Week of 2008-01-19 17:00 to 2008-01-26 16:59

You might imagine running into an old friend after 25 years apart would result in a lot to talk about. And you’d be right, even if one of them weighs 368,000 pounds, changed their name, and doesn’t speak much.

Steve Eshom over at Dogcaught ran into such a friend and took pictures: the erstwhile BN 8127 (Burlington Northern) now known as FURX 8127 (First Union Rail), a diesel locomotive he last saw in 1983. From “25 Years of 8127”:

It finally happened! I was reunited with an old friend and old friends do what old friends do, they conjure up memories. My happy reunion caused me not to reflect so much on myself but on 25 years of railroading and how much or how little it has changed.

This being the Web, you can browse tons of cool info and photos on BN 8127 (aka FURX 8127) or any other locomotive, thanks to railfans across North America. You can also read up on the model General Motors EMD SD40-2 on Wikipedia.

If you are wishing to connect to an AFP server via the Finder’s “Connect to Server” command, but you’ve already had your system remember your login information for that server (thus automatically logging you in), it might seem impossible to log in to that same server under a different username.

All you have to do is, in the initial dialog box, append your username with an @ sign to the host name, like in this screenshot:

Then hit the “Connect” button, and you’ll be prompted to enter a password.

Ars Technica has the story on the effort by KDE to port a great deal of its environment to run as native* Mac applications: “KDE goes cross-platform with Windows, Mac OS X support”.

More project details as well as torrent files are on the KDE TechBase, here: “Projects/KDE on Mac OS X”.

Mac OS X is already a “desktop environment” in the sense that it provides window management, application launching, etc. The goal of KDE on Mac OS X is to provide the rich frameworks and applications in KDE to a wider audience.

The Installation section of that wiki page notes:

You must install at least Qt, kdesupport, and kdelibs for any of these packages to work. Also, kdepimlibs, kdebase and strigi are recommended since a number of things will want them. (…and it has Konqueror)

Amarok (which I’ve seen a lot of people mentioning they were excited about getting) is “temporarily not building” so isn’t included in the downloads.

* - for certain values of native ;)