Aug 2003
Thu, 28 Aug 2003
US Republican Party Outsources Fundraising to India
The Inquirer says:
We do hope and trust here at the INQUIRER that the irony of underpaid people in Harayana helping robots to call possibly out of work Americans because of a widespread policy of corporate outsourcing is not lost on our readers.
I, for one, am endorsing Charlie Crystle for US Senate in 2004. I'm about as apolitical as you can get, and I'm not even sure if I can vote for Charlie, but I find most of his writing resonates with me and the fact that he's a Washington outsider and admits to having worked as a musician, waiter, and software executive fascinating.
Charlie clearly gets the technology aspect of evolving political campaigns as he managed to help me discover him by linking to my blog. I'm curious as to what caused him to make the link in the first place, but regardless, I'm glad to know there's somebody running for office who looks better than this.
Posted at: 23:13 | permalink
Sat, 23 Aug 2003
Redhat Severn Beta On Emachines M5310
Redhat released the Severn Beta (9.0.93) about a month ago and I started looking at it last night to see how well it was going to solve some of my laptop woes, most of which stem from the disjointed ACPI support in linux.
The install is reaching a very mature stage, I didn't really have any issues there.
After install, as with Mandrake 9.1, I had to edit the XF86Config for my widescreen monitor which runs at 1280x800. However, I no longer needed to disable the acceleration for the ATI Radeon IGP. Acceleration appears to work across the board.
Unfortunately, ACPI still appears to be very broken. Redhat makes some commentary on the ACPI detection at install time in their beta doc, but it remains a black art as far as I can tell. My box came up with the ACPI daemon installed, but there didn't appear to be any acpi=on line in the grub.conf. In addition, the gnome and KDE batt-stat applets were in various stages of disrepair. The KDE one ran, but didn't see the battery and gave an interesting message saying that ACPI was partially installed. The gnome applet crashed on load, and produced the same results on successive attempts. The lack of ACPI support, at least without a kernel rebuild, means that the machine runs full tilt (read hot) with the fan going, which in turn means that battery life is necessarily short ~ 1 hour.
The new boot graphical boot process is nice-looking, but there must be some technical hurdles to be overcome in the boot. The machine boots into grub with graphics, then goes into text mode for a few seconds, then switches to the graphical boot mode, then goes back into text mode for the login prompt, then switches back into graphical mode as it enters runlevel 5. It would be nice if the boot was unified, more like the mandrake one.
Right now, I've got my USB card reader and PCMCIA orinoco wireless card working. I haven't tried the firewire port but the ohci1394 driver loaded without complaint.
The system does appear to be very stable and the desktop fit and finish is reaching near-Teutonic levels of quality. I'm still hoping for the day when ACPI works fully.
Posted at: 10:02 | permalink
Fri, 22 Aug 2003
Ernie Ball Drops Microsoft
Microsoft gets a taste of it's own FUD campaigns. This has to worry the folks in Redmond.
Posted at: 21:33 | permalink
The End Of The Cam As We Know It
Variable valve timing and lift was just a stepping stone on the road to the complete replacement of mechanical valve systems in internal combustion engines with electronic valve actuating systems.
Posted at: 07:01 | permalink
Tue, 19 Aug 2003
Triumph Introduces 2300 cc Motorcycle
British bike-maker Triumph became the first manufacturer to introduce a 2300 cc motorcycle. The new bike has 140 hp and 147 lb ft of torque. I'm not normally wowed by sheer displacement (my bike's a 650), but maybe cruisers aren't so bad after all?
Posted at: 06:26 | permalink
Mon, 18 Aug 2003
Former Software Execs Slugging Coffee At Starbucks
From the Pittsburgh Post Gazzette:
Now he vacillates between praising the Starbucks job -- it offers health insurance and a chance to meet people who might be a link to another career -- and voicing a certain queasiness, not unlike a ballet dancer forced to dance for tips in a strip joint.
I feel very lucky to have a great job in technology - or any job for that matter.
Posted at: 05:47 | permalink
Sun, 17 Aug 2003
Pat Metheny Trio At Manchester Craftsmen's Guild
Pat Metheny Trio is playing Manchester Craftsmen's Guild in Pittsburgh on October 10, 11, 12. I'll finally get to see Antonio Sanchez live. I've seen Pat dozens of times, but I've been dying to catch his new drummer. Cool.
Posted at: 23:15 | permalink
Motorcycle Safety Program Yields License
I finished the last of the four sessions at the motorcycle safety foundation class today. The last hour was a test which I passed resulting in my learner's permit being promoted to a full Class M license. Now I can carry passengers and ride at night legally. Woo Hoo!
Posted at: 01:14 | permalink
Abandoning Blog Abandonment
I've come to the conlusion that my recent foray into alternative blog systems was going to eat my life and went back to using movable type. I am going to simplify the whole thing significantly but not tonight.
Posted at: 01:10 | permalink
