wonkablog

I was just chatting with my good friend, Corndog, and we were both lamenting how we have a similar issue when it comes to coding projects. We get these great ideas, but once the interest starts to wane off, we stop working on it for a while. What eventually happens is you have a lot of projects that aren’t getting updated regularly.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy coding, it’s that my organizational skills really need some work. One thing I’ve discovered recently that helps me a lot, personally, is to use lists. Instead of having tiny chores that need to be tended to that I randomly recall about when I’m doing something boring, I can write them down and then when I get some time to tackle stuff like that, I’ve already got a good list of things to tend to.

I’m hoping the same thing will help me with all my projects. One large problem with working on them is that they are all fairly large in nature. And when you go months on end without working on them, by the time you do come around to starting up again, you look at your code and wonder what the crap you were smoking, and want to start over from scratch to optimize it. But once you get halfway through that you either lose focus of where you were going with that or just satiate the bug enough, and move onto something else. Basically what is happening is you get lots of pockets of interest where you want to work on something, but because you aren’t organized, you tend to just idle furiously, never accomplishing anything.

So, here’s to hoping this will help. Im installing trac on my home server. It’s one of those things that I’ve been meaning to install for an embarrassingly long time, now. In fact, I actually use it at work, and while we were chatting, I remembered how much it helps. The thing I like about it is when I hit some downtime or just want to work on something different for a while, I can go to the Active Tickets page and remember those small little tweaks that I wanted to fix, and get them finally taken care of.

My belief is that if I can do the same here, but on a bit of a larger scale. The major hurdle with starting and re-starting on these large projects is their size. You get the bug to work on something, but if you run down a mental tally of what you want to work on it’s usually summed up in a week of four-hour sessions of majorly reworking an old site that’s been down for two years. I figure that I can use trac to break down the project into smaller chunks so I’m not biting off more than I can chew. So, for example, instead of thinking “I need to finish importing the Bible Dictionary into the database, and setup scripts to query it,” just add some tickets to trac for smaller parts like, “import data”, “setup fulltext indexes”, “write views” and “write stored procedures.” That’s a lot easier to handle.

Now I’m sure to most people who read this, that would be common sense. Well, to some people, common sense comes naturally. Me? Regular expressions. Talk about a trade-off.

I downloaded a copy of DSL-N last night, per Aaron’s suggestion, and played around with it.  I got it successfully installed on my USB stick, but my computer wouldn’t boot off of it.  It just said ‘boot failed’ even though I know I had the BIOS setup to access it. Maybe you need a special USB bootable stick.  I’m not sure.

Anyway, the really cool thing is that DSL has a tiny store where they sell Mini-ITX systems.  I’ve never heard of these until now, and I’m way stoked.  I gotta have one.

One of the coolest things about these little guys is that they are fanless!  I would love to have a totally quiet mythfrontend system.  I have no idea how in the world I’d set it up, boot off the network probably, but it would be loads of fun to try.  I picked out this little model as the one I want to get, and at under $300, I’m tempted to up and buy one right now.

I placed my order on New Egg today for my new Linksys router. Just in time, too. Today, my old one decided to stop forwarding packets all of a sudden. The poor thing has been slowly going downhill for the past couple of months. First the DHCP server gave out, which wasn’t too bad actually, because I got to install one on my mythbox and it’s actually been doing a much better job in the first place. I’ve been thinking of turning that into my router too, but I’ll probably have the new one in a few days anyway.

Overall, I’d say its done pretty well, though. I think I’ve had it for at least two years, probably more. That seems like a good enough lifespan for a small home router. The last firmware update is just barely a year old, so it’s probably already outlived its warranty. (more…)

For those of you who want to be among the few l33t, here’s a few tips on gaining guru butthead status:

• Successfully complete a stage1 install using floppies on a Pentium 100 and brag about it to all your friends, family, neighbors, and grocery store clerks.
• Install Gentoo on your desktop, your workstation, all your servers, your router and your oven, and then make everyone you know feel vastly inferior and worthless for not using it themselves.
• Get all the binary drivers to work simultaneously in your ohmypoop-speed-sources.
• Memorize quotes from funroll-loops.org and reference them wherever possible.
• File bug reports about an ebuild URL being wrong.
• Finally, make fun of all the n00bs on #gentoo

Happy snobbing.

