually like the report that the applet provides, I wonder if there’s a way to con OS X into giving me those details). As for a X-Chat replacement, there’s always Colloquy - its notifications with Growl, and the “person has possibly replied” is a nice feature. I also played with Screen Spanning Doctor on my current iBook, and am pleased to see it works (radeon7500). From the forums, the radeon9550 should also work in the event that I decide to get a 12″ iBook G4. Exporting the Evolution address book is easy - select all, save as vcards, then import into Address Book. Syncs well with my Palm as well. And the talking clock at the top of the hour is just oh so sexy. Need to scroll using Terminal.app + screen + irssi? The magic is in Shift+Fn+PgUp! Another problem solved.