Bash has dirname and basename and there is the ever present $PWD; but has no built-in mechanism for determining what the absolute path name of a file or directory. I find this infuriating. Did someone think that people would never need to know? Did someone impose their view that absolute or full pathnames are evil and should never be used within a script?
Ok, I'm overstating the problem. There is the workaround of using "readlink -f" command but it was not obvious and I was only lucky to stumble across it recently. I had to have a separate script otherwise.
2010-02-11
BarTap for Firefox
Truth be told, one of the reasons I have recently gotten into the habit of suspending my laptops instead of shutting down completely is so that I don't have to suffer through reloading Firefox with the gazillion tabs I kept open but didn't want to close for one reason or other.
But finally this Firefox app just crossed my desk to solve that problem and I love it. It has shot to the top 3 of must haves, maybe tied with Tree-style tab. I agree with the comments to the app, it should have been included with Firefox by default.
But finally this Firefox app just crossed my desk to solve that problem and I love it. It has shot to the top 3 of must haves, maybe tied with Tree-style tab. I agree with the comments to the app, it should have been included with Firefox by default.
2009-02-09
Another sentimental loss
The other day I de-activated my second oldest email account. It was my first Yahoo account, which actually was my very first webmail account. I've had it for 12 years, creating it when I did a stint in Munich as accessing my lab account (which remains my oldest existing account) that I used exclusively would have been very inconvenient. Webmail was sort of new at the time but the ability to access email from any browser anywhere made it compelling.
Well, back in its early days I was a little more promiscuous with its use (spam hadn't yet reached its peak). And it being that old, it made its way onto a LOT of spam lists. Eventually it was 99.99% spam, I could NOT find legit email on it easily. In fact, I learned some heartbreaking news of emails I missed for that very reason. It just got to the point where it was unusable due to the spam problem, and the Yahoo spam filter was loosing. I don't know why I kept it well past when I stopped using it. I simply don't. I even payed for the PoP access for years. Maybe because I had stuff attached to it, but that made no sense because I would never know. But now it's gone. Yet another part of the purge. It's just a bloody email account but for some reason I felt a little bit of loss. Now to get rid of the oldest account which is also nearly unusable... though I can see some small point in keeping it. I did try to get rid of it, but the sysadmin never removed it.
Well, back in its early days I was a little more promiscuous with its use (spam hadn't yet reached its peak). And it being that old, it made its way onto a LOT of spam lists. Eventually it was 99.99% spam, I could NOT find legit email on it easily. In fact, I learned some heartbreaking news of emails I missed for that very reason. It just got to the point where it was unusable due to the spam problem, and the Yahoo spam filter was loosing. I don't know why I kept it well past when I stopped using it. I simply don't. I even payed for the PoP access for years. Maybe because I had stuff attached to it, but that made no sense because I would never know. But now it's gone. Yet another part of the purge. It's just a bloody email account but for some reason I felt a little bit of loss. Now to get rid of the oldest account which is also nearly unusable... though I can see some small point in keeping it. I did try to get rid of it, but the sysadmin never removed it.
Contact merger
I don't know when it happened but at long last, there finally exists a means of simply merging the many different contact listings for the same person (as people rotate email addresses and whatnot). It's a killer feature that I've always desired but have never seen in any contact manager I've used. I've posted to group boards on this topic before. This problem came to the forefront when using webmail accounts like Yahoo and Google that typically added contacts based on incoming or outgoing emails. Hence multiple contacts for the same person were created. Finally Google's contact manager has a way of merging the many versions into a single contact. The lack of that feature (and the fact that there were just so many contacts, most of which I don't need to have synced) caused me to manually create a small set of contacts using a different application. I now have some incentive to keep clean up my contact list in Google and perhaps even use their new Google Sync.
2008-08-20
Floppy no more
For better or worse, I am now floppy free. I have given away all of my Zip disks, I have destroyed all of my 3.5" disks, and at long last I've taken some scissors to my 5.25" disks. This is all part of the great purge for my upcoming cross-country move. I feel a little antsy about it, but in the end I think it was inevitable.
I had kept 3.5" disks for emergencies for quite a while and I admit that there were times (when dealing with legacy programs and such). And I also had some even older 5.25" floppy disks. Those things had some old Wordstar, dBase III, Wordperfect, Newsroom Pro, and other data from way back in the DOS days. At some point, my computers did not have 5.25" drives anymore and yet I still kept them thinking that someday I'd get that data off of them. That day never came, until recently. Over the years I had asked coworkers and friends if they had any old computers with that drive; no one did. I considered going to an old electronics shop or even Ebay to get one, but didn't for 2 reasons: 1) I didn't want to spend money just to transfer old data that might not even be readable anymore, and 2) for most of these years I didn't have a desktop to install it in in the first place; I was pure laptop for a good 10 years due to grad school and moving and such. I did eventually get a gaming desktop machine but never reconsidered getting a 5.25". I was all ready to just declare it lost when I stumbled across an old PC in my landlord's basement. I got his permission to cannibalize it but it turns out that I didn't really need to. I did try to take the drive out and put it in my desktop only to discover that I didn't have the right connector. But the old computer was already working and running Windows 95 I think and it booted. The drive wasn't actually attached in the computer but after swapping out the 3.5" drive with it and playing with the BIOS it actually worked. Now the transfer problem... no network on it and no CD-burner on it. Fortunately for me, my landord is a techy and he had retrofitted an old USB1 card into it. I panicked a bit when my first attempt using a jump drive failed due to compatibility. But eventually I tried out some other ones that did work and voila, I was able to get my 20 year old data off these obsolete disks. Not that I'll be able to do anything much with them but this is history and I'm sentimental.... and trying not to be. Hence when I finally got the data off... snip snip and into the trash. Actually, that felt quite good. Space is limited and I've been carrying these things around with me for 20 years.
I had kept 3.5" disks for emergencies for quite a while and I admit that there were times (when dealing with legacy programs and such). And I also had some even older 5.25" floppy disks. Those things had some old Wordstar, dBase III, Wordperfect, Newsroom Pro, and other data from way back in the DOS days. At some point, my computers did not have 5.25" drives anymore and yet I still kept them thinking that someday I'd get that data off of them. That day never came, until recently. Over the years I had asked coworkers and friends if they had any old computers with that drive; no one did. I considered going to an old electronics shop or even Ebay to get one, but didn't for 2 reasons: 1) I didn't want to spend money just to transfer old data that might not even be readable anymore, and 2) for most of these years I didn't have a desktop to install it in in the first place; I was pure laptop for a good 10 years due to grad school and moving and such. I did eventually get a gaming desktop machine but never reconsidered getting a 5.25". I was all ready to just declare it lost when I stumbled across an old PC in my landlord's basement. I got his permission to cannibalize it but it turns out that I didn't really need to. I did try to take the drive out and put it in my desktop only to discover that I didn't have the right connector. But the old computer was already working and running Windows 95 I think and it booted. The drive wasn't actually attached in the computer but after swapping out the 3.5" drive with it and playing with the BIOS it actually worked. Now the transfer problem... no network on it and no CD-burner on it. Fortunately for me, my landord is a techy and he had retrofitted an old USB1 card into it. I panicked a bit when my first attempt using a jump drive failed due to compatibility. But eventually I tried out some other ones that did work and voila, I was able to get my 20 year old data off these obsolete disks. Not that I'll be able to do anything much with them but this is history and I'm sentimental.... and trying not to be. Hence when I finally got the data off... snip snip and into the trash. Actually, that felt quite good. Space is limited and I've been carrying these things around with me for 20 years.
