Ultranormal

Category: computing

  • Since I talk about them

    Since I talk about them all the time, I’ve decided to post a breakdown of the machines I have at work. Here you go, in no particular order:

    • Dell Precision 220 – 733mhz P3 / 20gb HD / 256 mb RAM – Win2k

    • Dell Precision 550 – Dual Xeon 1.7ghz / Dual 36gb SCSI hd / 1gb RAM – RedHat 7.2 (this is the uber-box)

    • Apple Powermac G4 – 867mhz G4 / 60gb hd / 512mb RAM – OS X

    • Apple Powerbook G4 – 550mhz G4 / 20gb hd / 256mb RAM – OS X

    • Sun Ultra 10 – 400mhz UltraSparc / 9gb hd / 512mb RAM – Solaris 7 (which I sorely need to upgrade)

    Why do I need so many machines? I live in a strange inbetween world. I work on frontends for a ton of different products that have to work in pretty much every browser, which explains the Macs and Windows machines. I also write a lot of code for log-crunching and other weird on-going maintenance type things, which explains the uber-box and the Sun box. So, see, it all makes sense when you get down to it. That, and I love collecting hardware, especially hardware that work will pay for.

  • I feel so geekily accomplished.

    I feel so geekily accomplished. I’m installing GNOME2 on the uber-box and have already completed the schema for a new project (reporting – not exciting). What else will I be able to accomplish today? Who knows!!?? It’s not even 11! Maybe I’ll rewrite everything in Java (which I need to learn). Maybe I’ll invent a better velco. Maybe I’ll make sense of the mysteries of the universe and plot a course to the stars. Maybe I’ll get some more caffeine…

  • I’m fighting the inevitable. My

    I’m fighting the inevitable. My PC has been running the same installation of Windows 2000 for over a year now. I have a RedHat partition I never use now that I have my wonderBox running Linux. My machine’s starting to drag. It’s losing its pep. There are programs hanging around that refuse to uninstall. Weird things are happening. It’s time to sign the DNR (Delete n’ Reinstall). It’s time to repartition with one big partition, because I have lots of other hard drive to back things up on. It’s time to start fresh.

    Maybe next week…

  • In the interest of fairness,

    In the interest of fairness, David Coursey has posted part two of his Linux Journey. This article is much better than his first, and I actually agree with a lot of his points. I love Linux because of it’s power, customization options, and its overall geek-appeal, the same things that make it a bad choice for people who want “ease-of-use” right out of the box. Linux is fun. It’s a tinkerers world, full of more options than anyone will ever have the time to tweak, and that’s the joy. It can be and do anything if you have the time to figure it out. You can take the core of Linux and put it in a phone, a toaster, a PDA, a satellite, a settop box, a PC, a Mac, an e-mail server, a dual-processor web server up to the largest virtual multi-processor super-machine at the NSA. Linux is great, but not great at everything, and that’s part of its charm.

  • I like OS X. Why?

    I like OS X. Why? I like my bad news anti-aliased.

  • I like David Coursey. He’s

    I like David Coursey. He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, but asks some good questions, and loves starting a fight. His latest missive, the ill-researched, by the seat of his pants Can a Windows User Learn to Love Linux? is hilarious. He wrote is as he was installing Red Hat. It’s almost stream-of-consciousness. To answer his question, yes, a Windows user can learn to love Linux. I did. I love it for its power, speed and all of the tasty stuff that comes with it.

    Learning to love Linux is like learning to cook or speak a new language. At first, it sucks, and things don’t make sense. But, the more you use it, the more you dig into documentation and talk to those who know, the better it gets and easier it is to use. Depending on the distro, it’s not “You opened the box and it tells you how to use it right off”. You have to learn in order to love it, and that’s the beauty.

  • Do you have OS X?

    Do you have OS X? Do you still love Unix? Oh, brother, then do I have something for you! Go check out Fink. It’s a easy way to get Unix packages installed and running in OS X. Sweet, sweet ingenuity.

  • I wish this was a

    I wish this was a joke. Apparently, it’s not. To save you the trouble of actually reading the article, “Doctor” Paley asserts that Macintosh OS X is of the devil because the codename for the software was Darwin, which is based on FreeBSD.

    He also asserts that Open Source is the same as Communism. What Mr. Uninformed probably didn’t realize is that the webserver running to serve out his rant is Apache, an Open Source project. I keep forgetting that people like this exist in the world. They give Christianity a bad name, and make me ill.

    If I didn’t feel so crappy, I’d go on. But, I feel crappy (which I know I just said), so I’m going to try to do my work, not think about “Doctor” Paley and his lunacy, and keep using my Godless Communist software.

  • Etc

    • I updated my linux newbie page to tell you how to start XWindows from the command prompt.

    • Also, if you were planning on installing YellowDog Linux 2.2 on a newer quicksilver G4 – don’t. Let me save you the trouble. There’s a problem with the new kernel and the installer that will totally hose you. Stick with 2.1 for now. It’s safer. Install and the product work great on my crap old Powerbook, but not my new machine. Go figure.

  • Sorry, Sweetie

    I have a new love. It’s not really new, but I just thought I’d spout off a bit about how much I love this part of my life. Linux, I love you. I love you so much in fact that I want to write a sonnet to you. I just moved a bunch of stuff around my gigantic linux box here, added a user (because he’s going to use my box to run something for my new group and he needed access to the pages and tcl directories). I was able to add him as a user both of the system and the db, move the pages and tcl directories, change permissions on them to allow him to use them, and bounce the server all in about 3 minutes. If I were using… Solaris, that would have taken much longer. Why? Because Linux has nice GUI-based tools for doing this stuff. Solaris may be rock-solid and everything, but Linux is leagues ahead in ease-of-use and in most distributions, bundled software. Everytime I have to help someone set up Solaris, I have to spend several hours downloading things like gcc, make, gzip, emacs, etc. You’d think Sun would give you the option to choose what you want to install. “Is this a developer workstation? Ok, we’ll install the stuff you’ll use every day.” or “You’re going to set this up as a big huge server? Ok, we’ll only install the OS and you can configure the rest.”

    Plus, Linux is just fun. It’s a great tinkering OS. You can get under the hood if you want and play around with services, compiling software, etc. Or, if you’re just into playing with the surface, you can skin just about everything.

    It’s funny. The more I use Linux and Mac OS X, the less I like Windows. I started on Windows and still use it at home and as my main machine at work because I’m just more comfortable with it. That doesn’t mean I like it. I’m kind of tied to it. Why? I work at AOL and we have to use the AOL Client to get mail, and everyone sends docs in Word format. I know all the arguments for StarOffice, KOffice, etc, but I just can’t get into them. Plus, I like to play UT and Jedi Knight too much to give it up.

    I like having all my options open. I love being able to switch from one OS to the other without much difficulty. It’s a great time to be a geek!!!! (and yes, I know this whole ramble was incoherently geeky – so sue me)