Gloria!

My wife and I kinda made an impulse purchase on the weekend: a new 12" iBook G4. It was weird: I made a joke about buying a laptop. Then I explained that I was only joking, but if we were going to buy one it should be an iBook since I kept hearing how sweet they were. Then we were going to go to Stanley Park, hang out at the beach, but maybe go to London Drugs (I don't know about you Americans, but in Canada we go to the drugstore for everything...car insurance, furniture, computers, you name it. Oh, and occasionally prescriptions) to see what prices were like. Then we were buying one. It all happened so fast.

So far, it's pretty damned impressive. After all the trouble I had to go to get gphoto to work with our digital camera, my wife just plugged it in here and it worked with iPhoto right away. Not only that, but we were looking at a slideshow of the crack-induced photos we'd taken while Fur Elise played in the background. Fucking unreal, man.

It's weird: I do feel a bit like I've made a deal with the devil. I've come to agree more and more with RMS about Free-as-in-Freedom, and here I am with a closed-source OS. Yada-yada-Darwin, what about Aqua? But it's sooooo nice...well, mostly, anyway.

I'm trying to use MacStumbler at the moment to find a wireless network to hook up to, but no luck: it just sits there, looking like it's scanning but with no more feedback than a scrolling bar. Dammit, I thought W2K was the only culprit there...and dammit, if I can't blog from the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, this thing is going back to the store. I suspect a problem with MacStumbler, but it's hard to be sure; I managed to find five or six access points at the office with Knoppix and the work laptop, and (apparently) wasn't able to find a thing with MS. I need to find a command-line version.

So far, though, that's my only complaint. Pretty fucking sweet, if you ask me.

Had a problem at work with Debian and VNC: the alt keys wouldn't work, for some reason. This was pretty annoying for the developer who really, really wanted to use Emacs. It took me about an hour of poring through Google -- Jesus Christ, the number of complaints about ALT keys disappearing, and Good God the long uber-thread about the change in keyboard behaviour between Debian versions -- to find the solution: vncserver --compatiblekbd A-ha!

Back to work and still no wireless access. Carousel is a LIE!!!

UPDATE: The VNC trick doesn't work. Details: The developer is running VNCViewer under VNC to connect to an X desktop on a Debian machine. On that machine, he's opening up an xterm and running User-Mode Linux. Alt-equals-meta works for Emacs when run on the Debian machine, but not for Emacs when run in the User-Mode Linux xterm. Fuck. UPDATE: Buddy found the trick: shift-left-click in the xterm to get the menu, then click "Meta sends escape". Double fuck!