Sex, Drugs & Unix

Thursday, July 13th

Monday, July 10th

Stupid is as Spokane does


Who, on God's green earth, steals a taxi?

You steal from the taxi driver, if you're desperate, but you don't take the taxi. Thats just dumb. Its hard to imagine a worse get-away vehicle. Being a cabbie in Spokane sucks.


Two carjacking suspects were arrested about 4 a.m. Sunday after they allegedly stole a taxi and led police on a chase that damaged three police vehicles.

Jeremy M. Gleese, 20, of Coeur d'Alene, and his 17-year-old companion were in custody after they allegedly stole the taxi minivan at knifepoint, Spokane police Officer William Hager said in a news release.

The two suspects had summoned the taxi in Post Falls for a ride to Spokane, Hager said. After arriving at an alley in the 1600 block of east First Avenue, the suspects pulled a knife on the driver, a woman in her 40s, and took her cell phone and money, Hager said. The victim called police from a nearby home at 3:40 a.m.

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Officers soon spotted the stolen taxi and followed it east on Trent Avenue at speeds reaching 50 mph to 65 mph, Hager said.

Spokane County sheriff's deputies joined in the chase as the minivan's driver turned south on Vista. The taxi's driver dodged a railroad crossing as a train was approaching, then slammed into a sheriff's cruiser, Hager said.

Two other officers used their cars to box in the taxi, causing minor damage to their vehicles.

The 17-year-old passenger fled on foot but was captured about two blocks away.

The driver was taken into custody and booked on a number of charges, including robbery, drug possession, assault, vehicle theft and attempting to elude a police officer, said Spokane police officer Jennifer DeRuwe.

The teen was booked into the Spokane County Juvenile Detention Center.

The money, phone and knife were recovered, Hager said.


Jim on 07.10.06 @ 04:06 AM PST [link]


Apple: the continuing crisis


Om Malik calls for a public re-write of .Mac:

Having said all that, I think what dotMac on the web needs is a major rethink. It needs to come to terms with the reality of consumer expectations. This is not to suggest, Apple should use Ajax for the sake of using it. The end users don’t care – they want a good, fast and easy experience. And as it stands, dotMac cannot claim to do that.
Jim on 07.10.06 @ 03:58 AM PST [link]


Wednesday, July 5th

This is bullshit


With the recently released maintence update Mac OS 10.4.7, Apple has added a background daemon that reports information about your computer to Apple every time you launch the Dashboard.

Instructions for turning it off can be found here, or you could just wipe MacOS X off your hard drive, and load linux instead.

Apple may be about to learn a very painful lesson over what they are sure to claim is a minor incident.

Jim


Jim on 07.05.06 @ 03:36 AM PST [link]


Tuesday, July 4th

stealing back the revolution, on Independence Day


So as others have pointed out, (me too) there seems to be a switch on from MacOS X to Ubuntu. (Sadly, Tim O'Reilly can only see the movement in terms of potential for his new book.)

Anyway, Mega-Geeks (of the Mac kind) seem to be switching to Ubuntu, typically on new PC hardware, mostly due to Apple's increasing pro-DRM / anti-FOSS stance.

I did it the other way.

I just "upgraded" my 12" PowerBook to Ubuntu 6.06, and I did it over a (somewhat slow) hotel network A free hotel network. (Are you listening, Wayport?)

It actually only took about 40 minutes for the CD-ROM to load and blow new bits onto my 80GB hard drive. When it was done (and I had added several more packages (emacs, xastir, EasyUbuntu), I've used less than 3GB for various files, and another 3GB for "swap".

In terms of memory, the machine has been up 2.5 hours since its most recent reboot (I've been grinding on making the Broadcom wireless (nee: "Airport") driver work), and has used less than 0.25GGB of memory. This while emacs (the X version), Thunderbird, Firefox and Gnome are all running, leaving me with right around 1GB of free memory for other applications to use.

MacOS X can't touch that.

My solution for the wireless driver, after following the instructions found here is to pop this little script in /etc/network/if-pre-up.d/:


#!/bin/sh

IWCONFIG=/sbin/iwconfig
if [ "eth1" == $IFACE ]; then
$IWCONFIG $IFACE ap any
fi


Now as soon as I get used to ^C and ^V, rather than %C and %V (% = the "Apple" key, which is bound to "Super" under linux), I'll be set. Oh yah, and I'll need to find a way to make linux crush out DVDs.

Happy Independence Day!
Jim on 07.04.06 @ 05:33 AM PST [link]



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