linux

Yesterday I went swimming early, which was great. I was tired after about 15 minutes, but pressed on to do a full 30 minutes. I actually noticed myself getting tired the night before at about 20 minutes, but went 45.

One of the things about exercising (ugh! I despise that word!) is that I’m more aware of signals my body is telling me. I have a baseline for what I’m able to do in the water—how should it feel if I hold my breath all the way across the pool? How should it feel if I go down 12 feet? how should I feel after 10 minutes of laps? The answer is “better than I feel right now”—and I am sick. It started with some extra weakness during swimming. Yesterday it progressed with backache and a nonproductive cough. Now I have the backache + headache + slight fever. I took it easy yesterday night.

I’m a bit resentful that my better judgment is telling me to avoid swimming right now.

In other news, I bought a new hard drive for the Windows box yesterday at Fry’s. Installed without a hitch. I tried out Ubuntu yesterday but the UI really didn’t run very well given the limitations of the video card. I ditched that and went with Xubuntu. So yesterday I spent a little time customizing that. I have a lot of stuff to migrate, and much to learn. I’ve not used any Linux variant as a desktop computer, but Windows 2003 Server is just not cutting it anymore for this machine. Then I think, maybe I just need a new video card, but a nice one is almost as much as a whole new machine, and heck, free software is free, and it’s a great environment to learn new things. That’s very important because as May comes in, this is the last month of my contract with Vivendi, and I want to brush up on my technological skills.

What I’d really like to do is have a new Mac, but financially that’s not a smart plan—not till we get the IRS situation squared away. I tell you kids, if you’re going to contract all year, be putting away those taxes as you go. Yes, it’s nice to have big dollars and put away debt. But the taxman, he will have his due, if not now, then later. Big lesson learned there for Leah and me.

Leah is doing great, the book she’s in is out, and some DW dough has showed up too. Also, any minute now we have our deposit money coming back from the previous place; Leah did a great job taking care of all the loose threads that needed cutting there—from cleaners, the floors, to dealing with the management company. The day before yesterday on the Dave Ramsey podcast Dave said to a person considering moving—I’m paraphrasing—“moving has big costs: financial, emotional, relational.” I agree with that wholeheartedly. April was really packed, and we got through it. Leah has done a great job. She may not think so, but she’s totally taking care of business.

That’s all for now.

To start with, a random screenshot from a video from 1989:

I enjoy his music very much. He got his name from a vision of Oral Roberts:

May 25, 1980, while overlooking his religious center which was in financial difficulty:

“’I felt an overwhelming holy presence all around me. When I opened my eyes, there He stood … some 900 feet tall, looking at me … He stood a full 300 feet taller than the 600-foot-tall City of Faith. There I was face to face with Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God. I have only seen Jesus once before, but here I was face to face with the King of kings. He reached down, put his Hands under the City of Faith, lifted it, and said to me, “See how easy it is for Me to lift it!”’”

“Oral recalled that his eyes filled with tears, and Jesus assured him that He would speak to the ministry’s partners and that the City of Faith would be finished.”

On to Misc, or, continuing the misc!

Ubuntu has a new version out—7.10. A few weeks ago, our houseguests brought with them a sad, cheap Wal-Mart laptop that would neither boot nor behave. I installed Ubuntu (6) for them and it’s given them what they wanted, a basic email and photos and web browsing machine. I have been impressed and as my Windows 2003 Server machine gets lamer (remember that?) it makes me think seriously about converting it to Linux. There are several apps I would miss: FileZilla, TextPad, Paint.NET, iTunes. We’ll see. I’m not really a zealot about open source, but I’ve been following Mark Pilgrim’s posts about switching to Linux and it has me intrigued. And it was great to install an OS on an x86 Machine and not have to dig around in boxes for stupid Activation Keys and do Windows Activation. It might be great for me too.

MAS read a book about SuperFoods, and the list he posted has me interested. Here’s the Cliff’s Notes:

1. Beans
2. Blueberries
3. Broccoli
4. Oats
5. Oranges
6. Pumpkin
7. Wild Salmon
8. Soy
9. Spinach
10. Tea
11. Tomatoes
12. Turkey
13. Walnuts
14. Yogurt

And what’s this? An obscure fact about “protocol relative links”—cool! Http-https transitions and relative URLs, via Simon Willison.

