Talking Past Each Other

Why did I know it would happen? I got some of my views on rolling release published on a webzine. Immediately, comments began to appear, as I had hoped. That means people are reading it and thinking about it.
Except, they aren’t really thinking about what I said. There is this mental block in the mass [...]

Decreasing Returns: Put the Brakes on Rolling Release

In Economics, we speak of the principle of decreasing returns. At some point, putting more resources into something no longer produces as much profit. As the thing becomes more complex, it gets more difficult to move forward without making major mistakes.
A part of my assertion about the problems of rolling release is this concept applied [...]

HTML Word Processing

The basic purpose of a word processor is to format text for printing. If you aren’t going to put it on paper, you really have no need for a word processor. However, I find a huge portion of the computer using population don’t make a distinction between documents and webpages. That is, not consciously. They [...]

Opera Reconsidered

CentOS isn’t all that friendly to standard desktop use, but it can be tamed. It has become my choice because once I get things working, I can pretty much expect it will continue working for the next couple of years, at least, with full security and bug-fixing support. Meanwhile, anything I build or add from [...]

CentOS Fix: GNOME Mahjongg Scores on “Difficult” Level

This is pretty minor and doesn’t warrant much discussion. When you play Mahjongg on the default game called “Difficult,” upon completion of that game a window pops up saying your score qualifies for the Top Ten. However, the window is empty, no scores are shown, and you can’t do anything with it except close it.
The [...]

More on Rolling Release

Let’s get one thing clear: I utterly despise the brand of morality and ethics displayed by Microsoft. Gates knew a thing or two about computers, just enough to steal everything he built; he never comprehended the difference between good and evil. To this day, his utterly broken moral compass still affects the way Microsoft does [...]

Return to Sanity: CentOS Is Home

After a few days of testing Debian Lenny AMD64, I just can’t make it home. Yes, the packages are newer, and once it hits “stable” in the Debian developer cycle, it will be supported for a long time. Still, there are a couple dozen little things which just don’t feel right, and I can’t get [...]

Dream Ride: Mass Transit

Thanks to the US military service, I spent quite some years in Europe. I must confess I prefer living there over living in the US, but I could never afford to go back there on my own. I’m not too sure any of those countries would want me, since I’m not highly productive in the [...]

Debian Lenny: 64-bit Pain

Debian has a different approach to 64-bit hardware. The entire system is 64-bit, and the only way you can run anything 32-bit is in a “jail” — a sort of security sandbox isolated from the system itself. I suppose this adds some measure of security, but it also offers a unique experience in pure 64-bit [...]

Gnomesword from Source

If I can’t get Bible search software for my computer, it’s not a good computer. Neither CentOS, nor any of the other compatible RedHat clones, offer a Gnomesword package for 64-bit. There is one source RPM set, but they were a bit older, and I felt I should be able to produce the latest version [...]