I managed to soundly b0rk my desktop machine yesterday afternoon. As painful as this might be, especially when you’ve completely destroyed a very functional stage 1 Gentoo install, it did make me reconsider my choice in distributions for a moment. That moment was long enough for me to boot up a Knoppix CD and ponder my potential choices. Well, actually I just grabbed a Libranet CD at first and went for a minimal install before I realized that it would be nearly as painful as a fresh Gentoo install. Nforce chip sets aren’t well supported in Libranet if only because it’s relatively ancient. I tried three different distributions of various derivations but I won’t mention any by name because I was 100% dissatisfied with them.

One of the less annoying things that I’ve learned over the past few days is that I’d much rather deal with some broken things on the Gentoo live CD because I know I’ll eventually figure out how to fix them than deal with the baked in broken-ness that most distributions call a release. I’m midway through a fresh install as I type this. I actually got the base system (from stage 2 this time) up and running in about three hours. Only about an hour of that time was attended so I don’t consider those hours to be totally lost. The biggest stumbling block was a bad ebuild (ppp,if you’re keeping score at home) that caused me to blame and subsequently tinker around with some things I didn’t need to. 2004.3 has none of the segfault-rific show stoppers that the 1.4 CD had so it’s actually a lot smoother install. Not that chrooting a non-functional system six or seven times really qualifies as an install.

Anyway, despite all of the tears and abundant cursing, I’m reinstalling (reminder to self: do not fuck with glibc without reading the bugzilla entries for it first) and will have a functional (read: with X and a window manager) machine again in an hour or so. I will be sleeping before five a.m. tonight.

I started writing a long winded (sound familiar) about a Slashdot article that opened up the “what’s wrong with unix?” question but 670 words in I decided that it was just too pathetic to foist onto anyone else. I’ll summarize and say that anyone who thinks they’ve discovered some Achilles heel of *nix because the POSIX standard hasn’t evolved quickly enough for desktop applications is either fucking with me or totally clueless. Standards move like chilled molasses for a reason.

Instead of that steaming puddle of bile and bitterness I give you a picture of Leonard’s nose:

I’ve got hundreds more just like it. Maybe tomorrow I’ll put up some pictures of her ear.

I found this specimen in my inbox this morning:

and decided immediately that Captcha need to pick up the pack of accessibility adaptation a whole lot faster. Yes, this is just a bunch of superscript and subscript text but, um, it’s text designed to evade spam filters. Before I was entirely awake, I thought, “My god, they’re sending spam in TeX! We’re fucking doomed!” At very least it really got me thinking and not about cartoon sized penises. This spam is legibly mangled and is readable by screen readers but Captcha and other software that uses similar mangling concepts are not.

Most of the holiday thing is finished now and we’re finally at that reprieve stage where people are supposed to rest and relax a little. I think getting older and being child-free, at least momentarily, because breaks actually feel like time off instead of the binge and purge hiring and firing often associated with holidays and poorish punk rock kids looking to pocket a little change whenever possible. It’s good to be idle I guess.

I’ve been poking at some code and trying to figure out what some of it does. Even oh-so-orderly Python becomes a little unreadable after a year or so of being deserted. Another thing that interested me was how much more quickly I could spot potential holes in my code. Obviously when you’re writing functions that basically exist to allow other functions to, uh, function the security of that particular batch of code is going to be less than airtight. I spotted a whole bunch of stuff that really sucked, though, and it’s both rewarding and embarrassing simultaneously. It’s also pretty rewarding to be able to go back over comments that say things like: “Fix this before some 31337 bastard owns it and causes you incredible pain,” and being able to fix those things without depending entirely on documentation. I’m probably introducing new problems in the process but it sure is fun.

