State of the Starport: Shai Dorsai!

[mdlbear]

This is being posted from Dorsai, a dual-core AMD-64 machine that has been my main workstation, um... all year. There are enough differences between Emacs on Lenny and Etch that I'm still not particularly satisfied with the configuration; that will presumably change over the course of the next few months. Iceweasel, now based on Firefox 3, is another source of continuing dissatisfaction. But on the whole it's a lot better.

The Emacs problems are largely due to my having carried over a number of hacks from the days of Emacs 18; things are better now, but they're different. It was long past time to update, though, and I'm glad of the excuse to do some cleanup.

Today was largely occupied with moving the daily mirror drive from Harmony (the old workstation) back to Nova (the fileserver). This shouldn't have been a problem -- it had been there before -- but a blown power supply occupied a lot of my time, and some oddities about the ethernet configuration occupied the rest. I still don't have a working gigabit ethernet card, and the old power supply I used is noisy. So those will need attention pretty soon, as will upgrading both Nova and Dorsai to reasonable amounts of RAM.

And the little old HP desktop the kids brought down from upstairs now that they're planning on using Harmony as a Linux box simply won't boot at all. Grrr - probably power supply again, and of course being HP it's probably all proprietary inside.

Still, I'm not complaining. I managed to get through the year without spending outrageous amounts of money on computers, and that's something.

The next thing that needs major attention is our net connection. I'd been planning to drop the old AT&T DSL line in favor of the new one from Sonic. But a couple of shills from AT&T came by a couple of days ago to say that the neighborhood has fiber now (or will have it soon -- I missed that part). So that would strongly tilt the balance back in the other direction. That would also include internet phone and TV; the latter would be a major win over cable or satellite. Later. When I have time and brain cells.