What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning, at volleyball practice, where I'm the Asst. Coach, I bent over to pick up a volleyball and Zing! I felt it right in my lower back. I had hoped it was simply muscular strain, and would get better during the day, but as time progressed, I knew it wasn't... it was going to be another long recovery.

I spent a lot of Saturday and Sunday resting, and getting a few back spasms along the way. I have to say, I've been told that kidney stones are one of the most painful things you can endure. I have to agree. When I had a kidney stone, it was bad. But a lower back spasm is right up there. If you can't control your breathing and force yourself to relax, then you're going to be in a world of hurt.

Monday morning Liza called the Doctor and I got the prescription for the steroid pack and some muscle relaxers which is all I need - along with time, to get better. It's no fun, no fun at all. But there's nothing I could have done to stop it. No way to know that this volleyball, or whatever, would be the one to aggravate the condition.

So I'm laid up until I'm better. What a drag.

With all the machine consolidation in my office of late, and the replacement of Liza's Windows laptop with a MacBook Air, it seemed fitting to take her old laptop and put Fecora Core 9 on it just so that I'd once again have a linux machine in the office. The last laptop I had with linux on it was an interesting experience getting drivers for, etc. as it was RedHat 5 at the time. I used it to type in my old thesis simulation work and get that going again.

Over time, I upgraded it until the last version I had on there was Fedora Core 3. It hadn't been updated in a long while. I've been working with Fedora Core 5 and 6 at work, and while Fedora Core 10 is due out in a week or so, I decided to just get the Fedora Core 9 ISO and burn it onto a DVD and be done with it.

It's interesting to do this process every now and then as you see what defaults they have for the OS. In this case, the Firewall and SELinux were both on by default, and there were no options I saw in the install to disable them, as there was in the past. I'll have to do a few more installs before I'm sure, but normally, I can see people wanting these on by default, but in my office, and at work, where the network is secured, it's just a hassle to mess with ports, etc.

It's up and running and hooked into the router so I can get to it from outside (on certain ports, of course). It was interesting. Fun even. We'll see what I do with it, but it's nice to have an x86_64 linux box at home - like I have at work.

This morning I noticed that Firefox 3.0.4 was out with the standard security and stability fixes. Nothing really specific unless you get pretty deep into the bug tracking code for Firefox. I don't - it's not that big a deal.

It's nice to see them moving forward, but I'm looking forward to 3.1 and a faster/better rendering scheme.

I just checked and DrawIt 3.7.3 is out with some pretty serious bugs fixed. I didn't notice any because I haven't hit it with anything recently, but it's nice to know they stay on top of things. Probably the funniest bug was he missing images... that just sounds like a "duh" moment for the developer. I know I've had my share.

Anyway, get it and have fun.

I was doing a lot of thinking about the Marc Liyanage builds of PHP and PostgreSQL and looking for alternatives - specifically MySQL as it's supported by Apple. Seems like a reasonable alternative if that's what I want to do, but I'm convinced now, more than before, that I can wait on Marc and see if he bows out or decides to keep things rolling, and here's the reason: Building PostgreSQL is easy. In fact, I can get it from another site with an OS X Installer package. That's not the problem. PHP is.

Marc packages a lot of third-party libraries with his PHP, and those are a lot more valuable to me than the most current database support. The version of PostgreSQL I have is fine. It works great. I don't need more. PHP is fine. If I find that I need a new database, then I'll look at MySQL as well and see how things shape up. But until I need a new database, I'm going to leave it as-is for now.

The trick will be building PHP from scratch with all the add-ins he's got. There is a build script on his support forum, and I could certainly start with that, and will, if I have to, but for now, I'm one minor release point behind Apple, and that's not a big enough reason to do it all myself.

I know I can get another PostgreSQL. I can get MySQL for sure. I can get and build PHP based on his script. That's a plan, if I need it. There's no reason to build a database from scratch, and there's no great need to have a different one now. We'll just sit tight and see how things play out in the months to come.

A while back, there was a flourish of new image editing apps based on CoreImage - I picked Acorn from FlyingMeat but another was Pixelmator. I didn't get it as Acorn did all I needed, but it was interesting to see all the apps come out about the same time (there were a few others of lesser note), with basically the same capabilities just a different spin on the UI.

