What’s new at COOLNAMEHERE? Not much, yet it seems like a lot. This was a busy time for everyone, but things have quieted down now. I’m studying for my driver’s test. My original hope was to have a driver’s license before I turned 30. Oh well, maybe I’ll take the test before I turn 31. The thought occurs to me that I am an odd individual ;-)

Computer-wise, I’m doing some heavy changes to stuff on this computer. The attempt with Redhat 7.3 was a total disaster, but I’m feeling too lazy to mess with downloading a different distribution while people wonder where the site is. I re-installed the old Redhat 7.2 distro, and have spent most of the day upgrading software from source. The computer is in the middle of fixing the RH oversight of not using an official released GCC. This computer will only vaguely resemble a Redhat system by the end of the week.

And yes, I’m working on PageTemplate stuff while all this is going on.

I just packed up the latest release of PageTemplate and sent it out into the wild. New features?

• It works under ruby 1.6 now - you no longer need Ruby CVS to use this little toy!
• Experimental support for caching! If you don’t know what this is, don’t worry about it for now. I’ll come up with a decent explanation when it’s working better :-)

No new features are planned for the near future, just some big-time code scrubbing.

COOLNAMEHERE has been pretty erratic for the last couple of days, hasn’t it? I upgraded my computer over the weekend - new CPU, motherboard, bigger hard drive. There’s practically a new system in this old tower! Little problem: I forgot to get a new power supply. Naturally the old one went pop within a day or two. But all is well. I have my new power supply, and the computer seems quite happy.

The old angst comes from the fact that I also upgraded Redhat from 7.2 to 7.3, and have been having the “but it worked fine in the last version!” woes that seem to be part of the daily grind with RH. It works now, though, so I should stop messing with it. Sort of works - my Wacom Graphire2 is wonky at best. Some clever sod thought it would be fun to reverse the direction that the scroll button works, and it still hasn’t occurred to any of the distribution maintainers that somebody might have a Wacom pad and want to use it for … oh, I don’t know … drawing?

Time for a sideways upgrade on the OS. Something where they trust me enough to let me muck about with things. Debian, or FreeBSD? Whichever one will let me play my old CivCTP and Heretic 2 games, I suppose. And the Wacom. Don’t forget about the Wacom.