Well, it’s official. I just checked my online bank balance, and my credit card balance is $43.75 more than I have in my checking and savings accounts combined. It’s a good thing I’m starting a new job soon.
(To be fair, most of what I owe on my credit card is expenses I incurred when interviewing at Apple, which hopefully they will soon reimburse me for.)
Sun today introduced new rack-mounted servers. Nothing new here, except that they use Intel Pentium chips and run Linux (you can also get them with Solaris x86).
A Slashdot reader made this comment, which I think sums up one possible interpretation very well:
I hope Sun notices the smoldering carcass of Silicon Graphics on the side of the road they are now traveling down.
Personally, I’m willing to give Sun the benefit of the doubt. SGI had managed to lose the high-end graphics/server market, had let the performance of their MIPS chips lag, and they were not only switching to x86 but trying break into a new market. Also, they got into bed with Microsoft, which in retrospect was a very bad idea. If Sun starts shipping Windows 2003 Server with these new Sun Fires instead of Linux, we’ll know it’s time to start selling Sun stock.
I suspect Sun’s motivation here is to keep their existing customers from buying cheaper Linux/x86 servers from Dell or IBM. By letting them purchase those same cheap x86 servers from Sun, they keep those customers from looking elsewhere when they need to buy the big, expensive, big iron servers that Sun’s real profit margin comes from. If that’s what Sun’s aiming at, I think it makes sense. On the other hand, if Sun sees Dell, et al, making piles of money selling cheap rack-mounted x86 hardware and wants a piece of it, they’re doomed.
I’ve been remembering lately something Brian said about five years ago: that within five years, all of the commercial Unix vendors would be shipping Linux instead of their proprietary operating systems, with the possible exception of Sun and Solaris. At the time, I thought he was nuts. I mean, sure, Linux was making some inroads with beige-box PC hardware, but I couldn’t imagine any of the big workstation and server companies giving up their proprietary OSes. But have you seen many new systems running HP-UX recently? IRIX? AIX? Tru64? UnixWare? BSD/OS? I didn’t think so.
Three hours, four record stores, two busses and one traffic ticket later, I’ve got it.
In installing some extensions to Mozilla Firebird, I’ve been given a perfect example of why buttons in dialog boxes should always be verbs:
Link Toolbar: “Do you wish to install Link Toolbar to you (sic) profile? This will mean it does not need reinstalling when you update your browser. (Click cancel if you want Link Toolbar installing to the main browser directory)”
Popup ALT Attribute: “Do you want this package to be installed for all users? (Administrator permissions required)”
Both dialogs displayed “OK” and “Cancel” buttons, and both were asking the exact same question (did I want the extension installed to my user profile or the application directory). The answers, however, were different. Suffice it to say, I installed at least one of them to the wrong place.
Mozilla Firebird 0.6 was released today. One of the new features is an official Mac OS X version (there have been unofficial builds of Phoenix floating around for a while). The release notes promise that “it’s still quite rough around the edges,” and this is definitely true. So I will avoid commenting on problems or glitches in the Mac OS X version for another few releases (and I will continue to use Safari and/or Camino).
One thing amuses me, though: The context menu for the Firebird toolbar icons give you an option to customize the toolbars, with a dialog very similar to Mac OS X’s native toolbar support (e.g., Cocoa’s NSToolbar). In fact, Firebird even goes to some trouble to simulate a sheet. Except on Mac OS X, where the toolbar customization window appears just like any other document window, complete with title bar. Mac OS X, of course, is the only OS that has native sheet support, and what no doubt inspired the dialog’s appearance on other platforms. I find this a little ironic.
Well, my signed offer letter is now sitting in a FedEx drop box, so I guess my mind is pretty much made up: on June 23, I will begin employment at Apple Computer, Inc. I’ll be working for the same “sooper-s3kr1t” group as Eric. I guess this makes him two for three.
I’m looking forward to moving back to the Bay Area, although I’ll miss St. Louis, and I still regret that in nine months I was never able to find full-time employment here as a software developer. It’s more than a little depressing.
According to Rodents of the World, by David Alderton, “young capybaras are miniatures of their parents, able to follow their mother and graze grass almost as soon as they are born.” (p. 74) So I’m thinking it’d be fun to give someone an infant capybara and tell them “Here, I got you this guinea pig as a pet.”
Although the capybara weighs only three pounds at birth, they are the largest living species of rodent, and an adult weighs over 150 pounds. Imagine your victim’s surprise when their “guinea pig” grows and grows and grows, to over four feet in length!
My laptop is broken again. Yes, I dropped it. I guess technically, since I was ten feet away at the time, it fell. But I was the one who left it sitting so precariously, so I take full responsibility.
It landed on its “back”, and the AC adapter’s plug bore the brunt of the impact, which it kindly transferred to the laptop’s power socket, which is now only barely connected to the motherboard (that 12″ PowerBook, with the power socket on the side, is looking better every day). The laptop is mostly intact and works fine, except that it only intermittently charges. From experience, I know that trying to power it in this condition leads to Bad Things. Unfortunately, not powering it at all will make it rather difficult to use the computer for many more hours.
I’ll get out my screwdriver and open ‘er up to ascertain the damage, but I expect that the system board needs to be replaced. From experience, I know this will cost me $968, plus tax. At this point, I doubt it’s worth it. One option is to get an external battery charger and just forget about the built-in one, although that’s not cheap either. Also a little annoying, since you can no longer run the laptop off of AC power.
Eric’s PowerBook screen cracked recently, and someone offered to sell him cheaply an intact screen from a dead PowerBook of the same model. I don’t suppose anyone out there has an otherwise-dead Dell Inspiron 4000 with an undamaged system board they’d be willing to sell me?
Since I released NCIDpop 0.9 in January, I’ve received a number of emails from people who’ve had difficulty patching ncidd to work with NCIDpop. This turned out to be especially complicated due to the fact that my patch didn’t compile on Linux (oops). Thanks to everyone who wrote to me, and especially those who sent me Linux-compatible versions of the patch; I apologize for never putting them online.
Anyway, I finally got around to rewriting NCIDpop’s network layer to not need a patched server. You can now use NCIDpop with a stock ncidd, as available directly from the NCID Web page.
Update (May 17): The NCID Web page is back up, now hosted at SourceForge.
Laura and I went to the St. Louis Zoo this afternoon, and we sketched some of the animals. For no good reason better than that I finally have an excuse to use the scanner that Laura’s had sitting in a box for four years, here are the drawings that I made:
See also Laura’s drawings, which are mostly the same animals, except that she has a puma instead of a leopard, and an anteater instead of a giant hamster.
