Fred's Home (Like we needed another home page)

A long time ago, I used to work in movies. I was assistant director, or production manager when working on ads, or I would shoot a number of short subjects when working in TV.
Unfortunately I'm definitely not a people's person. Translated to a film setting, this means that the artsy type soon gets on my nerves (because, no, you just can't watch a film with your sunglasses on... yes, even with a black turtleneck and champagne).

Read the previous entries... it was bound to happen eventually. I guess OS X just wasn't meant for me.

In the end I turned my iBook into a fancy paperweight and got a Samsung Q35 instead. It runs Kubuntu and it's great.

I've been running Linux on my desktop(s) for more than 10 years now. And recently I switched to (K)Ubuntu because it mostly just works. Like many others, I lost the interest in poking at the system for the hell of it quite some time ago. Now I just use it for whatever I need to do. And *Ubuntu mostly just works for me without getting in the way much. Yet it's still broken in one major way.

Like all desktop distributions I've seen to date, *Ubuntu has a real problem. It installs by default to a single partition. Notably, home is bundled with the rest. This makes updates or distribution switching needlessly complicated.

Je me rends encore régulièrement compte que pour beaucoup, un fichier bureautique est obligatoirement un fichier Microsoft Office. Plutôt que de répéter mon laïus pour la n^e fois, j'oriente désormais mes interlocuteurs vers cette page.

L'état des lieux

Microsoft a fait un tel travail de sape dans les esprits qu'il est inconcevable pour beaucoup d'utiliser autre chose que leurs logiciels pour la bonne raison que personne ne sait qu'il en existe d'autres. Dans le meilleur des cas, certains ont entendu parler des machines fabriquées par Apple. Toutefois dans l'esprit de la plupart, il s'agit d'engins exotiques, onéreux et réservés à des métiers particuliers comme la retouche d'image ou le montage vidéo.

Je republie cette page puisque apparemment il reste des utilisateurs de ce petit script :)

À leur attention donc, revoilà la page de fgg :

Version courante : 1.2

Pour les utilisateurs d'appareils photo numériques, la création de galeries HTML est laborieuse. Comme je ne trouvais pas d'outil satisfaisant pour créer mes galleries, j'ai fini par en écrire un en Perl. Il est très simple et crée des fichiers HTML très faciles à éditer (par exemple pour ajouter des commentaires). Le source HTML lui même est parfaitement lisible.
Ce programme est principalement destiné à la création de galeries de photos ou tout au moins d'images de grande taille.

Fred's believe it or not
It may seem odd, but my very commercial iBook is an awesome demonstration platform for FOSS. I just had a great chat at the pub with this guy who was working on airport security in Africa and I pointed out to him the savings of FOSS compared to traditional software. NeoOffice/J and other pieces of FOSS were used for demonstration purpose. I gave him a couple Google search terms, I hope he'll use them. I suppose a full blown Linux KDE or Gnome desktop demo would have been better but I had to do with what was at hand. I should have connected to my workstation but my home network link is down. And I can never find an open hotspot anyway.

Getting X11 to work
I can't get the xdm that comes with the Apple X11 to get its XDMCP chooser running. I'm beginning to wonder if Apple hasn't changed a few things inside it without changing the man pages. I'm now considering just getting up and working on my main machine (it's not as if anyone is using it anyway).
Ok, I gave up on the chooser, "sudo /usr/X11R6/bin/X -query 192.168.1.2" is less geeky but at least it works.

Mac gaming, a world of wonders
I looked at the available games for the Mac. Currently they are all excited because Deus Ex has been ported. Not Deus Ex 2 (or 3 or whatever the current version is, the original one, that came out years ago when the world was young). Amazing. I'm sticking with Asteroid for now. Maybe I'll try breakout next.

Give me my disk back !
When I first started the brand new machine, less than one third of the disk was available. That's on a 30GB disk. Silly me figured that on a mobile machine, I'd never fill a 30GB disk since I'd have at least 20 or 24GB worth of disk space to play with. Hah.
Well I found a tool (called "Monolingual") that removes all the superfluous languages that come bundled with the system. All the hundreds of megs of them. I left a few European ones but I know I'm not going to learn Armenian any time soon. And while I'm not sure where Kanada is spoken, they probably don't eat fries with melted cheese and chicken gravy.

A tale of puzzlement and discovery

Step 0: A foreword
I'm writing all of this in English as it's the language that most people on the network speak (unless the filters in China are suddenly dropped). However, it's written mostly in English, not US English, so don't bug me with "colour", it's the way lightwaves in visible light are named in English. Look it up. It is however possible that colonial spelling might have crept in here and there.
Secondly, I'm not a native speaker, so there might be grammatical or stylistic mistakes here and there. Just count yourself lucky that you aren't reading this through Babelfish and that I made the effort at all.

One of the plagues of current PCs (the Windows kind) is the deluge of viruses, and assorted malware that assaults each and every machine that tries to connect to the rest of the world.
Each and every ? No, for there is a little group that still resists. Get a Mac, or install one of several Unix versions (Linux is the popular choice, but there are others such as the many BSD variants) on your PC, and you'll be safe.

Well I just got a Mac laptop, and I connect it regularly to the outside and just like with my Unix machines, no adware has invaded my disk. No scanners or firewalls required.