I just watched an old Sherlock Holmes movie, “The Scarlet Claw”. At least, I think that’s what it was called. Really good stuff. This is only about the sixth or so old Holmes movie I’ve seen with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in it. Great stuff. I like the radio dramas a little better, though, because they are more in character and setting with the original stories. The movies take place a lot later.

Considering my last post, I should probably clarify something.

I actually go very far out of my way to find hardware that works with open source drivers before I buy it. Of all the hardware I have right now (which is a lot), only two of those use proprietary drivers: my nvidia video cards, and my USB wireless stick — and I’m going to return the second one. So, in that regard I think I’m actually doing pretty well.

In fact, I bought my Plextor ConvertX the same day they mentioned they released some kernel drivers (under the GPL even), and I’ve been happy with it ever since. I had tried a Hauppauge WinTV card before, and while it’s possible to get it working with the binary wrappers, it was a royal pain. The Plextor ones are beautiful in contrast. They have always worked flawlessly. Even my HP printer uses open source drivers, also developed by the manufacturer. You can’t beat that. And, I’m looking to get a new wireless router just so I can run OpenWRT on it.

So, for what it’s worth, just wanted to point out that I’m not indifferent about the whole proprietary drivers thing. Quite the opposite. But, I’m flexible when I have no other options.

I tell you what.

I just thought I’d weigh in on my opinion on the recent slashdot troll of whether or not proprietary drivers should be let into Linux. The title of my post pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter. Idealism is a noble goal, but you’re always going to have strike some bargain between principle and practicality.

One problem with being abosuletely purisitic is that the decision to do so is usually based upon a philosophy, of which in my opinion, they are all generally flawed to one degree or another. (Being a religious person, there is only one philosophy that is not flawed in my opinion, which is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.) With that in mind, I don’t accept human-made philosophies wholly, and I’m going to have to decide for myself some degree of what is right, and some degree of compromise. In the matter of FOSS, the compromise is going to be in the case of getting things done. I’ll admit, though, that my bias leans more towards practicality than purism when it comes to a choice between the two.

When I first started switching to libre software, the main attraction was first that it was free as in beer. Later, once I started learning about the ideals behind the communities, I was intrigued, and saw them as good reasons, both practically and ideally. There are some very good reasons for using open source software, both on a reasonable level and an altruistic one, neither of which can be argued away. I’m in favor of both at the same time, and my own open source projects are also written and released with those two as driving forces.

No matter how much I praise, admire, preach about and use free software though, you are always going to run into a situation where you are going to need to do interact with the world that isn’t using it. I use Samba at work. I convert GIFs to PNGs. I record calls with Skype. I watch DVDs. I play games. I chat on AIM. Some of those, I have to use free software that interacts with a proprietary world by choice, but in some cases, I have to just to let my life move forward.

A good example is Aaron’s idea to switch to Jabber-only communications over IM. I applaud his idealism, and I envy him for making such a bold move, but I would worry about cutting off communication with others who just don’t see things the way I do. It might be possible to convince all my friends to use Jabber clients instead of AOL / Yahoo / MSN / ICQ, but chances are more likely they won’t fire up one client (or switch to a client that has multi-protocol capabilities) just to talk to me. So, I compromise. I interact on their terms that they they consider standard.

Another example is my car stereo. The thing only plays WMAs and MP3s. Now, I don’t like MP3s because of the gray software patent area, to say nothing about Ogg Vorbis’s superior sound quality, but right now its the only choices I have if I want to put in a CD to listen to a lot of music. Now, there are other alternatives to this scenario, but they are not as practical. One option would be to buy a portable music player whose software has support for Oggs, and then run a line-in cable to my car stereo. Again in this case though, Ive sacrificed my standards a little bit just so it’s simpler to do things the way I want them. I’m not happy about it, but I’m not going to make things harder just for my stand on software policies.

Which is not to say I don’t think they’re important. On the other hand, I think the GPL is a little too restrictive, so I release my software as public domain so that anyone, anywhere can use it for any reason, whatsoever. I know that the GPL enforces that derivatives of that will also be freely avaiable, but in my opinion even that is too restrictive for my tastes (again, only for my software I release).

