RedHat == Redmond?

Red Hat: Next Redmond?

Red Hat’s dominance is worrisome to some industry players, who say the Raleigh, N.C., company needs effective competition to prevent it from becoming a Microsoft Corp. among Linux vendors and to ensure the operating system continues to develop in an open way.

And who wouldn’t want to have MSFT’s influence over their market? Can you fault RedHat for that?

But the openness of the source itself and the fact there are competing distributions — RedHat vs SuSE is not like Macintosh vs Windows, after all — doesn’t really convince me that RedHat is a monopoly. I hope never to run RedHat again: the pain of dealing with RPM is still fresh in my mind. If I couldn’t get what I needed from FreeBSD’s Linux emulation, I’d go with Debian or SuSE.

think different, and keep your options open

Apple Keeps x86 Torch Lit with ‘Marklar’

Sources said more than a dozen software engineers are tasked to Marklar, and the company’s mainstream Mac OS X team is regularly asked to modify code to address bugs that crop up when compiling the OS for x86. Build numbers keep pace with those of their pre-release PowerPC counterparts; for example, Apple is internally running a complete, x86-compatible version of Jaguar, a k a Mac OS X 10.2, which shipped last week.

Wade spotted this one.

keeping them honest

Looks like water usage here in my grove of sunflowers and tomatoes is closer to 100 gallons/day (pretty nearly exactly 100). So I’ll note it for a few more days and then all the City and ask them to make the necessary adjustments to my bill.

if there was ever a device was meant to be wireless

Driver Labo./Newton/WaveLAN

An 802.11b driver for the Newton has been completed and seems to work with a number of cards. Might be time to blow the dust off it and see how this works. Much as I love the thing, it’s hard to integrate something into you life when it needs to be wired up. If only Steve didn’t see the Newton as a reminder of John Sculley (or was there another reason for getting rid of it?), imagine where the technology could be now?

After some email correspondence with the driver’s author, it looks like the WaveLAN (Agere chipset) cards are the way to go: not enough people have provided feedback for Noguchi to flesh out any kind of matrix. If you use the driver and haven’t told him how it works for you, do it now.
Continue reading “if there was ever a device was meant to be wireless”

interesting event with MovableType

The filesystem where this ‘blog is stored came close to filling, perhaps even did fill for a moment, while I was adding an entry. As a result, the index.html page was zeroed out. Hmm . . . .

After freeing up some space, I asked MT to rebuild all files and that seems to have fixed it. Love those database-backed publishing systems . . . .

saving the family farm

Rate Information

Some facts you might find useful:

* A ccf is100 cubic feet of water. There are 748 gallons in a ccf.
* Typical water usage for a household is 7 ccf per month
* Typical sewer usage for a household is 6 ccf per month

The City of Seattle claims I used 300 gallons a day for the most recent period, or 26 ccf (almost 4 times their cited typical usage). The treasurer has been mumbling about profligate water use in the agricultural efforts here, but this news is much worse than I had suspected.

Of course, the city doesn’t actually *read* the meter, instead relying on estimates and SWAGs1. So I took the liberty of making a note of the number this afternoon and will see how much it actually moves. 300 gallons a day seems excessive to me, but if it’s true, perhaps I need a well.

1 SWAG: scientific wild-ass guess

who you calling limited?

Apple’s Newton Just Won’t Drop

the Newton’s limited processing power (160-MHz processor)

is anyone else shaking their head at the thought of 160 MHz being considered “limited”?

I’ve had every one of these from the OMP to the 2000 (which I stlll have). Apple really missed out o this. I’ll admit it had its flaws but some were overblown (the handwriting recognition was quite good on the later models). The Palm, of which I have had and disposed of 3 different models, is nothing more than a battery-backed roll of paper for notes, no intelligence whatever, other than in the mind of designer who made it shirt-pocket-sized and the marketeers who priced it within the geek gadget limit.

from Frank

i wish i had a camera

In the parking deck of Swedish Hospital, there is a set of disused gas pumps, for what reason I don’t know, but inside the chainlink compound with them is a very actively used bike rack more than half full of bikes.

The times they have a-changed . . . .