May 2004
Sun, 30 May 2004
PC World Reviews Cobind Desktop 0.1 alpha
Matthew Newton, who writes the Free Agent column for PC World, has reviewed Cobind Desktop 0.1 alpha. The more interesting parts of his review include the following:
...the duct tape holding it together shows.
Given the praise heaped on perl for being the duct tape of the internet, I'm flattered.
It's pointless to go into greater detail given that this is version 0.1, and clearly much work remains to be done. For example, one project the Cobind team is taking on is the creation of a friendly GUI for Yum, which Cobind also uses for package fetching. What's obvious at this early stage is that Cobind is a very interesting work in progress. I'll be keeping an eye on it.
Yep, and that'll be coming out real soon now, once we come to some conclusion with Seth Vidal as to whether the code can be integrated into the yum head branch without incurring a cranial infarction.
Cobind also opened my eyes to the XFCE desktop.
Excellent! We've seen a lot of evidence that we've helped to spread the word that XFCE deserves a rightful place alongside desktop heavyweights such as GNOME and KDE. FC2 confirmed that by including XFCE in the GDM menu choices. Kudos to the XFCE team!
Posted at: 23:47 | permalink
I'm Speaking at CMU This Week
Should anyone be so inclined to destroy a perfectly good saturday, we'll be speaking to the Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group at Carnegie Mellon University on Saturday, June 5. See the WPLUG site for more information.
Posted at: 23:21 | permalink
Sun, 23 May 2004
Distrowatch Comments On Getting Distrowatched
Check out the math.
The number of visitors on DistroWatch has now gone well past the 50,000-per-day mark, and while this is nowhere near Slashdot or other major sites, we are dealing with files of substantial sizes. If only 1% of those 50,000 people decide to download your 650MB ISO image, they will consume 325GB of your bandwidth! And if you offer 3 ISO images and 10% of the visitors want them, the bandwidth consumption goes up, theoretically speaking, to 10.5TB!
Posted at: 16:33 | permalink
In Memoriam: Peg Smith 1910-2004
My grandmother passed away quietly in her sleep on May 12, 2004. Grandma was a fiercely independent woman. She was the driver of the family, my granddad never did learn to drive. She drove to Florida every year by herself until she was 80. I will be forever grateful to her for teaching me to read before I went to kindergarten. I was the first of the latchkey generation and grandma essentially raised me from the time I was very young. This meant that in addition to learning to read at a very young age, I learned to eat my vegetables and clean my plate depression-era style. She had seen the entire 48 states many times over by the time she was retired. All that from someone with an 8th grade education. But we wouldn't let education stand in our way, would we?
Godspeed Grandma.
Posted at: 16:24 | permalink
Mon, 10 May 2004
informIT Covers Cobind Desktop
Bill Ball, coauthor of Fedora Unleashed, mentions Cobind Desktop on the informIT Linux Weblog.
Posted at: 22:42 | permalink
Mon, 03 May 2004
Back From Boston
I got back from Boston last night. Set a new record for my Boston to Pittsburgh run, actually Portsmouth to Pittsburgh, which is about 50 miles longer. I normally do it in about 10 hours, this time it was 9. I always drive faster when I'm alone. Go figure.
I met William Bardwell when I interviewed at Platinum Technology in January of 1997. One of the interviewers was out of the office and so William was substituted at the last minute. We spent most of the interview talking about his experience at CMU and Pittsburgh, as I recall.
Nobody would have believed it then, but we would go on to become great friends, working long hours in that office along Mall Road in Burlington, MA, dining on ethnic food late in the evenings, and returning to work late into the night. It was the height of the dotcom craze and we were excited to be creating a new CMS product called Raveler. It's difficult to remember that in 1997 the acronym "CMS" didn't exist and content management was a nascent market.
If you had told me that William was going to be married in 7 years, well, I guess 7 years is a long time. Pictures from Carrie and William's wedding are here. Oh, and don't ask what the Triumph Speed Four has to do with the wedding. The answer is nothing. It was parked in Canal Park and I just had to take it's picture since it was so sleek all in black. The wedding was a nice affair held in the courtyard at Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center. I sat with my old friend Tony Hinxman and his wife Christine. It was good to see them again after so many years.
We were seated with several of William's friends from Curl. They were all quite funny, young, still not having been beaten down by life. I find that youthfulness refreshing, and yet it makes me feel so damned old! You may remember Curl, they've been around since 1998 with quite a team behind them:
Curl Corporation was founded in February, 1998. The company was established to extend and commercialize the results of a three-year, five million dollar US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded research project conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The founders of Curl Corporation were twelve members of the MIT community, with a technical team led by Stephen A. Ward, an internationally recognized computer scientist; the late Michael L. Dertouzos, Former Director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science; and Timothy Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and Director of the W3C.
The wedding included a nice trio - guitar, bass, drums playing jazz for the reception. These kids were layin down a wicked groove playing standards. Very mature sound for their age. They didn't look a day over 20. Very dark and swingin. I wish I had gotten their names. It reminded me of my audition at Berklee when I was in high school - so many killer jazz players in Boston.
On another note, the Cobind press coverage continues with this blurb in Computerworld.
Oh, and mark your calendars (June 5, 2004) - Bryan and I will begin our Linux User Group world tour right here in Pittsburgh with our presentation to the Western PA Linux Users Group at CMU. Be there and you'll get to see what we've got cookin in the labs and maybe you'll be lucky enough to win some Cobind swag. Thanks to Beth Lynn for creating this opportunity for us.
Posted at: 23:57 | permalink