2008-04-27
iOMeGa!
I've been digging through my shite recently and among other things found a box with my old Iomega Zip-100 drive in it. This thing is relatively ancient. I mean this is pre-USB. It connected to the computer via parallel port. In the box also was about a dozen zip disks. And what's more, there was stuff on it that I had absolutely no clue if I had backed up or transferred to any other hard-drives. What to do, what to do. I did NOT want install drivers on my Windows system which is polluted enough as it is. Well, my freshly minted Ubuntu install was up and the computer it was on had a parallel port, so why not? I began looking up info about these parallel port zip drives for use with Ubuntu. I recall a decade ago getting it to work with my Toshiba running Red Hat (I think it was 5) and having to do some insmod's and ppa's and using mtools and the like; basically I remember it requiring some work. After finding an appropriate page I hooked it up.
OMG! Without doing anything else, up pops the ZIP-100 icon on my desktop and a Nautilus window with the contents. I utterly did not expect that. That rocked. I mean, who uses parallel ports to attach devices these days, outside of perhaps a legacy printer much less a block device? It's not so much that I expected it to not work easily but even with Windows I expected having to download some drivers or installs or something. Way to go Ubuntu!
It's amusing to consider how my stack of zip disks and the reader fit can all fit on my keychain via a USB key now. Those things were destined to go the way of the floppy; in fact I think the floppy outlived them. I don't think I ever liked them but for a few years I must admit that they were indeed practical. In light of the MiniDisc, I still think zip disks should never have existed. But for now, I'm just stoked that practically no effort I got it connected and was able to move all of that data off. I now look forward to getting rid of the beasties. The fact that it worked so effortlessly almost made me want to keep it around for amusement. Almost. Now to figure out the most consciencious way to purge it from my possessions.
OMG! Without doing anything else, up pops the ZIP-100 icon on my desktop and a Nautilus window with the contents. I utterly did not expect that. That rocked. I mean, who uses parallel ports to attach devices these days, outside of perhaps a legacy printer much less a block device? It's not so much that I expected it to not work easily but even with Windows I expected having to download some drivers or installs or something. Way to go Ubuntu!
It's amusing to consider how my stack of zip disks and the reader fit can all fit on my keychain via a USB key now. Those things were destined to go the way of the floppy; in fact I think the floppy outlived them. I don't think I ever liked them but for a few years I must admit that they were indeed practical. In light of the MiniDisc, I still think zip disks should never have existed. But for now, I'm just stoked that practically no effort I got it connected and was able to move all of that data off. I now look forward to getting rid of the beasties. The fact that it worked so effortlessly almost made me want to keep it around for amusement. Almost. Now to figure out the most consciencious way to purge it from my possessions.
Hardy har har
Ubuntu 8.04 a.k.a. Hardy Heron was released last week. I'd been waiting for it for a few weeks. I had decided to re-up my home Linux installation on my Alienware computer. But rather than installing the beta, I figured I'd just wait for the actual release. At long last it arrived to breath some life into my desktop computer. I've had a few days to play with it and if I was never convinced before, I now feel that:
But as far as desktop computers are concerned, I was thrilled. I've always been a little accepting of the fact that Linux always takes some tweaking to get working. Usually that means a bunch of web searches and manual installation and editing of configurations and such. For the desktop though, just about everything worked instantly and the only "hassle" was to get the multimedia up to snuff (not included by default for licensing, etc. reasons). But that's one thing that over the past few years has been wonderful, practically everything is available to install very easily. If I had to scratch install Windows, that would require a couple days of manually loading in all the software, dealing with all of the bloody registration notices that keep popping up over and over again when you do, all of the multiple "updates" to account for the difference between the CD version and the latest updates... well, everyone knows that Windows and all of the software isn't quite as quick as they suggest. In modern Linux distros, the package manager makes it as simple as clicking a bunch of check boxes and letting it go.
Early highlights for me:
Linux is absolutely ready for the desktop.I mean, I've used 7.10 on and off and that was great too, but I never used it often enough and is for the following reason:
That is why, in this case I installed it onto my desktop computer. Granted, I have not tried Hardy on any of my laptops but that will come in time.
Linux may not be quite ready for the laptop.
But as far as desktop computers are concerned, I was thrilled. I've always been a little accepting of the fact that Linux always takes some tweaking to get working. Usually that means a bunch of web searches and manual installation and editing of configurations and such. For the desktop though, just about everything worked instantly and the only "hassle" was to get the multimedia up to snuff (not included by default for licensing, etc. reasons). But that's one thing that over the past few years has been wonderful, practically everything is available to install very easily. If I had to scratch install Windows, that would require a couple days of manually loading in all the software, dealing with all of the bloody registration notices that keep popping up over and over again when you do, all of the multiple "updates" to account for the difference between the CD version and the latest updates... well, everyone knows that Windows and all of the software isn't quite as quick as they suggest. In modern Linux distros, the package manager makes it as simple as clicking a bunch of check boxes and letting it go.
Early highlights for me:
- Installation was largely unattended and quick.
- Windows partition auto detected and available.
- Compiz loaded cleanly (after NVidia drivers uploaded).
- I was able to get my basic working environment setup very quickly thanks to package manager.
- Some things like audio and such which were always a little flakey seemed to work out of the box.
- Had to do digging to allow network shares with Windows.
- Multimedia of course.
- Still puzzled why things like c/c++ development stuff isn't default, this is Linux afterall.
- Downgrading Firefox3b to Firefox-2 for some reason required some digging to get right (hint: delete .mozilla from home directory). Sorry, but I need my Google toolbar.
2008-04-19
Fear of the upgrade
There was a time when I would constantly upgrade to the latest version of software. I was a junky for new useless features. There was sometimes a secondary reason, like keeping certain file types up to date (due to the unfortunately still present but thankfully diminishing days of proprietary file formats). That changed as the years passed. I now find myself skeptical of upgrades. Oddly, the inevitable increase in bloat (both in size increase and speed decrease) is less the reason than the problems that invariably get introduced. It seems that these days an upgrade signifies an introduced incompatibility, instability, or worse.
Off the top of my head the first program that I purposefully abandoned upgrading (versus just didn't need to use anymore) was PaintShopPro, from back in the early 90s. It was freeware or shareware then. It was small, fast, and useful. Then at some point the upgrade was no longer free to get. It became around $30 and later $100. I kept the old free version around for many years and refused many upgrades. Eventually I abandoned it for other things, but I still remember liking it a lot. A copy may be lying around on a disk somewhere.
