After much thought has been given to a few new article/post ideas, I decided to be ueber lazy - and not do anything. There is good reason, though. I'm in Germany for the holidays - visiting Steffi's family and as many friends as we can. A few things I am hoping to work on, however, when I get back:
- Review of Treo 600
- Review of VerizonWireless Data Service
- Short Review of Data services in Germany (if anyone cares)
- Much needed update of the qmail howto pages (Olli has made some important updates that I have not totally followed - sorry)
... and a few other things. I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas - and has a wonderful New Years, too!
Tja, wieder an die nicht-Arbeit. Es macht mir wieder Spass im Lande zu Sein. Wenn (deutsche/europaeische) Bekannten diese Seite zufaellig vor Silvester besuchen, bitte ruf mich an! +49 171 855 1465 Sonnst, ich wuensche euch wunderbare Feiertage!
December 2003 Archives
I have to applaud UPS for the reliable and inexpensive package delivery they offer in my area of the States (x,y,z). I greatly dislike FedEx, only because it takes two days for items to get from Chicago to where I work - overnight, they are a star. It occurred to me today, however, that the tracking systems the likes of UPS and FedEx offer to us on the web are sometimes more infuriating than helpful. Case-in-point. I bought a new lens for my Nikon D100 off eBay that is being sent to me from Richmond, VA. It is supposed to arrive tomorrow, but knowing how FedEx operates in Milwaukee, I'm just not sure it's going to make it:
I sometimes find that not knowing is better than knowing. I have gone through more nights of frustration waiting for something important to arrive the next day, finding that the tracking system on UPS/FedEx's site is showing that it is unlikely it will reach me when I had originally expected, only to have it [thankfully] arrive at the dock or on our doorstep on time. I know I'm nit-picking here, but there is a lesson to be learned. Inaccurate information is usually worse than no information at all - positive or negative. This doesn't fit all situations or nor is it the norm for either of these companies to be wrong - but it does indeed happen. When the mistake is made, I often find myself wondering if I should have known anything at all in the first place. What do you think?
I have tested this concept on FreeBSD by having multiple terminals open and running 5 or so different port install processes simultaneously, but I have never actually thought much about it until today on OS X. I was initially always very careful to install only one port/application at a time on my FreeBSD machines - I wasn't sure whether the compilation and installation of the software would cause conflicting libraries to be installed, but I found out that the library concept used in Windows is not really the way things work under most *nix distros. So, after some testing of this theory by actually running multiple installations of related and unrelated programs at the same time, it didn't ever appear to effect the end result - i.e. whether or not the program properly ran on the machine. Today, however, I found myself in a slightly different situation and don't know if there is a straight forward answer.
I was installing Microsoft Office (gasp! - well, I do really need it sometimes for docs sent to me that cannot be properly read by OpenOffice) and at the same time compiling Gimp for the X11 side of my machine (i.e. not the native OS X version that is apparently out there). I was wondering: because one is basically a binary installation and the other a compilation process (very similar to the port installation routine under FreeBSD), is there a way that those installations could conflict with one another, and if so, how? My gut instinct is that the answer is no - but there are always exceptions to the norm and I am wondering what those exceptions might be. For the two people out there who read this weblog, maybe I will be lucky enough to find out without having to do too much research... Comments are very welcome.
