It’s coming! 6 days to go until the Tour starts. All the focus (particularly on OLN is on Lance Armstrong’s attempt for a 6th tour win. It looks like he’s still strong, but I wonder what the team is like this year. Seems USPS is dropping it’s primary sponsorship of the team, and they’ve lost Roberto Heras (one of their big climbers) to another team. I think it’ll be a good tour to watch this year.
On the move
In a few weeks, we’ll be moving to a new place. A bigger place, with more space for our Stuff. We’re not moving far. In fact we’re just moving to the other side of the building we’re in now, to a 2 bedroom apartment. The extra space will be very nice indeed, as we’re about bursting to the seams in our current place.
Now I have to collect a bunch of boxes to pack stuff up into, see about finding some mover guys to haul my stuff from one end of the building to the other, do the address changes and get utilities taken care of.
Fun fun fun.
OpenOffice doesn’t like my spreadsheets
Finally got my Win2k box to map my Fedora box as a network drive and transferred over a bunch of stuff. First thing I discovered is that my Excel spreadsheets apparently use a bunch of functions that aren’t implemented or have slightly different implementations by OpenOffice’s spreadsheet. There are a bunch of 502 and 504 errors that I’ll have to try to figure out how to fix. Already the transition to the Fedora desktop isn’t quite as seamless or painless as I hoped. Still, it could be worse.
Houseboat Hooligans: Chumming for Clowns!
There we were, enjoying another sunny day on the water floating around on the houseboat.
Somebody produced a bag of balloons from somewhere, which we proceeded to blow up. I think they might have been water balloons or something. So there are a few balloons floating around the inside cabin. We start off to our next destination, and then Joe starts throwing balloons out the window.
“Joe, what the heck are you doing?!” we ask.
“I’m chumming for clowns!” came his reply.
Taking Fedora Core 2 for a spin
The new Windows XP desktop system the computer guys rolled out at work just didn’t fit the way I work, so I decided to install Fedora on the box instead (2.4 GHz Dell Optiplex GX270). Too many constraints on their desktop model, including a 30 MB limit on your login profile which apparently includes all your data files as well. Heck, my stored mail alone takes up more than 30 MB.
Like Fedora Core 1, Core 2 was a pretty easy install, and the 2.6 linux kernel seems much peppier than 2.4. Compiling GCC 3.4 took hardly any time at all. The only glitch I ran into was the BIOS version on the computer caused the XOrg server problems with detecting the proper graphics card settings, leaving the display stuck at 640×480.
Argh. Spend a couple of hours trying to troubleshoot the X server and figure out how to make it do different screen resolutions. Google search yielded several promising posts and web pages that said the GX270 BIOS version A03 was the source of the problem and and upgrade to the latest version would fix it.
Download the latest BIOS version (A04) from Dell and copied it to a floppy. Uh oh, the BIOS flashing program only runs under Windows.
No problem, I’ll just make a DOS boot disk, boot off the floppy and run the flasher from the disk.
Well, then I discover that you can’t make bootable floppies with Win2K (the only other Windows machine I had around).
Crap. Stoopid Windows. I guess MS has decided nobody needs to boot off floppy disk anymore.
Stumble around trying to come up with a way to get around this. Finally I remember that I have a Win2K CD! But that means I have to wipe out the FC2 that I just installed. Well, nothing else to do so I break down, install Win2K just to flash the BIOS, then reinstall FC2. PITA.
But finally, I have a working, stable (at least until I start hacking at it) installation of Fedora. And so far I like what I see. Working on getting Apache properly configured and migrating stuff over from my old Sparc20. I think I’ll even try using it to replace my Win2K box for a while and see how it goes with OpenOffice.
This is going to be fun…:)