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.