Henry Moore Exhibit at the DMA

The Henry Moore exhibit has been at the Dallas Museum of Art for a while. Saturday Susan and I finally had time to check it out. I was quite impressed. I can’t really say I was a fan of Moore prior to the exhibit (it took a bit of urging from Susan to get me to go in fact) but I found it very fascinating. The range of materials he used was in itself pretty amazing. One sculpture was made from a huge stalactite. The exhibit included more than 100 works ranging from tiny maquettes to several of his trademark huge works.

Afterwards we went to yet another local arts festival. This time it was the Dallas ARTFEST at Fair Park in Dallas. While not particularly interesting this year, it was too nice just having a day or two off to complain.

Wildflower Arts & Music Festival 2001

Friday, Susan and I spent the evening at the Wildflower Arts & Music Festival. It was mostly music. And the music was mostly 80’s bands like the Go-Gos, Flock of Seagulls, The Romantics, and a bunch of others. Overall, it wasn’t a bad deal for 10 bucks. The Go-Go’s did a nice cover of I wanna be sedated “for Joey!”.

Saturday, I was on-site all day with one of our clients who was migrating their internal DNS to a new server.

Tonight, I’ll be watching the season finale of X-Files.

So Long and Thanks for all the Fish

It’s always depressing to wake up to bad news. Douglas Adams died this morning of a heart attack. He was only 49. By now, I’m sure everyone knows. It’s been covered by the BBC, AP, and the NY Times (as well as a lot of others I won’t bother to list…)

Nothing is up yet on his official site but I’m sure they’ll put some more information up soon.

We’ve read his books, have the tapes of the original BBC HHGG broadcasts, the old Infocom text game, and even a few servers named after characters from his books. From the look of Slashdot, I’m not the only one who’ll miss him. It’s hard not to imagine him in Milliway’s right now, shouting ‘Hi, guys! How’d you do?’.

New GNOME, Slow Nautilus

Time for another Mozilla upgrade – I’m posting this from Mozilla 0.9 and so far it seems to show the usual incremental improvement. There have been major performance improvements but there still need to be a few more before it’s ready for prime-time. The bookmark manager is still a bit slow and the initial start up is still slower than Netscape but there have been lots of bug fixes and the general responsiveness while browsing is greatly improved over 0.8.1.

I also upgraded GNOME on one of my boxes to Ximian GNOME v1.4. Mostly good with the exception of Nautilus which appears to be a complete waste. Nautilus sucks up huge amounts of memory but doesn’t appear to actually do anything except allow you to get a simple context menu on the desktop and a goofy folder-view of disk directories. The context menu is so slow that it’s virtually unusable (you click on it and nothing happens, you fire up an xterm and do a ps to look for the process to kill and about that time you see the menu option you clicked become hilighted, another 5 seconds or so and the menu option depresses and executes – making something that slow must have taken some work!).

The folder-view thing seems equally useless – it takes up a huge amount of real-estate and the icons are about 4 times larger than they need to be (not to mention that it took around two minutes to open and render for the root directory which has maybe a dozen files and directories to display). I killed all the processes that seemed to be Nautilus-related and GNOME has seemed pretty snappy ever since. I haven’t missed it and GNOME seems to run fine without it, so I guess it doesn’t do anything too important. Now I need to find a way to configure GNOME not to start Nautilus so I won’t have to kill it manually when I start up. Other than Nautilus, GNOME 1.4 seems to have plenty of improvements. The only other complaint I can come up with is that the panel at the top has a clock on it that isn’t removable for some reason (or at least I haven’t figured out how yet).

I was amused to see that Nautilus is so bad that it now has an entire mailing list devoted to flames about it.

robots.net got mentioned on a radio show called Computer Insider about a month ago. I wonder if anybody heard it? (I didn’t even know the radio show existed until I ran across their web site recently!)