Category: General

Corky.net moved server Tuesday, from Jules (in Boaz’s house) to Marcellos (at Barak Online).

Disaster and calamity soon followed, with some downtime, forum problems (one very new forum
got wiped out), and now FTP weirdness.

I’m updating my log just to test that.

The upside (for me at least) is that since Barak is my home ISP, the site now responds like a demon.

I’ve become addicted to politics.

Not Israeli Politics (there’s only so much frustration you can take), but nerd politics.
Specifically, the web forum of the Israeli Society for the promotion of Role Playing Games.

Which is why I still owe an article to Boaz’s web mag, The ISFSF&F web site, and “my own” Tenth Dimension.

I got sent to Paris from work (came back last night, flew there Monday afternoon), and the only thing I bought
there (except for dinner) was 4 bottles of mineral water.

Pathetic.

I was there for 3 days & nights, most of the day spent at the client’s office; the closest I got to sight-seeing was
the view of Paris at night from the resturant “Ciel De Paris”(?), which is on the 56th floor of the Monparnase tower.
Apparently, the Eiffel tower at night is lit up like a Disco. On the last day I took a cab to the airport, squezed onto a
nearly-full flight, and was rushed straight onboard the plane, without the chance to even glance at the Duty Free.

So I’m back, shame-faced and empty-suitcased.

Still, the weather was terrific (15-20 degrees C), with overcase skies and rain. Glorious.
Now I’m back at 30 degrees C in the shade and 90% humidity (or so it feels like), sweating as I type, but at least
I’m home.

Speaking of typing, french keyboards are bloody confusing. “Q” and “A” swapped, “M” out of place, and all the top row
(number keys) printing either accented characters, among other differences.

Mice work the same, though.

So, much improvement on the Linux front.

Set up the printer and it works great.

Found what was causing my hostname to change and preventing me from launching new apps once
kppp (modem connection) started – just a matter of unchecking a checkbox (the help file explains
that if this box is checked, you’ll get exactly the problem I had – great documentation, if you read it…)

Downloaded some Hebrew stuff, including a Perl script that imported my Hebrew windows fonts,
and Fribidi & GTKBidi; trying to configure & make these packages resulted in my understanding that
I was missing a lot of stuff needed for development and compilation; installed all that, and now things
work splendidly.

Installing RPMs is very nice, although I think their quality varies – some have good management of their
dependencies and some falter in this department.

Looked at KDevelop a bit, a very nice Visual Studio take-off, very well done.

Played more Reversi & Mah-Jong; I used to play a Mah Jong game called Shanghai on the Mac at the lab when I was
a graduate student, and this was a worthy successor. Reversi still beats me every time. I think I’ll play more games
with Linux than I did with Windows…

Still no sound, which sucks. Lothar (Mandrake’s hardware detection program) seems to detect the sound device, which
lives on the motherboard, but doesn’t realize it’s a sound card (maybe because it isn’t a card, as such).