Archive for October 2008
Updated: 25 Oct 2008 08:47 am by Ron
Filed: Geek Stuff • Linux
Tagged: Arch Linux • firefox • gnome • OpenOffice • thunderbird • WordPress
It has been a pretty busy couple of weeks in the land of open source software:
- OpenOffice.org’s new version 3 made it into the regular repositories in Arch Linux last week. One of the aspects of a rolling release distribution like Arch is how quickly stuff like this becomes available particularly in light of the recent announcement by the Ubuntu team that they will stay on version 2.4.1 in their next upcoming release. Both my Arch boxes have been updated, and I’m impressed with the changes and the speed improvements.
- Firefox’s beta 1 of version 3.1 was released up, too, and I’m running it on 3 of my boxes, including my Mac at work. It feels much faster — even without turning on the disabled-by-default new JavaScript engine which is still reportedly pretty buggy — and some of the UI changes are pretty nice.
- Mozilla Messaging release an alpha 3 of the next release of Thunderbird, and I’m running that as my primary mail client on my Mac at work. It has picked up some nice Mac UI changes, provides integration with the Mac address book, and the re-tooled IMAP support is noticably better that the current stable version 2 branch of Thunderbird. And how could you not like a mail client named “Shredder”?
- GNOME’s latest release — version 2.24 — made it into the stable repositories earlier this week, and both of my Arch boxes are now running it. Most of the changes aren’t all that obvious at this point, but it is noticably faster and feels more responsvive. The upgrade was painless (aside from the big download) and seems to have gone flawlessly on both boxes.
- Finally, WordPress released a minor point release to fix a security hole.
Updated: 22 Oct 2008 07:14 am by Ron
Filed: Adoption • Life in General
Tagged: Li
Li’s new thing — it started Friday after helping Deb clean the house — is dusting. She carries around a dustrag (she heads for the rag bag first thing in the morning now, even before juice) to get a rag, and then spends time off and on all through the day dusting window sills, furniture, carpet, her brother, Monkey, you name it. And she walks around saying “dust!” as she does it. Too cute…
I had no idea there was so much dust…
Updated: 15 Oct 2008 10:00 pm by Ron
Filed: Adoption • Life in General
Tagged: Li • seasons • soccer • summer
Late summer mornings working in the flower beds with Mom
It has been quite a while since I wrote much, but it feels like we’ve reached a couple of recent “ends” within the past couple weeks all at roughly the same time…
We’ve reached the end of the fall soccer season just a couple of days. One of the teams I coach at Taylorview reached the semi-finals of the post-season tournament before losing 3-2 in a penalty kick shootout. The finished the season with a very decent record, going into the tournament as the #2 seed from the south pod of the league. They played well the last four matches of the season, finishing strong, playing decent defense and a very attractive style. These guys were a treat to work with these past three months and as much as I’m looking forward to having my weekends and evenings back, I will miss these guys.
There's nothing like fresh corn from the garden!
We’ve reached the end of the garden, too, with hard freezes pretty much every night now and having had our first snowfall, with a couple inches falling on Saturday (a large chunk of which fell during our first tournament match). The peaches are long since done, and we had an extraordinary crop this year. We thinned and thinned and thinned and still had more that we could eat. The strawberries and tomatoes and corn are done, too, and we’ll all miss that. Li will miss it as much or more than the rest of us…
And we’ve reached the end of the summer in more than just a calendar sense. We’re definitely in autumn now, with cold mornings and evenings, ever-shortening days, golden light in the evenings, the occasional snowfall, and heavy frosts in the morning. Li is back in her fleece sleepers at night, although she pretty much refuses to let us pull down the feet to cover up those cold little toes of hers. She now snuggles up each night with not just her stuffed monkey (named “Monkey”, of course) but also a stuff cow named “Boo” (Li-speak for “moo”) and doll her friend Kate gave her (named “Doll”, appropriately). When she’s ready to get up in the mornings, she’ll be standing there in the crib with a big smile (most days) and her arms full of her friends, waiting to be picked up.
Just two more cherry tomatoes...
Her vocabulary is blossoming, and words are coming in pairs more and more frequently. We can’t drive anywhere without her pointing out all of the “big trucks” (which to the unlearned sounds much like “boo duck”) and “big trees” (“boo tees”). “Please” is making more frequent appearances, as is “Daddy”. Her all-purpose word these days is “dosh”, which we finally decided is sort of like “sauce” and she uses it for both apple sauce and soap (“body sauce”, I suppose) in the bath tub. She knows that balls are for kicking, and loves chasing her soccer balls around the house and kicking them back and forth with Ian. (And I caught her reading the adidas section of the Eurosport catalog this evening before dinner!)
Our friend Teri’s dog named Rudy is “Dee”, Ian’s girlfriend Fi is “Fee” or “Gee”, and Ian is something that sounds quite a bit like “bro” right now. Yoghurt is “doo” or something like that. “Peach” and “apple” are very recognizable, as is “juice”, “up”, “down”, “house”, “bath”, “bus”, “dog”, “kitty”, “duck” (although a duck’s quack still sounds alot like a dog growling), “book”, and “goat”.
Updated: 12 Oct 2008 08:48 am by Ron
Filed: Geek Stuff
Tagged: blogging • WordPress
Finally got around to updating to the latest WordPress and the latest version of a couple of the plugins that I use (including Akisment). Uploading the files to the server took longer than the actual upgrade…
That’s about the extent of anything I’ve managed to accomplish with respect to the blog lately.
Updated: 06 Oct 2008 06:03 am by Ron
Filed: Books & Reading • Geek Stuff • Life in General
Tagged: OpenID • soccer • TiddlyWiki
A few odd bits, given that I seem to lack the time to post much more than that, these days…
- Looking over the blog traffic for September, half the traffic was for the TiddlyWiki I set up for the junior high soccer teams for this fall season. Not surprising, given the absence of much of anything else new on the site these days. Overall, traffic was about even with August.
- We’re officially out of summer; more to come on that, I think.
- Been doing a bit of reading, but unfortunately most of it has been on the technical side. I’ll post more there, too, perhaps. The highlight, however, has been “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini: haunting, gripping, beautiful, and heartbreaking at times.
- Been looking a bit at OpenID, both from a work perspective and for use here. I’ve got a bit of cleanup to do here, as well, given a couple of updates to WordPress and plugins.