Let me take another example of purism to the extreme. Let’s say I won’t shop at Wal-Mart because of the corporate atrocities they expend upon their employees and local economies worldwide. That’s great, but where do you draw the line on the principle? I believe that the fact of the matter is that if you start elminiating corporations from your purcashing list because of violations against human rights, that eventually you’ll be left with the prospect of making your own clothes, and having a garden out in front of your house, and eventually being completely self-sustainable. Which, is not a bad goal at all, but it does stand in the way of practicality.

Anyway, my point is this, to each his own. I love free software, support it and use it wherever possible, but I don’t let it draw the lines for me of what I can and can’t do on everything. Moderation in all things, I suppose.

I’ve spent almost all day trying to get these free versions of large databases working. Well, that, and watching a good amount of Justice League. So far, I’ve yet to feel like I’ve made any good progress. Although that one battle with Lord Hades was pretty darn cool.

These new cartoons are a lot grittier than even Batman: The Animated Series was. The animation isn’t as sharp, though, but it is detailed in other places. It’s a trade-off, I guess.

Anyway, here’s my impressions so far:

Oracle XE

• Easy to install
• A pain in the arse to connect, what the crap is TNS and SID variables I need to set? I’m really lost.
• The web interface is really slick.
• The instant client installed without any issues on Gentoo (on both 32 and 64 bit installs, I dual boot).

SQL Server 2005 Express Edition

• Just as easy to install
• No cool frontends, no nothing. It does come with a separate SQL script thing you can run in DOS (that’s odd).
• I can’t figure out for the life of me how to connect with PHP, but I don’t think it’s going to be easy or possible, considering its so new. ODBC *might* work.
• I’m not even sure if its accepting remote connections yet. I can’t even get an ODBC connection created.
• I would be using the 2000 version, but I didn’t find it til much later, and I’ve already got everything installed.
• I would have found it much earlier if Microsoft didn’t make it so freaking absolutely gouge-my-eyes-out incredibly hard to find. Naming the databases 2000 and 2005 doesn’t help my search queries too much. Not that sql or server are really original either. Come up with some original names, guys, like … “Relational Asinity” or something.

Firebird

• I can’t even get the thing started or figure out how to create a database.
• I tried the web admin (ibwebadmin), and while it looks like a really cool app, see above.
• Couldn’t find any cool foss guis, so I gave up after searching for just a little bit to try the other ones.

IBM DB2

• Just barely finished installing it, I’m feeling optimistic about this one.
• Not too excited about installing RPMs on my Gentoo box just to get the PHP client working. Actually, I wouldn’t mind if there was an ebuild.

Granted, I’m reading very little documentation while I do this, other than the PHP website, and going as far as this will take me intuitively. I’ve spent most of my time on Oracle, and their website is really nice, and has a section just for PHP. I still can’t get any connections working though.

One thing’s for sure, it makes me love PostgreSQL even more than ever. And I used to think it was a pain to setup. Holy crap, its a cakewalk compared to these guys.

I think it’s time for some more cartoons. Green Lantern is definately the man. I think he’s tougher than Superman.

Me and my good friend Scott went to the Clark Planetarium last night. It was really cool. That homeboy knows more about astronomy than I ever imagined, and he gave me a good explanation of everything I didn’t have a clue about. It was great stuff.

I was a little surprised that there weren’t very many exhibits. There were enough, though, but the Smithsonian it ain’t. The good thing though is that, even though they were small, they were all really well done. All of the writing got straight to the point and it wasn’t boring or too technical. And the pictures and displays were really artistic.

I gotta go back sometime and check out the Black Hole movie they are showing. I’m sure thats some good stuff. Fun times. It was great.

I’m sure I’m going to get into trouble by announcing something I *plan* on releasing, because then I might never get around to it … but oh well, I felt like mentioning it.

I started working tonight on a SQL Server release of the lds-scriptures package. This one is actually going to have foreign keys, and maybe some views — some of the big things that will be in the next point release for the other databases too.

Someday I’ll have to get an eval version of Oracle and DB2 and maybe port it to those just for fun.