Posted by Jim at November 19th, 2007
1. No matter how fast you move, you will never catch the mouse pointer.
2. Interposing your butt between my face and the screen? Not appreciated.
3. Even though the house is colder than you might like, curling up directly in front of the spot where the hot air exits my laptop is just plain not allowed.
Posted by Jim at August 8th, 2007
Once or twice a year I get the urge to link to a post from the blog “Worse Than Failure,” formerly known as “The Daily WTF.”
This is one of those times.
It’s a blog about bizarre occurrences in the jobs of computer professionals. Sometimes the humor is related to bad programming practices and isn’t very accessible.
This isn’t one of those times.
There’s nothing that I can add in my attempt to entice you to read it that wouldn’t blow the funniest bit in it. Just go there. The piece is entitled:
Posted by Jim at May 29th, 2007
I recently got out my iBook (which I like) after not using it for a bit.
In between the last time I’ve used it and the present, virtually everything that I care about has moved from being usable on Mac OS 10.2.8 to being unavailable except on 10.3 or better.
Ah, you say to yourself, just go update your iBook.
Alas, it’s not that simple. To update, I’ve got to go buy OS X again. Even for a slightly older point release that’s still something like $129.
Which is just plain annoying.
Mind you, I like Apple’s aesthetic. It’s just that (coming out of Windows and FreeBSD/Linux) I’m not used to paying for point releases. It just seems wrong somehow.
You might argue, of course, that Windows 98 was simply a point release for 95 and that XP was little more than a point release for 2000, but, for the moment, I’m going to pretend not to believe you.
Posted by Jim at March 6th, 2007
I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I got interested in Ruby on Rails late in 2005.
I messed around with it a bit, got an extensive hosting account with a Rails friendly provider (for my business), and then stopped doing much with it. This isn’t because it’s not interesting or I came to dislike Ruby on Rails, but rather because I got sick of not knowing ruby.
Though I imagine it would have been possible to just push through and teach myself ruby and Rails simultaneously, I decided that I’d be happier if I just concentrated on learning ruby for a bit–and that’s where I am now.
I’m thinking that I might post exercises that I’ve done online for everyone’s entertainment and criticism. We’ll see if that happens though. I’m not completely sure if I want to leave a permanent record of clueless coding online.
Posted by Jim at February 23rd, 2007
Well, via Slashdot and more specifically ITWire comes the knowledge that some people are supposedly replacing Microsoft Office with Google Apps.
As someone who works with several non-profits as they make their decisions about technology, I’ve noticed that Microsoft Office is often overkill for the actual needs of said non-profits. This is probably also true of small businesses as well. I’m not sure that we’ll see massive use of Google apps among non-profits in part because most non-profits can get XP and Office practically for free through Techsoup and similar programs.
With regards to small business, who knows? Open Office (though cool) isn’t as familiar to people as MS Office and is just as complex. Goople apps might work pretty well for small business in that sense.
It would be funny at any rate. With all the talk of Linux/Open Source replacing Microsoft products (and the fact that it’s not happening very quickly), it would be funny if it happened indirectly with Google as the mediator.
It certainly seems more likely to happen that way than it is that my parents will install Ubuntu.
Posted by Jim at January 22nd, 2007
The Daily WTF is on my RSS feeds list. It’s a website devoted to remarkably dumb things done in programming and in IT generally.
Today’s post involves Take-Your-Child-To-Work Day, crucial servers, and a big, red button.
Now that I think about it, you don’t even have to read the post after that description. Nonetheless, I’ll just mention that as someone who has kids, it seems very true to life. In fairness to my children, however, I should mention that they don’t casually visit destruction on my computers.
Well, not recently anyway.
Posted by Jim at November 21st, 2006
I don’t know if this happens to other people, but personally it seems like the most frustrating problems I’ve faced in programming/system administration have been caused by myself.
For example, a few nights ago I set up a cvs repository. While setting it up was no problem, I found it absolutely impossible to access the CVS repository remotely. For some reason I was getting errors along the lines “No connection:I/O Error:blah-blah-blah:no such repository…”
This was rather irritating as I knew for a fact that there was such a repository.
I then spent a great deal of time experimenting with the various ways I could configure CVS on a CVS client, but no matter what I did, the client never connected.
