Somewhere out there!

Was at my brothers today showing him some prints from our new colour laser printer. (More about that in a later post). His wife has a G4 running OSX, we were trying to figure out how to connect to the two machines. The last time we tried was when the machine was running OS 9. Obviously it did not work, a wasted effort. However, OSX now has the wonders of Samba and BSD to draw on. Connecting to a file share on the WinXP boxs, was simple as saying cheese. Very slick I must admit.

Our second problem was trying to get it to connect to a print share. The Epson C70 inkjet they have is not strong as our old C800, after 18 odd months of moderate use the USB plug has broken off. No good for the Mac! Anyway its not an easy process, certain not some thing Apple talk about in their help file. So its Google to the rescue, moments later and a sure fire method is discovered: How to Use a Printer Attached to a Windows XP Computer in Mac OS X.

I’m quite glad this happen today, reminded me that I have a machine that is accessible so I can do some experiments to see if OSX is good enough for me to want to change from x86/KDE. Especially Liquid Ledgers. I like the look of the unlimited undoes. Seems like a simple but complete package that will be perfect for my mother to look after her finances. I’m interested in see how much better than Gnucash (for myself) or Money (for my family) it is.

As this guy says, Debian Stable is really starting to drag. It is so far behind the times it is becoming a joke, and so much for testing as an attempt to speed up the release process. Most of the time its just a slow-security-release root-kit-target-waiting-to-happen. In order to use even some of the current simple applications for a server, you basically have to be running Sid.

There doesn’t seem to be any slow up to the rate of packages being updated in Sid and I wonder if anyone is placing odds on Sarge being released next year. I’d say they aren’t that long. Just go ahead and freeze Sid, get the damn thing out already! Personally also think its becoming a real job for the Security Team to keep back porting patches into centuries old applications.

I’m started wondering if its better to look at something like Ubuntu as a server, their wiki has a short blurb about how to set this up with their current release: Ubuntu – Custom or Server Installation.

I’ve played around with a test install of Ubuntu, on a spare desktop. Seemed very nice. I much prefer KDE over Gnome, so its unlikely I’ll move my desktop to Ubuntu any time soon. However, it might be interest to try an experiment between Sarge/KDE and Ubuntu/Gnome desktops when I finally get around to building my NX server at work. Especially if I can get the two running on Xen or UML and get some of my users doing week long trials with either install.

A Terse first look review by NewsForge about Base the OpenOffice.org database application. Note its worth also considering Kexi which seems like it is maturing rapidly.

FireHOL is a Linux iptables packet filtering firewall builder for humans.

Has a nice looking rule set, looks almost as good a pf. Has a straight-forward tutorial for a home network situation.

I never really had much luck with Dans Guardian and its Clamav module, performance was really crappy. I probably should go back and have a look at it again. However, I saw this link in the openbsd-misc mailing list today: SquidClamAV Redirector. Looks interesting.

Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 review.

Planning to learn a new language. I don’t have anything at the moment, so a good pair of headphones is probably worth investing in. These guys seem to like the Sony MDR-V6 (“Best Headphones Ever: (by Jeremy Zawodny)”). Also some comments here about this HeadPhone.

When I was witting my dissertation I used to use M-q all the time. I’d forgotten about it until I saw this page: AUC TeX – Advanced Editing Features.

I need to move back to working on laptops as I’ll be doing a bit of travel. Been thinking about switching to a Powerbook, this seems like a good place to start: The Tao of Mac – HOWTO/Switch To The Mac.

Lack of an OSX Openoffice port, it probably the main thing that is holding me back. We use OO in our business, so it would be a pain to be without it. Especially the upcoming 2.0 release. I could of course run Debian/PPC, but that somewhat defeats the purpose. Then there is the NX option from my colo box. I’m not sure if there is a native NX client for OSX. Something to explore.

Nice straight forward development walk-thru for a recipe webapp with Ruby on Rails. It would be further interesting if the author continued with in a similar comparison walk-thru to the web-application at PyWebBlog.