Another example is MusicMatch. It was one of the first decent mp3 ripper-players around. I was fond of it not as much because of its real quality (it was good but kind of clumsy in some ways), but rather because the owners did something absolutely right: free lifetime upgrades. Now that policy deserved my money. I despise being forced to buy essentially the same software over and over again every year or two. For every software purchase, there should be at least 2 free major upgrades or like 4 years of upgrades included. But lifetime? that was awesome. Then Yahoo bought it, but I remained pleased because at least they still honored the lifetime upgrade. I saw an end to that coming when they changed the name to Yahoo Jukebox. Eventually it was unrecognizable as MusicMatch. And eventually, I stopped installing it and even stopped using the old version. Why? because I upgraded once too often and it kept pestering me to upgrade, and then gave me a stern warning that my version's days were numbered due to an interface change (basically a forced connection with Yahoo Music that I didn't want). Oh well.
Apple software gets my goat because I'm convinced they purposely break something just to keep things more proprietary. e.g. every new version of iPod firmware seems to be designed to break other peoples attempts at using their product not in the "vision" of Apple. iTunes is similar, only every major update seems to cause my iTunes to stop working properly. My new rule is to wait two updates minimum before updating.
These are kind of trite examples. The major one is Windows. Now there's an important piece of software that they force you to re-buy every couple years whether you like it or not. My latest excursion, I got a laptop last year that had ONLY Vista as an option. Of course a month after I got it the backlash forced Dell to offer an XP version. I stuck with Vista though because I didn't want to buy another copy of XP and also I'm lazy. I admit that it has some added niceties, mostly trivial in my opinion, but DEAR LORD IS IT ANNOYING. It has never stopped pestering me for something or other whenever I boot. I'm always getting these damned bubbles popping up in the corner, especially annoying when I'm playing WoW. Every major piece of software wants to put crap in my taskbar and wants to poll for updates and yadda yadda. Windows of course is the second worse offender (first being McAfee), especially with its constant "are you sure", "do you want to allow this", etc. It drives me nuts. The real issue here though is stuff just doesn't work cleanly in it that worked fine on my XP box. Even stuff that's certified for Vista in some way encounters problems.
As if that wasn't bad enough, along comes SP1. After some pestering, I allowed the update. And wouldn't you know, iTunes won't run. I was getting a "iTunes has stopped working" message before even the window popped up. Dangit, I wanted to swap in some stuff onto my nano NOW. I spend a couple hours scouring the interwebs for some solution and even tried the ol' uninstall and reinstall. The searches were kind of scary with all the notes on how iTunes and Vista were problematic from the get-go; I felt lucky that I got it to work at all. It took me a while to get the right incantation of the Google search to get me to this link which at least one solid and tangible solution to try. I downloaded the noted patches but turns out I didn't need them. For the benefit of the search engines: the trick that worked was Control_Panel -> Programs_and_Features -> Quicktime -> Repair. It runs now and thankfully even though I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes, my library info remained intact. A miracle I know. Sigh, I really wish I didn't HAVE to use iTunes... but it's the only iPod compatible program I'm aware of that supports the "resume playback where you left off" (or "save played position") feature that I need for audiobooks and podcasts. That's the critical deal-breaking feature.
Backing up to the upgrade subject, I do not sport this upgrade fear on Linux. Maybe it's because nearly everything I use on Linux is below version 3 with a non-trivial chunk of it below version 1. This basically means that most of it can still be a bit unpolished and upgrades are welcome. But there's also this sense that when it comes to open-source software, it really feels like the upgrades are needed somehow. Most updates really are bug fixes and often times optimizations. When new features are added, it's as if by committee it was decided that the new feature really was a good idea. Another related reason might be the tendency that when some piece of software gets old -- like versioning past 3 to 4 but often much sooner -- that by then something else similar but cooler comes out and people move to that even when it's in alpha. Yes, upgrading and changing and tweaking seem natural in the Linux world, but it works because you don't have to pay for each update and it's often not even required. Sigh... it always feels like I'm just on the cusp of going completely Linux, but for the durned expectation that everyone uses Windows and may only make drivers and software compatible with Linux as an afterthought, maybe.
Off the top of my head the first program that I purposefully abandoned upgrading (versus just didn't need to use anymore) was PaintShopPro, from back in the early 90s. It was freeware or shareware then. It was small, fast, and useful. Then at some point the upgrade was no longer free to get. It became around $30 and later $100. I kept the old free version around for many years and refused many upgrades. Eventually I abandoned it for other things, but I still remember liking it a lot. A copy may be lying around on a disk somewhere.
Another example is MusicMatch. It was one of the first decent mp3 ripper-players around. I was fond of it not as much because of its real quality (it was good but kind of clumsy in some ways), but rather because the owners did something absolutely right: free lifetime upgrades. Now that policy deserved my money. I despise being forced to buy essentially the same software over and over again every year or two. For every software purchase, there should be at least 2 free major upgrades or like 4 years of upgrades included. But lifetime? that was awesome. Then Yahoo bought it, but I remained pleased because at least they still honored the lifetime upgrade. I saw an end to that coming when they changed the name to Yahoo Jukebox. Eventually it was unrecognizable as MusicMatch. And eventually, I stopped installing it and even stopped using the old version. Why? because I upgraded once too often and it kept pestering me to upgrade, and then gave me a stern warning that my version's days were numbered due to an interface change (basically a forced connection with Yahoo Music that I didn't want). Oh well.
Apple software gets my goat because I'm convinced they purposely break something just to keep things more proprietary. e.g. every new version of iPod firmware seems to be designed to break other peoples attempts at using their product not in the "vision" of Apple. iTunes is similar, only every major update seems to cause my iTunes to stop working properly. My new rule is to wait two updates minimum before updating.
These are kind of trite examples. The major one is Windows. Now there's an important piece of software that they force you to re-buy every couple years whether you like it or not. My latest excursion, I got a laptop last year that had ONLY Vista as an option. Of course a month after I got it the backlash forced Dell to offer an XP version. I stuck with Vista though because I didn't want to buy another copy of XP and also I'm lazy. I admit that it has some added niceties, mostly trivial in my opinion, but DEAR LORD IS IT ANNOYING. It has never stopped pestering me for something or other whenever I boot. I'm always getting these damned bubbles popping up in the corner, especially annoying when I'm playing WoW. Every major piece of software wants to put crap in my taskbar and wants to poll for updates and yadda yadda. Windows of course is the second worse offender (first being McAfee), especially with its constant "are you sure", "do you want to allow this", etc. It drives me nuts. The real issue here though is stuff just doesn't work cleanly in it that worked fine on my XP box. Even stuff that's certified for Vista in some way encounters problems.
