So, the semester is finally over. I made it through another one alive. And aside from a trip to Maryland for five or six days, I’m home until the 20th of January. That’s lots of time to spend running calls for the Midland Park (Volunteer) Ambulance Corps, here in my home town of Midland Park, NJ, with which I’ve been volunteering as an EMT-B for almost four years now. So far, in the past 24 hours (Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I’ve done 3 runs, which is above average for us - usually about 1.75/day). It’s also a lot of time to spend on some projects of mine.
I’ve already setup one of the SunBlade 150 machines as a desktop, and had to handle a lot of networking stuff (see the Solaris Tips page on my Wiki).
In other news, after getting some Christmas and Chanukah (yes, my father’s family is Jewish, and I’ve yet to find out a single accepted spelling for the holiday) money, I ran out to a Verizon store and picked up the phone I’ve been dreaming of for months - a beautiful NEW (my first not-used phone in 6 years) Treo 700p. So far, aside from some problems with the Chatter Email software (to my dismay, I can’t find a free (even as in cost, let alone as in freedom, IMAP client for Palm) and problems deciding whether or not to pay $25/month for data, I love it. I still need to deal with Verizon, as they wouldn’t let me activate the phone without a data plan, and the current $45/month “unlimited” plan is a bit much for me.
So, I have a few big projects planned for the upcoming down time:
- Setup my other SunBlade as a mail server running Postfix, Procmail, SpamAssassin (with Pyzor or Razor), an IMAP server, and SSL for everything.
- Setup a Soekris box as a WAP here at home.
- Get Chatter Email on the Treo working right with folders (Maildir) on my IMAP (Dovecot) server.
- Port my GnuPG/Java-based password manager application to J2ME on the Treo, and figure out how to sync the databases (just GnuPG-encrypted flat files). Also, port it to my Nokia 770 Tablet.
- Get my Bluetooth Keyboard (an iGo Ultra Slim) working with the 770 - right now, the Bluetooth Plugin crashes the unit after typing a few characters.
- Do a bunch of overhauling on the website, especially generating sitemaps (big issue when you have static content, MediaWiki, and source code) and submitting my CVS repo to Google Code Search.
Also, A few Links for your enjoyment: A New York Times blog by David Pogue talking about “intellectual property”, “copyright morality”, etc. He even goes so far as to imply that making a single backup copy of a legally purchased DVD is illegal.
A Groklaw article on the February ISO Ballot Resolution Meeting on MSOOXML. If you’re not familiar with it, check out noOOXML.org and their petition listing the reasons to vote NO on the OOXML ballot.
A CNN article stating that it’s true that “Switching from a Windows-operated computer to a Linux-operated one could slash computer-generated e-waste levels by 50%.”
The Register - Windows vs. Linux Security Report.
Some interesting Earthlink (yes, apparently they still exist) newsletters talking about Linux for the Desktop and Open-Source Software.
Stay tuned. More updates to come…
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