Driving Off
Driving off alone Out of state summer college Parents letting go
Driving off alone Out of state summer college Parents letting go
Two stroke gas engine Signature suburban sound Ruins day in yard
Rain falls from trees Pitter patter of the wind Spring breeze after rains
I recently rebuilt this blog, which has migrated repeatedly from different services as they have come and gone, or as I have grown frustrated with some limit...
Polaroid Broken Kodachrome rewound, stuck with iPhone camera
After some continual struggles to manage disk space on my 2013 MacBook Pro (when purchased, I went for the small disk and maximum RAM), I found a command to ...
The other day, as I was near the end of Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle, I espied a television in the dining facility running one of those shows which I ...
The other day, while watching some child’s television show (I think it was the Power Puff Girls), for some reason I was thinking of Herge’s Tintin stories an...
In science, ‘fact’ can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that a...
Flying Monday evening, taking off just before sunset, under cloudy skies, I was disappointed to find that we were immediately in the clouds not even having l...
Yesterday I was talking to my brother and described life (not in the technical sense) as the negotiation between the senses of what the world should be of tw...
It promises to be cool day today. on Flickr.
Port of Djibouti from my hotel room at dusk. on Flickr.
These rains hinted at storms that would extend the travel time from Albuquerque to Washington by 10 hours that day. on Flickr.
untitled on Flickr.
After writing about some scripts I wrote to allow Jenkins running on a Linode to schedule builds on my iMac, I continued to tweak those scripts until I reali...
Update: Use Jenkins Slave for OS X instead. It’s based on these gists and has the benefit of being maintained.
As I was mobilizing late last year (in mid-to-late December), I had an idea of an easy, simple app that I could write for the iPhone. It would serve a purpos...
This is a journal of my time in Afghanistan, started a month after I arrived at Bagram Air Base in Parwan.
This is a journal of my time in Afghanistan, started a month after I arrived at Bagram Air Base in Parwan.
I wrote a simple app for the iPhone while I was preparing to deploy called Doing Time. These are some notes and experiences during the process.
I happened to spend a few hours in Bisbee, AZ in early October 2010. These are my notes (and a few of the paltry photographs I took) from the town.
This collection of short essays has got me thinking about life again and living it.
I fell in love with San Diego and California and Los Angeles all over again and again and again while on a business trip out to San Diego. First I fell in lo...
It’s well…it’s Microsoft.
I remember being very angry at what I felt was an unnecessarily self congratulatory tone of Unzipped, the movie about Isaac Mizrahi. I remember that you seem...
I remember one summer at home–I think it was the summer of ‘98–when a single lonely saxophone would play out over the roofs of the neighborhood in the evenin...
I’ve been at Shaw AFB for work for the week, and frequently hear fighter jets overhead. They are impressive little engines with wings and at night they look ...
I had gotten used to using my iDisk to hold personal stuff that I need when I’m at drills, but was surprised to see the following when attempting to get to i...
Yesterday morning I upgraded my work laptop from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10. Other than a couple of issues outlined below, the experience seemed reasonable:
Update: As of June 2013, Spanning Sync was overcome by events (changes in OS X and Google made it obsolete) and the developer ceased supporting it.
This is a sort of Weekly Report.
My wife: “I have to email it to [the president of a local club]. Her computer is ancient. It is beige.”
I have been using the Inbox 0 system to manage my email at work for a couple of months. It’s working out mostly, as I find that I sometimes let my Inbox grow...
I had once signed up for Google News alerts on a particular subject matter, and later cancelled the email alerts and switched to an RSS feed. I have finally ...
Yesterday I rode a little more than 20 miles on the Washington & Old Dominion trail. Isabella rode with me, and apparently slept most of the trip. This w...
Why does the commercial application display its icon in the GNOME Workspace Switcher (even though it is not full screen), but the open source applications do...
I used to be totally flexible in my life. It (my live, my future) was wide open, on some arid plains somewhere, full of beauty and possibility.
A few months ago, I wrote about using Gimp on Mac OS X without X11 from MacPorts. Since then I’ve upgraded my systems to Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5), and...
Last month, I created a Google Custom Search of the MacPorts websites: the project home, the guide, the wiki, the tickets database, and the source code brow...
I discovered today that a Facebook application that I had used as an amusement had been changed so that it spammed almost every one on my Friends list. Grr. ...
