Another project

It's been over two years since my last post. But I have another project I am working on.

I got a laptop from a student whose Internet I fixed, and I am working to put gentoo on it right now

Massive update

Well...lots has happened since I've put a post..

For one I lost my broadband connection, and have been put down to dialup. So no native linux anymore, although I created a Gentoo Virtual machine(VM) I can use with VMWare player under windows (the best thing since beer in a can!) I also have been using VMWare player to try out Ubuntu. It's pretty cool. I may use it instead of Xandros as my second distro on my desktop. Just for kicks, I'm going to set my Gentoo machine up such that it's got the GNOME desktop again. Now the vmware tools doesn't work too well under VMWare player, but I haven't played with it too much. Not only that, my laptop I house my VM under shuts down when I try to compile software in it, so I set up my office machine so that it will create binary Gentoo packages for me, and I set up my Gentoo VM so that it goes to my office machine to downoad the binary packages and not compile from source. It's cool. My objectives then are to get the VM just like I want my desktop to be like, then create a stage 4 archive to put on a desktop I'm going to salvage...sound like another masterpiece, which I haven't forgotten my pervious masterpiece. it works, for the most part.

Is Ignorance Bliss?

A funny thing happened to me at work today. I received a call from a lady trying to submit an online work order. She was complaining that her password didn't work. She said when she typed her password little dots showed up where her password was. I know I was wrong for this, but I could hardly contain my laughter on the phone when I had to explain to her that that was to keep people from looking over her shoulder to steal her password. Sometimes I talk to my mother about some of my experiences at work, and I"m always reminded of the fact that not everyone's into this computer thing. But SHE has been on the computer since I've interacted with her, so I would have expected her to know better.

My Masterpiece...part 4

I used SLAX to create a live cd of the DSL installation I customized for the lady. She told me to take my time because she was broke...oh well...soon as I get some CDs I'll burn a copy for consumption...but I realize now that the CD player doesn't work, so I'll install it on the computer the same way I did it last time: I had to slave the drive to another computer while I performed the installation from a live CD, only this time, instead of using DSL , I'm using a remastered SLAX-frodo CD.

My Masterpiece...part 3

I tried to burn a CD-RW of openoffice to install on the lady's computer, but the CD-RW didn't work on that old ass computer, so I created a VMWare virtual machine mirroring the lady's installation, where I'll add what I need to get the thing going. I tried using mondo/mindi, but I didn't get mindi to make the boot floppies, so I'm just putting a network card and copying the files over the network.....only thing I need to set up is the internet, which I will discuss with her, since she's in a dormitory with no ethernet :(

My Masterpiece...part 2

Im trying to install Openoffice 2 on this machine, so the lady can work on office files. I'm having a problem with a MyDSL package, so I may have to try other ways of getting this on here. Also, I may need to get CD-RW discs, as right now that's the only way any software's getting on this box....

My Masterpiece...part 1

A lady was given a computer and wanted me to see if I could do something with it... It was an old Pentium computer with 32 MB of RAM, and a busted hard drive.

Now what could I do with that???

Simple! The lady just needed something to type papers on, so I'm going to hook her up with Linux and OpenOffice.org. She's a beginner, so I should have no trouble hooking her up with some linux knowledge. I've already completed the first step, which was install DSL on the hard drive I provided for her. Now it's on to getting OOo on the computer. How to do?? just use CD-RW. I'll work on that tomorrow when I get home from my second job...

Back in business!!

I finally took the time to finish getting my desktop computer restored. All I really had to do was get the X working again and reconfigure the VMWare services, and I was good to go, thanks to the stage4 procedure on Gentoo wiki. The only problem is that my home directory backup was not complete, letting me know to test my backup before I rely on it. More later...

I'm using the program Synergy to share my desktop's keyboard and mouse between my desktop and laptop computer, and it's a sweet program...

Sweetness!!!!

I was able to use Amarok to transfer songs to my iPod Shuffle...the procedure was pretty painless...just mounted my Shuffle, connected and transferred the songs via Amarok, disconnected and unmounted the Shuffle. Voila!

That's really cool, since now I'm one step away from needing to use VMWare Workstation to update my iPod through iTunes. I've set up Amarok to download my regularly heard podcasts. With all the things I can do with the computer, mostly tweaking, it's hard for me to ever be bored with using the computer and technology :)

rm -rf *

That command spelled doom for my desktop machine at work. Somehow my home directory for root was changed to /, and when I tried to remove some files to get some space back. Well, that took out my /bin directory before I realized that it was taking out my whole filesystem. No matter. just back up my home and etc directories, and restore from the stage4 backup I made last night on my laptop.

Life Experiment, Day 6

Day 6, and I'm itching to get back online.

I said that I'd replace chatting with gaming, but I've been so tired from my second job I haven't the energy to do any gaming. Does that mean chatting is done for good? Maybe...maybe not.

Life Experiment, Day 5

Well, 5 days without chatting online, and it's not been life-threatening. I'd like to hurry up and get back on to see what I've missed.

Entering this stuff in Flock has been really nice. Speaking of which, I've gotten back into using thunderbird for my email, coupled with MrPostman for my web mail accounts. Refreshing return.

Life Experiment

http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/Praise/challenge/valorie121305

This link takes me to this page where you're asked to devise a life experiment for a week. What I may consider doing is fasting on chatting for a week and see how that works.

What will I do in its place? Gaming! I haven't done that in a while, so it would be a cool change.

technorati tags: life

Flight of the Flock

I'm using Flock now, and so far, it's pretty neat. What I'd like to do is take my bookarks from furl and put them on del.icio.us. I don't know if it will take hold of my desire for Firefox, but I'd use it ocassionally.

Blog replies

I can't believe I actually have comments on my blog! I had this up for years, and this is the first time I actually got comments. Pretty cool I can see how this can be used to find and communicate with other people with similar interests.

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.