As if that wasn't bad enough, along comes SP1. After some pestering, I allowed the update. And wouldn't you know, iTunes won't run. I was getting a "iTunes has stopped working" message before even the window popped up. Dangit, I wanted to swap in some stuff onto my nano NOW. I spend a couple hours scouring the interwebs for some solution and even tried the ol' uninstall and reinstall. The searches were kind of scary with all the notes on how iTunes and Vista were problematic from the get-go; I felt lucky that I got it to work at all. It took me a while to get the right incantation of the Google search to get me to this link which at least one solid and tangible solution to try. I downloaded the noted patches but turns out I didn't need them. For the benefit of the search engines: the trick that worked was Control_Panel -> Programs_and_Features -> Quicktime -> Repair. It runs now and thankfully even though I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes, my library info remained intact. A miracle I know. Sigh, I really wish I didn't HAVE to use iTunes... but it's the only iPod compatible program I'm aware of that supports the "resume playback where you left off" (or "save played position") feature that I need for audiobooks and podcasts. That's the critical deal-breaking feature.
Backing up to the upgrade subject, I do not sport this upgrade fear on Linux. Maybe it's because nearly everything I use on Linux is below version 3 with a non-trivial chunk of it below version 1. This basically means that most of it can still be a bit unpolished and upgrades are welcome. But there's also this sense that when it comes to open-source software, it really feels like the upgrades are needed somehow. Most updates really are bug fixes and often times optimizations. When new features are added, it's as if by committee it was decided that the new feature really was a good idea. Another related reason might be the tendency that when some piece of software gets old -- like versioning past 3 to 4 but often much sooner -- that by then something else similar but cooler comes out and people move to that even when it's in alpha. Yes, upgrading and changing and tweaking seem natural in the Linux world, but it works because you don't have to pay for each update and it's often not even required. Sigh... it always feels like I'm just on the cusp of going completely Linux, but for the durned expectation that everyone uses Windows and may only make drivers and software compatible with Linux as an afterthought, maybe.
2008-02-11
Love Ruby, Hate Rails?
Fairly recently I read a post (and listened to a podcast) decrying the Ruby on Rails community. A couple weeks ago I was talking to th dev crew of a company a buddy works at, and they seemed to wince when I mentioned that I do nearly all of my scripting now in Ruby. It became obvious quickly that it was because they had some bad experience with Rails. They obviously, as I've learned many people do, think that Ruby is synonymous with Rails and I find that unfortunate. I don't think my point came across that I use Ruby the scripting language, not Rails the framework. I've played with Rails but not enough to truly hate it. I remember liking it actually but then again I'm not a web developer and don't know what to complain about. I have little doubts that Zed is correct in his criticisms of Rails itself, not to mention the Rails community.
Still, I'm a little disheartened that that by all accounts the fate of Ruby is tied to Rails. Rails certainly did put Ruby on the radar (similarly to how Lua seems popular because of WoW) and that is a good thing, but the backlash could make it a bad thing. My only hope is that all that is wrong with Rails gets fixed in time. Well, I care less about Rails since I don't use it; I'm more concerned with the thriving of Ruby which has its own problems that I hope get fixed. I'd be sad if I were really forced to fully go back to Python or Perl.
Still, I'm a little disheartened that that by all accounts the fate of Ruby is tied to Rails. Rails certainly did put Ruby on the radar (similarly to how Lua seems popular because of WoW) and that is a good thing, but the backlash could make it a bad thing. My only hope is that all that is wrong with Rails gets fixed in time. Well, I care less about Rails since I don't use it; I'm more concerned with the thriving of Ruby which has its own problems that I hope get fixed. I'd be sad if I were really forced to fully go back to Python or Perl.
Time decimation
Alas, it has been over a year since my single post just over a year ago.
As it turns out, last year was just a mess overall and since no-one reads this it doesn't matter anyways. When I re-read my last post, on quitting WoW I had to laugh because a couple months ago I let some coworkers talk me into playing again. I'm doomed.
So I start up on yet another server from scratch but with some starting funds and get busy trying to catch up to my coworkers (still a long way to go). Just this weekend for no good reason I logged onto some of my previous servers noting that I still had characters from a year ago there. As I inspected them I realize that I didn't really know what I was doing back then. I hadn't even used any talent points. Well things tend to make more sense the second time around. Again for no good reason, I spent a little time cleaning some of those chars up knowing that they probably won't get much play time.
Ah well, enough of that. Let's see how long this lasts.
As it turns out, last year was just a mess overall and since no-one reads this it doesn't matter anyways. When I re-read my last post, on quitting WoW I had to laugh because a couple months ago I let some coworkers talk me into playing again. I'm doomed.
So I start up on yet another server from scratch but with some starting funds and get busy trying to catch up to my coworkers (still a long way to go). Just this weekend for no good reason I logged onto some of my previous servers noting that I still had characters from a year ago there. As I inspected them I realize that I didn't really know what I was doing back then. I hadn't even used any talent points. Well things tend to make more sense the second time around. Again for no good reason, I spent a little time cleaning some of those chars up knowing that they probably won't get much play time.
Ah well, enough of that. Let's see how long this lasts.
2007-01-30
Time reclamation
About a week ago, I finally did it. I canceled my subscription to WoW. I canceled it on the heals of the release of their expansion Burning Crusade. I didn't cancel because of the expansion; it looked really cool. I didn't cancel because I didn't like the game; I liked it a lot, it's well designed, fun, and beautiful. I didn't cancel because it was too hard or wasn't my thing; I have friends that play and the quest progression system is straight forward and fun. I didn't cancel it because it costs too much; $15 a month hasn't affected me all that much and is far from my most costly monthly subscription fees. I did it for 2 reasons, which ends up boiling down to 1 reason when I think about it. That reason is (drumroll)... I got too fucking burned out on EverCrack. I put years into that game, time I can't get back. I look back and it feels like such a waste. That retrospect as well as other things like not having used the time to accomplish other things that I said I'd do but never did has made me rethink my priorities. Now, having played EQ (esp. an EQ ranger) I have a total appreciation for WoW. If I had started off on WoW, it's even quite possible I would not have gotten burned out at all. But it didn't happen that way and now it's too late. I just don't make time to play. I'm afraid to play. I don't want to get re-addicted. Yes, it is possible to have short fun and WoW is conducive to hour-here hour-there play... but durnit, I need those hours now. I want those hours now. And with the goals that I'm trying to make for myself I can't afford to commit those hours to MMORPGs anymore. I really want to but I just can't. Lord help me.
As you can tell, I'm still in recovery.
As you can tell, I'm still in recovery.
2006-11-27
Eye candy
I retract my previous jest regarding being in with the IT guys. One of them hooked my workstation up with Beryl and I'm gushing like the geek I am. I remember seeing some vids/demos of it over this past year and I thought it was nifty... I never thought I'd actually play with it. A) I don't have root at work and B) my linux box at home is not that powerful.
