habitual pragmatist

Boy, oh boy! I have just been swamped recently between work, school, and actually trying to get to the gym once in a while. Glad I could make it in to post before the month since my last post rolled over. I already feel like a jackass not updating.

Work is going well. The students have their finals this week, which means the next two weeks I basically get to do nothing. For the next 4 or 5 days though, it will be sheer madness. Students seem to want to wait until the last minute when they’re desparately behind to ask for help, by which point they’ve frustrated themselves so thoroughly, they expect me to step in an just do it for them (to which I respond by giving them a big ol’ ticket for a free trip on the FAILboat). I’m also amazed sometimes by how much people want to (yes WANT) to not catch on, and continue to make excuses as to why they can’t do something instead of just learning to do it. It makes me wonder if in the past (or even currently) I have done the same things. I’d like to think not.

School, while intriguing and challenging, has been eating up a good hunk of time. I’m OK with that. In my programming classes over the past few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of re-implementing the unix tools “cat” and “grep” in c/c++ and the FreeBSD passwd diff’ing security check in bash. It’s kind of neat to dissect and re-implement the tools I’ve been using for so long. While they seem like trivial exercises, it teaches alot about why software engineers design software they way they do. Who would have thought there were so many ways to put the contents of a file to STDOUT? Now the question is, whose way is faster, better, and more concise, and why is that? I know when I’m doing work for production, a lot of times these questions don’t receive alot of attention. “Oh, it compiles? Ship it!” It’s nice to see some time spent discussing the science behind our science. ;)

Fun stuff.

Since the recent laconica updates, lopost is indeed broken. I have not had the time to fix it. Sad but true. I’ll probably rework it over the semester break. Chances are I’ll have to take a look at the way gwibber does it, as my code was based on the original python at the laconi.ca trac, which no longer works.

I’ve also been asked to help out with the SQL security libraries for Photon CRM, although all of that is still in the planning stages. I’ve started writing some documentation (as in anything that doesn’t exist yet, document first, implement second), but we’ll see how much time I end up having for actually writing the code.

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!

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.