July 20, 2006

For the artists...

"So the Dark did a simple thing," he said. "They showed the maker of the sword his own uncertainty and fear. Fear of having done the wrong thing--fear that having done this thing, he would never again be able to accomplish anything of great worth--fear of age, of insufficiency, of unmet promise. All such endless fears, that are the doom of people given the gift of making, and lie always somewhere in their minds. And gradually, he was put into lethargy--and so hope died, and a terrible paralyzing melancholy took its place. He is held by it now, he is held captive by his own mind. He and the sword Eirias that he made, with him. Despair holds him prisoner, despair, the most terrible creation of all. For in great men, the mind can produce giant spectres of great power."


-- from p. 165, 166 of Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper

Posted by TheIdeaMan at 07:47 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 15, 2006

CakePHP got SitePointed...

SitePoint's got an above-the-fold, front page article online about CakePHP, the framework I've been using for the past year.


It's a good introduction to the framework. If you're in need of a ready-to-roll PHP framework with minimal overhead, I'd suggest checking out the article and CakePHP.


If you're looking for something more minimal, check out Ismo. :)

Posted by TheIdeaMan at 03:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 14, 2006

The Beeb does Open Source...

The BBC has a few open source projects available under a number of different licenses. Their Flash Tools and mod_rest_cache look particularly interesting as does the ID3 Chapter Tag Java code.


Thanks for sharing, and for offering so many licensing options.

Posted by TheIdeaMan at 11:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Gnome 2.14

Those Gnome benchmarks were no lie. It's much faster.


Thank you Gnome devs! :)

Posted by TheIdeaMan at 10:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 12, 2006

Gnome 2.14 for Gentoo (finally)...

Granted, I'm sure it was a very long and arduous task to stabilize the ebuild for Gnome 2.14, however, I was within hours of switching to Ubuntu over this.

Ubuntu may still steal my desktop from Gentoo, but I'm staying put for now.

Update (13 July @ 6:58 pm): Well, as usual, I spoke too soon. Gentoo, always the winning tortoise, caught up to my rant within about 12 hours. All the packages listed in the extended entry are stabalized now (and being compiled). Maybe I was too gleeful at the sight of this on the gentoo.org site. Maybe... :) My apologies to the hard working Gentoo devs/ebuilders/etc. You have my thanks and esteem.

Update (2:58): As exciting as this is, I'm going to hold off until I've got a good bit of time to upgrade. Attempting my usual "compile in the background" method gave me this series of necessary keywords to unmask:

sys-apps/hal ~x86
gnome-base/gnome-vfs ~x86
x11-wm/metacity ~x86
x11-libs/libwnck ~x86
x11-themes/gtk-engines ~x86
www-client/epiphany ~x86
dev-libs/libxml2 ~x86
dev-libs/atk ~x86
x11-themes/gnome-backgrounds ~x86
x11-terms/gnome-terminal ~x86
x11-libs/pango ~x86
gnome-extra/gnome-utils ~x86
x11-themes/gnome-themes ~x86
dev-libs/libxslt ~x86
x11-libs/libxklavier ~x86
x11-libs/vte ~x86
x11-libs/gtksourceview ~x86
x11-themes/gnome-icon-theme ~x86

Something about having that many additional unstable packages on my system makes me a little uneasy--at least at moment (read: no time to fix headaches). I think I'm also going to migrate to modular X before I attempt this. Ah Gentoo... Great for the D.I.Y.'er in all of us--not so great for productivity.

Posted by TheIdeaMan at 02:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 07, 2006

Limitations

Limit yourself if you want to succeed.


And the sky doesn't count.

Posted by TheIdeaMan at 02:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 02, 2006

Linux: so much potential, so much frustraition

Simple tasks have never been so hard.


Impossible tasks have never been more attainable.

Posted by TheIdeaMan at 06:15 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack