Archived news items from June 2004
Since this is old news, some links may be broken.
current news
newer old news from July 2004
Actually late Friday night....
Just got back from my weekly small group. We usually play pool afterwards, and tonight we played a game of Cowboy that ended up running long.
Anyway, just wanted to mention that the new hard drive came in Thursday afternoon, so I got all my data copied over and then installed Fedora Core 2 to a clean drive. And now I'm in the process of making sure everything still works, and getting it working (again) if not.
My printer is giving me trouble, but otherwise everything seems to be about the same. Other than the newer versions of things like Gnumeric and OpenOffice, which alone are worth the hassle of the fresh install, since those applications are notoriously difficult to upgrade on your own.
Anyway, I should get to bed. And mention again the wish list, since I've haven't gotten any birthday gifts since the last update....
Well, I've been doing not much the past couple of weeks. Right after my last update I spent a few days trying to optimize a library that I'd written for CS-2 back at the end of the school year. My first try at a rewrite resulted in a 2200% speedup (the old code took 40 seconds to run, vs. a second and a half for the new code), but there were some subtle bugs in both versions I couldn't shake. I then spent some time planning a third version, which would have been very nice, but at the last minute discovered a built-in Java library that exactly duplicates the functionality I was trying to create.
So I haven't been back to it since.
This past weekend I went to East Texas to see everybody for our second annual family reunion. It was fun, and I got to play Risk: Lord of the Rings edition with my brother. Oh, and watch Monster, which goes in the same bucket as The Passion of the Christ as being good but not fun to watch.
And I've been exercising more lately, so I guess that's good.
As soon as my new hard drive gets in (hopefully Thursday), I'll back up everything on my current system and install Fedora Core 2, RedHat's newish community-driven Linux distribution. It'll be nice for an upgrade, since I've been running RedHat 9 just over a year. And have been completely Microsoft-free (other than my keyboard, I guess) for... what is it now, two years?
Speaking of Microsoft-free, you'll have noticed the Firefox button reappearing above, which means that Firefox 0.9 was released today. They changed default themes for licensing reasons, and the new one is fairly ugly. So, do yourself a favor and (after you've installed the new version), go into Tools | Themes and click on "Get More Themes" in the lower right-hand corner. Then install and use the "Qute" theme, which is the one that used to be the default before Arvid picked a license that the Mozilla folks weren't comfortable with for a bundled theme.
Then sigh because it's so much easier on the eyes.
And you know that you can right-click on the buttons and choose "Customize..." and then drag-and-drop things to reorder them however you want, right? I usually have it show Icons only, and small icons at that, but you do what you like.
Oh, and my birthday is coming up in two weeks, so buy me stuff or something.
May 2004
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