I used Transmission on my iMac to download Fedora so I could install it on my work computer and on an older PowerBook I have. I have been serving it up for t...
I just upgraded my laptop at work to Fedora 9, and I really like the new package manager, but otherwise am ambivalent about the upgrade. I recommend that upg...
I recently began running again. I had fallen into this strange I feel bad because I don’t exercise and I don’t exercise because I feel bad loop, but I think ...
Walkers, Beware - washingtonpost.com
On the Official Gmail Blog there is an article 9 reasons to archive.
Recently I’ve been writing a number of checks instead of using a credit or debit card to pay for things. It feels far more satisfying in some way that I can’...
I recently began working at Trusted Computer Solutions (TCS). TCS is (as I understand things) a Linux shop transitioning from a being a Solaris shop.
I need to run a virtual machine on my work computer that provides DHCP services on a host-only network. Unfortunately, VMWare Server on Linux does not provid...
A brief note on the status of Pallet and the MacPorts.Framework:
https://www.youtube.com/p/851670FD59236321
A- “Men don’t like ballet.”
[googleapps domain=“spreadsheets” dir=“pub” query=“key=pXT1NE0qatrjGoaxTWMRidw&output=html&gid=0&single=true&widget=true” width=“500” height=...
Chrysta is taking it harder than I am.
This past weekend, we rearranged the common area (a combined living room/dining room) to not block off the living room as a separate room. It created the imp...
![](https://lh5.google.com/image/randall.h.wood/RmKX7tCx5RE/AAAAAAAAAqY/siqgCJoti4E/s160-c/LazyFilmCartridge.jpg
GNOME has released version 2.18.2 of their platform and desktop software suites. MacPorts has some catching up to do. There is a diagram of the current statu...
I get badly flustered when I am calling someone and their voicemail or answering machine picks up instead. I hope I’m not the only person who has this proble...
MacPorts hit two milestones this week:
Our old (and first) vacuum cleaner (a Eureka of some sort) died after 4 years.
We visited the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden today. Augusta had been demanding this week that we go to Richmond to the Children’s Museum of Richmond (she has...
Yesterday I rode my bicycle from Chris Greene Lake to home after work, and somewhere along the ride my wedding band disappeared.
Silicon Island: Why the free software desktop year is not yet here, and why it doesn’t matter anymore.
The night before last, Friday morning at about 0100 hours actually, I went to the emergency room with chest pains. While it turns out that it was not a heart...
I saw that on the back of a semi truck the other day and wondered about it. Its a political thing.
Due to rough times this week, I still have not gotten GNOME built on my computer.
This past week has been LOOONNNNGGGG.
Pallet is the beginnings of an attempt to write a usable and free GUI for the MacPorts software porting system.
Here is the obligatory screen shot of Pallet.
My MacPorts-based installation of GNOME is broken. It seems that when I installed KDE Office to verify that some GNOME packages that KDE Office uses were not...
The GNOME bug reporting tool, Bug Buddy works well. Maybe even too well.
I managed to, within 3 days of GNOME releasing version 2.18.0, get the entire current GNOME Platform into MacPorts. It actually took only a few hours work, a...
Chysta (my wife) reports that Augusta repeatedly stated that “Daddy made me a bridge. I’m Special” when she was reading to her in bed Sunday night.
I know, I know. This seems more like a quarterly report than a weekly report, but it is more that I took a sabbatical from port maintenance than that I have ...
GNOME has sound! (Actually ever since we ported gstreamer version 0.10.0+, GNOME has had working sound if the esd output was selected in the GNOME Preference...
This week I began porting the GNOME desktop to version 2.16.0
This is the first of what I hope will be a weekly report on the goings on with the GNOME packages carried by the MacPorts project.
I love myself I think I’m grand. I go to the movie Just to hold my hand. I wrap my arms Around my waist. I get so fresh I slap my face. I’m a nut! Ha, ha!...
This afternoon Augusta and I rode Chrysta’s bicycle to McIntire Park. I rode Chrysta’s bike since the rear inner tube on mine had a leak at the valve, meanin...
Things have been quiet of late. Its been more of the same-ol’, same-ol’.
Yesterday Augusta, my 2 year old daughter, climbed onto a bunk bed that is in her room (we got it used knowing that soon we will need the bunking capability)...
About 6 months ago, I threw together a script to help me automate the process of updating a Portfile for a package from GNOME ftp servers. I called the scrip...
