A Diet of One

The Pistons/Pacers series is turning out to be an exciting one. I haven't watched the pistons in years, but they seem to be doing quite well for a change, having made the Eastern Conference Finals.


I have decided to switch to linux for a while - for the first time in months. Despite the prettiness of the OS X user interface, is is extremely slow. The OS X WindowServer process tends to just sit and hog the CPU.

Having booted into debian, I was able to apt-get update to the newest 2.6.6 kernel, which seems to solve most of the problems that I had previously with getting X working properly WITH HIGHMEM enabled (which lets me use more than 768 Mb of ram on my system.) The issues I'm still having are getting sound working properly - I'm still having issues getting different programs to access the sound card at the same time (it suddenly feels like using windows 95 in 1996). We really need a proper multimedia framework in linux. That may be the number one showstopper to linux adoption. The system also seems to be starting by default in a mode where it sits at the lower power setting, 667 Mhz, inste3ad of 1Ghz. Even though my broadcom based 802.11g card, supported from inside OS X, isn't supported in linux, my prism based PCMCIA card works just fine. Otherwise, my system is working excellently. Openoffice finds the cups shared printer on the network seamlessly, and the machine sleeps and wakes up perfectly. I've found a RSS reader that seems to work ok, though not as well as NetNewsWire does.

The other minor irritations are from services I've come to expect from the OS after using OS X. Built in Spell Check in any application and the system keychain come to mind. KDE Apps, as far as I know have this functionality, but sound in KDE is even more broken than it is in gnome, and besides, gnome does look pretty.

Back to the apartment search.

Oh, and this is my favorite quote from the NYT today, in an article on how Kerry should appeal to white males:

"My proposal is that the Kerry campaign run a 30-second ad which is nothing but John Kerry sitting on a couch and eating pretzels without involving paramedics at all," Mr. Katz said. "Guys can't help but be impressed by that, if he can get to the bottom of a bag of pretzels without someone having to call an ambulance."