Axodys

Last night Dateline had a look at the dangers of driver multi-tasking. I think they raised a valid point in that drivers doing other things than driving like (dialing a cellphone or changing cds) are much more likely to have accidents. Watching various people driving around the hazard simulation course up while attempting to accomplish assigned tasks was pretty scary. But the thing I didn’t like about the segment was that they didn’t really demonstrate that average drivers can handle unexpected situations even when they aren’t distracted. I have a feeling that most of the drivers would have had problems with the course even if they weren’t distracted.

I managed to get WindowMaker installed today after tweaking a few things. Next up: Gimp.

Team III lost to U-Hi III by six points tonight. We got down by as much as 15, but closed it up to get within three in the fourth quarter. Unfortunately we missed several three points attempts and weren’t able to tie it up. I think I’m going to try a slightly different approach for our next game.

I finally figured out where I was running astray in my efforts to install Xfree86 4.1 under MacOS X last week. It turns out that there is an additional file called Xquartz.tgz that I had failed to download. Once I downloaded it and ran the Xinstall.sh script again it ran like a charm. Now I just need to track down a decent window manager and install GIMP.

Looks like darwinfo.org has a nice listing of X Windows ports and I think Fink supports a few as well. Time to do a little exploring later.

Lots of family stuff yesterday. My dad’s mom’s side of the family had a little reunion at Comstock Park just up the hill. I also got to see talk to my cousin Brian for the first time in a couple years. It was nice to catch up with him and get his current email address. He’s also working on starting up his own company, 4-th Realm. I’m really interested in hearing how that process goes for him.

After the reunion Mary and I went out to my mom’s to visit and also to show my sister Kristen one of the new iBook’s. We ended up watching part of the video I made of her graduation and helping with a little landscaping as well.

Now it’s time for bed. I’ve got a fairly important meeting in the morning and I need to be ready for it.

I’m finally back home at our apartment after a week of house/dog-sitting up at Mary’s parent’s place. And I really need to clean my desk.

It’s literally buried in papers, envelopes, CD cases, a Roxio box, a couple hats, and various other detritus. But hey, there was room for my PowerBook so why worry about it now. There’s no basketball going on tomorrow though, so there should be plenty of time to do some cleaning/arranging.

Mary’s supposed to be getting here herself anytime. In fact I think she’s running a bit late. That could put a kink in our plans to go to Atlantis (Flash needed) tonight.

I’m playing on one of the two new iBooks we recently purchased for a couple department heads here at work. They’re cute and seem pretty rugged. Right now I’m running in MacOS X, since it came pre-installed and I’m more MacOS X oriented these days. It feels pretty comparable speed wise to my upgraded Lombard, although with 128 MB it only has half as much RAM as I’ve got installed.

I have a feeling that Apple is going to sell a ton of these.

There’s a new site in town for MacOS X and Darwin users interested in getting X Windows running on their computers: XDarwin.org. There’s not a whole lot of information there yet, but it sounds like it will be the definite source of information for running XFree86 under Darwin and MacOS X.

In related news: Fink didn’t come through for me getting the XFree86 packages installed. It quit over an hour into the install process with compile errors. Maybe I should wait until I can find some kind of binary install.

I’m in the process of installing Xfree86 4.1 under MacOS X. Fink is handling everything which is pretty cool. Hopefully there won’t be any glitches along the way. Unfortunately it’s taking a long time just to download everything, so it’s going to be a while before the build process starts.

Once I get X working, I’ll probably give the GIMP a go. Check out macgimp.com for the latest info on getting it up and running under MacOS X.

MacOS X Zone has pointed out two articles on Stepwise.com that are quite timely to me considering I was messing around with the gd graphics library installation and also trying to get sendmail working in the last week or so:

• Email Servers and Mac OS X
• Building GD on Mac OS X.x

The Ripley Wearable Computer is a pretty nifty looking contraption. There’s also an article over at linuxdevices.com. [via Doc Searls]