Quote for my thinkers

"Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless."
-- Thomas A. Edison

I really like this quote. It is the philosophy that many people who embrace linux have. They say, alright, it doesn't work for this. What will? Is there something that this will work with? Will it work for this developer or that user? Will it become the foundation for a new idea?

my big project!

Alright, so this has been a couple of months in the making. I bought a computer about a year ago to learn Linux and now I'm going to do something with it.

As you know, I like to think that I'm a poker player! HAHA! See The Chad's Poker -> -> -> -> under Italian Roast. Anyway, I bought a workstation in August and a nice monitor a couple of weeks ago to play poker on. Well, I don't mind how Pokerstars runs on the new box, but I'm not a big fan of Vista. It's a huge memory hog and you really should not need that much horsepower to work. I was already on the way to learning Linux and this is inspiring me to learn faster.

I've been working with Ubuntu and Fedora. Ubuntu is supported/written by Mark Shuttleworth's Cononical. It has his African roots and philosophy of community and sharing. I dig that. Fedora is Red Hat's child. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is THE Linux that powers the big corporate servers. RH is more the commercial, production Linux and they have commercial support for it too. Fedora is really nice and clean IMO. I've seen lots of people who mod it and make it a really solid OS. Both Ubuntu and Fedora run the Gnome desktop environment as a default, but they also support KDE and Xfce if you would prefer.

Alright, the project! I run a database behind my poker to track and analyze my play and my opponents. I'm thinking that I can have the server run the database and it's engine while I play on the workstation. I'm not real sure how I can do this yet, but I'm gonna try! I'm currently in the stage of getting a workstation that will run stars like I want (stable). I'll then work on getting the database engine running smoothly and interacting well with stars. Then I'll wipe vista off of my "production" workstation and build a Fedora box for actual play. As far as I can tell (I hit google AND 2+2), nobody has done this yet, anywhere. People have played poker on Linux, but nobody has run the database that was written in windows, much less off of another computer.

Updates later.

charity

I have been thinking a bit about my move this past weekend. I gave a ton (for me) of stuff to goodwill and I'm just thinking about that. I gave a bunch of shirts (some old dress shirts that I don't wear anymore), some over shirts/jackets, and a backpack-FULL of books (not actually a backpack; I just used it for a picture). I didn't realize the tax break and I certainly didn't realize how good I would feel about the whole thing. I'm thinking of giving more.

I have an old computer that I'm thinking of donating. It is really pretty old. I'm guessing it was built around 2000 or 2001. Since it won't run windows really at all anymore, I installed Fedora 10 on it and it seems to run pretty well. I'd guess that it would be limited to writing papers and browsing the web with its hardware state. But none the less. If you know someone who is in need and could use something like this AND would be willing to learn Fedora, I would be interested in chatting with them in the future. I'm thinking that I will use it until I get my server up and running and then look at giving it away or selling it. ($60ish, monitor included) I think the optimal recipient would be a student or single parent, etc with little or no computer knowledge. I find it much easier to show someone linux who has not been brainwashed by the Microsoft crowd. But alas, it will be about a month before I do this regardless.

FOSS

FOSS is an awesome philosophy that I inherently disdain, but in this particular field, I'm down with it! Free Open-Source Software is three parts. Free is self defining and most people know what Software is too. Open-source is a little foreign to most though. Every program, every script, every operating system (including windows) has what is called in the developer world "source code." It is the basic code that the programmers write each day at their jobs as they work towards whatever it is they are developing for their company. Linux is based on this philosophy.

Now, I am a libertarian. I'm a big believer in as much limitation of government as possible, privitization of as much of society as possible, and as much individual rights and ownership as possible. This is something of an paradox for me. For the reason of furthering technology in society, I applaud and support the idea.

"But, but but..???" I hear that WAY too much. "You can't do Microsoft!" is one that I hear often as well. The truth is you can. I ask why you would want to and that seems to get people confused. At that point, I try to explain a little bit of this blog. I'm not sure why, but people are so hesitant to change that they want to blindly defend Windows. I don't mind too much if someone wants to run windows. I really don't! I went Microsoft free for a while with success. I now run one windows box simply because a couple pieces of software that I consider essential were written natively in the windows environment. The box is scaled WAY down to run a simple and secure workstation. I run about 4 programs, one of which does NOT run off of the Linux box. The network environment is mixed and runs perfectly fine. But I would encourage you to
try Ubuntu or Fedora at the very least for a month and see how you like it. It's different, yes. But there is a joke among Linux developers - "You're running into virus problems? What's a Virus?"

