Midlife

My coding sucks! I am working on a report where I have this huge text file that I have to munge, so I tried writing a program in Java. So far it got some of the information I wanted, but when I even look at the small piece of code I wrote, it's like the coding of my algorithm is just bad and brittle. Sounds like I need to practice more.

Happy Birthday, me!

WOW!

I haven't been here in a while!!! Guess the blogging bug has gone. A lot has happened, but maybe not worth blogging about.

I had the nice pleasure of getting my own laptop for work, and having a laptop for me would be the next best investment of my money, besides getting VMWare Workstation. I was able to put Xandros and Gentoo on it along with windows, the I put SUSE 9.3 in place of Xandros, then I just used the extra space for my Gentoo installation. I have been using this machine for some interesting ventures, including setting up LVM partitions on it and my own email server for some work related tasks. I plan on consolidating all those partitions into one partition, soon as I get some of this work out of the way.

One thing that I found was really cool is the fact the newspaper of my Alma Mater has gone completely online, and guess what??? RSS FEEDS! When I saw that I was like "Whoa!" It's really simple to do, I'm sure, but to see my alma mater have such capability is refreshing.

I've been furling a lot lately. It seems like when I find a site that interests me, or has some information I want, I furl it, no questions asked. If you'd like to see where my mind has gone, I'll share my list of sites, once I find out how.

bye bye LXR

I was on the #gentoo forum today, and I found another tool I can use to look at code. One of the people there told me about global, another code marking tool. I guess I could have used ctags as well.

Another Reason I Enjoy Computing, Gentoo in particular.

A really good article on Linux Journal's web site highlights some of the reasons Gentoo is a really good distribution. With source-based distros the reported advantage is maximum optimization of the resources of the machine, but the author highlights some other goodies I've tried on my Gentoo boxes at work and at home.

Since I installed Google Desktop on my WIndows box at home I've looked for something analagous to Google Desktop on Linux. My search led me to some pretty good alternatives, most notably Aduna AutoFocus and Beagle, both based on a project called Lucene, hosted by Apache. Beagle has a really nice interface, but the daemon stops communicating with the clients after a while. I was able to script around that such that every 15 minutes the daemon restarts. Also I couldn't get the web service for Beagle to work for some reason. AutoFocus has a nice interface, and a nice graphical display of your results, but I'd like something that interfaces with my web browser, like Google Desktop. It seems like AutoFocus has a companion called Metadata Server, but I haven't played with it enough to see if that meets my needs, and also, it requires Tomcat, so I don't know about the overhead.

Anyway I had a chance to work on modifying ebuilds in Gentoo, and also to create my own ebuilds. I made one for OpenSHORE, a tool that can be used to analyze Java code, among other things. It works fine, but I need to tweak it such that it points to the right Expat library. And the Binary is in German, so I'll have to tweak the ebuild to potentially compile the application in English.

One of the neat things about the ebuilds is you can do your own "version bumps," which is upgrading the version of the software without having to wait on Gentoo Foundation to put the ebuild in the official Portage tree (coolness.) It seems painless, but when I tried to do it for LXR, another code analysis tool, it didn't work out too well, because the way the program got installed changed. Not a problem. I now have an opportunity to use Subversion to make changes and keep track of them. I also need to get Bugzilla working, so I can pitch that as a help ticket system for my job.

Ideally I'd like to roll up my sleeves and work on some code for software I like and want to fix, and hopefully setting up some of this software will help me do it. Just a matter of choice and time.

Computing's just plain fun

Yesterday I played around with creating and using SSH keys to log into my servers, and I really enjoy it.

I also "won," if you can call it that, some free songs from iTunes. Let me log in and see what I can get.

My work machine is a multi-boot box, consisting of Gentoo Linux, Xandros 3.01 OCE, and Windows XP. I primarily play on my Gentoo partition, and I just upgraded my profile to 2005.0. Now to recompile my kernel when I get a chance. Having SSH keys makes uploading all the packages I make to my PORTAGEBINHOST a snap. :)

I also experimented using distcc to help my compiles, with a reasonable amount of success. I used the distccKNOPPIX to set up another machine as a distcc node. I had to tweak a symlink for this to work with Gentoo, thanks to a person I was talking to on #gentoo. I may modify the CD to include a more up-do-date version of GCC

I started experimenting with different note-taking programs, and I've settled on tomboy. It has a nice interface, and reminds me most closely of OneNote.

Back on the Block

Haven't been here in a while. Let's see what I've done.

For starters I was successfully able to distribute a modified Knoppix CD to use for one of my classes, and now I've gotten used to just booting one up for use in a computer lab when I can't get back to the office. Reminds me of graduate school days when I was able to get away to a unix lab when I wanted to. The administration of accounts seemed so much easier than making another image just to put a library on it.

