mindful iterations

I really wish I would have seen this: http://sidux.com/Article420.html before I did an apt-get dist-upgrade. Hopefully this gets straightened out soon.

I'm totally annoyed, which seems to be the theme for the day.

And, my system's fan keeps coming on.  I have an uneasy feeling about that.

Feh. 

This evening was spent installing the dependencies I needed to get the awn-extras running on my system.  Avant Window Navigator is a really nice dockbar.  Sometimes it's nice to zone out on things that have absolutely no consequence.

Aside from that, most of the day was spent catching up with folks, cleaning the house, and sitting around in my pajamas.  It's been a wonderfully relaxing weekend which doesn't get to happen very often, really.  Usually I'm so busy running around and studying that I don't usually get to really relax and come down from my work week.

While I did do some studying and 'geeking-out', I did manage to have a nicely balanced weekend of responsibility and laziness.  Ah, balance - I love it.

In any case, in addition to running awn, I'm also running compiz, which is a requirement for running the dockbar.  I, of course, like the squiggly windows that come along with compiz, but it seems to really slow things down on my system.  I've got a decent enough graphics card - an 256MB nVidia.  I've got a GB of RAM in my system.  While that's not huge in today's standards, it's definitely not the piece of shit.  I'll probably ride the composite wave for a little while, maybe a few weeks, and then end up back to my standard Gnome desktop.   I'm not known for my patience.

Anyway, enough of this - I'm off to read some more of the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A friend gave me the book to read and I've just passed the part about the improbability drive.

And with that, I'm off. 

Really.  I haven't gone away.  I promise.

So, here's a quick rundown on things:

Ruby on Rails

Lately I've been doing the majority of my programming in Ruby and Rails.  Things are becoming second nature for me and slowly but surely I'm getting self-confidence when it comes to "am I doing this right?"  That's a great feeling to have.

I was discussing it with someone lately who was telling me that all I really need is the self-confidence.  That's great to hear from an observer.  

Linux

I've been trying to get a Linux install up and running on my P3-500 toybox.  Unfortunately the CD-Rom drive is fubarred, so I've been taking the CD drive out of my main PC and putting it into the other system in order to get things working on it.  I installed OpenSuse and immediately felt dirty.  I need this as a Windows replacement box, so I wanted something relatively 'user-friendly'. I'm downloading Mint right now and we'll see how that works out.

Life in General

While spring is officially here, when I look out my window and see several feet of snow still on the ground, and when I walk outside into 7 degree weather first thing in the morning, I can't help but wonder if spring will ever really get here.  I'm looking forward to the Summer - except for the bees, wasps, hornets, and other immensely frightening creatures.  I can't wait to be back in shorts and t-shirts and flip flops.  I love my Tevas.

Anyway, I hope to update more in the next couple of days or over the weekend.  I'm posting this from Safari in Windows and every few moments I get the notification that a script is slow.  So, enough is enough.  It's harshing my mellow. 

So, now I'm running Sidux, which is notably faster than Ubuntu.

 I'm on the 2.6.23.9 Kernel.  I did have some issues installing, as the installer did not write Grub's menu entry properly. It couldn't find my root partition and it kept telling me that job control was turned off, along with an intramfs prompt. 

After examining the entry in the grub menu, I discovered that it left the uuid blank for root.  So, after trying to put the uuid in, and it failing miserably, I changed it to reflect root=/my/device.

Booted up perfectly after that.

There are a few things I need to tweak, but overall, I'm pretty satisfied.  One of the niceties of installing this was that the install took all of 8 1/2 minutes.  Not bad. :)

If you're interested in checking out sidux, you can go to sidux' home page. 

I have my /home stuff on a separate partiiton which means all my settings have been retained.  Anyway, enough blogging about this - I'm going to explore my system. :)  Next step - apt-get install ruby :) 

Hardy Heron didn't happen.  Well, it started to, but then at the very end, it didn't.  So, I took about 30 minutes of deep contemplation and since I was told by the upgrade process that my system may be unstable, decided to backup all my stuff from my main partition (config files that I need) and put 'em over to my spare partition.

I just finished downloading the image of Sidux.  I'm going to install it.  What the hell, eh?  I like more 'bleeding edge' stuff and I also enjoy the package management that comes along with distros other than Gentoo.  So, here goes nothin' :)

 

Ah, what the hell - I'm going to upgrade to Hardy Heron.  It's easier to appease my distro-boredom by doing that than it is to change over to Debian or another distro.

So, I just ran update-manager -d and I'm upgrading Ubuntu to version 8.04.

If it all goes awry, at least I have my little P3 dev box with Zenwalk Linux on it to research how to fix it. :)

Did I mention I'm impulsive? 

Call me fickle - I've been running Ubuntu since the end of April and I'm dreadfully bored with it. Yes, I'm on Gutsy, using the Gutsy-proposed packages and all.  I'm once again contemplating moving over to a different distro.

