Now that things have settled down for me with OS X and Panther is running relatively smooth, I want to try to get Debian up and running on my 17″ PowerBook. I had a really positive experience with Debian on my old Titanium PowerBook, but some hardware changes in the latest PowerBook family have apparently not been fortuitous for Debian (and others). nVidia is apparently not cooperating at all on the video front, which in turn prevents the sleep functionality from working. Big minus.

If anyone knows of some good links for Debian on a 17″ PowerBook, please fill me in. Here are the links I currently have:

Debian/PowerBook Information:
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ibook/
http://neugierig.org/content/tibook/
http://penguinppc.org/~benh/
http://www.cattlegrid.net/~christophe/titanium/
http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~schmidtm/apple/powerbook.en.php

I have had the pleasure of running through all of the install routines for my Unix software that I run on my PowerBook installation of Mac OS X. Although it has been fairly smooth, I have run into some issues with database servers, application servers, etc.
My recent experience with resolving those issues brought to mind one of the common pieces of rhetoric used by those who are either wary of or outright against open source software: “what are you going to do for support?” I have noticed that the questions I have posted to the relevant mailing lists regarding my software issues have been answered within an hour or two, if I didn’t first find the answer by examing the documentation for the product or searching the online mailing list archives for a particular issue.
Here’s my criticism of the support objection to open source: “How is problem-solving with your proprietary software that different from the approaches used in open source software?” Unless your company is large and loose enough with the purse strings (a concept whose mention generates raucous laughter these days by virtue of the fact that it is ludicrous), you don’t have the “gold support package” or whatever stupid name they call the ability to phone first-level support at the vendor’s office. So what do you do? Search online, Google for answers, join a mailing list…huh, same here.

Maddox has posted a review of The Matrix Revolutions, for those who are interested. Do not read it if you have not seen the movie. If the name Maddox doesn’t ring a bell, it soon will.

So I went to see The Matrix Revolutions this weekend. (Insert slow, drawn, sigh) A quick scan of the Rotten Tomatoes reviews will expand on my take of this third movie and save bandwidth.
In short, the Matrix has collapsed under its own weight; the shallowness of the storyline has been fully revealed. If that’s as good as you can do with years of production, a practically bottomless budget, and all the time you could ask for to unfold the complex and intriguing story revealed in the first film, then there never was much there. The intrigue was with what we didn’t know. (All girls wearing the stuff with your belly hanging out and cleavage working hard for its money, take note.)
To “the brothers”: stick to one-ups. Or, perhaps follow Peter Jackson’s approach and have a solid literary work to somewhat constrain the seemingly pathological urges of filmmakers to veer wildly off-course. Perhaps pick a William Gibson title and run with that. As for the Matrix, I think it’s not worth reworking, reloading, or revoluting any further. Please don’t.

Well, metaphorically, at least. Perhaps “absorbed” would be more appropriate. I am referring to the Disk Copy utility of the Apple Mac OS. I discovered the joys of Disk Copy with Jaguar. If you have games that require a CD, using Disk Copy to create a disk image (.dmg) can be really handy; you don’t have to cart the CD around with you, and you also don’t have the spin time or battery consumption for the optical drive.
Imagine my woe when I could not find Disk Copy in its usual home of /Applications/Utilities! Fortunately, a member of the Atlanta Macintosh Users Group enlightened me; the functionality of Disk Copy now resides within the application named Disk Utility.
The functionality in Disk Utility (and Disk Copy pre-Panther) is so neat; it’s stuffed I always thought should exist when I lived, or existed rather, in the Windows PC world. How glad I am to have that dark and unclean time behind me.

Tonight was a memorable evening at the Atlanta Java Users Group. James Gosling from Sun Microsystems was there. It was basically a 2-hour question and answer session, with no particular structure or agenda. Obviously, when the guy who initially created the programming language upon which the user group is based shows up, there is neither a lack of attendance nor a dearth of questions.
It was pretty fascinating to hear some of the ways that Java is being used. The work on the Real-Time for Java specification sounds promising, especially to anyone with an awareness of that market’s untapped potential.
AJUG is allegedly going to post the video of the event somehow. I am not sure how that will be accomplished, but those interested might browse over to the AJUG site to see if it’s there. James’ weblog is usually a fun read.