drewmckinney.net » Tech

GodDamnFuckingLinux

drew — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 08:01:22 +0000

I have been wrestling with getting a wireless card to work under Ubuntu. We’re not talking about some weird card that nobody has heard of, this is a card that actually has drivers built into the latest version of Hardy Heron…

After five hours (no, I’m not exaggerating) of beating my head against a wall I’m giving up for the night. I’m talking about right now having eighteen tabs open in Firefox, dealing with the OS and the card and who knows how many tabs I’ve closed trying to narrow the issue down, so you can’t say that I haven’t RTFM. I have, indeed, RTFM. Several times. I DID manage to finally get the OS to recognize the thing, so there’s that.

I’m sure most people are familiar with iwconfig, lsmod, modprobe, wpasupplicant, lshw, iwlist, ifconfig, lspci, dhclient, and the like so you know what I’m talking about. Yep, Linux is definitely not just for geeks anymore…

Chrome

drew — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:51:40 +0000

My first thoughts on Google Chrome…fast. Very fast. Nice UI. Works well under Parallels also. Need to test more. Don’t think it will support extensions like Firefox but too soon to tell.

XO

drew — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 09:18:52 +0000

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.

Overhead

drew — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:31:02 +0000

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 smoov like butter

drew — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 05:23:06 +0000

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.

Drink the iKoolAid

drew — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 10:00:41 +0000

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?

Phony

drew — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 08:23:15 +0000

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

Easy to swallow tablet

drew — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 08:20:38 +0000

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.

Speaking UNIX

drew — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 10:08:25 +0000

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

People getting sick of Digg?

drew — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 23:49:55 +0000

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?