Axodys

Crud, I just realized that I never bothered to post an entry yesterday. That’s no good. I guess I got too wrapped up in other things.

One thing I did do yesterday was to set up another Greymatter weblog for local use, specifically for the purpose of tracking the work I do on our servers in the building. This will be the first time I’ve tried using a weblog for work related purposes and I think it’s going to work very well.

Last night Mary and I gave my sister Kristen her big graduation present. Hopefully it will help everyone in our family keep in touch with her while she’s off at school this fall. At least Phoenix is only a few hours away by plane these days.

MacOS X tip: Receiving Daily System Reports in Mail.app I’m going to have to try this when I get back to my computer.

It’s been a busy weekend away from computers for the most part, but I’m finally starting to catch up on some of my online reading.

The last two movies that Mary and I have gone to are What’s The Worst That Can Happen? and Evolution. Both ended up being quite funny and entertaining and as an added bonus WTWTCH? featured a couple Macs running MacOS X.

I still haven’t seen Parl Harbor or the Mummy Returns, movies that I was at least initially fairly exited to see. There should be plenty of time to watch some movies later in the week though as I’m done with basketball for the week after tomorrow.
Ferris ended up winning Mt. Spokane’s summer basketball tournament with a convincing victory over Mead, the team that had ousted them in last weekend’s tournament. That was pretty sweet and it allowed me to add a new basketball t-shirt to my wardrobe which is always a good thing.

Graduation - Graduation Party - Home - Basketball Game - Mary’s Parent’s House - Basketball Game - Home - Mary’s Parent’s House (house sitting all next week). The last 24 hours have been kind of busy. No time for the web at all really.

I went to CompUSSR today to buy a couple MiniDV tapes so that I can record Kristen’s graduation a few short hours from now. As I stood in line waiting to make my purchase, my gaze fell upon the shelves with all the different computer cases for customers looking to put together their own systems. “I’ve never built my own computer,” I thought to myself. “I should really do that some time.”

Then I pondered which operating system I would choose. “Probably, BSD… definitely not MS anything…”

“Hmm… Why do I need a new computer again?”
The line moved forward and I noticed that the customer service counter was manned (or more acurately geeked) by that same skinny, awkward looking young salesman that had let me stand dumbly in front of an unlocked display case for ten minutes before revealing with an air of bemused superiority that I could in fact reach the MiniDV tapes I was looking to purchase that day without his help. I was annoyed then, but now as I watched him smugly engage a pair of customers with wishy-washy sales speak, I knew that I was the superior one this day. I had found my tapes again in mere minutes this time around; he was still stuck here in his red polo shirt and black dockers handling the unwashed computing masses.

I paid, flashed my shiny new receipt at the poor guy guarding the entranceway, and strolled out into the warm sunshine of Spokane in June.

I’m tired, but I want to stay up long enough to watch Kevin razz Jay about last night’s game. Hopefully he’ll get a few more chances. Go Sixers!

Tomorrow at 5 PM Pacific my sister will be graduating from high school at long last. It’s hard to believe that this day has finally arrived. Even harder to believe, exactly ten years ago I was doing the same thing.

Compiling PHP with jpeg and png graphics support hasn’t happened for me yet, but I’m getting closer. I keep getting distracted by interesting things like the gnu-darwin project.

I also finally got around to fully purging Linux from my PowerBook; now that I’m focusing on OS X it didn’t make much sense to waste 3GB on something I haven’t logged into for months. I deleted the two Linux partitions (root and swap) and then recreated them as two HFS+ partitions, Zoom and Swap respectively. Then I used the instructions in this article I found at ResExcellence to move my MacOS X swap file over to its new home in the Swap partition. Everything seems to be working as planned so far. I haven’t attempted to stress test my system yet, but I’m going to give it a go shortly.

I started going through a php tutorial on creating your own voting polls and discovered along the way that my current installation of PHP wasn’t compiled with support for the gd graphics library. I set to work searching around the web for MacOS X packages that contained the gd library, zlib, and libpng and stumbled upon this helpful site with precompiled tarballs of just about everything I was looking for. I’m going to wait to recompile PHP until after I get home from work, but I’ll report back here with the outcome.

During my search I also discovered the Fink package manager project for Darwin/MacOS X. It looks interesting, and while I successfully installed it (I think), I didn’t succeed in downloading anything during the initial install run because the site it attempted to access was busy. I’ll probably play with it more later as well.

Charming Python:† Revisiting XML tools for Python

Python 101 (part 1): Snake EyesIn the consciously-elitist world of software engineering, a developer with a few years of Python under his belt gets the best cubicle, the prettiest girl and the respect of his neighbours; people move out of the way when he strides down the hall, and colleagues turn to him for creative and elegant solutions to the problems they encounter. Walk into a job interview and mention Python when reciting your qualifications; you’ll immediately see a glint of recognition in the interviewer’s eyes, an awareness that, in the hierarchy of software developers, you’re one of the top guns.

Python 101 (part 2): If Wishes Were Pythons

Ferris Team III managed to pull out a come from behind 54 - 53 victory over rival LC III after getting down by as many as 13 points in the third quarter. It wasn’t a pretty game, but the outcome was much more satisfying than the last time around. Taking the time to prepare my line ups this afternoon made a big difference in getting the right players on the court for the end of the game.

Now I get to take a break from high school summer basketball for a few days.