habitual pragmatist

Well, you may notice I’ve added a feed over on the right there of tweets (as in twitter). I’ve avoided sites like twitter for a few reasons:

1. I feel like I can handle my own social networking, thank you very much. This is why I have my own blog, where I aggregate what I do at other sites (like the music I listen to and articles I digg) all on my own.
2. Sites like Twitter and Facebook run proprietary software. No one is able to see, modify, or redistribute the code for these sites.
3. Said sites also maintain licenses that can restrict what you post, and call into question the ownership rights of anything posted to them.

My friends over at Linux Outlaws have solved this problem for me. They’ve installed a service called Laconica, which functions much the same way as other micro-blogging software, like Twitter. The difference, however, between this and other services is that it is open-source software, and it is being run by some fellas I consider friends, which means that I am indeed, handling my own social networking. On top of that, I don’t feel like I should ever have to worry about doing something like aggregating my own posts over to this site and wondering if I really have a right to re-distribute my own content. One more neat part? You can subscribe to others’ tweets, even if they’re not on the same Laconica server.

If you’re interested, head over to Linux Outlaws’ Laconica site, and sign up. Also, if you have any interest in computers or Linux or you just hate microsoft, you should really head over to their podcast website and listen. To it all. Dan and Fab kick ass.

Ok, back to implementing a (yes, really) four-function calculator for fractions, in C++.

Well, I’ve been having tons of fun with gentoo over the past few days. I like the idea of do-it-yourself linux distributions, when i have the time for them. And, seeing as I have had the past 3 days off work, I’ve had the time.

I’m actually typing this up on the laptop, while the workstation on which I’ve been playing with gentoo resizes its partitions. I borked up 2 installs already, but this is how one learns new things, when it comes down to it.

At first, I spent all kinds of time convinced I could make my own custom kernel to be all uber-useful. FAIL. So the second time around, I got everything up and running, with gnome all up and active, ATI drivers installed (manually, ’cause emerge didn’t want to have anything to do with installing them on a 2.6.25 kernel) and compiz running, if not very well (windows would wobble, but then no longer refresh their contents). I was upset that the version of Gnome that gentoo provides was 2.20, since the 2.22 version came out month ago, and went about enabling parts of the “testing” branch of portage. Big mistake. I was in dependancy hell, and realized that I wasn’t going to get everything back and moving smoothly with only 2 days experience with the system. On top of that, I’d tried putting all of gentoo on an 8.5GB partition, which isn’t nearly enough space to be installing everything from source comfortably.

So now, I’m resizing the partition on that hard drive, in anticipation of once again installing gentoo, over SSH, from my laptop. Awesome, if you ask me. It’s neat to think I’m remotely installing one machine from another machine.

Perhaps if I get some more time, I’ll get to write an update about how I’m loving my awesome new gentoo system.

Another abominably short post, but whatever, I’m busy. The two pieces of good news: I think I aced my first physics exam (woot!), and I’m gonna be playing with Debian Lenny. I’ve got it installed on the laptop, but as soon as the install finished and I had just booted, something came up, so I haven’t even had time to get compiz and the broadcom wireless running. Soon enough though. I’ll report back.

Well, I wrote a quick & dirty motion module in python that represents single-vector motions in physics. I did it mosty to do my homework for me. I may expand on it though to include more dimensions… at which point I’ll probably release it to the wild and hope someone has fun with it.

Also, it’s funny how when at work I hit ctrl+alt+right to switch to the next desktop, only to be sadly reminded that it does not exist on windows.

This post will be quick, because I’ve got a tons of physics homework to get to (which it seems will be the status quo for the next ten weeks). The class is 3 days a week, back to back, 3 hours each day. On top of that, the professor is, well, a bit insane, so there are some high expectations.

The two things I wanted to mention are that my buddy Dan had a laptop from ibuypower, that has been “broken” for a long time. So when I mentioned I was interested in getting an eeePC just so I could ssh into my server downstairs and whatnot, he mentioned this laptop. Turns out it was just a minor problem with the power supply, and my dad (the amazing electronics engineer) was able to help track down the problem and fix it up quick snap! Well, now I’ve got it, and it’s joined the ranks of my home network under the hostname auspice of “tinkerbell”.

Also, I’ve made a new friend in a girl named Shrotriyee. She’s a geek, a big xkcd fan, a linux user, and just generally awesome. We actually went out to a bar last night to communally repartition and install linux on our laptop harddrives. Is that friggin’ sweet or what?

Well, school starts tomorrow. I’m still pretending like I have all the time in the world to get things ready before then. Still haven’t gotten Groovy on Grails running on the FreeBSD box, which was one of the goals. I have however, gotten Arch set up pretty close to how I’d like it. So we’ll see how it carries me through the semester. And of course, since I won’t have too much time to play with my environment for the coming weeks, it’s obligatory screenshot time!

