Maggie’s had Debian Sarge on her computer now for 24 hours, and is loving it. She can do all the things she needs to do, with the exception of printing, which I’m yet to configire for her (though I know it works).

I was suprised how natural GNOME was for her, and before I explained how things were in different locations and named differently, she’d fired up a web browser and e-mail client, and was already using it. I showed her how there’s multiple desktops, and how there’s no Start button, but rather the foot/applications button, but she didn’t need any help. She found a nicer wallpaper on art.gnome.org and began customizing the way GNOME looks and feels.

I thought it was a testament not only to her ability to learn new things, but also to the interface designers working on these open source projects. Two thumbs up from me.

OpenOffice.org threw her (and me) for a second when she was trying to edit some text in a table cell, and it wouldn’t let her change the colour. We Googled and found an answer in a few minutes though, and she was on her way again. Export to PDF is the coolest!

To show her support for this amazing operating system, she’ll be buying and wearing this little number (to the top-left) around the house, especially when she’s cleaning. Furthermore, she encourages all (sexy) women to do the same. It sure beats a French maid’s uniform ;)

The only downside to all of this is that she’s making me feel inferior for using XP (which means it’s coming off, once and for all ;)

Ohh yeah!

Thank God they’re 18.

I expect jury duty would get pretty boring at times (if anyone has done it let me know), and it would be nice to use that time to do something else. It would be even worse being a judge… though I guess they kinda need to pay attention.

You’d want to maybe read a book? Lean something. Or make your willy bigger.

As I take a break from codin’ for a second, I thought, based on my last blog entry, that I’d see just how much a DEC Alpha workstation sells for on eBay. I checked eBay Australia first, and the eBay International (US) later.

I noticed that Sun Microsystems powers the Australian version, and IBM powers the US version. How strange?

Also, clicking on each of their logos pops up a blurb window, spinning a little sales pitch as to why eBay has chosen that supplier. I guess the US and Australian operations are very independent.

It just occured to me, whilst hacking away on some overdue code, that I lied.

The Cobalt Qube, whilst having a MIPS processor, doesn’t use the mips architecture as far as Debian is concerned. That’s for SGI machiness (like my IP-22 Indys), whilst mipsel is for the Cobalt gear, and the DECStations with MIPS processors.

So, I actually have 4 of the 11 architectures covered :)

Next; a DEC Alpha I think. Whilst it’s not a new architecture (like I said, it uses mipsel), the Alpha processor was a major player, and for history’s sake, I’d like to have on in my personal museum :)