I also checked out the inetd.conf file. “inetd” for those of you who don’t know is the unix daemon used to control connections from outside computers to yours. In the case of CVS, you’re supposed to enable a line that allows the particular CVS protocol that you’re using. Part of this line describes the path to the CVS repository. Get it wrong and you risk allowing people access to your machine.
I got it wrong.
Bearing in mind that the computer was on my home network, this was not a security problem. Nonetheless it took me a few days to notice this despite checking the file several times.
Grr…
Posted by Jim at August 21st, 2006
Here’s another post that will bore my wife to tears. Actually, bearing in mind that I now know that both her sisters have seen my blog, I have the potential of boring her entire family–and probably most of mine too.
So anyway…
I’m using my FreeBSD box a lot these days. That, of course, means that I have a lot of time to meditate upon what like and dislike about the FreeBSD ports system.
For those of you who don’t know:
One of the more annoying things about unix is that sometimes when you install a program, you find that it won’t work without another (or possibly many more) program(s). There are various systems of getting around this. One of them is the FreeBSD ports/packaging system which actively downloads all the programs that your program depends on so that you don’t have to track them all down individually.
This is great when it works.
What’s not great is when you install a program that depends on many different things, none of which you’re running (such as, for example, the entire GNOME desktop environment). Worse, while it can find packages for some of the programs, it can’t find them for all. Thus, it actually compiles the program in question.
The end result is that sometimes your computer will end up compiling late into the night. Sometimes, it will not only compile late into the night, but when you come back the next day, you will find that some selection of programs no longer works.
For example, even as I write this, I am theoretically installing eclipse. The last time I installed eclipse, it forced most but not all of my GNOME desktop installation to upgrade and I was forced to repair it.
This sucked beyond words.
Not coincidentally, I’m not using GNOME anymore. Thus, it can’t mess up my desktop. Nonetheless, it’s irritating that in order to run a program that’s written in java, a language that’s not dependent upon the local computer, it is somehow necessary to install the entire GNOME desktop and not just a few libraries.
FreeBSD’s ports system is usually great, but this is one of those things that irritates me. I’m sure that someone will figure out a solution to it someday, but until then, I’m stuck watching piles of largely superfluous packages install on my machine.
Posted by Jim at August 13th, 2006
I installed PC-BSD today. It took about 30 minutes.
It blows my mind.
It probably won’t blow your mind if you’re used to Windows XP and Apple’s OS X. Those are operating systems where things tend to work immediately. They’re also operating systems where you can reasonably expect that when you’re done installing your OS, you’ll actually be able to do something with it.
With Linux and FreeBSD, that’s not always true.
Even with some of the better distributions of Linux, I’ve often found myself configuring X-windows late into the night. FreeBSD has at times not even had X-windows included in the initial distribution. Thus I’d end up:
1. Installing FreeBSD
2. Installing X
3. Installing a Desktop Environment (GNOME or KDE)
4. Modifying things
5. Flailing hopelessly as I tried to make standard amenities like Flash, Java, and sound work.
With PC-BSD, it went like this:
1. Install PC-BSD
2. Download and install the Nvidia display drivers, sound driver, Java, and Flash.
And they all just work.
I’m currently listening to music via Mplayer, something that I’d gotten to work previously, but I’d had massive problems getting the sound to work and no motivation to spend the time (since it working easily on my mac and on XP).
Particularly amusing for me is that I’m actually using Flash 8. I don’t think that I’ve ever before used a current version of Flash on FreeBSD. It’s almost always been Flash from the previous version (at best).
Of course, not everything is perfect. For example, I found that some video and sound get messed up, but still, it’s far better than before.
Posted by Jim at August 11th, 2006
Sometime this weekend I intend to install PC-BSD. PC-BSD is essentially FreeBSD with a focus on making things easier for the new user.
From what I’ve read, the installation is remarkably easy. Similarly, it’s also easy to install software thanks to the distribution’s method of packaging them. I don’t really fall into the new user category, but I am married to someone who wants to have sound and video on the Freebsd/Linux box that we happen to have as our second computer.
I’m sure it would be possible to make things work without installing a different version of FreeBSD, but honestly, I don’t feel like figuring out how and I’m hoping that things like that will be easier than usual.
We’ll see.
Anyway, watch this space and you’ll hopefully get to read about how wonderful installing it was. If not, you may get to read about me installing something else to see if I can make that work instead.