I spent the morning installing Arch Linux again. With most of the nice little minimalistic toolset I want, it takes up a whopping 1.76 Gb. And I was far more optimistic about making it work today, which made all the difference. Every problem I came across was easily solvable. It’ll be nice just to have there to boot into. I still gotta figure out what I’m gonna do about sharing files back and forth, ’cause that’s a pain in the ass. So, while I ragged on it the other day a little, I was just feeling negative toward it I guess. Don’t get me wrong… Arch is not in any way for the inexperienced Linux user, but if you know your way around, it’s not a bad one to have. I still think for most situations, it’s more of a pain in the ass, and thereby creates more difficulties that prevent real work getting done. But I see Arch as a chance to tweak, and a chance to play around and find the golden configuration without everything else in the way. And for that, it’s perfect.

well, several things to talk about… mainly FreeBSD 7.0, Arch Linux, and Ubuntu Hardy Heron. So, as I said I was going to spend these 3 days of hiatus messing around with my boxes, and I did! I had SO much fun too. It’s been a long time since I got my hands dirty with linux, but man do I love it.

First order of business was to get my FreeBSD server up and running. That was a breeze! Last FreeBSD install I did was 4.3 - about 10 years ago. Let me tell you, they’ve come a long way! The disk partitioner is still ugly, but oh well. Who needs a pretty disk partitioner?

I love the FreeBSD Ports Collection too. It’s all the great parts of compiling from source, without the hassle of dependency hell! I hear Gentoo tries to do this too, but I also hear Gentoo takes forever to get working properly, and I had a lot to get accomplished in three days. So essentially, the steps for the FreeBSD install were simple… run through the install, select the distribution (X windows, minimal, what have you), make a user, and BAM. It works. Then the ever important part… installed irssi and finch. that’s as easy as

cd /usr/ports/irc/irssi/ ; make ; make install ; cd ../../net-im/finch ; make ; make install

nice, huh?

So as I’m on IRC talking to people about how I’m installing this server and I’m gonna spend the day distro-hopping, everyone’s like “Man, you HAVE to check out Arch! You’ll love it.” So I downloaded and burned it.

I must say, I like the idea of Arch. It’s somewhere between Linux From Scratch and a regular distro. The idea is they give you a barebones system and you install only what you need. However, I found the package system slow and confusing. I had trouble with the mirrors. It just wasn’t all that great. Of course, I’m way into tinkering, so it was fun fixing all of that by hand, but I wouldn’t ever try to say it’s meant to get up and go. Granted, I’m a little rusty with my hardcore hackin’ skills, and after an hour or two I had a workable environment, but all in all, i wouldn’t use it for much more than the experience I considered it to be. I am however going to make some room on this hard drive so it can live peacefully alongside Ubuntu.

So speaking of. After playing with Arch all day I was like: “Ok, I need to be back working with some stuff so I’m gonna just install Ubuntu for now ’cause I know it will be fine out of the box”. Man was I wrong!

Ok, all you people who have been ranting and raving about how awesome Hardy is? ENH! Wrong. I’ve had more problems with this release of Ubuntu than any other. I booted up, really dug the new compositing (thanks Gnome team!), saw it installed the video drivers, and started restoring from my backup drive. And wow! The new gnome virtual file system is spiffy! Overall great improvements to the gnome environment, and nice theme Ubuntu team.

Then of course I made the mistake of trying to say… play some music. Sound didn’t work. I spent about 2 hours going crazy as to why it wasn’t working. Turns out they had set it to default to a digital SPDIF output for my Audigy 2. Eh? Really guys? I finally found the setting, and cool, it was working. Next order of business, lemme get my compiz on. Well, compiz was a no-hassle setup, but apparently whatever combination of drivers and configuration they used to provide compiz/emerald produces really vicious video artifacts. So about 10-minutes in, I was stuck with this every 3-4 minutes:

Reinstalling the ATI drivers by hand seems to have fixed the problem, but here I was hoping for just a walk-in-the-park and get moving, like I usually expect from Ubuntu.

Really, I’d like to have seen them wait 2 weeks to release and tighten this up. No way I would give this to my mother and have her install it though, whereas I did just that (well, to my father) with Gutsy. Then again, all things considered, it seemed nice and easy after dealing with Arch. I can’t wait until I have more time to tackle THAT beast.

I’ve been toying with Openbox a lot this week (in between all that time I spent studying for finals). I’m used to having a crazy fully accelerated compiz desktop. I am also a sucker for config files though. So, I decided to install Openbox out of some crazy belief that having a minimalist desktop would help me get more work done. BZZZZT! Wrong answer. It’s more of a blank easel! Well, I’ll let the screenshots speak for themselves.

Old desktop:

Desktop as of Friday:

Desktop yesterday:

Tinkering is what makes Linux delicious.

Well folks, I’ve officially posted my first ever public contribution to the linux desktop community. I made a badass conkyrc that I was quite proud of. So I uploaded it to gnome-look.org. So now no one can say I never did anything for the community! (Aside from giving away linux CDs almost every day, and helping people with their installs, and… well yea)

If you want it, go check it out here.