Speaking of which, Stani’s Python Editor is a fantastic editor even though I use a bare fraction of the features baked into it. Blender is a much bigger hammer than I need for any of the trivial graphic work I do (all of which is strictly two dimensional) but it’s there in case you’re clinically insane or really want to jack off impress the interface freaks with some Tron-esque GUI of the future that won’t ever happen. Pychecker is also in there so you can learn from the mistakes of others, wonder how long you’ve been making those mistakes, and how many machines are eventually going to flare up like erupting volcanos in a celebratory conflagration of your sloppy coding. Importing Pychecker as a module for in-code in-fighting is also highly recommended. All bullshit aside, I really like working with SPE and it deserves congratulations if only for the non-annoying code completion rolled in. I assume it uses PyCrust but I might be wrong because it works the same way and, more importantly, doesn’t infuriate me instantaneously. I have a really hard time remembering name spaces for infrequently used libraries and modules so completion really helps when it works properly. I’ve used other IDEs or more bulky editors in the past that tried to do code completion for me in C++ instead of Python while insisting that I use its suggestion. Having to fight with IDEs is one of the reasons that I avoid them.

Oh, and all of that stuff that you did to your XP box because your support person insisted that you do it before they wring your technophobic neck? You have to do the same on your new machines as well. If we could just reimage people it would make support work a whole lot easier. Sticking with your old machine would probably be the safer option.

There’s a pretty good, if short, article on the merits of FOSS software running on proprietary operating systems over at Newsforge that’s worth checking out. I’ve heard umpteen different arguments on this subject over the past couple of years and most of them have been pretty ridiculous. Good software is good software and when you’re stuck in a work environment or even temporarily stuck on a platform that isn’t your first choice being able to grab copies of Open Office or whatever is a good thing.If I have to spend any amount of time on a non-Linux box I’ll end up installing the Windows version of emacs and a decent FTP client. The article that got me started thinking about this actually ends with the author thinking about platform neutrality rather than the application versus platform problem.

Personally, I don’t care what OS you use but I will become cranky very quickly if you insist that I use your tools of preference to get my work done. I got through an entire semester length class of ‘using Office’ (a requirement for a now defunct CIS minor) without using MS Office for a single assignment. The nice part about using FOSS tools is being able to tell people to just download the damned software. You really can’t do that (at least legally) with Office and that puts responsibility for ownership of a piece of software more expensive than the hardware required to run it on another person. Unfortunately, I do have Crossover Office installed on all of my boxes so if necessary I can view crappiness in its original context. I hate that.

You might want to check with some people that don’t currently live on Planet Ad Agency before calling your facial cleanser “Morning Burst with bursting blah blah blah.” Find a fifteen year old kid and then show him all of your packaging before it goes to market. If he laughs or does anything but look bored, start from scratch. Seriously. The text on the back detailing how your face feels after you get hit with a morning burst is sketchy comedy gold.

I’ve had a pretty frustrating couple of days with this new machine. Unfortunately I sprung for the “nicer” motherboard (ASUS Ax-blah, blah, blah) with an nForce2 chipset. Very, very stupid idea because although the older GeForce2 I had in the last machine worked flawlessly, the new binary-only nvidia driver in combination with the new cards sucks a dump truck load of ass. I haven’t been suffering the all out lock ups that other are driving themselves crazy trying to fix but I am randomly getting kicked out of X usually midsentence. I just installed the newest from Gentoo portage which means yet another masked package installed on this machine and I’m passing acpi=no to the kernel on boot. I have no idea if this will stabilize things or not since I haven’t had much time in front of this box over the last couple of days. It has, however, provided me with the impetus for a resolution: never, never buy the shiny, new, and sexy thing when clunky, three years old, and stable is available (and, god forbid, inexpensive) for the taking. Eventually, this lesson will sink in.

I just heard about the announced release date for Land of the Dead so I spent a ridiculous amount of time searching around for a little more info about where they’re at in terms of production and whatnot. October of next year looks to be the “real” release date. Most people seem to have no problem with this because we’ve waited years and years as it is so why not another? There’s some photos of sets and a zombie photo even but they always look like shit to me so I’m trying to forget the whole thing. That fucking armored truck thing… jesus. Romero’s films will always have a special spot reserved in my heart, the zombie ones anyway, but the more recent interviews that I’ve read with him have left me a little baffled. I can’t bring myself to talk shit about him so I’ll leave it at that.