Here's the inspiration: http://conversasdobruno.blogs.sapo.pt/372067.html

My week - productive

Monday was a big day for me. I got the file server online and one-sat my climbing project. The file server is for the law firm. I wanted to start working with Linux and the two solutions just fit together. Victory #1: learning how to configure Samba! It took me about 2 hours to learn about the details, but it works now. It authenticates and they can write/save things to a 300+GB networked hard drive. It didn't come back up the next morning, so I had to work with it a bit more. But I got the bugs out and it's operational as of Wednesday. Makes me happy. Now, I want to get it away from my work area. So, I'll grab a wireless card and move it into their main work area (or maybe their closet). I networked my USB external as a backup to the server for the time being. After I get that done, I'm gonna setup a workstation with Ubuntu on it for the paralegal to write briefs, do email, and the other easy stuff that she does so that she will start working with linux. I really want them to trend away from Microsoft. They have spent way too much money on software that they could have downloaded for free and had it work better than their methods now.

Then, I went climbing that night! Sean was not around so I just ran a few routes on top-rope. My current project is harder than most of my routes in the past. I've only climbed this hard a couple of times in my life and it's been at least 3 years. I want it. I've climbed one 5.12 in Denver. I worked one here in teh fort. And now, I have one that I can physically do. Last week, I worked it out and figured out most of the beta. I wanted the next goal - the "one-fall." It signifies that you are capable of cleaning the route, given that it is doable by a human. Victory #2: one fall on the orange 5.12. I'll throw this in too! Victory #3: leading the roof. I have a pretty big mental block about leading out the roof. It is very intimidating for me. That's why my hardest lead (5.11+ on the roof) was such a huge deal to me. I still remember hearing the final *snap* of the carabiner gate. What a relief! I collapsed off of the route with a loud shout. I had a beer that night!

I'm glad that Heather made me do it on Tuesday night. I felt good overall, but I needed some pushing into it. Sean was nice enough to belay me for it. I'm working with Heather on lead belaying so that I can get on the roof a lot more often. I want to climb Drop Zone this summer and I'll need some phenomenal footwork to do it.

Some links to encourage mom about the move to linux...
Grandma can use linux too!
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9889681-16.html
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9867494-16.html
http://www.linux.com/feature/125799

haha, too funny

I was talking to a buddy's wife a couple weeks ago about my current affairs. She's a very established account auditor for a firm in Denver. I mentioned that I'm doing some work with a Linux server and she scowled. "Why would you do that? You don't have any way of doing [Microsoft] Word documents! You don't have compatibility with the internet!" I laughed and told her about Wine and Samba. I knew that Google was running on linux. However, I did NOT know that Yahoo! and Facebook ran on Linux servers!

http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/03/10/microsofts-new-play-for-linux-lovers/

thank you very much!

testing my patience

Over the past weekish, my patience has been tested. I like to think I'm a pretty patient guy, but I grow tired.

Problem: bought a new computer and have this habit of hating Microsoft. I'm installing Ubuntu on it, making it a server, then installing some sort of linux on my laptop (that I use everyday).

The CD-burner in my laptop is pretty old and decaying (2001) and the CD-ROM function in the new machine doesn't seem to want any part of it. Blah blah blah, to no avail. Several different brands of CD, several different versions, different types of installations, hell, my girlfriend even had her "Ubuntu guru" friend burn a CD from an ISO that she downloaded. No love for the Chad.

I have a 500gb external usb drive that I've just been reading about how to load from that, but I haven't figured out how to boot from it. But in the midst of that, I stumbled upon a windows/network/yaddahyaddah/ftp/intel/PXE install. That one finally worked. However, it was focused on an old version and as I was in the middle of an upgrade, something happened. It asked me to restart. It wasn't required, but it still asked me. Uhm, yeah.... WTF?!?!?!?!?! So, alright, I can do that. But I'm a bit surprised. Restart... and Ubuntu commits Harry Carry. hmmmmm.... right..... I do a hard reboot and the same thing happens.

I've always loved working on computers, but this is a bit frustrating. One thing that I've noticed, I'm not stressing nearly as much as when I was working on Windoze. I think I've also figured out why: sleep. When I used to do this kind of work, I would do it to all hours of the night/day/night. Yes, I once used a computer for something like 30 hours and change! Now, if I get tired or frustrated/pissed, I just say hey, it'll be there when I come back and I wander off to the couch for a nap. Being rested really seems to help my patience and resilience. It really seems to me that this world is so focused on killing that rest time that it's no wonder that we are all so stressed out, impatient, tired, cranky, inconsiderate, non-confident bags of worthlessness.

I was talking to one of my regulars a little while ago about Europe. She said that they are so proud of the fact that they have coffee for "you Americans." However, there are rarely ever 'to-go' cups. This requires a person to actually sit down and enjoy the cup of java for a little while. "Novel idea!" my regular said. I agree.

Oh, and if anyone can vouch for Ubuntu, Debian, or any other Linux distro, please toss me a line. Thanks! derchad@gmail.com