The Harold and Kumar sequel might be called Harold and Kumar go to Guantanamo Bay. That’s as crazy as the first movie was. Harold and Kumar is a dumb movie I really like.

“Guilty Pleasure” movies have been a topic at work of late… two I really like that are not necessarily great movies are Necessary Roughness and Under Siege.

Yes, San Diego Voice and Viewpoint’s website is still under construction. Yes, it’s sad when newspapers, even niche ones, don’t have websites. What year is it again?

Oh, the thing that powers the avatars on my site and over on Leah’s site is called Gravatar. They got bought by WordPress.

I got the new Cat and Girl book in the mail! See, look, here’s proof I got it:

Buy one!

Dave Segovia is reintroducing himself. He’s a heck of a character. Drop by his blog and say “Hi!”

Over on BlogHer, Laura Scott mentioned leahpeah’s recent posting about uncomfortable subjects and readership.

David Foster speaks about a basic question cancer warriors have about why they would get cancer if they did everything right. He’s got the same kind of cancer my Mom has. Here’s a quote:

But they are beating up themselves and their lifestyle for no reason. It is true that some behaviors—like smoking cigarettes—cause cancer. But many—if not most—cancers have nothing to do with how healthily you live your life or how many vegetables you eat or vitamins you take.

And lastly, the estimable Jeffrey Zeldman points to the A List Apart Web Survey Results, which make for some interesting reading.

Have a great weekend!

From The Dead Letter Department

I’m getting rid of lots of paper. Where I can, I put the nuggets of wisdom online. These minimal notes are from the two-day seminar given by Philip Greenspun at Caltech several years ago.

He used the WimpyPoint system to do the slides. Looks like his slideshow is protected, so I can’t provide the real url.

And Now, Assorted Notes:

One so-funny it’s sad thing was his mention of a tenured professor in Computer Science who in conversation asked him “what’s Oracle” and “what’s an RDBMS”

“No matter how good your user interface is, it’s better to have LESS of it”

“Q: Why is the war between Linux and BSD so intense?”
“Because there’s so little at stake.”

He dismissed graphic design almost entirely, at one point saying “Add a look and feel if necessary.”

On documentation manuals, and on why systems have to be made plainly learnable in and of themselves, he asks: “How much did you pay for your car? Have you read the owner’s manual?”

“The war (to build database-backed websites/communities) is won or lost on developing a data model, and specifying legal transactions.”

The standard SQL thing of ACID:
A – atomicity
C – consistency
I – isolation
D – durability

In building websites, the eternal tension is: “The wisdom of 50 years of software engineering” vs. “The Schedule”

The value of a toolkit (such as ACS) is that it requires less customization. It’s going to be better than a roll-your-own solution madly hacked in anticipation of an impossible rollout deadline.

At the time I thought this was interesting, but now I have a lot more respect for this statement… “SQL is actually very subtle.”

And lastly, on the myriad technologies available to the aspiring webhead: “Not everything you can learn is worth learning.”

MacOS X from a Linux and OSS Perspective
There’s a great article on LinuxJournal site about MacOSX. It’s by Doc Searls and Brent Simmons.

What I passed along in April of last year is closer to coming to pass with AOL client version 8.0, according to NewsForge:

Exclusive: AOL embraces Linux and Mozilla, plans to drop MS Explorer

So, if you’ve been Mozilla / Netscape6 / Geckophobic, time to step up to the plate and learn to code for the Mozilla rendering engine. And best practice is to code to standards and leave your browserspecific crud behind. There’s a great deal to learn.

BeOS meets OSX
If you have any interest in BeOS or Mac OSX, you will be very interested in Tales of a BeOS Refugee: From BeOS to OS X (by way of Windows and Linux). Which is a long and thorough article comparing the two operating systems at length from the point of view of a person who was a Be die-hard. It’s excellent. And be sure to read the follow-up, Tales of a BeOS Refugee Redux as well, where the author responds to comments and corrections emailed by readers of the article.

I played with Be when it was still geared toward PowerPC machines, and it was a dazzling OS, really fast at anything multimedia, and now I play with OSX very much, so I really have an appreciation for this article. For anyone technical there’s a lot to like in the article.

Comment: This kind of article / interaction is precisely what the web is about. Commentary that turns into a Socratic dialogue where all participants (and spectators like me!) learn something in the process.

I like this line very much, from Doc:
... you’d think that Linux was failing on the desktop. It’s not, any more than, say, Saab is failing on the highway…