Ever Held a Gun to a Bunny?

You know I have friends and family on fotoSomething.com (wordpress doesn’t allow the publishing of this site’s domain name), so I sometimes check these postings out. Every once in a while I stumble upon photos that impress me in one way or another, such as this one,

Stephanía Gutmann, my Friend the Mooch

Seems I made it onto Stephanía Gutmann’s fotolog.

Don’t read anything into the stared corners, or maybe you could but as far as I’m concerned there isn’t anything there. We refer to this Stephy with descriptive words such as “balsa” (slang and equivalent to “mooch”), which refers to that lovable friend that always shows up empty handed –even if they agree to help out in potlucks.

Debian GNU/Minix

Finally someone has seen the light and started a project that I called for in a previous article. This melding of the Minix kernel with the GNU userland is called Preventa, and seems to poke fun at the name Nexenta –a similar project using the Solaris kernel– all in good fun I’m sure, considering that the project leader’s blog is called “La Salle Debain” (a play on “Debian” and the French for “bathroom”).

Canadiana Music

I’m not sure why I started writing this entry (some time ago), but I gather it had to do with being away from my Canadian home for over a year and longing for Canadiana.

Noteworthy in my opinion, is the classic
Stompin Tom Connors

Not so classic but good,
Jim Cuddy

Newer artists include,
Ron Sexsmith
Rufus Wainwright

Windows’ Idiosyncratic Insecure Infrastructure (WIII)

I found this article –on how intrinsically insecure Windows is– particularly illuminating.

Djvu on OS X

Dec 24, 2007 Update: 
Since last month, there has been an official OS X port of the DjVuLibre project located at Sourceforge.  It has “find all occurrences of a search string”, thumbnail, and outline viewing capabilities. Upon testing, the print to .ps does not seem to create a readable .ps file –or OS X fails to convert it to .pdf (OS X’s default viewing format)– but exporting straight to .pdf (command+E on OS X) overcomes this issue. Exporting to various other common formats –such as .tiff and .jpg– is also possible.

Heads up!

In certain circles I was used to move in, .pdf was considered “the” universal document format, that and .eps or just .ps, but .pdf was considered a cleaned up .ps –anyway.

There’s now a “new” format on the turf. How’s it different from .pdf? Well, .pdf doesn’t optimally do graphics –just text–, while

The Difference Between Gnu-Linux, Windows, and OS X

When figuring out the difference between Gnu-Linux, Windows, and OS X user experiences …

“The timing couldn’t be better since Vista is a Wagner Opera that is usually late to start, takes too long to finish, and is spoilt by floorboards creaking under the weight of the cast,” he continues. “Mac OS X Leopard is the late show in an exclusive nightclub where the drinks are always too expensive. Linux Desktop is the free show in the park across the street — it imposes some discomforts on the audience but provides plenty of entertainment.“

Picasa Upload Interface Undocumented

I’m not sure about this love/hate relationship between GPL/BSD software and Google. On the one hand, google is great in funding development with their “Summer of Code” initiative, but on the other hand they pay lip service to open Picasa API (as in uploading photos functionality), but developers mention that uploading is entirely undocumented.

Zorra Veloz and Custom SeaMonkey Builds

As mentioned previously mentioned in another article, I have provided customized MacTel Firefox builds (Zorra Veloz).

Comments pertaining to these can go here.

Linux has New MultiMediaCard Support

Liquidat reports, “Pierre Ossman, the MultiMediaCard (MMC) subsystem maintainer, announced the new related patches for the Linux kernel almost two weeks ago. He described the patchset as “probably … one of the biggest ones for the MMC layer so far” and highlighted the SDIO and SPI support as the major improvements.“

Sure, it sounds great but how long before a renovation wreaks havoc on users? I recall an issue where implementation of USB scanners caused such confusion because on my beloved Debian that scanners could only be accessed as “su”, and doing that invoked warnings. This occurred because people on the kernel side of things decided to change the infrastructure. And you know what? Nobody seemed to know what was happening, except the good old folks that were doing the renovating, and their documentation was useless –at least to the non-developer Gnu-Linux user sort. Yes, I read the documentation, and it was cryptic, decentralised, and seemed incomplete and contradictory.