I see Lugaru just released a Mac OS X version of their Emacs-style Epsilon editor.

A long time ago (late 80s) I used Epsilon for DOS and I liked it because it was the closest thing to Emacs. Mac OS X includes Emacs, plus enhanced X11 & Carbon versions are available, all free. Epsilon is an X11 application that sells for $250 – it doesn’t even use the Mac GUI. Why should I pay $250 for Epsilon, which doesn’t offer much more for an Emacs user, when good free editors are available?

I really hate American Idol. Especially this season, since I really dislike all of the contestants. Most people around here seem to be obsessed with it. When we had our condo association board meeting Tuesday night, almost half of the attendees left early to watch the finale. Even Mike Doughty, one of my favorite singers, is obsessed with AI. How can the same person who created Soul Coughing watch such bland mainstream crap?

I now have the final version of the MacMegasite logo, using a nicer font & background images representing linux, osx & darwin.

World Music Cenntral reports that Desmond Dekker, the Jamaican singer who became popular worldwide with the hit songs ‘The Israelites’ and ‘Intensified’ died May 25 in the morning. He suffered a heart attack on stage during a soundcheck in Dublin, Ireland.

Desmond Dekker (born Desmond Adolphus Dacres in Kingston, Jamaica on July 16, 1941) was one of the pioneers of Ska & early Reggae. Before Bob Marley, he was Jamaica’s most popular musician. He’s still one of my favorites.

“It Doesn’t Work” is not a useful bug report.

There was a copyright problem with the old logo I used for MacMegasite, which combined an Apple & Universal logo. I’ve made a new text-only logo:

I may use this alternate version, which features Hexley & Tux:

Sorry I haven’t had a chance to write much lately. I’ve been digging very deeply into IOKit & EFI so I’ve been buried in documentation & code. Today I’ve also had to do one of my least favorite things: writing documentation.

Dries Buytaert: Google to invest 70.000 USD in Drupal:

Rumor has it that Google will sponsor 14 Drupal developer stipends in this year’s Summer of Code program (SoC). To inspire young developers to work on FOSS projects during the summer, Google will provide a stipend of 5000 USD to each student developer, of which 4500 USD goes to the student and 500 USD goes to Drupal project (or to the mentors). With 14 accepted applications this adds up to a 70.000 USD investment over a three-month period.

Thanks to Google, Drupal’s SoC organizers and the 36 Drupal mentors to bring on board a range of fresh talents.

(Via Planet Drupal.)

I find that DreamHost’s SpamAssassin is pretty much useless, since lots of spam gets past it. I ended up installing SpamBouncer, which seems to be much better at identifying spam.

The Parallels WorkstationDesktop team now has an official blog.

A water main outside my building broke last night, flooding my patio with over 3″ of water. It was also raining heavily, so I first thought it was flooded from the rain. I borrowed a pump and the water flowed back in as fast as I was pumping it out. When I looked outside, the entire back of my building looked like a swamp. They had to turn off the water for our entire complex for most of the night. Thankfully it’s fixed (although the rest of that pipe is in bad condition, so they’re watching it carefully) and we had the water back when I got up at 7:30 today.

On April 17, Daniel Wultz of Weston captured international attention after he and his father, Tuly, were injured during a Passover trip to Israel. Tuly Wultz was dining with his devout son on the patio of the kosher Mayor’s Falafel when a suicide bomber, thought to be a member of the Islamic Jihad, blew up a bag of explosives and nails. Ten people were killed and about 60 were hurt.

After many surgeries, more prayers and an immeasurable amount of hope, Daniel died Sunday, a month after shrapnel tore through his body.

Members of Daniel Wultz’s tightknit school and religious community were shocked to learn of the 16-year-old’s death. Family and friends visited the young basketball player and asked for prayers on Web sites as his condition first seemed to improve, then deteriorated. They shuddered when he lost part of a leg and gasped when he lost his life, a victim of a terrorist act.

“Daniel really put up a fight because he really wanted to live,” said Debbie Gober, vice president of Daniel’s high school, David Posnack Hebrew Day School. “This was a tragedy. It’s not the news you want to hear on Mother’s Day.” (excerpted from Sun-Sentinel story)

This cycle of violence needs to stop. We don’t need more attacks in retaliation. Instead we need peace talks & negotiation. Both sides have the right to coexist and need to acknowledge that. Although Israel has done plenty to provoke the Palestinians by displacing them from their land and not allowing them to live as full members of society, it doesn’t give them the right to kill innocent people.

I hear the same intense hatred coming from both sides and as long as they keep their intolerant attitude this will never change. Violence solves nothing. There needs to be peace talks to clear the air and work out their differences. They have no choice but to learn to get along. The Palestinians need to be allowed to live as full-fledged members of Israeli society with the right to work and live wherever they want and in return they need to stop suicide attacks on innocent people.

Today was my first mother’s day without my mom, so it felt sort of weird. I went with two of my friends to have dinner with one of one’s mom. We had a very nice time, as much as I was able to. I also went to a memorial gathering Friday from the hospice where my mom spent her last days, so I’ve been thinking about her a lot for the last few days.

Gunnar Langemark: Free Alaa!:
Alaa Abd El-Fatah – egyptian blogger, democracy activist and Drupal contributor was arrested a few days ago for being on a demonstration for democracy.
So what to do? googlebomb the egyptian government?
Sign a petition?
Write a blogpost?
Read the news?
Or all of the above?
Please join the campaign.
Also visit Manalaa to check it out for yourself!

(Via Planet Drupal.)

29 percent

President Bush’s job-approval rating has fallen to its lowest mark of his presidency, according to a new Harris Interactive poll. Of 1,003 U.S. adults surveyed in a telephone poll, 29% think Mr. Bush is doing an ‘excellent or pretty good’ job as president, down from 35% in April and significantly lower than 43% in January.

Roughly one-quarter of U.S. adults say ‘things in the country are going in the right direction,’ while 69% say ‘things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track.’ This trend has declined every month since January, when 33% said the nation was heading in the right direction. Iraq remains a key concern for the general public, as 28% of Americans said they consider Iraq to be one of the top two most important issues the government should address, up from 23% in April. The immigration debate also prompted 16% of Americans to consider it a top issue, down from 19% last month, but still sharply higher from 4% in March.

(Via Daily Kos.)

I just upgraded my MacBook Pro’s RAM to 2GB and I find it runs a lot faster. With only 1GB, running Windows XP in Parallels Workstation slows down the entire system, but now there’s no slowdown.

BEFORE

AFTER

I just finished upgrading MacMegasite to Drupal 4.7. The upgrade was quick & painless. I had already installed the modules, made a few patches (most notably redirecting the feed to FeedBurner) and tested everything with a back up of the database from several days ago. To do the switch, I disabled posting, dumped the database, restored it to a new database, ran the upgrade script & configured it. I then switched the new directory with the old site directory.

It looks like all of the rumor sites were wrong for a change. They were all predicting that Apple would announce the MacBook non-Pro, a replacement for the iBook. There were no Apple hardware announcements today. Furthermore, I have proof that G4 iBooks were still being manufactured as recently as last month.

I’ve been dealing with a large school deployment of iBooks. Just for fun, I ran a few of the serial numbers through this Mac serial number decoder. The results told that those machines were manufactured in April 2006.

I’ve been working on upgrading MacMegasite to Drupal 4.7. It’s now running on my MacBookPro, so I’ll probably go live with it in a few days.

My old theme didn’t work with 4.7, so I made this new theme based on Chameleon.

Via MetaFilter: “First it was called The War on Terror. Then it was called the Global War on Terror. But now President Bush is simply calling it World War III.”