Well, I have to say, Pixelmator is making me think twice about that. It's more like a Photoshop app with the toolbars, but it's based on the same capabilities as Acorn... it's just a matter of which you prefer.

I'll probably still stick with Acorn, but I'm going to keep an eye on Pixelmator as it's moving in the right direction and may have to give it a good once-over to see if it's a better fit for me.

I was blown away this morning to see that Coda 1.6 was released with a new plug-in system as well as a smart spell checker (it checks the code, not your words), and a few other new things, as well as a ton of bug fixes. It's all in the release notes.

Again, they stun me. I've always liked Coda, but it's the fact that they are really moving forward with it so consistently that impresses me. It'll take me a few days to get out from under what I'm doing and give it a good spin, but I'm really impressed. Nice job!

I noticed that there was a new version of gfortran available from the Mac HPC site, though it has probably been available for a while now. I was looking at the Intel FORTRAN compilers and at $600 each, you have to have something significant to use it on in my book. There's nothing wrong with the gfortran compiler, and while I'm not solving weather problems or simulating nuclear explosions, it's still cranking out answers for me that took machines a few years ago a long time to answer. That's not bad.

I still remember very fondly the days in grad school writing FORTRAN code for the Cyber 205, Gould NP1, and the Sun 3/60... fun days indeed.

I've been cleaning up my office - OK, more than 'cleaning', I've been gutting it and dropping about five computers (Sun, SGI, NeXT, HP, and Canon) and reorganizing the entire office to simplify the office and clean all the wiring and power distribution I have. It's taken me several weekends, and it's required me to throw away computers that I've had longer than I've had kids. It's been an emotional journey.

Several months ago, my iMac G5 died and the cats at the Genius Bar in OakBrook said that it would be $900 to replace the mainboard. Yikes! That's nearly the cost of a new Intel iMac. So I got the Intel iMac and put it into service. I didn't get rid of the iMac G5 because I really wanted to get it working, I just didn't know what it'd take to get it going.

Well, in the cleanup, it was one machine that I just could not part with. I think it's the emotional attachment to the first iMac I bought myself. It was a G5, after all! That was a smoking processor! So I kept it. Well... this weekend, I decided to try and see if I could get to the bottom of the problem. All my Google searches said "Mainboard replacement", and my tests showed that I had to do the same. No way around it.

So I realized that it was worth $900 to me, and I went back to the OakBrook Genius Bar and said the story of my iMac. It boots, but then locks up. The gal took it and looked at it behind the bar (it was very crowded) and after a little bit came back to me and said "Yeah, it looks like the mainboard, and it's out of warranty." This, I knew. But I was ready. "But we're going to fix it for you for free."

What!?

Free?!

Yes, free. She took down a little more information from me and went to write up the ticket. It was going to take about 5 days to get the board and replace it. I told Liza about the news and she was blown away for about half a second. "Bob", she said, "You bought a MacBook Pro for your Mom here, my MacBook Air, the three Kids' MacBooks, your iMac... they're going to throw you a bone because it's good advertising."

OK, I had to agree, she's right. After all I've spent in that store, the cost of the mainboard is really nothing to them, but to me, it's incredible customer service. I'll be telling this story for a long time to come - and buying Apple computers for even longer.

So in about a week I'll be able to go back and get my new iMac G5 and put it in my new office and have it back up and running. That's just the most incredible news I've had in weeks. I'm so very glad I didn't ditch it in the clean-up. This is going to be great.

This morning I was wondering if the heavy load I was seeing on my MacBook Pro when viewing Intrade in Firefox (approx. 30% CPU) was fixed in the Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 - so I downloaded it and tried it. Turns out, that's not it. But I did notice a few nice things about the beta that may be really slick when they finish them.

First, the 'smoothness' (hard to put it any other way) of the GUI is much improved. I feels slicker, more polished. I know, very subjective, but still, it's a nice addition. Also, the tabs have been worked over. They are nicer as well. But there are still a few issues with the updating of the GUI that make me feel like they have a little bit of work to do before it's 'final'.

Nice, and in the right direction, but not ready for me to use. Not yet.