Author archives: Mike

Showing the laptop to a lady yesterday I discovered that the touchpad/trackpad was misbehaving. Moving the cursor would work as long as I was touching the trackpad, but when I took my finger off the trackpad the cursor would jump back (that is, in the reverse of the direction of motion) a couple of cursor-widths ...

Came into the "office" this morning to discover a last-minute project in-process. Project was attempting to get a "boxed" Edubuntu configuration that was to be carted over to Nigeria for one of their model schools. 3 hours to build the whole system.

We wound up with just the server (an old laptop) poorly configured, but ...

We have a rescue machine here. Soni gave her (reasonably powerful) workstation to a family member in exchange for their tired old machine. It's a consumer-level Compaq, nothing special and I'm sure quite normal seeming to most people.

But it's driving me nuts! It's so loud and annoying!

As of having to replace the old ...

I managed to get the regular Toolkit compilation toolchain all configured and ready-to-go this morning. Result is that we now have a pre-compiled GLE DLL available for Win32 for use with PyOpenGL 3.x. Still missing a pre-compiled TCL/Tk extension (Togl) to get to full coverage of the PyOpenGL 2.x functionality.

Need to look at the ...

Spent another 4 hours on the taxes today, mostly getting the final forms printed on a non-mucked-up printer and then copying in all the values and checking the results. Total cost is getting way up there, around $2175 in time that could have been billable. Just because I wound up waiting for recommended people to ...

Was invited to speak at the Ontario Linux Fest in October. Needed to write up a biography for it. Seems everywhere I speak to more than a few hundred people they want a biography. Anyway, here it is for the curious:

Since VServer appears to be going in (somehow, for some period of time) I spent quite a bit of time while not emailing today reading up on the technology. It's basically some capability bits and somewhat improved chroot implementation AFAICS.

The most disturbing issue VServer seems to address is a trivial escape provided for ...

I've now had 4 different planned tax accountants "drop through", one turned out not to be able to do corporate tax (duh! wish I'd known that before waiting until she was free), the one recommended by her used to do taxes for big corporations but doesn't touch taxes any more, and two others (recommended again) ...

Spent the evening trying to entertain Soni's mom. We're still working on the language barrier there (and we already did quite a lot of that today), so I was looking for a few Albanian-language elements she could read/listen-to/watch during the down-time.

BBC Albania is okay, but the audio-streams don't work with RealPlayer 10 (on Linux, ...

I spent the largest fraction of my walk home thinking about "what nexts"; what to do after I finish building provisioning and billing systems, after I finish helping build a community to raise a laptop.

I want to go back to thinking deeply. I want to spend my days exploring really complex things, things that ...