Web Development, startups, entrepreneurship, books, art, and other stuff
24 hours and counting. That’s approximately how long OpenOffice has been sitting here compiling.
This is a compelling argument against compiling everything from source. ;-)
There is an OOo binary ebuild, but since I happened to start this one — 24 hours into it, it doesn’t really feel right to halt it.
If I don’t find something else to post about soon, this will start looking like a gaming blog… At any rate, the wonderful folks behind Homestarrunner & Strongbad invite you to Behold Thy Graphics!! and enjoy Dungeonman 3… yet another celebration of everything that was seriously awesome about the videogames we used to play in the 80s.
ps2pdf is a handy online utility to convert postscript to pdf format; it’s fast, and works perfectly.
Of course, there is a host of software that will do this locally, notably Ghostview/Ghostscript. I happened upon ps2pdf.com while trying to help a user for whom GSView was just not working (problem still open — if you have suggestions, comments are welcome) — the ps2pdf site has been a very handy workaround.
You may recall the oh-so-promising and yet-still-unfinished 3D roguelike game Egoboo… well, it seems that Egoboo’s creator, the Mysterious programmer X, is one Aaron Bishop, and that he is finishing up a new game called Secret Of Ultimate Legendary Fantasy: Unleashed (or, SoulFu. Yes, really).
I wish there was a little more than a couple screenshots and a promise of being “almost finished” — but like Egoboo, this looks pretty cool. Perhaps a finished game will ultimately see the light of day.
In what, as far as I know, is a first for Google… they are the host of an online puzzle game/marketing initiative for the DaVince Code.
The game needs to sit in a block on your Google personalized home page, so you’ll need a Google account, and to take a few seconds to set up/login to your personalized page. Looks interesting.
So, I just spent a couple days tinkering with kororaa-xgl and kororaa, respectively. I’ll talk about the first one, first.
You might recall some really slick video captures from Novell
some time back showcasing xgl, enhancements to the X.org project that add a whole host of fancy graphics effects to the Linux desktop.
You can actually see this in action with the Kororaa xgl LiveCD. Since it runs from the CD, like Knoppix and many other disks, even Windows users have no excuse for not checking this out; it has to be seen to be believed.
You can find another review/overview of xgl here, and some kororaa xgl screenshots here.
Besides having this pre-configured, Kororaa is also sounding like a pretty slick way to get a Gentoo system up and running quickly. I have no trouble with the full-length Gentoo install — done that more times than I can count — but it is time-consuming, and a short-cut install for what is pretty much my all-time favorite Linux distro is starting to sound pretty good. ;-) I’m going to give the install a whirl as soon as I finish this post.
I just spent quite awhile chasing down non-solutions for a problem with getting yum to use an http proxy on Fedora Core 5.
It turns out that yum, apparently, ignores environment variables(?) — at least, that’s how it’s behaving here. HTTP_PROXY is set, but yum would not cooperate. No, I was wrong: actually, it is using the environment variables (which it should, so this is a good thing). The reason I thought it was not is that pup (GUI frontend for yum) was still not working… but even with the yum.conf settings below, it is still not working. That’s all right; GUIs can be nice, but as long as it will update, I’m happy.
yum.conf has it’s own syntax for setting a proxy… reasonably enough, you just open /etc/yum.conf and add a line that looks like proxy=http:/yourproxy.
I had been adding :80 at the end, there, since that is the correct port for my particular proxy… but yum didn’t seem to like that. In fact, it complained: urlopen error nonnumeric port: ‘80?’
On a whim, I decided to remove the ‘:80′ (how 80 is nonnumeric, I am still working on) from the end of the proxy setting in yum.conf… and lo and behold, it began to work.
Some things may look different. You will know it is done when it stops changing.
Minor Update: I’ve burned up my lunch hour, so I guess it’s back to a default style for awhile. ;-)
Sad but true… The Perils of Java Schools? Students get jobs! - Archipelagos
Caveat: I’ve nothing against Java per se. There are reasons that languages like Java exist, and there are reasons both to like and dislike them; too much to go into here.
