For dif­fer­ent clients, I am hav­ing to in­stall pro­grams that for some rea­son dis­tros don't in­clude.

Couri­er-imap, a dozen perl mod­ules, ne­tatalk... why aren't they in Red Hat or oth­er main­stream dis­tros? Sure, De­bian has them, but I don't like De­bian.

Oh, well. They are easy to rp­m-ize, so I just do it my­self. But then I have no place to put them so oth­ers can use it.

Does it mean I should be­come part of some­thing like fe­do­ra or some­such? I don't want to main­tain them forever!

Now, if this appears in the site, bartleblog has advogato support..

And you, read­er­s, if you want a slow, not ful­ly func­tion­al PyQt based ad­voga­to (and oth­er blogs) ed­i­tor, then you can use it too, just search for bartle­blog in sf.net.

Now, if I im­ple­ment­ed caching, and cor­rect date for­mat­ting, and a de­cent HTML edit­ing in­ter­face, this could even be a de­cent ap­p.

Hey, it works :-)

Found a few ref­er­ences to the trick ques­tion I post­ed a few days ago, and I re­al­ly don't un­der­stand them.

I mean, some guys say "y­ou throw the box away" or "y­ou are a masochist". Well, as it turns out, I had good rea­sons not to throw it away, and good rea­son why those con­straints were in place.

The good rea­son not to throw it away is, of course, that it's a sweet com­put­er. It's small­er than al­most any oth­er note­book sold nowa­days, rugged and it works just fine. And it can be use­ful. So why throw it away?

As for masochis­m... I have no li­cens­es for DOS, so I could­n't use DOS flop­pies. I had no PCM­CIA gad­gets and no mon­ey, so I did­n't use a PCM­CIA CD, or USB or flash disk.

Fi­nal­ly, I did­n't open it and move the HD to an­oth­er box be­cause it's a note­book. They are quite tricky to open, and the Li­bret­to more than most. I had just got it, if there was any chance of not break­ing it, I want­ed not to break it.

And of course... I ex­pect­ed most read­ers to be, well, hack­er­s, in the old sense. You know, com­pli­ca­tion for com­pli­ca­tion's sake is the ba­sis for tech­ni­cal fun some­times, as long as it's not over­done. Since I did this in one af­ter­noon, I just had fun for a few hours.

Say­ing that this is masochism is about as stupid as com­plain­ing that bas­ket­ball is masochism bea­cuse it would be eas­i­er if you built a con­vey­or belt to drop the balls in the bas­ket!

It's a game, folk­s! Part of the game is that rules re­strict you!

The rules I gave were the con­straints I faced. Of course oth­er sit­u­a­tions would make it eas­i­er.

And if the San An­to­nio Spurs were al­lowed to use a con­vey­or belt, they would have won the NBA fi­nals in 4 games!

I ex­pect­ed the trick in­stall ques­tion to be hard­er, so next time I am go­ing to try some­thing re­al­ly trick­y!

Well, some­one got it right al­ready, so no point in wait­ing a week :-)

See the an­swers here.