Category: Tech

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I’ve been driving a 2007 Toyota Prius for a little over two months now. My old car was a 1997 Nissan Sentra that I’d had for years, so just driving another car is a change. Then factor in the switch from a plain gas engine to a hybrid…

Thoughts on the Car

Very smooth, very quiet ride. Lots of nifty little conveniences, like the fact that it remembers different volume levels for radio vs. the line-in jack (for the iPod). Far roomier inside than it looks. Oddly enough, I think it may be wider than the old car.

Not big on the hatchback, though I’m getting used to it. Cargo space is limited, though it makes very efficient use of the space it has. Lots of extra little compartments, hooks, etc. Cup holders are a bit too loose* for most purposes, including my travel coffee mug (yeah, big deal, I know).

Driving it

I’ve found myself changing the way I drive. I used to focus on maintaining stopping distance. Now I’m focusing on making the most efficient use of acceleration. The Prius dashboard displays the point MPG, and a graph of 5-minute averages over the past half-hour. It makes you acutely aware of which actions are most efficient. Continue reading →

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Fedora LogoFedora 8 has just been released, code-named “Werewolf.” As is tradition for this particular Linux distribution, the official release announcement is accompanied by an alternative, humorous announcement playing off the code name.

This time, the joke announcement is a song parody of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” And unlike a lot of really bad filk I’ve seen (online and otherwise), it’s surprisingly not bad (for all the subject matter is a bit odd. At least, from what I remember of the original song, it scans.

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Five years ago, Mozilla was forced to rename the Phoenix web browser because Phoenix Technologies was working on an in-BIOS browser that would let you get on the internet and troubleshoot/download drivers/etc. even if your operating system was trashed. It became Firebird, and then Firefox. The Phoenix product has finally been released. Ironically, it’s evolved into an embedded Linux distro that runs…Firefox.

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Mac OS X LeopardThe new Mac OS X disc arrived in today’s mail. I opened it up to make sure everything was there, and was surprised to see that Apple has really cut down on packaging. Instead of the ~8×10″ box with folds to keep the disc and manual in place, they’ve gone to a small box the size of a cardboard CD case. Just enough room for the DVD and the “manual” (which is mainly a “Look what’s new!” booklet).

“So,” I said. “I have to ask myself. Do I feel lucky?”
“Well,” Katie replied. “Do you? Punk?”
“What the heck.”

I’d done some research on application compatibility earlier this week, and the PowerBook looked ready. Katie’s desktop is going to need further study. The Mac Classic environment will no longer run under Leopard, and she’s still got a couple of Classic apps she pulls out occasionally. Also, Photoshop 7 is reported not to run under Leopard, and Adobe isn’t testing or updating anything older than CS3.

But the laptop? No critical data to back up (it’s all duplicated from the desktops), and everything we actually use on it has been tested on at least a pre-release.

So I fired up Netscape 4 for old times’ sake (and discovered that this theme is completely unreadable in it; then I switched the CSS around so that Netscape 4 won’t even try). Then I popped in the disc, selected some options, and let it install during Pushing Daisies.

No problems so far. Disk space is running low, but it’s a 3-year old laptop (so the drive is small) and I did an Archive and Install, so it has a backup of the old OS. Once it’s clear that everything works, I can free up ~6GB right there. It may also be time to wipe the Yellow Dog Linux partition. I haven’t used it in over a year.

Some highlights: I really like finally having virtual desktops (what Apple calls “Spaces”). The new search highlighting, previously seen in the Safari 3 beta, appears in other apps as well. Heck, Safari 3 is a big jump itself. (Hey, Apple, where are the Windows and Tiger releases?)

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I had an interesting thought looking at the Blog Action Day, um, blog, which remarked on what, for me, was Sunday:

And so we come to it at last… Blog Action Day has now officially begun for the first countries closest to the International Dateline.

I realized that it wasn’t going to stop after 24 hours the way that, for instance, Slashdot’s April Fools days run (GMT midnight to midnight). The event was designed to be October 15—not October 15 in a particular time zone. If you start with the first zone to reach a date, and run through the last zone to finish it, “October 15” would last about 48 hours.

I’m too sleepy to do the math myself, so I’ll trust Wikipedia’s entry on Time Zones:

Because the earliest and latest time zones are 26 hours apart, any given calendar date exists at some point on the globe for 50 hours. For example, April 11 begins in time zone UTC+14 at 10:00 UTC April 10, and ends in time zone UTC-12 at 12:00 UTC April 12.

So there you have it: a worldwide event tied to a calendar day but no time zone lasts 50 hours.

And here you thought things moved faster on Internet Time!

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It’s funny: When Microsoft releases a new OS, my inclination is to sit it out and wait for the first service pack, usually a year or so in. When Apple or Fedora releases a new OS, my inclination is to upgrade as soon as I have the time. Even though all of them have had histories of significant problems on one release or another—the broken video driver I ran into on Fedora 7, for instance, or the firewire drives fried by one version of Mac OS X.

I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s trust. Maybe it’s speed of the fixes: Linux vendors will have updated packages within days to weeks. (Heck, some Linux distros have updates available by the time the ISOs go live, because a bug was fixed after the contents were frozen.) And you can count on a Mac OS 10.5.1 in a month or two. Maybe it’s the scale of problems. You risk things like broken drivers or software with anyone’s major OS upgrade, but Windows always seems to have some problem that’s bigger than just a bug fix, something that needs more time and effort to redesign. In short, something that won’t get fixed until the next service pack.

Update 2026: Sadly, this is no longer true. For the last few years, I’ve been holding off my macOS updates for at least a year, which usually means waiting until the next version after it launches. As for Windows…I put in for the extra year of Windows 10 fixes and downgraded a device from Windows 11 because the one piece of hardware I “upgraded” turned into an unusably slow mess.

Somewhere along the line I got in the habit of waiting a couple of weeks on Fedora updates to make sure third-party graphics drivers catch up, which turned out to be fortunate with the most recent release.

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