I downloaded Solaris 10, but have yet to install it anywhere. From what I've seen in some reviews I expect to be impressed with it. Just another OS under my belt.

Speaking of OSs I run WS2003 in a virtual machine at work , and I have a problem rebuilding the Active Directory indices. It keeps making me reboot the machine. I was able to back up the virtual machine, but I think I may need to use Windows Backup on the machine and do a complete reinstall.

I read about some desktop search engines for Linux, and I'd like to give it a whirl on my computers. It's also be nice if I can also try my hand at making custom Gentoo ebuilds. they look pretty simple to do.

More Knoppix fun

I bought a copy of Knoppix Hacks, and I'm really impressed with the book and the information contained in them. Over the holidays I've gone Knoppix crazy. I've downloaded other versions of Knoppix to try, such as GamesKnoppix, Knoppix-STD, Overclockix, and MediainLinux. I even modified and made a Knoppix CD of my own, that runs PostgreSQL instead of MySQL. I'm adding the dd_rhelp program and chntpw to the next CD I make. I also downloaded Quantian and will probably modify that for a class I'm teaching this semester. Much fun indeed.

Another Gentoo LiveCD tutorial

I found and Furled another site that shows how to make Gentoo LiveCDs. I'm almost done with it, although I have a problem with the initrd I made. Just need to make sure I did that part right. Maybe I'll have some time over the holidays to work on it. I'd like it to have some multimedia utilities on it, as I may use a spare partition to store all of my media on, just for kicks.

Knoppix/Gentoo fun!

I read about a book called Knoppix Hacks, which details some of the things you can do with Knoppix, and after looking at the preview at Safari.com, I wouldn't mind getting that book. I was able to configure the X.org setup on my home computer using Knoppix-STD, and I'm able to get a better screen resolution than when I just used xorgcfg. Nice hack.

Also, I gave up using catalyst to make my own live CDs in favor of a technique I found on one of Gentoo's forums. It works pretty well, and I'm able to archive the setup for whenever I want to make any more CDs.

Catalyst continues....

So far the catalyst is chugging along :) It's nice to be able to remotely access my home machine so I can work on this while I'm at work. It's even more fault tolerant than the livecd-ng, and the instructions seem easier the second time around.

Just of kicks...

I'm trying to build a Gentoo LiveCD that has VMWare workstation installed on it, kinda like the CoolLinux CD that was put out last year some time. I tried to do the LiveCD thing before with Gentoo's catalyst, but at the time I found that hard to follow, and up until now, implement. I found some instructions on Gentoo-Wiki.com using livecd-ng, and that seems easier to set up. I had to tweak the script some to actually get it to work, and even then I ran out of space before the script finished compiling all the software. I might try catalyst now. More in a minute

VMWare goodness

I finally broke down and purchased a copy of VMWare workstation 4.5, and I am enjoying every minute of its use. I have been able to try out different Linux distros and some instances of Microsoft Windows working. Very cool indeed. I just got turned on to Arch Linux this way, and I want to install it independently of a VM. I want to replace Xandros 2 on my machine, but I might keep it there, just because I don't want to play musical partitions again. Good thing I got that copy ov VMWare :)

Endless Possibilities

I'm fascinated with all the gmail and firefox goodies out there. It's nice to know that these goodies are mostly open source, so I can look at the code and find out how it's done. I just ran into a way you can skin the look go Gmail. Go here and find out!

More Firefox Goodness

I was looking at Wil Wheaton's blog, and I ran across a site that has some Firefox plugins. take a look at this: http://extensions.roachfiend.com/index.php

Firefox 1.0PR

I'm absolutely impressed with Firefox and Thunderbird! Live bookmarks, popup blocking, and countless additions make this the smoothest web browsing experience to date!

Blog burnout?

Doesn't seem like I had anything to write about in the last month. It's not like I haven't had anything to write about. It's pure laziness.

I haven't had much time to do any more transcoding of any more Star Trek episodes, but I have an opportunity to record From the earth to the moon on some channel; I have to find out which channel.

I also found out that the individual whose computers I salvaged for parts wants his main computer back. That takes me back down in RAM from 512MB to 128MB of RAM I may have lying around. Looks like I'm investing in some lighter weight apps. Good thing I was looking at that article on Light weight linux apps.

Another link to check out: http://platypuswiki.sourceforge.net/

Interesting find.

I'd like to check this link out further: http://www.interactivetools.com/products/htmlarea/

Time flies..

Haven't had much tiime to work on my computer at home. I'd like to set up a system to catalog all my CDs here and at home.

I found something to that effect. I also want a program to catalog my MP3 files, and Zinf doesn't work well on my machine, so I had to find something else. More on that later

Gee....

I don't really have too much to say today... other than that I'll be looking forware to the opening of Aliens vs. Predator.