Birch Street Computing -

about me

John M is a Linux fan in Lowell, MA.

I work at at a company writing software. I fool around with Free and Open Source software for fun & profit.

I was big into Last.fm and you can still see some of what I listen to there. I can also be found using github and recently sourcehut as well as bitbucket (historically). I don't care for most popular social media sites. If I have an account on one or the other it's probably either old and unused or was created just for tinkering.

promo

Links to things I like, use, or otherwise feel is worth sharing. Things I'd like to see get more popular.

Tids and Bits

I've got a few things to cover since I havent posted in a while...

Plone+DSL is really slow, nothing I seem to do speeds things up reasonably well. This makes me want to switch to a more static-file based blog.... something boxsomish maybe? (Not really plone's fault)

My sister bought a MacBook (Intel Mac Laptop) for school next year. It came f***ed up from the factory. The hard drive partion was screwed with a kind of B-Tree error and was reporting the wrong amount of free space. Plus the wireless connection (WEP & a Linksys router) is flaky. You can read about it on a couple of Mac forums. I have had 2 sperate windows desktops, my laptop, my sisters first laptop, my other sisters laptop, and a sharp zaurus all connect to this thing no problem. In other words APPLE SCREWED UP. I say it this way because it seems that a lot of Mac owners solution to the problem is to go out and buy an airport! WTF, that's not a solution, Apple ought to release a patch. So much for "just works" eh guys? Other than a handful of issues it is pretty nice, the integrated webcam was a pretty good idea. (Oh and Mail.app sucks too - borked SMTP AUTH)

I've got AIGLX and Compiz working on my Kubuntu laptop. The effects are really sweet. I miss KWin though, there are a couple of things about compiz as a WM that just feel wrong. I hope the KDE guys or the Compiz guys build a more kde integrated 3d window manager.

NetworkManager is pretty damn cool. Sometime nice stuff does come out of the GNOME camp :-). Of course I use the KDE frontend, but it integrates well and has a good set of features & a good interface. I know how to set up Postfix with Greylisting now. If only I could use it at work.

It's suprisingly easy to get Linux to use Active Directory. The guides out there aren't bad, they just lack a little cohesiveness. And don't bother trying to use LDAP unless you can change your AD contents/schema. Go with winbind instead.

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