I started out years and years ago, with RedHat Linux.  I believe it may have been RedHat 5, but I can't quite recall.  Then, I took a break for a while.  Eventually, I ran a dual boot with Fedora.  Then, I switched over to Mandrake (before it was Mandriva).  Or, it could have been the other way around.  In any case, I wasn't 'learning enough' and so I decided - wtf, and I installed Gentoo.  And, boy - did I learn.  After running Gentoo for a while, I moved to Gentoo unstable.  ~x86, baby.  Once I stopped consistently breaking my system, things were rolling along fine.

Then one day, I broke my system. In a really big, and I do mean BIG way.  So, I decided again - wtf, let's see what this Ubuntu is like.  I haven't really had any troubles with Ubuntu.  It's simple and easy and relatively stable.  The biggest issues I had were when I upgraded from Feisty to Gutsy.  And even that wasn't that much of a big deal.

But, the thing is, I'm bored again.  I'd love a distro that will challenge me - not necessarily as much as Gentoo challenged me, but c'mon, more than Ubuntu is challenging me.

So, I'm contemplating making the switch over to Debian (which seems a little more advanced than Ubuntu) or possibly FreeBSD (which, I know is a different beast).  I also use Slackware based distros on some baby machines I have, but I'm not sure if I want to go that route.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Unlike most of my distribution-switching decisions, I'm trying to take my time and not act out of impulsiveness.  I'm very impulsive when it comes to changing my system.

I'm leaning more towards moving over to Debian, although I may consider just keeping things simple and going to Ubuntu's Hardy Heron while it's still in Alpha. 

In any case, we'll see - I have learned over the years not to start anything like this towards the end of the weekend.  We'll see if I have the patience to actually put what I've learned into practice.

I just finished installing KDE 4 RC2 on Ubuntu/Kubuntu.  It looks really nice.  I'm impressed by the progress that was made between RC1 and RC2.

I'm about to go to sleep, but just wanted to post a quick update.  I really like the way that this looks and I can't wait for the final to come out. 

While I was originally going to post a relatively pensive post on how much it sucks that time goes faster the older you get, I decided to post on technological stuff instead, sparing my 5 readers the agony of reading a post filled with Gen-X angst. :) So, now onto my latest adventures in technology.

• Emacs – I've been dabbling with emacs as of late. I really like it. I was using vim, which is awesome in its own regard, but the key bindings of emacs just seem more natural to me. I'm sure I could pimp out vim to have emacs key bindings (I know I can, there's stuff to do that with), but I like emacs. So, we'll see. It's a process, I suppose, finding just the right editor. I love Komodo Edit, but sometimes I'm at the command line looking at stuff and it's just more convenient to go into emacs or vim. Anyway, I like it a lot. I have done some customization and we'll see how the next week or two goes with it.
• MySQL and Relational Databases – I've been reading up about schema design and MySQL. Let me just say, while my last post discussed my fascination with relationships and databases, that said fascination does not extend into reading about relational database theory. Really. I know there are whole books about it, but just point me in the direction of a good 10 page best practices "do this, don't do that" pamphlet and I'll be good. But, all in all, I'm getting a stronger understanding of how things fit together and how relationships work.

That pretty much sums up my latest focus. I'm still doing stuff in perl – much of my MySQL focus is so that I can work with DBI functions in perl with MySQL.

I spent much of this weekend thinking about programming and databases. While I find all of it very interesting, it didn't make for the most relaxing weekend.

I'm fascinated by database relationships. Okay, so maybe fascinated isn't exactly the right word. I just find the complexities of relationships very interesting. How you can have a simple structure or you can make things really damn complicated. (Much like human relationships, really).

If you get too deep or too granular, you can have a big ol' complicated mess. If you don't get deep or granular enough, you may not have the amount of substance that you really need for things to work the way they should.

As for programming, I think I'm really drawn to that because it is structured and it makes sense. Okay, so not all of it makes sense, especially at this point in time, however, it is purely logical and has a structure. Even in languages such as perl where there is more than one way to do things, there is structure. If you leave the confines of that structure, you're going to have issues.

Life can be like that, as well. If one doesn't have any structure or logic in their life, it is probable that one will have issues. Unfortunately, life, unlike languages such as perl, doesn't offer things like, "use warnings" and "use diagnostics" to let you know when you're making a huge mistake.

While I don't consider myself the most structured person in the world, I also don't consider myself the most chaotic. In certain areas of my life, I have a great deal of structure. In others, well, not so much.

That is where the beauty of balance steps in. To live in one extreme, where life is so structured that there is no room for the creative genius that is sparked from chaos, is stifling. However, to live in the other extreme where life is so full of chaos that there is no order and no semblance of rationale or logic, can be stifling, too. With a life of balance, there is just the right amount of order and just the right amount of chaos. My life isn't always what I'd call balanced. However, balance is something I strive for.

I find it interesting why some people are drawn to technology and the fields that they are in.

The above points aren't the only reasons I'm drawn to programming and technology. I like figuring things out and I love being creative. With programming, I can be creative and figure things out, all while using logic and analysis. The same goes with technology – I get to figure things out and new technology is just friggin' cool. What can I say?

So, my question to you:

What draws you to your field?

I'd love to hear your answers.