John Borwick's blog

My Titanium Powerbook power supply has died. I think it died because the power supply was plugged in to the wall, but the computer wasn’t plugged in to the power supply. The power supply all of the sudden wouldn’t power the computer, and it was pretty hot when I detached it to the wall.

Now I’ve got to call 1-800-APL-CARE and get them to send me another one. We did go by Southpoint to see if they’d give me a new one, but in order to get repairs from an apple store they have to physically verify the serial number on your computer. I didn’t bring my computer, just the power supply, so they couldn’t help me. They also aren’t allowed to mail parts to people (you have to do that through the 800 number) and they didn’t have any parts on-hand, so I couldn’t have been helped anyways.

I’m using Lauren‘s computer for blogging, mail, etc.

I am involved with UCSB Capture the Flag computer security competition. I am on the NCSU team, helping with the defensive aspect. Wish me luck, and feel free to give me any advice. Via email, that is.

We decided to put FreeBSD 5.1 on Lauren’s computer, a VPR Matrix 185A5. Previously, she was running Red Hat 9. We switched because the firewire driver would crash a lot, ACPI isn’t turned on in Red Hat 9, and the wireless support was flaky. Also, it would take me FOREVER to install any new functionality because of the authoritarian nature of the Red Hat Network’s list of packages and the sketchiness of “found” RPMs.

FreeBSD 5.1 comes with good ACPI, sound, wireless, and firewire support. The minor challenges were/are XFree86, gdm flakiness (perhaps due to installing gnome 2.2 and then upgrading to 2.4), and re-mounting firewire devices.

The perks: I had no problems installing straw (RSS newsreader), Linux’s Mozilla with flash support, evolution, xmms, or Frozen Bubble (a Snood-like game). Most everything’s been easy to install because of the ports collection.

There have been difficulties with each installation, but FreeBSD’s easy-to-update ports collection will make it easy (for me, at least) to maintain her computer.

I’d like to extend my original post and reply to Wilson’s comment by talking a bit more about sendmail, and why I’m starting to like it. In brief, I like it because sendmail doesn’t try to re-invent itself; it grows to accomodate new functionality and interfaces without breaking its old syntax and uses. Heck, you can still route mail through UUCP or FAX!
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Seriously, folks, there is something wrong with me. I was sitting around doing homework the other night, and I thought to myself “Man, I wish I knew LISP so I could make EMACS display the type declaration of whatever is under the cursor while I’m editing C code.” This thought percolated, and when mixed with this usenet posting led me to wonder “What language would I choose if I were to write an extensible programmer’s editor like EMACS, but different?” I charged my thought-imp with the task of running pell-mell through the dusty records-room of my brain, sorting through the list of programming languages that I know or have heard about, and for some reason it returned clutching “Forth” in its filthy pincers. I clearly don’t know what I’m doing.
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Programmers, cvsplot will graph your code bloat.

I’ve got the book and starting to understand this kind of junk. Yay?