John Borwick's blog

Though Earthlink told us that cable Internet was available in our apartment, the contractor found out that we don’t have a cable box in back of the building.

The contractor believed that Time Warner might send an engineer to look at the building and perhaps eventually install a cable box. Our other option is to get written permission from our landlord and the person who own the building joined to ours, so that a contractor could mount cable and run it along the outside of the building to our apartment.

Well, perhaps I’ll be able to go on-line w/o going to Chelsee’s. We’re getting Earthlink cable installed, by a Time Warner Cable person, this Saturday.

They are running a $29.95/mo for six months deal. Hopefully they will be able to install cable in our place, because the closest thing we have to “access” is an exposed cable hanging outside our (second story) front window.

Seth showed me that the WFU Library lets you check out books on-line through NetLibrary. Well, they’ve got Learning the Bash Shell on-line, and well, bash is the default shell for Red Hat. So I read some of it yesterday, and then went through the first half of the info docs (info bash) last night and this morning.

The resulting options added to my .bashrc are

shopt -s cdspell
# physical directories only
set -P
export CDPATH=~:~/cvs
PROMPT_COMMAND=’echo -ne “�33]0;${USER}@${HOSTNAME%%.*}:${PWD/#$HOME/~}${STATUS:+” “}${STATUS}�07″‘
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• Why C is horrible
• Time Warner is blocking Apple’s outgoing mail
• Bluetooth vulnerabilities
• Detecting anger

I’m using SharpReader, a Windows newsreader, to follow work-related stuff.

I’m looking for a website that offers free news aggregation; I use several computers, and if I set up say, NetNewsWire on my Mac, I can’t view the same news on my PC or my Dell laptop somewhere else. I’ve seen Bloglines.com, but they seem to have a hairy clause in their terms of service which would allow them to send out anything I provide to them for service (i.e. my email address) to any of their “contracted parties”. I don’t want more spam. It’s the same way with Feedster.

If this isn’t feasible, has … Continue Reading

I wanted to install Perl 5.8.3 and Perl/Tk under Panther, and I had a hell of a time trying to get this to work, simply because there isn’t a good HOWTO or anything that I was able to find. So here are the steps I had to take, for future reference:

note: where you see “%” and “cpan>”, these indicate input at a prompt in the UNIX shell or in the cpan utility. The portion of the line to be typed is after the “%” or “cpan>”. You would be surprised at how often … Continue Reading

Add (somewhat slow) Ogg Vorbis support to iTunes in Panther.

It’s been a long time since I have posted here; I just feel so busy, and it’s not as big a part of my routine since I tend to spend my “in front of the computer” time doing homework. Also, I haven’t got any of my machines optimized for RSS/Blog stuff like I had my laptop when I first had Debian on it. In any case, I thought I had something to say here because…
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I’ve got internet access for just a bit, here at Chelsee’s.

A listserv I’m on is switching to mailman. I found Mail::Box, the most comprehensive Mail module (for Perl) EVER.

Also I’ve been reading Will’s copy of The Mythical Man-Month, which has been “borrowed” (purloined) for the last few years by Y.T.

The Unitarians have been keeping me grounded a little. We went to a CHANGE meeting in Winston-Salem last week about the state of public schools in Forsyth County.

Must. Get. Internet.