To Migrate or to Not Migrate

My new MacBook Pro arrived today and I had to decide how to set it up. Apple has a great Migration Assistant for transferring information from an old machine. So I could either use that or do things manually. I decided for a mixed approach. I copied all the info from my old machine (via Gigabit Ethernet) and installed everything by hand. I didn't copy the preferences over as they sometimes contain cruft. After about 5 hours, everything was working! Yeah. I just have to get backups going again and then I'll have an even bigger smile on my face.

More Negative Campaigning

Following up on my previous post about the local city council election, I've decided to post copies of ads I received from both candidates (these ads are only the ones I received today; I receive ads a few times a week from both candidates).

From April Boling, the extremely negative campaigner:

From Marti Emerald, my candidate of choice:

Please, oh please, don't elect April Boling; we need cooperation in government and all she seems to want to do is put down her opponent. To me, this seems like someone that has no good qualities to be in government, so she slams her opponent.

Any quote can be taken out of context and misconstrued. Let's not stop there; the photo of Marti Emerald has been flipped horizontally; the original is the other way. And while I'm on a roll, that picture comes from a site that is copywritten which may make using it a copyright violation.

(The images above are posted with the understanding that I can use them under the Fair Use Doctrine of US copyright law. If asked by the copyright holder, I will remove the images.)

Enough with negative campaigning

I know I've written about this before, but I finally decided to write a letter to the editor about it.

The race for City Council District 7 is heating up with both sides sending numerous printed ads to us, but each side has a different tactic. April Boling has decided that negative campaigning is the only way to win the race; instead of focusing on what she can do for San Diego and our council district, she has chosen to show what Marti Emerald hasn't done. Of course, it hasn't been Marti's job to change city council, but April feels it is necessary to blame the city's problems on her.

While I'm disappointed that the Union Tribune has decided to endorse a candidate that has nothing positive to say nor has any real solutions for San Diego, I'm not surprised. I hope that voters in council district 7 don't simply take the Union Tribune's word on who should represent this district and can see that we need a city council member that is an outsider and can bring much needed change to our city.

Will they publish it? Probably not.

Bit by 32 bits

The other day, I went to install a program on one of my clients systems. I've installed the software before on Linux without a problem; the problem started out that this was an Xserve running OS X Server (Leopard). I started by trying to install the PHP extensions needed for this program. I found information on the web to help me and things seemed to work fine, except when it came time to test the extensions; they all failed.

Turns out I missed a very important step; the instructions mentioned "does this for 32 bit machines and do this for 64 bit machines". Up until this time, I had never used a 64 bit machine (my MacBook Pro is a Core Duo based machine which is 32 bit). So I had followed the 32 bit instructions not remembering that the G5 processor in the Xserves was 64 bit. Once I realized my mistake (hours later), the install process went quite smoothly.