Denis Lemire's Site

Today marks five years since I abandoned Windows on the Desktop in favor of an OS that doesn’t completely suck. At the time, my primary motivation, or excuse, was to familiarize myself with an OS that I was receiving an increasing number of tech support calls for at AirSurfer. Trying to support an OS I had never used was no easy task.

I had actually been eye-balling the Mac since the appearance of the Power Mac G4 Cube and later the iMac G4. The high cost of either of these systems kept me away, but I was definitely drawn to the compact and elegant design of the integrated hardware as well as the rich graphical UI Apple had been showing off since the early releases of OS X.

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After a very inconvenient 9 month waiting period, Jessie & I finally had the opportunity to meet our second daughter. Allison Zoe Lemire was born yesterday evening at 7:23 PM.

Allison weighed in at exactly 8 lbs and is 21 ½ inches tall. Impressed as we may be, we’re told she’ll get heavier and taller over the next several years.

About a month ago, I reached the breaking point of my own curiosity and decided to wipe out my Ubuntu installation in favor of the latest Fedora release. The VAIO notebook I loaded it on has typically served as my ‘plaything’ machine, as opposed to being my primary workhorse computer.

Due to this choice of purpose it changes Linux distributions or even operating systems on a pretty regular basis. More recently I was even perverted enough to allow it to dual boot with Windows 7 Home Premium, but that’s a filthy confession for another day.

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The factory installed 80 GB Seagate (ST98823AS) was increasingly feeling cramped under the weight of ever growing iTunes and iPhoto libraries.

Adding insult to injury the 5400 RPM speed of the rickety old clunker was a painful bottleneck I could no longer endure. Suddenly the unrestful gleam of the legendary Mac Mini opening putty knife caught my eye. It was time.

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The moment I stumbled upon Prowl (a new iPhone App that routes Growl notifications to your iPhone via Apple’s push service) I knew I would find some powerful uses for it.

At Tera-Byte, several of my colleagues telecommute. In order to stay in constant communication with each other, we all use good ol’ IRC. In order to be readily available and allow quick roaming from one location to an other, I use Irssi‘s proxy module which runs continuously within a screen session on my co-located server.

On my Desktops and iPhone I run Colloquy which connects to my Irssi proxy. Although push capabilities are planned for Colloquy, it’s not ready yet. Prowl appeared to be the perfect band-aid for the situation.

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