Posted by Eric Stewart
Fri, 24 Jun 2005 20:57:00 GMT
In this case, I’m talking about my buddy Spencer. See, late last year he was diagnosed with Leukemia. That can be quite a drag on such a young guy doing things that boys typically do. Turns out he’s fighting hard and doing well. Well enough, in fact, that he’s trying to help raise awareness and funds for the fight against Cancer.
Spencer is raising money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. He’s also hoping to ride in the Ride for the Roses this year (and pull his dad along with him). If you have a moment, head over to his dad’s blog and read their ongoing story.
Donate to support cancer survivors
Posted in Austin | no comments
Posted by Eric Stewart
Thu, 23 Jun 2005 21:37:00 GMT
I didn’t really expect to hear this any time.. well.. ever! One technology strategist at least seems to think Mandriva will move from being Red Hat based to Debian based.
At the beginning of this year I might have been ambivalent about such a move. But in March, after being a Mandrake (now Mandriva) user for several years I made the switch to Ubuntu. More specifically, I moved to Kubuntu, being more of a KDE fan as of late. I haven’t looked back.
Despite making a concurrent switch to amd64 builds (and the associated extra headaches with being a relatively early adopter) the switch has been a great success. Why has it been better?
- package management and installation has been easier (Synaptic and apt-get are nice!)
- I have had no real dependency headaches – apt-get has kept me out of trouble pretty well
- wider availability of stable software
- I like system structure better – things like apache layout/config better thought through
- seems to have a great, responsive community
- Ubuntu highly leverages their Debian base
Some things have not gone so smoothly. Much having to do with using the amd64 version of the distribution:
- Fewer binaries available/harder to track down some dependencies
- Drivers not always available
- Some things (like hotplugging) didn’t work as well out of the box as the non-amd64 dist
- Software overally not kept quite as up-to-date, though this is not purely a bad thing
- Audo/Video have been problematic and inconsistent
Overall I’m very happy and haven’t thought of going back. I can’t say how much of this is due to the Debian base, but my current impression is that it would be a good move. RPM gave me nothing but headaches.
Posted in Software Development, Technology | Tags linux | no comments
Posted by Eric Stewart
Sat, 11 Jun 2005 21:57:00 GMT
I just updated my recent post on adding feeds per category in Typo. If you had trouble getting my modified files, take a look again. I'll be submitting them as patches soon, but need to look at the main categories template a little more considering the new default css in the Typo trunk.
Posted in Ruby, Typo | Tags meta, rails, ruby, typo | no comments
Posted by Eric Stewart
Mon, 06 Jun 2005 04:24:18 GMT
I went out today to help and participate in National Cancer Survivor’s Day at Live Oak Unitarian Church. My friend Rob Sartin didn’t have to do too much persuading and I was glad to help out. There was a good crowd and lots of familes. Quite a success for an inagural event.
Especially touching were all the stories posted on the walls of various people and their cancer stories. Next year I will be contributing the story of my mother who beat cancer yet passed on 15 years later due to the damage the treatment did to her body at still quite a young age.
Look for this event next year and come on out. In the mean time, head over to Rob’s site and pitch in for his son Spencer’s fund raising efforts in the cancer fight.
Posted in Austin | no comments
Posted by Eric Stewart
Fri, 03 Jun 2005 08:06:00 GMT
I've been playing with Typo even more and I'm loving it. Just look how good the new logo looks! That's the most important thing!
I thought I was going to have to start from scratch adding per-category syndicated feeds, but luckily someone had already submitted a patch. Unfortunately, the patch only set up the xml_controller routing (the meat of the feature). So, I modified the categories list to provide syndication links for each category. Then I edited the syndication view code itself to include the category in the link, title, and descriptions so all the feeds for a blog don't have the same info/link.
I'm going to clean it all up a little more and submit as a patch, but will provide those files here if anyone is interested:
Make sure an apply the patch above for this to work
Update: I fixed one of the links here and added some clarifying information for anyone who had trouble getting these files. Also, the _categores.rhtml template looks especially hokey in the new default css in the typo trunk, so it definitely has to change now.
Posted in Ruby, Typo | Tags rails, ruby, typo | 2 comments
