MacWorld takes a first look at Pages ‘08. My hand isn’t twitching towards my credit card yet, but the day may be coming.
Archive for August, 2007
Oops. Looks like 1998 is no longer the hottest year on record in USA. Once you get the results you expect, the code clearly works, right?
“The trouble is there are enough crazy factors and wild cards on the table now that I can’t convince myself of where a future might be in 10 to 15 years.”
After a few months of package creep and a new power supply, I decided to reinstall Kubuntu 7.04 on my desktop. This was actually quite painful.
Every time I would install the fglrx driver, it would try to put the VE175b into a mode it didn’t support. Plug and play? Incompatible mode. Standard 1024×768 monitor? Incompatible mode. Viewsonic VE175b driver? Incompatible mode.
A couple things I learned that helped immensely:
- Ctrl-Alt-F# to switch sessions.
- Alt-E reloads X11.
- sudo dpkg-reconfigure does magic that is not automatically done otherwise. Why not? No idea. Nothing else came close to working.
In the end I was able to get a fairly basic xorg.conf file and remove inappropriate modelines. I felt quite a bit or relief when I was finally able to see the login screen, even in the wrong mode, and get into KDE. From there, things moved quite quickly. I felt quite a feeling of accomplishment when the login screen finally came up centered and not in virtual mode.
I really wonder how many people would have persevered, though. The was by far the most painful OS install I’ve ever done.
I bought a Apevia Q-XPACK 2 of these as a replacement to a Q-XPACK (i.e., the first model). Was pleasantly surprised to find a lot of the hardware is exactly the same as the Q-XPACK: motherboard tray, drive assembly. Install was really fast as a result. The sides/top of the case is the same size as the Q-XPACK, although I think the Q-XPACK’s is a little sturdier. I bought a refurb with sharp gouge on the outer case, so I just used my old wrapper.
The extra inch of depth is mostly in the front of the case and in how the parts fit within the assembly. The design is nicer than it looks in photos. Fan LED is definitely much brighter than the Q-XPACK. How much brighter? Well, my next purchase is probably going to be a fan.
Lack of power cable management is one downside here. The cables are wired directly into the power supply, so unless you’re willing to cut them you’re probably going to end up with at least one that you’re not using. That’s pretty typical, but it hurts a little more here; There’s more cables than the Q-XPACK, and not much space to hide them away.
Of course, it’s much too early to see how the power supply stands up.
I was very pleased with the Q-XPACK right up until the power supply started wavering. The Q-XPACK2 seems to have everything I liked about the Q-XPACK, plus the (theoretically) more robust and standard power supply. Even if the power supply isn’t as robust as I’m expecting, being able to swap it is a major benefit.
Other problems? Well, this was a refurb, and it had some problems from that. The handle wasn’t very well attached, and it didn’t come with a couple cables that it should have. Neither of these was a problem for me, though.
It looks like Apple is going to continue shipping Microsoft’s “core fonts.” Web designers everywhere have settled on these fonts as the lowest common denominator — and in a lot of cases, that’s pretty darned low.
I’d much rather have seen these disappear and developers needing to start using font lists and not just assuming that Windows’ crappy fonts are everywhere.