DarkWyrm Unabridged

Early this summer I bought my almost 5-year-old son the game Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga for the PC. Aside from a bug, which prevented me from completing one puzzle in the game, it's a great game. Expecting the same experience, when my mom asked for recommendations for gifts for him, one of those that I mentioned was Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures. She got it for him and since then, I've been playing it, off and on, for a little while. I now refuse to play it because of multiple infuratingly bad experiences. The cause? Bugs in the game. Two years later, there are NO patches for any of them or the one well-known bug in Lego Star Wars. In playing through five levels of Raiders of the Lost Ark, I have found three different bugs which put the game in a state where the only option is to bail out of the level, losing all progress. One of those bugs is 75% of the way through the level. It's both pathetic, indicative of bad QA, and totally, utterly inexcusable. I...

Apparently the folks over at Westboro Baptist Church have had another incident, this time at Comic-Con . I vaguely remembered seeing its protesting in the news some time ago and was intrigued when I saw the post about this on Slashdot. When I read the article about Comic-Con, I was both amused and saddened. There are a wealth of things I could say at this point, but nothing would put it as succinctly as saying that this is a great example of people -- I'm not sure they can be called Christians -- acting in a very un-Christian way. If even half of the information on the Wikipedia article about WBC is to be believed, I have to question their motives, let alone their theology. Their actions give proper Christians a bad name, no, a very bad name. As if Christians needed to do more to be disliked / hated. Most American Christians have no idea how good they have it. Read through some of the entries over at Christian Persecution India . These are real events happening around the worl...

Until this season I've been a Johnny-come-lately fan of the show. The last couple of seasons of SYTYCD have been really good. I'm a big fan of fine arts, and the show isn't really any different. It seems, though, that this one has been pretty unexciting. In fact, it's been downright predictable or otherwise disappointing for the most part. A "tribal" routine almost every other week. The token weird Sonya routine. Two competitors have been injured. The whole "all-stars" concept -- 10 competitors instead of 20, dancing with top-10 dancers from previous seasons -- it seems like such a lame attempt at a ratings grab. I hope this is the last season. It would be a shame for such a great series to grow sickly and die because it had been overdone time and again.

As if I needed further confirmation. Right. I just got a new toy: a Dell Latitude D620, used for eBay for $250. Definitely a great deal for the price. Once I got it last night, I proceeded to wipe it and install XP Pro and Ubuntu Karmic. The Karmic install took about an hour with updates and extra programs that I use. It still needs a few tweaks, but it's basically done. 3 hours later, the XP install is now downloading updates for Office 2007. I really don't like Office, but seeing how this laptop is for my use at school and I teach a class on Office, I kinda have to have it. Personally speaking, I'd rather not bother with Windows at all. 1 hour vs 3+. Hmmm. Once again, Micro$oft can't seem to get it right.

My search for a good, usable, free groupware package has been a tough quest. There are a lot out there. Some of them, like OpenGroupWare, are ugly. Others, like phpGroupWare and eGroupWare, are easy to install, but buggy. Scalable OpenGroupWare seems almost designed to be near-impossible to install. While I haven't tried OpenChange, I've heard that its webmail is clunky. Zimbra, at first, didn't seem much better than them. Actually, it's quite good, but if you don't have much background in the components that make up Zimbra, it's not at all easy to install. The learning curve is steep, but I nailed it and set up a mail server on a Linux partition I have on my development box. I'm *so* excited and relieved at the same time. I'm a little concerned, too, because the box hung itself completely, and I couldn't even do an Alt-PrintScreen reboot. It doesn't want to boot now. I hope the thing hasn't died. Even if it has, I can get the data back, but ...

These last few weeks have had a lot of ups and downs, and I've learned a lot in the process. First thing that I've learned is that Linux Administration is hard to learn quickly. I twiddled with Zimbra for a few days and learned that it's kinda a picky. Interface-wise, there aren't any groupware packages out there that are usable, open source, and easy to set up. Pick any two, instead. Scalable OpenGroupware is usable and open source, but a pain to set up. The documentation isn't exactly great, either. I've managed to set up a nice Courier mail server with a MySQL backend and I'm in the middle of setting up OpenLDAP services so that I can (theoretically) set up SOGo. Not easy, but maybe I'll write a HOWTO if/when I get it going. *shrug*

My school is going through some changes between this year and next. In an effort to save some money, I volunteered to research some alternatives to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. So far, the only workable, totally free solution which should meet its needs is Scalable OpenGroupWare (SOGo), currently running on CentOS 5.3. It's a groupware solution which is totally free, mature, and supports CalDAV, unlike Citadel. With me being a big Ubuntu, this is a bit of a jump, especially when I'm kind of new to Linux in an enterprise context, but I've learned quite a bit already. What have I learned? The combination of Postfix and Dovecot is pretty darn easy to set up e-mail. There are also some definite head-scratcher moments when dealing with PostgreSQL, having only worked with SQLite before. Next stop, OpenLDAP. Oog. Even if my boss decides to ignore me, and my FOSS advocacy, at least it won't have been for nothing. It's been fun, too. :-)

OK. Now it's official: I'm tired of winter now. For the third time in my school's 25ish year history, it closed early yesterday because of the blizzard coming our way. 2 feet of snow in 24 hours. I realize that were I to live in Wyoming, North Dakota, or somewhere in Canada, this might be a frequent occurrence. I'd also have a snowblower. Neither is the case. The roads look pretty good, but digging around 400 cubic feet of snow just to get my van to just get to the road is hard, especially in conjunction with a lower back injury from last November that I still haven't totally recovered from. Barring major financial difficulties or some other sizable lifestyle change, I'm buying a snowblower next fall.