Misc. Ramblings

I need to catch up with my work here, so this will be a short post.

Back in the Saddle. I'm back at my position in the state Judiciary today. While I've been gone only six weeks, a lot of change has taken place during that time. Both the Administrative Director and his Deputy are leaving. We've switched to an alternative work schedule (options include a four-day work week). Conversion from Token-Ring to Gigabit Ethernet is beginning this month. A second route to the Internet is also being implemented (as soon as the on-order Cisco router arrives and is configured). And on and on.

Much to do and not much time to do it so I gotta go - Aloha!

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Tuesday - 17 July 2001

Gas Bubble Shrinks. No, I'm not saying to run out and buy that Hummer you've always wanted but the price of a gallon of "regular" gas declined recently. This after being warned that prices would hit $3.00/gallon this summer. Unfortunately, prices in Hawai'i are leading the nation (as usual, according to Associated Press figures):

Aloha!

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Hump Day Wednesday - 18 July 2001

Hurry Up and Wait. Waiting lines for Pearl Harbor (the memorial, not the movie) are averaging three hours. The average, prior to the release of the movie was two hours. So if you are planning to come to Hawai'i and see the WWII era USS Arizona Memorial, plan on waiting.

Ups and Downs. BancWest, parent company of First Hawaiian Bank, where I recently spent six weeks working on my practicum, reported earnings up 22 percent over the same time last year. This works out to be 52 cents a share and beat analysts' estimates of 47 cents. This may be the last public quarterly earnings report as BancWest will soon be going private (bought by a French company, BNP Paribas).

On the other hand, Intel profits fell 94%. Yes, that's right - 94%. I'll leave it to the market mavens to explain why, because I don't know.

KDE 2.2 Release Pushed Back. While I was over at KDE.org downloading the most recent stable release, 2.1.1, I noticed an announcement (see it here) that the next version of KDE had been delayed by two weeks. Originally, they had scheduled a release date of 16 July. It is now pushed back to 6 August so that some security and stability issues can be addressed. As they say in the announcement, security and stability are Good Things. So mark you calendars.

For those who want to see what's new in 2.2, see this here.

Aloha!

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Thursday - 19 July 2001

Anti-Aliasing. One of the reasons I downloaded KDE 2.1.1 yesterday was to try to get anti-aliasing going on my PC at work. Long-time readers (all eleven of you) may remember I tried to get fonts and anti-aliasing going awhile back, and I am not too small a person to say I failed miserably.

But being strong willed/hard headed/stupid, I decided to try again. Step one was to download and install the pre-compiled binaries, in the form of RPMs, for KDE 2.1.1. This installed without problems, other than having to use the rpm -ivh -force switch, since I kept getting errors about how some text files were in conflict (like readme). I don't know enough about Linux to know why the errors were occurring or how else I could have solved the problem (comments welcome) but "force" always works (as does a large enough hammer)!

Anyway, KDE came up and ran without problems so I guess I got bold and decided to see if I could get XFree86 3.3.x upgraded to 4.1.0. I don't have it in my notes but I think I went to xfree86.org or maybe it was kde.org, and found a link to an anti-aliasing How-To at linuxplanet.com (see it here). You may remember, I also love How-Tos, especially ones that don't work because they are just plain incorrect, or outdated, or leave out critical steps without even saying so. Like this one, as I was soon to find out. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The How-To says you have to use XFree86-4.02 or later. Fine, there's binaries for that version for Caldera's OpenLinux that I am using at work. So I try installing that. All seems to go well. But apparently, the precompiled binaries were not linked to something called Freetype2. Okay, the How-To says that may be a problem (no kidding). So you have to compile your own version. So I download two of, I think, four tarballs. Each of the two is about 20MB each. You actually don't need the second tarball if you already have the fonts, which you probably do. But I digress.

I unzip the files and read the install and readme files. The How-To says I need to edit a file called /xc/config/cf/host.def, so the Freetyp2 directory will be known to the compiler. So I look for the the host.def file. Nope. Not there. Not anywhere in fact. I keep reading the install and other files and find that a file called sites.def can be setup to call for a host.def file. I figure it's worth a shot uncommenting the lines in sites.def so it does exactly that. Of course, I still don't have a host.def file. So I create one with just the line the How-To says I need: #define Freetype2Dir /usr/local. I then do a "make" and I get all kinds of errors, including one saying host.def includes a define statement that is not terminated. Huh? Did I already mention I'm not a Linux expert? Did I mention I love How-Tos?

Pretty much at that point I gave up. I don't have that much time to fool around with this stuff. Why Linux makes it so hard to include something that is natively available in Windows is beyond me. I guess that's why I'm happy my distribution of SuSe 7.2, at home, is already configured, out-of-the box, for anti-aliasing. At this point, I think I'll wait for Caldera's 3.1 to come out with, I hope, anti-aliasing included and configured. Sigh.

Oh. I forgot. Even if I had gotten XFree86 to work, I would then need to download and compile, with something called Xft enabled, QT-2.3.0 or higher. Then, if that wasn't enough, I would then need to hand edit the font path and also create an environmental variable. Sheesh. Big Sigh. Get thee behind me Satan.

Aloha!

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Aloha Friday - 20 July 2001

It's Friday!

Bugs! Bugs, everywhere! Well, not exactly. But I'm going into work late today so I can let the termite person (a woman as it turns out) into the house to check the Sentricon termite bait stations installed about a week ago.

To back up a little, we are doing some renovations to both the front and back houses on our property. So far, we've just done preliminary stuff like putting in a new water line (to replace the original plastic one with copper), having a property survey done (in preparation for building a perimeter wall), and tenting the houses so they could be fumigated against termites.

It's the termites that got us going on this project. There is a main support beam, incased in drywall material, that runs the length of our family room. I noticed, about six months ago, cracks developing along the length of the beam. They were very fine lines and seemed to be about an inch in from the edge of the beam. I called a couple of structural engineers and they said it was probably termites rather than a problem inherent with the beam. So I called in a carpenter who ripped open the sheet rock covering the beam. Lo and behold, the beam was eaten away almost half way through in some points. This was causing the beam to sag, and the metal corner bead strips, used by the dry wall installers, had given way. Thus the long, straight lines that I had seen.

Part of the Sentricon system are bait stations. In our case, some outside the house and some inside (because of the active ground termite infestation). So this morning the termite woman will come and check the inside stations.

Have a Great Weekend Everyone! - Aloha!

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© 2001 Daniel K. Seto. All rights reserved.