Patrick’s weblog, featuring posts dating back to 2002 on topics including technology, open source, networking, and various technical adventures.
I’m making some good progress on my modifications of MCatalog. I’ve already managed to remove the old Mozilla based shelf viewer for a shiny new one that uses Cairo. This has some nice performance improvements and provides better scaling. Of course, layout changes are no…
Kristina and I purchase a fair amount of DVDs in the second market (used). Usually we get pretty good deals on them, for example, last weekend we bought 8 DVDs from Hollywood video for about $50. One consequence of our DVD buying habit is that…
Pittsburgh has seen some absolutely amazing weather this weekend, which all things considered, is quite rare. On Saturday, Kristina and I, along with a couple of friends decided to ride the inclines on Mount Washington. The Monongahela and Duquesne inclines both provide excellent views of…
This week I managed to unpack the T2000 server. It’s a pretty large box, but not overly huge. The hard disks are nice little 73GB SAS drives that pull right out of the box. The CD/DVD drive is a sleek slot loading drive. I do…
After a long series of delays and communication problems, the T2000 server from Sun has finally arrived. Apparently there was an issue with my original submission back in February. Once I resubmitted my request I was approved in fairly short order and received some pretty…
I admit, I’m a CNN.com news junky. In the past I used a combination of Firefox, AdBlock, and Privoxy to keep their annoyances to a minimum. Then yesterday they dropped the bomb. Ack, their new site is just annoying. I don’t care about the videos…
Ubuntu 06.06 (note the delay from the original 06.04), aka Dapper Drake, is well into development, and being as I have a shiny new laptop, I decided to give it a shot. So, here’s a list of five things that I like about Dapper and…
Last most graduate students I’m enjoying my spring break doing work. But hey, at least I don’t have many meetings this week. Most of my work has been on trying to get a paper out the door and finished up for a CSCW 2006 this…
Yesterday was a sad day for baseball with the surprise death of Twins legend Kirby Puckett. If something happens to Cal Ripken in the next few days, I’m just going to curl up in a ball and give up on baseball. However, today something good…
Baseball lost a hero today. It’s sad that there is so few of them left. Kirby Puckett after his home run in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series