But now I can. Yes it's completely useless, doesn't do anything that I actually need, and it's kind of distracting; I find myself playing more with the window manager than I am working at times. However, I think there's nothing wrong with eye candy, and I think no matter how much people harp on bloated overkill waste-of-cycles things, they internally know that style counts for something. I mean, just look at cars and cell phones and Apple products. "function over form"... yes, but not that's not to say that form doesn't count. As for me, anything to break the monotony of the screen I stare at all day is a plus.
But now I can. Yes it's completely useless, doesn't do anything that I actually need, and it's kind of distracting; I find myself playing more with the window manager than I am working at times. However, I think there's nothing wrong with eye candy, and I think no matter how much people harp on bloated overkill waste-of-cycles things, they internally know that style counts for something. I mean, just look at cars and cell phones and Apple products. "function over form"... yes, but not that's not to say that form doesn't count. As for me, anything to break the monotony of the screen I stare at all day is a plus.
2006-11-08
Linux Layout
Over the course of my life in the Unix/Unix-like world it's every so often occurred to me that there's just gotta be a better directory layout for the beast. 2 things about that: 1) it's messy with items belonging to the same program spread all over the place and mixed in with other applications making it hard to keep track of; and 2) the places programs want to install to are root-owned so adding new programs on my own as a non-root become more work, if not downright frustrating, to put it somewhere else.
WHY!!! is it standard operating procedure in the Linux community to assume that everyone has root?
Anyhow, one of the frustrating things is wanting to try out new packages and having to jump through hoops to get it to work in place without installing files into X different directories. I'd envisioned many times a system where applications were self contained in their own sub-directory tree that can be easily maintained and deleted if desired. There would of course be a convention for searching and sharing dependent libraries and items. I guess this is how it's done in the new OS-X world, good for them.
I recently read about a Linux distro that does exactly that: GoboLinux. It's nearly exactly what I was thinking of and I strongly suspect that it has occurred to the minds of a LOT of Unix/Linux users.
Reading the forums and talkbacks and comments though, it seems like there are a lot of people that are against the idea of re-organizing the Unix layout of /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin /usr/lib /opt /etc etc. etc. They seem to fall into 3 camps:
Number 2 probably has some valid points but I don't fully buy it. They seem to think Unix was designed to be sensible. There were indeed decisions for the layout but by and large I'm convinced that it grew organically from a day when there were far far fewer applications and when memory and space and speed were at a premium. IMHO, there was really no long-term plan for this organization and this directory structure just doesn't scale well to the number of users and applications now. It's created a mess and all the work on packaging and dependency tracking were grafted on and only serve to obfuscate the basic underlying cause being this antiquated file tree.
Number 3 is probably why we're forever going to be stuck with complicated system management.
Thing of it is, there are already good examples to refute the reasons not to have an alternate organization scheme for applications and files. OS-X is one example it's a BSD based system. But there are other sub-examples in the typical Linux world. Rubygems comes to mind immediately. It's relatively simple (only 1 command organizes the whole thing), gracefully handles multiple versions of the same package, and casual inspection of the tree proves it to be fairly logical.
I may try out GoboLinux at some point, they even have a Live CD which I find impressive. They made a couple of design decisions that I find practical and interesting and possibly even better than what I was originally imagining. The linking of pertinent files to the old tree structure is sensible. I had imagined turning the includes, paths, and library finding features into more of a device such that any attempted access to /usr/local/lib/xxx.so would be handled by the system as a redirect, like the way web pages are. It was just a thought experiment. Links (and the possibly clever use of hiding) seems more practical. I just fear that dependence on the old tree structure will remain if one always assumes it's there.
But again there's the inertia problem. Not enough people would conform to the new layout. The spark of hope is that if developers would make their program installs well enough to easily allow installation to non-standard places, then this may become less and less of an issue. I'd certainly welcome a system where the organization is implicit and not reliant on a myriad of package handlers where there are as many as there are distributions.
WHY!!! is it standard operating procedure in the Linux community to assume that everyone has root?
Anyhow, one of the frustrating things is wanting to try out new packages and having to jump through hoops to get it to work in place without installing files into X different directories. I'd envisioned many times a system where applications were self contained in their own sub-directory tree that can be easily maintained and deleted if desired. There would of course be a convention for searching and sharing dependent libraries and items. I guess this is how it's done in the new OS-X world, good for them.
I recently read about a Linux distro that does exactly that: GoboLinux. It's nearly exactly what I was thinking of and I strongly suspect that it has occurred to the minds of a LOT of Unix/Linux users.
Reading the forums and talkbacks and comments though, it seems like there are a lot of people that are against the idea of re-organizing the Unix layout of /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin /usr/lib /opt /etc etc. etc. They seem to fall into 3 camps:
- Too Windows like... dumbing it down for the n00bs... things of that nature
- There are good reasons for the layout, aint-broke-don't-fix
- Too set in our ways
Number 2 probably has some valid points but I don't fully buy it. They seem to think Unix was designed to be sensible. There were indeed decisions for the layout but by and large I'm convinced that it grew organically from a day when there were far far fewer applications and when memory and space and speed were at a premium. IMHO, there was really no long-term plan for this organization and this directory structure just doesn't scale well to the number of users and applications now. It's created a mess and all the work on packaging and dependency tracking were grafted on and only serve to obfuscate the basic underlying cause being this antiquated file tree.
Number 3 is probably why we're forever going to be stuck with complicated system management.
Thing of it is, there are already good examples to refute the reasons not to have an alternate organization scheme for applications and files. OS-X is one example it's a BSD based system. But there are other sub-examples in the typical Linux world. Rubygems comes to mind immediately. It's relatively simple (only 1 command organizes the whole thing), gracefully handles multiple versions of the same package, and casual inspection of the tree proves it to be fairly logical.
I may try out GoboLinux at some point, they even have a Live CD which I find impressive. They made a couple of design decisions that I find practical and interesting and possibly even better than what I was originally imagining. The linking of pertinent files to the old tree structure is sensible. I had imagined turning the includes, paths, and library finding features into more of a device such that any attempted access to /usr/local/lib/xxx.so would be handled by the system as a redirect, like the way web pages are. It was just a thought experiment. Links (and the possibly clever use of hiding) seems more practical. I just fear that dependence on the old tree structure will remain if one always assumes it's there.
But again there's the inertia problem. Not enough people would conform to the new layout. The spark of hope is that if developers would make their program installs well enough to easily allow installation to non-standard places, then this may become less and less of an issue. I'd certainly welcome a system where the organization is implicit and not reliant on a myriad of package handlers where there are as many as there are distributions.
2006-10-12
A reason not to be good friends with the IT department
I've been buddies with the current instatiation of my company IT department. It has been a good thing. Service is a hair better, I have an easier time getting upgrades (like a new flatscreen monitor) and I can more or less provide a little influence on the system and ask for some geeky things to be installed that aren't really important to the work grind.
Alas, today I finally found a reason not to be so buddy-buddy with them. I get an email and one of them installed World of Warcraft on my workstation, running under Gentoo Linux of course.
Must... resist...
