OK, what idiot decided...

... that you can only have one home directory?

It used to be that Unix programs got your configuration files from whatever directory was set as the value of the environment variable $HOME.  This let you have multiple logins with different home directories, shells, or what-have-you.  For example, I usually have two home directories, one on my desktop machine and one on the fileserver.  Both logins have the same numeric user ID.

Now, however, there are a lot of programs (Java comes to mind, but Firefox has the same problem, which it apparently shares with everything in Gnome) that look up your userID in /etc/passwd and go to the first home directory they find.  STUPID!  Actually, Firefox isn't consistent:  it finds your profile using $HOME, but your .gtkrc-2.0 file by userID.  IDIOTS!

So how was my weekend?

The flower_cat and chaoswolf were off at a Further Confusion meeting Saturday, then off to the Dickens Faire Sunday. I did a little shopping (spending an inordinate amount of money on ink cartridges at Fry's -- maybe a 6-color printer wasn't such a great idea after all) and some recording. In the background I did a couple of Firefox 1.0 installs and a total upgrade on the Cat's DeMuDi partition. (Over 500 files upgraded -- I love apt-get!)

Meanwhile, the Younger Daughter spent most of her time with a friend, and was very little trouble.