iLife has been delivered, finally :-)

Posted on February 5, 2005 by kenvandine

iLife ’05 has been delivered… finally! I have typically had good experiences with Fedex, but this was aweful. I spent a week getting contradicting stories from them. They kept telling me they had picked it up from the other address… but they weren’t delivering it. At one point they said they had made attempts to deliver it two days in a row… but Laurie was home those days and there was no notes left on the door. Then, they told me they still had not picked it up from the other residence… Anyway, I finally got sick of going in circles and called Apple. They overnighted it again. Should have done that from the get go… but it should have been simple for Fedex to handle it. I guess it is true, hind sight is 20/20.

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Beagle is packaged now…

Posted on February 3, 2005 by kenvandine

I have worked out the issues I was still having with Beagle, works great! I pulled a snapshot from cvs as of this morning, which seems pretty stable… so far 🙂

Also added a script to /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/ to start dbus and beagled correctly when logging in with GDM. This also works well. Created a best.desktop file so now we have a launcher for Best. One note, if your home directory is big it may appear to take a while to get going… be patient, all is well.

Cool stuff…

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Change Control…

Posted on February 2, 2005 by kenvandine

Why is change control so hard? Why can’t people think before they release? I understand if you are in heavy development, Alpha or Beta phases even. But, in a production environment with customers depending on you… why would you deploy changes that simply break the way people do business?

At my job, we have a vendor, an ASP that provides an “API” for us to access our data. This “API” is really just an xml output from a web server, but it does the job. We suck data down and import it into our system nightly. This vendor, periodically, makes changes that break this “API” without even thinking about the consequences.

Change control really isn’t hard, but it just must not be human nature…

I think this is a common problem in IT, but not other industries. Imagine if a team working on a pipeline in Alaska didn’t follow proper change contol guidelines? Or an F-15 mechanic? If they can do it, we can do it!

Ok, I am done ranting for now…

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Beagle…

Posted on January 29, 2005 by kenvandine

Got Beagle cooked up yesterday in my repository… and it is cool.. Still have some issues to work out, but I think they are related to the inotify patch to the kernel.

I need to figure out how to how to make the inotify device automatically and how to make the dbus and beagled startup to happen automatically for all users…

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GNOME based distro using Conary

Posted on January 27, 2005 by kenvandine

Thanks to the fine developers over at Specifix, shadows are available! So, I have created a shadow of their main distro using the conary label conary.vandine.org@ken:desktop (this namespace will change when we think of a cool name). This shadow will be used to add some very cool, more bleeding edge stuff for a desktop distro. Things like Beagle, Dashboard, etc.

The GNOME folks are working on some very cool stuff, and we want to create something that can really showcase it. There will also be a shadow of this distro which will be used to create a LiveCD. Very cool stuff.

If you are interested in discussion, we have a general discussion mailing list as well as a commits watch list.

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PowerPC Meet Conary!

Posted on January 25, 2005 by kenvandine

Well, I have made progress towards my goal of porting Specifix Linux to PPC. I now have Ubuntu installed on my ibook with Conary installed and working.

Yes, on my iBook. For anyone that has been reading this blog, I know I had explained that I was going to do this on the Dual G4 I bought off eBay. Plans changed, Laurie now has lots of free time on her hands and will be using the G4 alot. It is the only desktop class box we have, and she will be doing lots of graphics work which is much easy with a real monitor and mouse. On that note, if anyone is looking for someone to do work with their digital photos, let me know. She does great work!

Now onto my Linux/Conary install. This was not that simple, first Ubuntu doesn’t have all the development tools installed by default which in general is a good thing (imho). So, I had to install the necessary tools which took a little time. I also had to install Python2.4, and elfutils. Elfutils is a problem on Debian based systems due to some sort of licensing issue which I do not understand. So, I had to install elfutils from source, and of course it didn’t build well. So, I eventually extracted the source tarball from the SRPM for Fedora PPC, thanks Fedora! That built just fine.

After all that, I now have a working Conary. I have cooked up several troves… and it feels good!

Now it is time to bootstrap… more to come soon.

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Fedex Woes

Posted on January 22, 2005 by kenvandine

Well, i pre-ordered a copy of iLife ’05 to help with my home video project. It was to be delivered by the 22nd. Well, Fedex says they delivered it yesterday… but to the wrong address. Funny thing, they have 2 addresses that they delivered my one package to. Neither of which is mine… not sure how that happens. I guess they have some magical machine to clone my copy of iLife and give it to multiple people. Sigh…

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Sushi… Yum!

Posted on January 22, 2005 by kenvandine

Tonight we had sushi, nothing fancy… but we pickup some various rolls at Harris Teeter. It was soooo good. I have never bought sushi @ the grocery store before, and I was pleased. Perhaps you really can get edible sushi at the grocery store? Perhaps it was just because I had such a craving for sushi tonight? Perhaps Microsoft makes a descent Operating System? Nah, that one can’t be true 😉

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GNOME-Blog, no excuses anymore…

Posted on January 12, 2005 by kenvandine

Well, today I packaged up gnome-blog for Specifix Linux. It is a very simple applet that allows you to post to most popular blogging systems.

It is very simple, and easy to use… so now I have no excuse not to post to my blog often 🙂

We’ll see if my pattern changes!

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Can’t waste 123GB

Posted on January 12, 2005 by kenvandine

So the G4 I bought off Ebay works great! One problem, the ATA interface on the Sawtooth doesn’t see more that 127GB of my 250GB drive I added. So I had to buy a Sonnet Tempo ATA133 PCI card. Now it should see the whole drive, and it should also perform a bit better… Can’t wait to get it installed so I can finally get to work on all those videos Laurie is waiting for 🙂

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