Alas, today I finally found a reason not to be so buddy-buddy with them. I get an email and one of them installed World of Warcraft on my workstation, running under Gentoo Linux of course.
Must... resist...
Distro feel
I finally allowed the IT guys at work to replace/upate my machine to the new regime. I have a Gentoo box sitting on my desk now. It's actually been ready for a couple of weeks but I had to make them wait because I couldn't afford the interruption in the meantime. At last I got my upgrade. Most of the folks in my group are very resistant to system updates and changes... some notoriously so. I can see their point of view, I just don't share it. And knowing that I'm very amenable to updates and changes despite the glitches that always appear, the IT folk had slated me as one of the earlier guinea pigs (though not the first). I'd been waiting for this update for quite some time actually. Newer software with newer features and at last I can use my USB flash. I also like that my machine seems more responsive all around (mostly due to newer machine with more memory but I suspect some of it is due to how Gentoo builds things).
One thing that kind of surprised me this time around, though, is that the feel of the Gentoo distro is not what I expected. True, I've only used it for a few days but it almost feels like I'm really just using a generic KDE box. Here's what I mean. When I was using RedHat it somehow felt like I was using RedHat. When I was using Debian it felt like I was using Debian. My home machine has Ubuntu and it definitely feels like I'm using Ubuntu. But right now, I don't have this strong feeling that I'm using Gentoo. Not that I feel like I'm using some other distro, but more that I'm just using some generic Linux with KDE. It's just a feeling and I'm sure it's more than just splash screens and extra icons here and there. It's a bit hard to define precisely and maybe it's largely subconscious. It's probably a good thing but is that not wierd?
One thing that kind of surprised me this time around, though, is that the feel of the Gentoo distro is not what I expected. True, I've only used it for a few days but it almost feels like I'm really just using a generic KDE box. Here's what I mean. When I was using RedHat it somehow felt like I was using RedHat. When I was using Debian it felt like I was using Debian. My home machine has Ubuntu and it definitely feels like I'm using Ubuntu. But right now, I don't have this strong feeling that I'm using Gentoo. Not that I feel like I'm using some other distro, but more that I'm just using some generic Linux with KDE. It's just a feeling and I'm sure it's more than just splash screens and extra icons here and there. It's a bit hard to define precisely and maybe it's largely subconscious. It's probably a good thing but is that not wierd?
Readme
I'd been a Bloglines user for some time now, but the only things I used it for were for the smaller things like friend's blogs and things that didn't have a huge update frequency on the scale of, say, Digg or even Slashdot or Boingboing. For the bigger stuff that I checked daily, I went to the actual pages in sequence and at most kept a recent articles listing on my personalized Google page. I tested out readers and aggregators that ran locally on my machine but determined pretty quickly that it didn't serve my purposes because there wasn't a convenient way to sync between my home machine(s) and workstation. So Bloglines sufficed but the interface was just clumsy enough that I only used it for a "here's what's updated" list.
Then a week or so ago I found that Google Reader aggregator was updated and I started using it. I'm a huge fan of Gmail, one of the few, if not only, web apps that I prefer to use online rather than with a local program. I gave it a go and, true to form, I like the interface. I've moved just about everything I monitor to it and even deleted the overlapped items on my personal Google page. The main usage difference (other than the interface) I noticed between this and Bloglines is that with Bloglines, I would just see what was updated and click over to the actual site to read the articles. Something about the look and the missing images just made me not like to read within it. On the Goolge Reader, I am just as happy to read the full text (when available) within the reader and only click over to the site when I want to look at the whole article or when I care about the comments. It's not perfect of course, but very well done and I have now changed my viewing habits.
Of course now that everything's in more or less a single stream, I'm starting to feel my own version of the Digg effect. Up to hundreds and hundreds of new and unread items waiting for me to click through them. I'm sure I'll find a system to not get too overloaded, the layout and interface seems to allow for it a lot better than other aggregators I've tried.
One aggregator to rule them all.
Then a week or so ago I found that Google Reader aggregator was updated and I started using it. I'm a huge fan of Gmail, one of the few, if not only, web apps that I prefer to use online rather than with a local program. I gave it a go and, true to form, I like the interface. I've moved just about everything I monitor to it and even deleted the overlapped items on my personal Google page. The main usage difference (other than the interface) I noticed between this and Bloglines is that with Bloglines, I would just see what was updated and click over to the actual site to read the articles. Something about the look and the missing images just made me not like to read within it. On the Goolge Reader, I am just as happy to read the full text (when available) within the reader and only click over to the site when I want to look at the whole article or when I care about the comments. It's not perfect of course, but very well done and I have now changed my viewing habits.
Of course now that everything's in more or less a single stream, I'm starting to feel my own version of the Digg effect. Up to hundreds and hundreds of new and unread items waiting for me to click through them. I'm sure I'll find a system to not get too overloaded, the layout and interface seems to allow for it a lot better than other aggregators I've tried.
One aggregator to rule them all.
2006-08-28
Open formats reaffirmation
I very nearly got burned by a proprietary format again. In my recent mission to collect, collate, and back up my data, I stumbled upon an old collection of .SNG files that I had long since thought I had lost (with sadness). These were recorded a DOS Midi sequencing program from back in the day, circa Windows 3.0's intro, when I was a bit more into music and had a Midi box to connect my digital piano to my computer. I used it to record and later transcribe some songs I learned and even managed once to capture some of my dad's old songs he knew from his more serious piano playing days (sadly, didn't record enough of them).
Well, I found these song files and discovered that they are completely obsolete, undocumented and unsupported. I started to sweat a little and spent a good solid night looking for something, someone, anyone(!), to convert them to normal Midi files. Nothing, nada, zip. I checked the Voyetra site the company that made the sequencer and thankfully they're still in business. Posted in their help/faq/support area was a notice that the format was completely unsupported... along with this note:
I read that to mean "you didn't keep shelling out for our software so tuff shitz for J00". Incidentally I was using a program much older than the one they mentioned here. I was furious and almost fired off a little former customer "feedback". But instead I kept searching and finally found a solution to my problem which ended up being their solution. They basically said I had to install my old DOS program version of the program, get it up and running, load the SNG files in (one by one) and re-save them. WTF! I don't even know where that stuff is from 15 years ago and countless moves. Heck, it came on 5.25 inch floppies and I don't know anyone that has one of those drives anymore. They didn't even have a simple program available that would simply convert or extract the Midi track items out of their own file format. No, you had to use the full blown DOS program, get it working, load the file in, then export it within the program. This blows my mind. As some consolation though, they did at least provide a version of the program (Sequencer Plus Gold) for free on their FTP site, with no manuals.
