malvasia bianca

So I was just thinking that I would avoid Dell and get a Sun Ultra 20 and a Powerbook, when along comes this post; I guess I’m on to something. (Part of the reason for my Powerbook craving is that all of the cool people at Sun seem to have one, including employee #1.)

Our laptop took an unfortunate tumble the other day; it turns out that it’s not the best idea to pick up a laptop from a high shelf while carrying a dog in the other arm. Most of the laptop survived the journey, but the CD drive tray snapped in half; oops. So I went to […]

I added a stylesheet to dbcdb; here is an example of what it currently looks like. Move your mouse over a link without clicking on it and notice the a:hover effect. Most of the issues involved formatting definition lists properly; this page was helpful. I did have to modify my HTML, though; before, for compound […]

I finally got around to plugging the digital camera I bought before going on vacation into my computer. It’s only been just over two months since we got back; to put this in context, right before going on vaction we developed a roll of film that contained pictures from not only Halloween 2004 but also […]

I was planning to make dbcdb look beautiful (well, something other than butt-ugly) this weekend, but reality intervened in the form of books that I’ve read that didn’t fit into my existing setup. And keeping it up-to-date with respect to my current reading list is my current highest priority, so I spent a couple of […]

This blog is remarkable. Alas, its only feed is in Atom, which Gnus doesn’t understand. Hopefully in half a year or so I’ll know enough to be able to write my own feed reader in Ruby.

This page looks the same as it did last week, but it’s being generated using Java. Whee. (And I hope it will look a little different by the end of the weekend.) I didn’t spend too much time programming: my time was mostly spent managing and understanding infrastructure. There’s now an acceptance test which runs […]

I’ve subscribed to my first podcasts: Agile Toolkit and The Sound of Vision. It really is nice that I can enter the URL for an RSS feed into iTunes and it will go and fetch new shows for me. And the iPod is definitely the right place for this sort of thing: if the podcasts […]

I’ve implemented my first story; the results can be seen at The Arcades Project. (Of course, if things go as planned, then the appearance of that page will drastically change over coming months!) I was pretty good about writing an acceptance test first. Which meant that I got to install Apache locally on my laptop, […]

I wish that I knew more about certain aspects of modern computer technology, espcially information-management aspects of technology. Examples of things that I wish I knew more about: Java. Ant. Eclipse, especially its automated refactoring tools. How to write a web page that doesn’t look like it was written a decade ago. Web pages that […]

I spent a little more time playing around with doing the upgrade piecemeal; it turned out that, while there were some pleasant groups of packages that came together in a clump of 10-20, most packages either were happy to be upgraded individually or were part of a huge clump that required a few hundred packages […]

As threatened after my last OS upgrade, I’m upgrading to FC4 relatively soon after its release. This time, the release notes are very clear about the easiest way to upgrade: install a single RPM (which basically tells yum to look for FC4 packages instead of FC3 packages), and then do yum upgrade. I’m actually not […]

The A’s are continuing to do pleasantly well: they haven’t gone on a huge win streak or anything, but they’re winning almost every series these days. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by Bobby Crosby’s return; call me a pessimist, but even though he was rookie of the year last year, he only batted .239 last […]

My overheating theory sounded plausible, but it isn’t holding up too well: I’ve seen more memory complaints at boot, including complaints when the computer was turned on for the first time in the day. For a while, I hoped that only one of the DIMMs was problematic, but that theory isn’t holding up too well, […]

I was happily using my computer yesterday when it froze. I waited for a few minutes (thinking “Linux isn’t supposed to do this – at the worst, X could crash, but why would everything freeze?”), and then rebooted it. At this point, things got a little scary: it complained right at the start about a […]

For a while, I’ve been thinking of changing my use of a couple of pieces of software: Galeon, the web browser that I use, and XEmacs, which I basically use for everything other than web browsing. (It has a web browser, too, but it’s less than optimal.) These are, of course, two rather different situations. […]

WordPress, the blog software that I used, has gone through some changes recently, so I thought that I’d upgrade it yesterday. At first, I thought everything went well, so I started to write a post about how remarkably well designed the upgrade process was. Unfortunately, when I went to edit that post in progress, it […]

I now have FC3 installed on my home and both work computers. So I spent the morning today upgrading packages on one of my work computers. It took forever, though, because the web proxy that I have to go through at work kept on corrupting data, as far as I can tell. Once I found […]

It turns out that, if you poke around enough at the boot: prompt, you get told about an option for where to find the images to upgrade from. So, a couple of hours of installation later and a couple of hours more of package upgrades later, here I am. Yay. No big differences are yet […]

I was hoping that I’d be using Fedora Core 3 the next time I wrote an entry here, but ’twas not to be: I can’t get the damn CD’s written. I’ve eliminated all variables, using two different CD writers, two different CD readers, two different sources of blank CDs, two different downloads of the images […]