I tried out rdesktop for the first time earlier today and was really impressed with it. I actually had to install grdesktop in order to figure out how to use the user and domain flags. Grdesktop also looks a lot like the MS remote client. I took remote control of another machine, fired up IE, and grabbed control of another machine through LANDesk. Yet another reason to dump the behemoth. The lag was minimal and, after I adjusted the resolution and color depth, it was more stable and smooth than Microsoft’s client. You’ve also gotta love the option to use your window manager key bindings. I’m going to play with this some more tomorrow but it was still an exciting discovery. I really didn’t anticipate the *nix client being so slick on 03/XP machines. I see a lot less walking in my future.

I randomly came across this great post about the ambiguities of the Free Software/Open Source dichotomy and how it dilutes the meaning of either. I couldn’t agree more and I fall far more on the Stallman side of the argument than the grab your ankles and write code for me cadre. Transparency in the process of development just makes sense, like common, expected of MBAs kind of common sense. I think there needs to be a distinction between the public relations salad that Scoble refers to and the actual idea that mere mortals can participate in a project without excessive mediation. Leaving comments on a weblog is not participation and doesn’t exactly epitomize transparency in most cases in less you think that creating a FAQ that actually answers the real questions people want answers to is some kind of business miracle. I don’t think that we need a new term but rather to tell people they’re buzzwording incorrectly instead of using well and publicly defined terminology. Free Software and Open Source: fucking use them.

PHP-Help is fucking handy. I have big and cumbersome books that contain the same information but I’d much rather look them up when I need ‘em as opposed to lugging. The Functions section alone is well worth having available. There is a crazy amount of useful documentation available now that isn’t directly linked to one company. Long ago, I had to reimplement a C project in Java and everyone I asked for help on either IRC or mailing lists just referred me to the Cthuloid horror that the Sun Developers Site is. Yuck. I’m glad to see that people are doing it themselves rather than letting some people with their heads a little too close to the code muck it all up.

I had some other things I was thinking about but either X.org or Fluxbox is causing the X server to go down every ten minutes or so. I have a feeling that the nForce chip on this motherboard might also have something to do with it. So, I will troubleshoot instead of thinking apropos of a new work week ready to begin.

OK, so I really love having a digital camera kicking it around the house almost as much as I love using William Shatner’s brilliant rendition of “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” as music to get the wife moving out of bed for Saturday morning breakfast. Unfortunately, she doesn’t share my appreciation for the man’s finer audio work. That’s probably one of the more unfortunate incompatibilities in our relationship.

We’re getting ready to head off to the Hi Dive for some quality rock and the absolutely fucking wonderful aspect that distinguishes this night from the many blurry in memory though sanctified in the soul nights I’ve spent darkening their doorstep is that they’re allegedly giving away shots of Wild Turkey. Might as well just call that the Smash Up Our Poor Little Bar special. Free shots of cheap whiskey. Jesus.

Woo hoo. I got Yoon a digital camera as a present and, despite assurances otherwise, I was a little worried about it playing nice with Linux. It works.

I just did the upgrade the new and improved WordPress and, like always, it was a smooth process that involved some putting, getting, and little else. Oh how I wish that other upgrades were that simple and painless. I swear the next time a new version comes out that I’m not even going to backup my entire home directory.

I picked up Mono: A Developer’s Notebook from the library yesterday so I’ve been playing around with Mono a little bit. I’m still referring constantly to a C# book I picked up on the same outing but it’s fun and I’m impressed by how slick most of the tools are for how (relatively) new Mono is. Installing MonoDevelop required a fair amount of tweaking on this machine mainly due to masked packages in Gentoo and other assorted broken-ness. It’s all working now but I haven’t managed to get through much of either book. It’s times like this that I forget that finals were only finished yesterday. I need to do a lot more reading in order to really understand what’s going on here. I’ve got a little over a month until I’m knee deep in novels again.

I really, really wish that the new, new Zaurus wasn’t so ungodly expensive. I’m already wishing that I’d spent a little bit more money than I did on my hoopty but plenty useful PDA and held out for a Zaurus. The allure of a real keyboard with so little overhead is undeniable. I use mine more like a little notebook for scribbling down things that would ordinarily end up written on sticky notes and forgotten until they’ve taken a round trip through the washing machine. I’m not much of an appointments and contacts guy. I’ll just keep my eyes glued to auctions for the older SL series and hopefully will get some of that goodness before I get tired of the platform.

Blah.