This evening I published a new tool for DarwinPorts called portfile-update. Run from a directory containing a DarwinPorts Portfile, it will upgrade the port ...
My auto-status tool for the GNOME packages in DarwinPorts broke because GNOME’s MD5 hashsum list for the official packages for 2.14.2 are different than for ...
My Powerbook’s hard drive, not three days after a complete checkup at the Short Pump Genuis Bar just failed. At the hardware level no less.
I was disappointed.
I have been using my backup Mac Powerbook (now a 5 year old vintage) as my primary these past two weeks ever since fsck spasmed out on a bad node conflict on...
Since my primary machine went down 2 weeks ago, I have had a chance (and a need) to reinstall GNOME from scratch with DarwinPorts. This has resulted in many ...
I broke Gnome and did not see it happening until later. Sorry about that.
On 29 Apr 2006, at 18:35, Marc wrote: Hey thanks a lot! I’m using fink; any advantages to using darwinports? I’m so glad I recently discovered about...
Recently when Chrysta and I were driving in the country–one of the rare occasions when I was a passenger–we hit a butterfly on our windshield.
Successfully upgraded glib and gtk to the GNOME 2.14.0 speced versions, albeit running GNOME 2.12.3 speced everything else.
Some DarwinPorts happenings:
This weekend past I attended the wedding of my wife’s step brother, one Brian by name. Augusta, my daughter participated.
I have finally overcome my fear of needles.
I’m an enlisted soldier. It means that when I see an officer outdoors, I salute. It’s a simple thing to do and rarely is screwed up or even really noticed by...
Yesterday Judge Dee woke me by knocking things off the headboards at about 0300. It was a bit early, but she tends to do that when she wants her daily wet f...
Darwinports released a new version of the port engine this week and it broke my scripts that maintain the GNOME on Darwinports page. For some damned reason, ...
I recently moved from Daegu, Korea to Charlottesville, Virginia, USA and then a month after that moved again within Charlottesville. A week or so after the s...
eSite is a tool for handling static web content. It basically allows for complex looking sites and some simple scripting (to, say, generate an index or compl...
About two weeks ago, I suddenly lost CVS access to the Opendarwin.org servers. SSH was simply refusing to work. I have now traced the problem to SSHPassKey, ...
GNOME on Darwinports is something of a mess since the upgrade from GNOME 2.10 to 2.12. Things are just breaking all over the place. And what does not break a...
All I want is my GNOME tools to work on Mac OS X. It would be really cool if they ran as Aqua applications, but I’ll settle for using them in Apple’s X11 env...
I was nominated to be a commiter on the DarwinPorts project due to the number of ports that I have submitted upgrades for. Almost every port I have submitted...
They have so conditioned me to “Hollywood Endings” that I find it difficult to handle movies that don’t have the Hollywood ending, like, oh say, most every g...
I rewrote my dynamic Get Firefox button code to be unobtrusive and to display the Firefox button no matter what. The code now only runs after the page is loa...
Today I finished clearing my unit except for the Final Out, the day before I fly to my next assignment since I fly at some ridiculously early hour on Tuesday...
I had been maintaining my site with a combination of online tools (Blogger mostly, .Mac, and a bunch of google searches), some tools I installed via DarwinPo...
I saw the 2002 edition of The Design of Everyday Things (previously published as The Psychology of Everyday Things). It is a book about how not to design thi...
It doesn’t happen.
Any developer who has worked the web knows that different browsers render content differently. I remember back in the day working to make sure that things re...
A few of the core GNOME packages carried by DarwinPorts have been updated over the week. Most of my patches have been accepted and applied, but some have yet...
I submitted some patches to update some portfiles in DarwinPorts today. Most of the GNOME Developer’s Platform packages work with simple updates (changing on...
I have posted the current status of the various packages provided by DarwinPorts for Mac OS X and Darwin that make up the GNOME platform, bindings, and deskt...
Could not call my wife in Germany from Korea the night-for-me/morning-for-her when London was bombed. Korean Telecoms simply reported that the call could not...
Hurry up and wait. Bored without gun nor bullets, I am a Soldier!
If your NCO is pressuring his soldiers not to take correspondence courses but merely to take the tests for the correspondence courses (by using the handy sca...
Using Drivel.
This is a new journal for me, and one that is very public. I used to write long letters with some frequency but then just stopped about 5 years ago. I also u...