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Driving Off

Driving off alone Out of state summer college Parents letting go

Ruined Day

Two stroke gas engine Signature suburban sound Ruins day in yard

Spring Breeze

Rain falls from trees Pitter patter of the wind Spring breeze after rains

On Rebuilding a Blog

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...

Broken Polaroid

Polaroid Broken Kodachrome rewound, stuck with iPhone camera

Time Machine and Space

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 Law is a Commodity

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 ...

Tintin and the Diamond Smugglers

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...

On Science…

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

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...

Life

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...

Jenkins Slave for OS X

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...

A Jenkins Node Daemon on OS X

Update: Use Jenkins Slave for OS X instead. It’s based on these gists and has the benefit of being maintained.

Writing a Throwaway App

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...

Reflections on the Lake

This is a journal of my time in Afghanistan, started a month after I arrived at Bagram Air Base in Parwan.

Blowing Snow

This is a journal of my time in Afghanistan, started a month after I arrived at Bagram Air Base in Parwan.

Writing a Throwaway App

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.

Notes on Bisbee

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.

What Matters Now

This collection of short essays has got me thinking about life again and living it.

San Diego

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...

A letter to an old friend:

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...

Lonely Saxophones

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...

F-16s at night

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 ...

MobileMe and Incompatible Browsers

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...

Upgrading to Fedora 10

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:

Spanning Sync

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.

Inbox Control

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...

Spam Yourself

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 ...

20 Miles

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...

Workplace Switcher

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...

Afraid of Risk

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.

MacPorts Search

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...

Stupid Little Facebook Applications

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. ...

Transmission Goodness

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...

Upgraded Fedora

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...

An excellent run

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 ...

Writing Checks

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’...

My Laptop at Work

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.

DHCP in VMware Server

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...

Streetcar!

https://www.youtube.com/p/851670FD59236321

Getting Short

[googleapps domain=“spreadsheets” dir=“pub” query=“key=pXT1NE0qatrjGoaxTWMRidw&output=html&gid=0&single=true&widget=true” width=“500” height=...

Letting Go

Chrysta is taking it harder than I am.

Redoing the Living Room

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...

Habits, Bad or Good

![](https://lh5.google.com/image/randall.h.wood/RmKX7tCx5RE/AAAAAAAAAqY/siqgCJoti4E/s160-c/LazyFilmCartridge.jpg

GNOME 2.18.2 is out

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...

Flustered

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...

Dyson Animal

Our old (and first) vacuum cleaner (a Eureka of some sort) died after 4 years.

Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden

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...

Gone

Yesterday I rode my bicycle from Chris Greene Lake to home after work, and somewhere along the ride my wedding band disappeared.

Nasty Nasty Scare

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...

Say No to Cheap Freight

I saw that on the back of a semi truck the other day and wondered about it. Its a political thing.

Plugging away at GNOME

Due to rough times this week, I still have not gotten GNOME built on my computer.

Long Week

This past week has been LOOONNNNGGGG.

Pallet

Pallet is the beginnings of an attempt to write a usable and free GUI for the MacPorts software porting system.

Broken GNOME

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...

Bug Buddy works

The GNOME bug reporting tool, Bug Buddy works well. Maybe even too well.

MacPorts / GNOME Report

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...

Little Black Bridge (2)

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.

MacPorts / GNOME Weekly Report

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 ...

MacPorts / GNOME Weekly Report

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...

MacPorts / GNOME Weekly Report

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’m a Nut!

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!...

Riding to the Park

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...

Mid-August

Things have been quiet of late. Its been more of the same-ol’, same-ol’.

What’s the Matter?

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)...

Using portfile-update

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...

portfile-update 0.1

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 ...

Changes in GNOME bindings…

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 ...

Dead Mac!

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.

My Mac’s Back!

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...

GNOME on DarwinPorts (2)

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 ...

A Conversation with Marc

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...

Throwing Butterflies

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.

glib/gtk

Successfully upgraded glib and gtk to the GNOME 2.14.0 speced versions, albeit running GNOME 2.12.3 speced everything else.

A Weddin’

This weekend past I attended the wedding of my wife’s step brother, one Brian by name. Augusta, my daughter participated.

I Wondered Why He Did That

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...

Judge Dee

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 1.2

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, ...

Me!

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

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...

Working SSH!

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, ...

3 OCT 05

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...

GNOME on Mac OS X

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...

GNOME on DarwinPorts

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...

I Hate Hollywood

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...

Static servers/Dynamic pages (2)

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...

Clearing

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...

eSite

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...

The Psychology Design of Everyday Things

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...

Static Servers/Dynamic Pages

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...

GNOME on DarwinPorts Status

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...

Today

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...

GNOME Platform for Darwin/Mac OS X

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...

London Calling

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...

I am a Soldier

Hurry up and wait. Bored without gun nor bullets, I am a Soldier!

Trusting your NCO

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...

Welcome, welcome

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...