SlackWorld Feature!

For whatever reason, the guys over at The Slack World thought I was worthy of this month's "Persona Grata" feature, so they fired off a few questions and gathered some responses. You can find it on their home page (linked above) or go directly to the interview.

It's a girl!

Well, it *will* be a girl when it arrives :D

As I announced back in December, my wife and I are expecting our first child in early August, and we found out last week that it will be a little girl. That's not official yet, so it's subject to change, but the ultrasound images are rather unequivocal. :-)

Changes to site

As indicated on the main page, I've mostly finished some major overhaul of the site backend - everything has been modularized using PHP (but still no dynamic content - no need for it). The may be some broken links in a few places, and some of your existing bookmarks may no longer be valid, but otherwise, everything should be fully functional now. By the way, everything you see is now hosted on cardinal, but the DNS records haven't been moved yet. Until I (and rob0) can find time to get the mail aliases set up properly, I'm going to leave the DNS and MX at 1and1...

Pitter-patter of little feet...

To the enormous delight of our families, Marla and I announced today that we are expecting a new addition in or around early August 2007. We've known about this for approximately a month now, but we wanted to surprise our families with an announcement at Christmas. Look out world - there's another geek on the way! ;-)

New Truck! :)

Yes, I finally decided to buy a new truck, so here it is - a 2006 Chevrolet Colorado. Notice the back glass... :D

Jade Memorial Stone

Three weeks after her untimely death, Jade now has a memorial stone to mark her final resting place. Thanks to Nancy McComas at Carved Graphics for working with us on it. She agreed to place a custom image on it for us, and we are very pleased with the result. I certainly hope that none of you find yourself in a similar situation with losing a beloved pet, but if you do, I can recommend Carved Graphics without reservation.

Update on Jade

Bad news... As of 1630 CDT 29 September 2006, Jade is confirmed dead. I found her about a mile away on the side of the highway - she was struck by a vehicle at some point yesterday. I can only hope that she didn't lie there in pain wondering why her mommy and daddy weren't there to help her...

From September 2000 until I met Marla in April 2002, Jade was the most important part of my life, and Marla loved her just as much as I did from the first day of our relationship. So much of our lives revolved around Jade (and Dakota too, later on) that it's hard to imagine life without her right now. From our "Jade voice," "feed the dogs," "Look - it's a Smiling Beckus" and all the other little things that wouldn't exist without her, the next few weeks are going to be a struggle, to say the least. So far as dogs go, I couldn't have asked for a better one than Jade.

Jade, you were always a smart dog (even if you didn't quite figure out how to dodge moving vehicles), so if you've somehow learned how to read up there in doggie Heaven, I love you, girl. Rest in peace - you will not be forgotten.

Jade?

What a horrible ending to an otherwise nice day... When I arrived home earlier tonight (Thursday, 20060928), my lab/hound/mutt dog (Dakota) was outside the dog fence, and my German Shepherd (Jade) was nowhere to be found. This is *very* unusual for the dogs, as they don't go anywhere alone, and even so, it was well past their normal feeding time, and they *always* come home when it's time to eat. After further inspection, I found that Jade had physically broken one of the gate latches in the back of the fence. I don't know what she decided to get out and chase, but as best I can tell, it must have won the battle, as Jade has still not returned as of 0034 20060929. Unless something changes, she is presumed to be dead somewhere (or at best, severely injured), as she would otherwise never even consider spending the night away from home. As you might imagine, my emotional state is not very good right now - I've had Jade since she was a puppy back in 2000, and to say that she's been a major part of my life would be a huge understatement. As always, life goes on, but she will be missed. RIP, Jade - I love you, girl...

Rest in peace, Rob Levin

It was announced earlier today that Rob Levin (aka lilo) of the Peer-Directed Projects Center (PDPC), has died. On September 12th, he was hit by a car while riding his bike. He suffered head injuries and was in a coma. Rob was being treated at the Neuro Trauma Intensive Care Unit at a local hospital in Houston, Texas, where he passed away on September 16th.

Rob was a founding member of the Freenode IRC (internet relay chat) network, and in my experiences with him, he was always willing to give of his time to help someone else. The Freenode network has been tremendously beneficial to more than a few open source software projects. The world is a better place because of Rob Levin, and he will certainly be missed. RIP, lilo.

Temporary Break Coming Soon...

Well, I still have three or four different assignments to complete (and final exams), but next Thursday is the last day of the summer semester - maybe I'll finally have a bit of free time to get some work done ;-)
With a bit of luck, I'll figure out the problems with kde application icons not being displayed in xfce 4.4beta2, and there are a few other minor things on my TODO list...

Pic from Vacation

Here's a picture taken at Little River Canyon near Fort Payne; notice the Slackware hat ;-)

Vacation!!

I'm not sure it *really* qualifies as a vacation, but my wife and I spent the weekend at the Mountain Laurel Inn (a Bed and Breakfast) in Mentone, Alabama (near Fort Payne) to celebrate our second wedding anniversary. It was a very rural area, so internet access wasn't an option (which, in the grand scheme of things, is a good thing, I guess) - it was, shall we say, interesting to spend three whole days without thinking about anything related to computers... :-) We did a fair amount of hiking on some of the mountain trails and taking in the beautiful scenery, and while the steep inclines aren't much fun to climb, I have to admit that it was a very enjoyable trip... To make a long story short, if you're in the southeastern United States and are considering a "get-a-way" trip for a few days, I would recommend this one...

Recent Developments

There are quite a few things going on right now:
1. I'm enrolled in graduate school working on my Master's degree in Educational Administration, and I'm taking four classes this summer - as should be readily obvious, I'm quite busy with those... :)
2. I'm working with a good group of people on a project (SlackBuilds.org) to provide build scripts for additional software applications not included with Slackware "out of the box." We're not at all happy with new users of Slackware becoming dependent upon third-party sources for precompiled packages, as they tend to introduce unnecessary dependencies on other applications (and occasionally security problems), and new users don't yet know enough to tell the difference. Our goal is to provide both scripts to compile the source code of those needed applications as well as educate new users on how to work with the scripts.
3. The release of Slackware 11.0 will be coming soon; Pat Volkerding (the maintainer) has indicated in the ChangeLog that the -current tree is stable and that a new release is close at hand...
4. I've been testing some experimental work on "bleeding-edge" udev | sysvinit | sysfsutils | pcmciautils stuff done largely by Roberto Batista (aka PiterPunk), and based on my results, it looks promising. The decision is ultimately up to Pat, but we're hoping it will be stable (and reliable) enough to hit -current sometime after 11.0 releases; if not, we'll keep working until it *is* stable enough... :)
I've recently done some hacking to the newest version of sysvinit (2.86) and forwarded the results to PiterPunk, so maybe it will hit the experimental tree at some point...
5. My preferred window manager, xfce, is approaching the release of version 4.4. The beta 2 was released yesterday, and after hacking around on Pat's script for the 4.2 series, I've got a package built for -current. While it's much more usable than the beta 1 release (in fact, I'm now using it exclusively), there's no hope of it being included in the 11.0 release of Slackware - it's nowhere near ready for that. There's still a problem where some kde icons don't show up in the various menus, and I've had one random crash that had no rhyme nor reason :)

New Blog & First (new) Post

Well, due to extreme dislike for the old blog (as well as some of its content), I completely wiped it and decided to start over again.
I'm going to try to be more vigilant about keeping this new one updated regularly with (hopefully) interesting and/or enlightening content, but I'm not making any promises... ;-)