drewmckinney.net

Yes, I think the album is pretty good. But I’m talking about my new XO laptop that arrived today. It’s tiny! I’m typing this entry on the XO and it’s taking me awhile because I can’t touch-type on the keyboard. It’s frickin’ fun though. This little computer is a blast. I’m looking forward to traveling with it.

The machine is small but a little bit heavier than it looks. The browser seems pretty snappy on my home network (thanks DD-WRT!) and it worked fine at a tmobile access point at Starbucks. I’ve only played with the camera and wordprocessor so far but I’m diggin’ it, Man, I’m diggin’ it. Later today will be testing the mesh networking thingy with a coworker that has a XO also.

Haven’t figured out how to open a new tab in the browser so I’ll post some pictures and links later. For now I’ll just say WHEEEE.

The next punk that refers to IT as Overhead should try to migrate the fucking mail server on their own.

UPDATE: 3:12 AM
Yes, I know the definition of overhead. It still sounds shitty though.

FireFox 3 (beta 2) is the best browser I’ve ever installed on my iBook G4. Snappy. Awesome. My aging laptop rejoices. Most of my extensions aren’t updated for this build yet but I can live with it. Get your beta on here and bang away at your stable here. With a beta this good, do I even need to upgrade to GM? Yeah, probably.

If this article at engadget is correct, 500,000 units of the new phone have been sold so far. That’s 250 million dollars at the bare minimum, not counting those folks that sprung for the more expensive unit or maybe dumped some cash on some accessories as well. Have people forgotten who the exclusive carrier for this thing is? The company that helped Bush spy on millions of American Citizens? Does that ring a bell? This company now has 250,000 new customers with thousands more before the week is over, who knows how many millions before the year is over.

The telcos have sold everybody out to the sham government that has taken over this once-free country and, unbelievably, the People are slobbering all over themselves in all manner of ugly ways to pay for the privilege to be spied on.

What bugs me most about this whole thing is the complicit hardware designer. By signing a deal to give this telco an exclusive contract, they have sided against the American people and decided that unlawful wiretapping is okay. Man, that’s just not cool. I won’t be giving them any more of my money so I need to start looking for a new laptop that’s GNU/Linux-friendly…something compact like my iBook 12″…any suggestions?

I am tired of all the coverage of the phone that some company recently released. Get over it, it’s a phone.

Where are the Mac tablets? This one by Motion Computing looks pretty sweet, too bad I loathe XP so much that I would never buy one.

This page does a pretty good job of explaining the UNIX file system.

About a month ago I wrote a post titled “Five reasons why Digg sucks.” I’m not sure what’s going on with Digg and the alienation of its users but my month-old posting has gotten four comments today. This leads me to believe that yes, indeed, Digg sucks and people want to talk about it. These days I visit Digg through bloglines. I don’t bother reading the comments because I’ve learned that I won’t find anything useful there. I still have to visit the actual site if there’s an interesting article that I want to read because the linked article is never in the feed but I’m okay with that, what’s an extra click eh?. My question - Why is everyone suddenly disenchanted with Digg today? What happened that is making people search for “digg sucks” in their favorite search engine?

Nice post by Schneier on security in the upcoming version of Windows. Sounds ghastly. I wonder if they’ve fixed permissions. When I was doing desktop support for Windows machines the biggest waste of time was setting up permissions. You had to be signed in as the administrator for every task that you wanted to do and I often wondered why Microsoft had bothered with permissions at all. Why is Microsoft in the operating system business anyway? They make good software - Word and Excel are great for what they are supposed to do. Why not concentrate on making good software that runs on other OSes? I’m no business mogul so I’m sure there’s something that I’m missing but I think MS would have a better reputation and better products if they ditched the OS.

Back in January I wrote about my browser problems and I loudly proclaimed that they all sucked. I have to take that back though because I’ve been using a browser that totally doesn’t suck. That browser is Flock. I don’t think Flock is such a great name for a browser but a rose by any other name eh? Actually, the name is fine, I’m just being difficult.

Flock was built (from what I can determine, your mileage may vary…) with someone just like me in mind. The Flickr integration is awesome and I can post to my multiple blogs all from within the browser without having to log in to my host server. Flock is built off of Firefox but seems to run much snappier on my G4 than Firefox ever did. I don’t experience browser crashes anymore and so far I haven’t been locked out of any sites. There are a few things that seem to work…strangeley, sometimes, but since the browser is still in beta (I think) I can live with that. I can’t think of any specific quirks right now but there have been a couple of times that something happened that was unexpected, nothing life-altering though. My brother had suggested that I try Camino but I’ve been having so much fun with Flock that I don’t know when or if I’ll ever get around to testing Camino out. Way to go Flock team, y’all have a fine product.