I spent yesterday at the University of Iowa, attending a presentation on how to make OS X Macs work with Microsoft's ActiveDirectory. In short, it's hard. It shouldn't have to be this hard. Let's hope that Microsoft and/or Apple and/or some clever third party can make it a little easier for those of us who don't want to become LDAP architects just to have our machines share a common list of users.
I attempted to grill a steak for my wife last night, but it didn't go so well. We got this new gas grill for our wedding last fall, and I've only used it a few times, for burgers, brats, and hot dogs. Well, I was feeling manly last night, so I told her I'd cook her a steak, though I was just going to toss a couple hot dogs on for myself, as I had some buns I wanted to use up. So, I tossed the steak on the grill, closed the lid, and went inside to get the hot dogs, figuring it'd be a while before it was cooked. I came back out, and noticed an unusually high amount of smoke coming from the inside of the grill, so I lifted the lid to behold a flaming T-Bone of death. Flaming T-Bone makes a good name for a rock band, as well as a nice euphemism for venereal disease, in my opinion. Needless to say, the steak was, shall we say, less than edible? I watched the hot dogs like a hawk, however, and they came out fine. Maybe I'll try again tonight on that steak, I'd better master this art before summer, and before I run out of steaks, as they are a bit expensive to cremating regularly...
I'm very afraid. I saw over on Al's weblog that Warner Brothers has optioned a great book, Have Space Suit, Will Travel, by the late great Robert A. Heinlein. This is literally the first Sci-Fi book that I ever read as a child, and so help me God, they'd better not commit blasphemy on the same levels that they did with the last two movies based on Heinlein books, Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters. I'm realistic, I understand that books have to be changed to be made into movies, but I hate arrogant movie directors that change the story to fit their "creative vision". Here's an idea, if you don't like the story as it's written, don't frickin' option it, go write your own. Paul Verhoeven, I'm talking to you. The Lord of the Rings series is a great example of how to make a movie true to the original work, without royally pissing off all your fans. Hopefully, since the director of Harry Potter has some experience in transferring popular books to the big screen, he won't screw this up.
Okay, who wants to settle a grammar argument? My wife, Holly, and I disagree over this paragraph from the contact us page of the brand new web site that her employer just launched:
As you've toured our site, you've seen many examples of how the staff at Hellman Associates has helped our clients formulate their business goals and implement innovative marketing tools to achieve great results.
Now, I say that it should read "how the staff at Hellman Associates HAVE helped our clients", because staff is a plural noun, and you wouldn't say "The people at Hellman has helped me a lot!", at least not if you had all your teeth, or graduated from high school.
She says "No, actually, it depends on how you use plural nouns. This is acceptable usage, as we are working together as a single entity (in theory)."
So who is correct? Post your comments below!
I snagged Red Hat 9 the other day. You can grab a copy of my .iso files from my work machine, they're the ones called "Shrike". I installed it today while waiting for the Satellite Guy, and I really like it. I'm writing this post in it right now. I'm a Linux poker, I poke at it every now and then, and have a mail server that uses Libranet, as well as a web server I set up for some faculty. I'm not proficient, but I'm not helpless either. I really like apt-get, and the ease that Debian gives you to install packages, but I've got to say, Red Hat has done a great job. Installation was painless, other than requiring 3 entire CDs of stuff. It autodetected all my hardware, and worked great, other than forgetting to get my DNS servers via DHCP at first. It's possible I missed something there during the setup, but really, the default when specifying DHCP, should be to automatically retrieve DNS servers that way. After I fixed that minor glitch, all was well, I actually like their "Blue Curve" themed X experience. Menus are organized logically, if you know where something is in Windows, you can probably find it here, and all the essentials are already on the menus for you.
The thing that pleased me most, and it's somewhat simple, is that now I can adjust screen resolution and color depth in the GUI. I don't have to mess with my config files for Xfree86, I just do it the same way that I have for years in Windows. I've been griping about that for at least 5 years, since I first laid hands on a Linux box, and I'm really glad to see that someone has finally implemented it. Let me also say that it's possible this was done before, in previous versions, or distributions, and that this is just the first time I've personally seen in on a machine I've set up.
I easily connected to my printers here on the home network, they're attached to my Windows 2000 Server, and I configured them without great difficulty, though I did have to manually enter the queue names, it'd have been nice if it auto-detected them.
I have two places where I'm not overly enthusiastic though, and one of them is Gaim, the instant messaging client. I normally use Trillian, which is great, and it lets you talk on multiple protocols all at once. Gaim will let you do that too, but it's not quite as nice about it. For one, it can't retrieve your ICQ buddy list from the ICQ servers, so you either have to wait for all your friends to message you, or import/enter that list manually. That stinks. For two, it has no integration with the taskbar. It'd be nice if I could just minimize Gaim to an icon in the System Tray area, but I see no way to do it, though I'm sure there's some arcane method of doing so.
The second place I've broken down, is setting up a VPN connection to work. Okay, this isn't exactly a total newbie task, but really, it shouldn't be that hard. I just want to use PPTP (the proprietary Microsoft VPN protocol) to connect to my workplace. I found the page of a site that offers a PPTP client, and even got it installed, but configuring it isn't exactly simple. I'm sure I'll get it working when I take an hour to devote to the task, but something like that should really be built into the GUI, in my opinion.
Maybe in Red Hat 10?
