Daley Ponderings

A good quote from Linux Journal: There are 100000000000 stars in the galaxy.  That used to be a huge number  But it's only a hundred billion.  It's less than the national deficit!  We used to call them astronomical number,  Now we should call them economical... (More)

There is a bizarre issue with AT&T and their latest phone - the tech support folks (even the second level) haven't ever seen one, and the scripts they have are made for the original Tilt, and AT&T somehow hasn't realized that while it probably is possible to do it the "old"... (More)

Our printer finally died.  Or actually, it didn't really die, but required more money, so I decided (somewhat hesitantly, since the HP Laserjet 6L is the best printer ever made, according to most sources) to replace it.  The 6L lasted 13 years , so the longest lasting printer I've... (More)

Since I am a lazy Debian user, I am not used to compiling things from source.  (sidenote: It is interesting to me how many people from other distributions are fairly used to mucking around in source code, spending hours working on getting a simple package installed)  But, clusterssh... (More)

Cygwin is one of the packages that seems to often break when I upgrade it.  In their defense, it is a large collection of packages, so presumably hard to get everything right in all circumstances.  I run Debian (testing) on my Linux systems, and I rarely have any issues during... (More)

I am working on a Vista machine for a client, and was trying to update things - the firewall was turned off, windows update hadn't been run in a while, etc.  Windows Defender was complaining about not updating for the last 8 months, and currently giving me an error of 0x8024402c.  I searched... (More)

I had turned down some work the other day, and as I thought about it more, realized that I was ready to hire someone to work for me.  I talked to a dad at church, and he thought it was a good idea, and his son was interested as well.  It turns out that he has less programming... (More)

I had the privilege of installing VMWare 1.0.5 on a brand new 2.6.25 kernel.  I downloaded the 2.6.XX patch for vmware 1.0.4 , applied the one change from asm to linux in vcpuset.h.  That had worked for me before when using 1.0.5 on a 2.6.24 kernel, but today I downloaded a 2.6.25... (More)

It took some amount of work to get Linux up and running on my laptop , but I just got a new computer ($50 from Peter's workplace - let me or him know if you are interested, there might be some more left) and installed Linux in an hour two, including copying all the old data from the old... (More)

I am sure this will excite many of our normal readers, but I have finally (after four years) switched my laptop to Linux.  Now that I am using it everyday, it is much nicer to be in this environment, instead of having putty windows all over the place.  Perhaps if I had a better... (More)

I have been getting a bunch of spam through my contact form over the last couple of days, so I thought I would check out what they are trying to do.  The domain's contact information is protected by privacyprotect.org, so we can't know who they are, though I filled out a form showing... (More)

This is what the HP technical support person said to me when I called about our printer.  Our faithful HP LaserJet 6L, which was manufactured 10.5 years ago, and given to us 6(7?) years ago.  It printed Mom's boarding pass just fine, and then one day later, all three indicator lights... (More)

Everyone always says how user-friendly Windows is, and as I sit here waiting for my Windows computer to endlessly update itself, I am struck by how much harder it is to update my Windows laptop than all of my Linux (Debian) servers put together. On Debian: Type "aptitude",... (More)

I started a new IT job recently, and the majority of the people there have Macs, so I have been bringing one home in order to learn more about them.  They have come a long way in 20 years, when I used to play on a Macintosh SE (with three floppy drives, a nice bonus so you didn't have... (More)

It seems that lots of people have trouble typing in keywords into search engines that result in the hits that they want. Every once in a while I have to go to the second page of results, but generally things are available on the first page.For example, I was recently asked, "How do I get... (More)