Say hello to my little friend!
My name's Glenn Holmer, and I'm a Java programmer (not a web designer, as you can see...) living on the East Side in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA: this is the view out my window. I can be reached by email as shadowm at lyonlabs dot org.
The picture at right is me with some of the servers I'm responsible for at work.
Enough is enough... the OpenSolaris honeymoon is over. As of 2010-06-20, I've switched this machine back to Ubuntu.
You can see my astrological birth chart if you like (don't tell me Pluto isn't a planet).
Here's a link to pictures of my travels to Yogyakarta in central Java (Indonesia).
I used to play in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, in which the fates of worlds were decided on a regular basis.
...all watched over by machines of loving grace. Speaking of which, I just got a Genibo robot dog... here's my first crude video of him.
I'm a long-time Commodore 64 enthusiast; in fact, most of this site consists of information about this great little machine that's still so much fun to use. There are software and documentation downloads, programming tips, and pictures of exotic hardware. You'll also find photos from Commodore shows around the US and Canada in recent years, where all are welcome to join in the Commodore goodness. You can find all this from the main Commodore page.
If you're ever in Silicon Valley, be sure to visit the Computer History Museum. They've got displays that will knock your socks off, from centuries-old slide rules, to the underground behemoths that watched the skies during the Cold War. They've even got a piece of ENIAC! One of their latest acquisitions is a reconstruction of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine. Update: check the CHM web site before a visit... they're in the midst of a huge renovation, and will not be back to full operation until early next year.
I'm an active member of the NetBeans community, and have been part of the NetCAT (Community Acceptance Testing) program for the 3.6, 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, 6.0, 6.5, 6.7, 6.8, and 6.9 releases. I am also a past member of the NetBeans Dream Team.
NetBeans 6.9 was released on 2010-06-15. (A maintenance release, 6.9.1, is scheduled to be released on or about 2010-08-04.) On the NetBeans site, you can find the feature list (also in more detail), some good screencasts, and a page of tutorials. One of the more notable achievements in this release is that debugging speed (especially remote debugging) has dramatically improved.
Some information is already available about the next release, 6.10. On the NetBeans wiki, you can find information on plans for the web tier, the editor, and performance improvements.
I've been a Linux user since 1995, starting with Slackware. I switched to SUSE in 1998 after seeing it at the Linux Expo in Raleigh, and stuck with it for ten years. In mid-2008, I switched to Ubuntu, and continue to run it on my desktop machines.
Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) was released on 2010-04-29, and is a LTS (long-term support) release. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting a proper operating system for their machine. It's easy to use and looks great, but has all the features that experienced users demand.
Here are some Ubuntu tips 'n' tricks:
If you hate those annoying on-screen notifications as much as
I do (you know, the little black ones that pop up over whatever
windows are open), they can easily be terminated with
prejudice. First, pkill notify-osd, then make sure it
doesn't rear its ugly head again by going
to /usr/lib/notify-osd and removing the executable bits
(chmod 644 notify-osd). I realize that the modern trend
is to assume that everyone suffers from attention defecit disorder,
but whoever thought of this little horror should be publicly
tortured and dismembered.
To remove the user list from the gdm login screen, recite this incantation:
sudo -u gdm gconftool-2 --set --type boolean /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_user_list true
If GRUB is giving you the message "Error 28: Selected item cannot fit into memory" when you try to load memtest on a newer machine, it's not his fault. For an excellent description of the problem, see this message attached to Debian bug report 319837. The solution is to write memtest directly to a floppy (i.e. not to a filesystem on the floppy) and boot from there. If you're too modern to have a floppy drive, you're on your own! Here's the simple command that will do it:
cat /boot/memtest.bin > /dev/fd0
