This morning I got a contract in the email from a lawyer and clicked on it, and MS Word started opening. Sigh. Then, my Mac locked up. After I cycled the power a couple of times, it was essentially a brick. Can I blame Microsoft? It’s off at the Mac doctor now, no prognosis, no ETA. [Update: Fried logic board, new one on order, they can’t say when it’ll be here.] I’m learning how to actually work full time on Ubuntu really fast (that was the current most up-to-date install on the Ultra 20, and I really did not want to invest any OS-install time). If you’re reading this, I’m moving along OK; this is the first-ever ongoing post not authored on and posted from a Macintosh.

The Good · You know, this has been said a lot, but it bears repeating: Apt-get is just so unreasonably fucking great. Why aren’t we using it for Solaris updates? I managed to pull together the whole witches’ brew of OSS that makes ongoing go without ever leaving Synaptic. Oops, not quite true, I cruised past CPAN to get DBI and DBD::MySQL, but I’m not sure I needed to, because when I got MySQL, I saw a lot of perl-related stuff go flying by.

The thing I was really scared of was getting all my Emacs customization pulled over, but that was pretty well 100% painless. Almost all my keybindings even worked.

The Bad · Thunderbird can’t see some of my IMAP folders on the Sun server. No idea why. [Update: Because I hadn’t “subscribed” to them. Why should I have to do this?]

Some things are anti-aliased, but Emacs isn’t, and the jaggies are hurting my brain. So I’m using this monstrous 14-point Courier bold to help me ignore them.

“Ispell” doesn’t work in Emacs; the Net is full of people asking about the dreaded “Ispell misalignment” message, but none of the answers worked. Blecch; I need a working spell-checker. [Update: Several people have written telling me to use aspell instead of ispell. I am; that’s the default on Ubuntu, and it’s broken. I think it may be related to me having everything in Unicode-by-default.]

The MySQL Admin GUI is broken as shipped. I didn’t even know it existed, so I thought I’d spare myself the mental pain of remembering how to define users and databases and so on; but every time I selected the User Admin function, it just locked up. Anyhow, a quick poke around the Web led me to the necessary GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO TBRAY@LOCALHOST IDENTIFIED BY ... voodoo.

The Funny · I finally got to the point where the publishing software would attempt to run without whining about missing pieces, wrote the first couple paragraphs of this and optimistically hit the “proof” key; disappointingly, nothing happened. So I swore and started poking around, and it took a couple of minutes to realize that the Emacs/Perl/MySQL monster was is so much faster on the Ultra than the Mac that the proofing was finished before my finger had left the key and the “Proofing...” advisory was gone before I’d seen it.