So I downloaded it and went through the paces to get it installed. Get this, I had to find some 3.5 inch floppies to copy the disk images too because it would only install from disk. Luckily I keep some around and even luckier that I had the foresight to a 3.5 inch drive added to my new computer (combo drive with the little media card readers, pretty cool). Installation wasn't a problem, but getting it to run was a little tricky with the whole WinXP compatibility mode stuff. Eventually, and after some scares, it ran. I spent even more time figuring out how to work it (this was pre standard menu interface) and then correcting for the fact that it was a "newer" version of the program I used and I had to figure out a correction to some of the differences. (It did something special with track 1 and the output Midi files would be incomplete or just empty.) After figuring out the right tweaks to make to the imported songs files, I was finally able to save all the tracks individually to Midi. At last. They even play in Windows Media Player. Hallelujah.
I guess I should have had some kind of inkling back then that I should have taken some steps to future-proof my data. I've lost a lot over the years due to negligence. But back then, the stuff was still relatively new. I was young and foolish and still of the opinion that so long as I kept the data, I'd be in good shape. Hah. Hindsight 20-20. I know that i still have a bunch of Wordstar, Word Perfect, DBase III, and a slew of other stuff sitting in my collection waiting to be salvaged before it really gets too late. Sadly, it will have to wait, because they're all on 5.25 inch floppies. I'm sure I'll find one of these drives somewhere, right? I'm having a similar problem with my zip disks, though I'm less worried about that at the present moment.
Anyhow, the (obvious) lessons to be reaffirmed are:
Well, I found these song files and discovered that they are completely obsolete, undocumented and unsupported. I started to sweat a little and spent a good solid night looking for something, someone, anyone(!), to convert them to normal Midi files. Nothing, nada, zip. I checked the Voyetra site the company that made the sequencer and thankfully they're still in business. Posted in their help/faq/support area was a notice that the format was completely unsupported... along with this note:
NOTE:
We understand that a lot of SPG users have created libraries over the years (some with thousands of SNG files) that they need to use in newer systems. These users had a good chance to purchase the discounted. Upgrades that we offered for almost a decade. Unfortunately, at this time "Digital Orchestrator Pro" is a Discontinued product that is no longer available.
I read that to mean "you didn't keep shelling out for our software so tuff shitz for J00". Incidentally I was using a program much older than the one they mentioned here. I was furious and almost fired off a little former customer "feedback". But instead I kept searching and finally found a solution to my problem which ended up being their solution. They basically said I had to install my old DOS program version of the program, get it up and running, load the SNG files in (one by one) and re-save them. WTF! I don't even know where that stuff is from 15 years ago and countless moves. Heck, it came on 5.25 inch floppies and I don't know anyone that has one of those drives anymore. They didn't even have a simple program available that would simply convert or extract the Midi track items out of their own file format. No, you had to use the full blown DOS program, get it working, load the file in, then export it within the program. This blows my mind. As some consolation though, they did at least provide a version of the program (Sequencer Plus Gold) for free on their FTP site, with no manuals.
So I downloaded it and went through the paces to get it installed. Get this, I had to find some 3.5 inch floppies to copy the disk images too because it would only install from disk. Luckily I keep some around and even luckier that I had the foresight to a 3.5 inch drive added to my new computer (combo drive with the little media card readers, pretty cool). Installation wasn't a problem, but getting it to run was a little tricky with the whole WinXP compatibility mode stuff. Eventually, and after some scares, it ran. I spent even more time figuring out how to work it (this was pre standard menu interface) and then correcting for the fact that it was a "newer" version of the program I used and I had to figure out a correction to some of the differences. (It did something special with track 1 and the output Midi files would be incomplete or just empty.) After figuring out the right tweaks to make to the imported songs files, I was finally able to save all the tracks individually to Midi. At last. They even play in Windows Media Player. Hallelujah.
I guess I should have had some kind of inkling back then that I should have taken some steps to future-proof my data. I've lost a lot over the years due to negligence. But back then, the stuff was still relatively new. I was young and foolish and still of the opinion that so long as I kept the data, I'd be in good shape. Hah. Hindsight 20-20. I know that i still have a bunch of Wordstar, Word Perfect, DBase III, and a slew of other stuff sitting in my collection waiting to be salvaged before it really gets too late. Sadly, it will have to wait, because they're all on 5.25 inch floppies. I'm sure I'll find one of these drives somewhere, right? I'm having a similar problem with my zip disks, though I'm less worried about that at the present moment.
Anyhow, the (obvious) lessons to be reaffirmed are:
- Use open, documented formats, or at least industry standard ones.
- Always migrate your data (ALL of it) to newer media.
- download their Sequencer Plus Gold (sp_gold.zip), unzip it and copy each disk image to a separate 3.5 floppy.
- the floppies are labelled disks 1, 2, 3, and 4 but this is wrong, it should be "install" disks 1,2 and "driver" disks 1,2. take this into account when going through the install.
- when installing, select just the sequencer option, not the midi equipment drivers.
- on WinXP, I set the install and the programs to Windows 95 compatibility
- When firing up the program, there would be a loading message and then it would just hang there. I thought the bloody thing was broken and did several re-installs... but once unintentionally I let the window sit there and some 15 minutes later or more it actually run.
- experiment with how to work their menus, eventually you'll get the hang of it. basically to load: F for filemenu; M for mode (click until mode is SNG); highlight .sng file (best to move the .sng files to their song directory beforehand); L for load. To save: same except put it in MIDI mode and S for save. I used the default options when saving to .mid.
- Prior to saving the songs, make sure you have no real song information in Track 1. Use "J" to "jump" the track to another number
- For my files, I would delete all tracks but one, and save each track separately, but you not need to do this.
2006-08-22
Firefox bound
Ever have something nagging at you for the longest time and yet you do nothing about it and just try and deal with it. I do that all the time. I'd always been bugged that when entering web forms in a browser, namely Firefox, I didn't have my emacs-style keybindings for editing text. And yet, I did nothing about, not even something as trivial as doing a web search. I think there's a certain amount of learned helplessness in there somewhere. Well, now that I've set up my work Instiki, I will be doing more and more text entry into my browser than I used to and enough was enough.
Thank the maker! My solution was within a few keystrokes reach. As usual, I feel like an idiot for not looking this up ages ago.
Sadly, those keybindings don't seem to work in Blogger. Curses!
ADDENDUM:
Speaking of binding Firefox, I had an issue when I upgraded to 1.5 and Thunderbird as well. They didn't work together by default on my workstation. Now... there's a reason for this. The IT guys were so overworked that our workstations are way out of date. Not their fault really, there are other political reasons why our systems stay out of date. Anyhow, I ended up installing it locally in my home directory and using it there. When I clicked on a link in the email client, it would try and bring up epiphany, and when i clicked on an email address in the browser, nothing would happen. I did a web search and all the pages pointed to making sure the "Default Browser" was set properly. I changed it everywhere I could with the control panel(s) and such. None of it work. So I got stuck with doing the cut/paste method of following links and I was irritated for months. Fed up I finally cornered an IT guy for help and he was able to dig up a couple web pages that had the solution. Ugh! I did web searches but he used one or two different words in the search that I did not (nonobvious ones like "force") and was able to get the result whereas I was not. I applied the changes and voila, all fixed in a snap. What a difference a search makes. I feel like a n00b. In my defense, he had done that fix before so remembered what to look for, but still.
