I just realized that if I don’t post in the next 75 minutes or so, It’ll be a whole week since my last post. Whoops. Just been so busy lately. I’m behind on everything. Typical of this time of the year I suppose.
I was looking for something tonight I remembered seeing in a comment on my blog. While looking for it, I found some new comments I hadn’t read yet. I’ve really got to get around to adding date/timestamps to comments, and to setting up something to notify me when I get new comments. I know there’s a plugin for notifications. Just need some time.
Athough I don’t blog much here about Microsoft development, the recent publications of the Office XML Schemas is definately worthy of note, since I’ve spent most of the last couple of years at my day job working on systems to produce Excel (and Word) documents from XML data. I’ll be blogging about this more soon.
In fact, I’ve got a number of things I want to write about; I’m going to try to get on them before problems occur. To any regular readers I may have (anyone? Beuller?), sorry for the silence lately. I hope to do a little writing tommorow, since the Eagles don’t play until Monday Night (Go BIRDS!), but I’m also planning to watch Back to the Future II with my son. We just watched Part I last weekend, his first time. It’s always been one of my favorite trilogies, and he loved it. If I had a flux capacitor and 1.21 Gigawatts to burn, you can bet I’d be catching up on my sleep.
Never enough time.
Simon Willison recently wrote about Knoppix. Knoppix is a complete Linux distribution on a single, bootable CD. After reading Simon’s account, I’ve been meaning to give it a whirl. Tonight I did. And am… this entry is being blogged to you from Knoppix 3.3.
I’m very impressed. Simon’s review was right on the money… it works great, right out of the box. Autodetects everything. Audio, video, USB keyboard & mouse, configured the network connection; beautiful. I love it when something Just Works™.
Since I normally run Windows 2000 on this pc, my drive contains a single NTFS partition. Knoppix has mounted it read-only. If it were FAT, I could write to it, even creating a swap partition within a file in the FAT filesystem. I’ve been planning to re-install this machine from scratch for a while; when I do you can be sure I’ll be leaving some room for (at a minimum) a nice Linux swap partition (right now, I’m running with 256K ram and no swap… nicely!). Of course, the beautiful thing here is that I’m running a totally useful Linux desktop without repartitioning my hard drive. For that matter, without any setup whatsoever. If Linux is ever to make a presence on the desktop, this is how it will happen… with a distribution that’s even easier to use that Windows.
So far, my only complaint is that it doesn’t seem to include tcsh. I really need to break down and learn to use bash, I suppose, but I’ve been using tcsh ever since college and old habbits are hard to break.
Behold, the power of XSLT: Cleaning up iTunes plist XML. This is another example of why data should be in XML (even a lousy XML format like Apple’s plist).
If you read the word Greensheet in the title and knew I meant a television listing, you probably live(d) in Tidewater, VA (the Norfolk/Virginia Beach/Chesapeake/… area, a.k.a. Hampton Roads), where I grew up. For as long as I can remember, the local paper back home has included the weekly television listings in the Saturday newspaper, in a separate section printed on green paper. I’m not sure if they ever titled it “the greensheet,” but that’s what we always called it.
But I digress. Zap2it is an online television listing service that gets its programming information from the same source as TiVo (via bbum’s rants, code & references). Handy for TiVo owners; while TiVo’s search features are nice, browsing schedules can be a bit of a pain.
Terra Soft Solutions, creators of Yellow Dog Linux, have an incredibly cool way to fill an empty 5.25″ drive bay in your desktop pc. With a PowerPC. Meet the Briq.
Pricey, but boy oh boy do I want one. With Cygwin’s XFree86 implementation running an X server under windows, I’d never even need a display connected directly too it.
They are a bit pricey… I’d love to see a cheaper version, perhaps an X86-based box. Hmm, maybe using something like this.
I’ve had a wicked case of creator’s block for the last week or so. It’s not the same as writer’s block; I know what I want to write, and it affects me writing code as well as prose. I just can’t get it out of my head and onto paper (or into type). I’ve had a half dozen blog entries rattling around in my head for the past week, I’m pretty sure I’ve figured out a solution to a coding issue I’ve been banging my head against for a week, and I’ve got aanother project I haven’t touched in a week. I just can’t get any of it out of my head and into the computer.
It’s a bit like procratination, as I just can’t seem to get started; but it not the same- I want to get started. If I do get started, I just can’t concentrate. As soon as I do, I suddenly get sidetracked by questions, ideas, or problems I hadn’t considered before. They often aren’t even important, but I’ll end up funnelling all my time and focus into them.
I think it has something to do with how much time an idea or problem spends in my head. I’m normally a great subliminal thinker… if I can’t figure out something (like a coding problem) in a short period of time, my best bet is to ignore it. My subconcious mind will work it out, and the answer will occur to me. I then have no problem coding it. But if the process takes to long, the rules seem to change. The longer it takes to figure something out, the harder it seems to be to implement once I’ve worked it out. I just can’t focus.
It’s similar with writing prose. I usualy start with an outline which I’ve worked out in my head. As I write, I flesh out detail and evolve the idea into a completed thought. But if the outline sits too long before I try to write about it, I have trouble figuring out the detail, or I get sidetracked by the details themselves. This is especially true for blogging. If I have an idea for an entry, but I save it to blog later, it’s always harder to get started writing it “later”. That’s one reason I haven’t written anything all week… too many ideas I’ve held onto for too long, and I can’t get started.
That’s also why I’m posting this now. I was thinking about some topics I’d like to blog, and the fact that I haven’t posted much at all for a week. I came to the recognition of how I work (or don’t… the notion of creator’s block) and decided I’d better write it down before it sits too long. I just hope this will help me to get unstuck on some other things.
Home sweet home, broadband sweet broadband. I’m home, but I’m a bit behind on email, blog reading, blog entries, etc. As is obvious, I didn’t make it to Panera Bread Co. over the weekend. I’ll be visiting family again the week after Christmas, and intend to check it out then. For now, I’ll be trying to get caught up over the next couple of days.