Oh, a solution can be found here and it didn't involve any system or window manager or desktop "Defaults".
Thank the maker! My solution was within a few keystrokes reach. As usual, I feel like an idiot for not looking this up ages ago.
Sadly, those keybindings don't seem to work in Blogger. Curses!
ADDENDUM:
Speaking of binding Firefox, I had an issue when I upgraded to 1.5 and Thunderbird as well. They didn't work together by default on my workstation. Now... there's a reason for this. The IT guys were so overworked that our workstations are way out of date. Not their fault really, there are other political reasons why our systems stay out of date. Anyhow, I ended up installing it locally in my home directory and using it there. When I clicked on a link in the email client, it would try and bring up epiphany, and when i clicked on an email address in the browser, nothing would happen. I did a web search and all the pages pointed to making sure the "Default Browser" was set properly. I changed it everywhere I could with the control panel(s) and such. None of it work. So I got stuck with doing the cut/paste method of following links and I was irritated for months. Fed up I finally cornered an IT guy for help and he was able to dig up a couple web pages that had the solution. Ugh! I did web searches but he used one or two different words in the search that I did not (nonobvious ones like "force") and was able to get the result whereas I was not. I applied the changes and voila, all fixed in a snap. What a difference a search makes. I feel like a n00b. In my defense, he had done that fix before so remembered what to look for, but still.
Oh, a solution can be found here and it didn't involve any system or window manager or desktop "Defaults".
Rails rocks
I hadn't done much in the way of web stuff since the days I maintained some personal static research logs at my lab way back when. I wouldn't even count that as web stuff. Had a cursory knowledge of HTML by inspection, never learned Java, nor PHP, nor pretty much anything else. wget was my friend when I wanted or needed to do anything fancy. I did some digging, looked at some complicated-looking scripts, dabbled with a cgi script or two but not a lot. I'd always wanted to play around with it but never put much effort.
That sort of changed recently when I finally had some cause to investigate it for work related reasons. I'd been a scripting fiend for a decade and fell smitten with Ruby over a year ago. I'd been hearing about Rails (who hasn't) but only read enough to get an idea of what it was. Well, now I have dug a bit deeper, had time to play, and I have to say that it is way cool. Even without any formal or informal experience with other types of webdev platforms, I can already feel that I'd rather learn this than those others (save maybe Java but for different reasons). I was set up very quickly, ran though a neat tutorial, and marvelled at the relative ease and quickness with which I was able to get something working. I felt the excitement. I hadn't actually looked forward to getting home to play on my Linux box to play for a long time.
It didn't stop there, either. Before I knew it, I had Typo and Instiki installed in a snap. Those systems are just insanely cool, especially to a webdev n00b like me. I love that they come with their own servers ready to go via Webrick or tapping into Lighttpd. Instiki is now going to be a part of my work logs; it's just convenient to have a wiki where I can collect tips and results. As for home use, I don't really have much in the way of a web application or set of them, it's just to play around with. Next step, find out how to access my home Linux servers from outside. For some reason the port forwarding isn't doing the trick. I suspect my ISP is blocking those ports but I won't rule out my doing something wrong.
That sort of changed recently when I finally had some cause to investigate it for work related reasons. I'd been a scripting fiend for a decade and fell smitten with Ruby over a year ago. I'd been hearing about Rails (who hasn't) but only read enough to get an idea of what it was. Well, now I have dug a bit deeper, had time to play, and I have to say that it is way cool. Even without any formal or informal experience with other types of webdev platforms, I can already feel that I'd rather learn this than those others (save maybe Java but for different reasons). I was set up very quickly, ran though a neat tutorial, and marvelled at the relative ease and quickness with which I was able to get something working. I felt the excitement. I hadn't actually looked forward to getting home to play on my Linux box to play for a long time.
It didn't stop there, either. Before I knew it, I had Typo and Instiki installed in a snap. Those systems are just insanely cool, especially to a webdev n00b like me. I love that they come with their own servers ready to go via Webrick or tapping into Lighttpd. Instiki is now going to be a part of my work logs; it's just convenient to have a wiki where I can collect tips and results. As for home use, I don't really have much in the way of a web application or set of them, it's just to play around with. Next step, find out how to access my home Linux servers from outside. For some reason the port forwarding isn't doing the trick. I suspect my ISP is blocking those ports but I won't rule out my doing something wrong.
2006-08-18
Labels at last
So it looks like I may keep using Blogger afterall. I kept telling myself, "come on, they're not that stupid, what's the holdup?". At long last, Google has finally stepped up to the plate and updated Blogger (now Beta.Blogger of course) and one such valuable upgrade is the addition of labels. For the longest time, I'd been confounded by the lack of any significant features added to Blogger, most notably, the lack of categories or tags. The lack of that feature really makes a blog inaccessable. I mean, if you stumble upon someone's blog and happen to dig an article and want to learn more on what they have to say on the subject via categories, then manyally sifting through the archives is a miserable option. Even site search is a poor substitute. Categories give topics an identity in a way that keyword search cannot (at least currently). Further, a listing of categories gives the entire blog a kind of identity and at the very least hints as to whether other articles on the site would be of interest.
It's not that I think anyone would be interested in this blog, but even for personal use, down the road, it would be nice to at least peruse the different things I had to write about a given interest at the time. There are still tons of cool features that area available to the likes of Wordpress and Typepad and others but for now, the simple category listing is a what I was looking for. I don't necessarily think they display or handle their "labels" elegantly at the moment but I'm happy it's there.
The synchronicity here is that I'd only last week started playing around with my own web servers and webdev stuff on my home Linux box. Some work projects had me playing around with web-works and through that I became more interested in the whole web-development thing. I finally got around to playing with Ruby on Rails and subsequently Typo after reading about them for the past year or so. So far, I think they're fantastic. I'd been imagining setting up something more focused and porting it to a hosted site and such, I have a few ideas in mind, but for now I'm content with the minor dribblings that I have here on Blogger. Perhaps someday after (or if) I develop more webdev chops I'll make a more serious attempt.
It's not that I think anyone would be interested in this blog, but even for personal use, down the road, it would be nice to at least peruse the different things I had to write about a given interest at the time. There are still tons of cool features that area available to the likes of Wordpress and Typepad and others but for now, the simple category listing is a what I was looking for. I don't necessarily think they display or handle their "labels" elegantly at the moment but I'm happy it's there.
The synchronicity here is that I'd only last week started playing around with my own web servers and webdev stuff on my home Linux box. Some work projects had me playing around with web-works and through that I became more interested in the whole web-development thing. I finally got around to playing with Ruby on Rails and subsequently Typo after reading about them for the past year or so. So far, I think they're fantastic. I'd been imagining setting up something more focused and porting it to a hosted site and such, I have a few ideas in mind, but for now I'm content with the minor dribblings that I have here on Blogger. Perhaps someday after (or if) I develop more webdev chops I'll make a more serious attempt.
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