Tao Of Foo

I think I’m getting bored with Fedora (and Red Hat for that matter). Don’t get me wrong I’ve been rather faithful for a while now but I keep getting the feeling that I’m missing out on something better. I’m not one of those “tweak, fiddle, poke and prod” kind of Linux guys. I’m more of a “get my job done and get out” kind of geeks.

I remember back in the summer of 1995 when my college roommate (Lamont Lucas, where art thou?) and I got ahold of some free ARCNET network cards and a hub we decided that we needed a seriously professional network capable operating system … to play games. We embarked on a mission to acquire Windows NT 3.51 for free (we were REALLY poor college students) to no avail. Windows 3.1 for Workgroups was rather dull and painful. We heard some rumors from some obscure newsgroups about this seemingly unknown OS called Linux. A dozen 3.5″ floppies loaded with Slackware, one solid weekend and a lot of guts later we both had working systems (my 60MHz Pentium and his 486DX2 66MHz) with no GUI. Configuring XFree86 was another matter. That took lots of trips back to the computer lab to read all about the wonderful ways that misconfigured modelines could literally turn your monitor into a smoking brick. Eventually we both had working X setups and were happily tweaking away at fvwm to get everything just right. I can still remember the first moments of having a working Linux machine at my feet and again when I had X working. It smelled like victory.

I then spent the next several years tweaking my X desktop. I tried several distributions but mostly settled on Slackware. I ran SUSE for a bit but felt more somfortable with Slackware. I also tried every window manager under the sun. Remember fvwm95? It looked just like Windows 95, only worse. Using Linux at that point wasn’t a matter of productivity, it was more a matter of pride. Another roommate of mine later told me not to waste my time on that crappy little OS because it wouldn’t go anywhere.

So my primary desktop has been Linux for the last 6.5 years (just about every version of RedHat since 6.2) and roughly 50% of the servers under management at work (Rackspace) are Linux based. It’s not going away anytime soon. I am on my 3rd laptop that has run absolutely nothing but Linux. I get the usual sneers at work when I have some obscure issue when I undock my dual-headed HP nx9420, close the lid, walk to a conference room, open the lid, connect to a projector and something doesn’t work quite right. I’m sort of used to things needing a little tweaking here and there to get working. I have to say that Fedora Core 6 on this nx9240 has been rather nice yet not trouble free. The usual Linux stumbling blocks like APM, wireless and video (crazy 1680×1050 resolution) have all worked out of the box. I did struggle with the dual headed setup though, the media card reader isn’t supported yet and the thumbprint scanner isn’t really useable. I hear these things are almost all fixed in Ubuntu so I’m thinking of switching.

Keep in mind that I’m probably the atypical Linux geek here. I don’t mind tweaking things to get them functional but I really don’t want to be required to do so. I have a job to do. I have lots of code to sling and not much time to do it. I don’t want to be wasting my time dealing jacking around with yum repository settings just to keep gstreamer from killing itself. Ideally I’d prefer my OS not get in the way.

It all comes down to this. To any of my Linux listeners: What distro do you recommend? Is Ubuntu where it’s at these days? Is Gentoo worth a shot? Should I give SuSE another shot? Is Fedora 7 going to be the shiznit? What are your thoughts?

Last weekend we had the honor of attending my cousin Seth’s wedding in Denton. Ben and I were actually in the wedding party (Ring Bearer and Groomsman respectively).

During the reception all the kids were running around dancing themselves silly when the Rascal Flatts cover of “Life is a Highway” came on. Keep in mind that “Cars” is probably Ben’s vaforite movie right now. When Ben heard the song he froze in his tracks, held his hands out and yelled, “I know this song!”. Once the lyrics started and I knew he was going to sing every word I ran tward the stage, told Ben to follow me and I grabbed the microphone. I turned him loose, stepped back and watched as every single person in the audience slowly turned to face him once they heard somebody singing.

He literally knows every single word to the song. Not only was he singing the words however, he was also singing the guitar solo and some of the drum beats. It was a blast. Every single person in the audience was laughing and some (including myself) were crying it was so funny. When the song ended he got a really loud round of applause and he thanked the croud. What an event.

Seth and Lora, congrats guys. I am so happy for the both of you. See you at the reunion.

I have an addiction. An addiction to RSS feeds. I admit it’s not one of the more destructive addictions one can have but it’s an addiction nonetheless. One of the positive side effects of this addiction is that I find out a lot of very interesting (to me at least) yet useless crap. Sometimes this can come in handy, the other 90% of the time … not so much.

One of my feeds happens to be a Google search for Nathan Anderson. In the last week the following 2 websites were found:

• Man admits to impromptu parakeet beheading; in which a man rips the head off of a parakeet during an argument with his girlfriend
• Nathan Anderson, 25, failure to appear for theft

Just for the record if you are an old friend looking to get back in touch and you happen upon either of those two articles, they aren’t me. I am a very peaceful software developer living in a small town. I have no ill will toward birds and I don’t steal. Just in case there was any doubt or anything.

“Ben, why do you look scared?  It’s just a butterfly.”

“Daddy, I’m scared because he’s going to drink my nectar.”

Ben,

Today you turned 4. You are an incredibly funny, smart and independent kid. For every moment you try our patience, you give us tenfold moments of joy. I can only wonder what kind of child you are becoming and what kind of man you will one day become. Will you be determined like your mother or even-keeled like your father? Regardless, I look forward to every day with you on this journey.

Happy birthday Benjamin.

…begin movie guy voice…

In a world where tranquil gardens are a place of rest and relaxation, only one thing could ruin a Sunday morning. Snakes. Snakes on a wheelbarrow.

…end movie guy voice..

As I reached into the wheelbarrow to get a handful of mulch for the garden I felt something slither across my palm. I looked down in time to see a snake slithering back into the mulch and out of my hand. As I dropped the mulch and reeled my hand back I see it, the tiny diamond shaped head popping up with mouth open in a strike position and then the tail starts rattling. Good thing I was paying attention because young rattlesnakes can be much more dangerous than adults. I guess it’s time to get rid of the mulch pile by the back fence.

Update: I don’t know about you Helotes, but Amy took care of our mulch pile in less than a week. Unfortunately no burning was involved.

Since Amy had a conference in Austin for a few days, Ben and I decided to head to Ft. Worth for a few days to hang out with my parents.

We did a bunch of really cool kid stuff while there including a cattle drive and a train ride. I took a few pictures but my Dad took much better ones.

There’s a thick (.5″ in many places) blanket of ice covering everything in Boerne right now and the sleet has hardly stopped all day. The local news stations have of course all given this storm wonderfully descriptive names like “Winter Blast” and “Winter Wallop” (my personal favorite). We are supposed to get snow later this afternoon.

Stay warm.

Update: We never received more than about 10 minutes of snow but we did loose power yesterday for a little over 9 hours. We did have a full inch of ice everywhere. My new workshop was completely sealed shut as were the cars. Check out our pictures.

First a little disclosure. I don’t currently own a Mac. It’s not that I don’t want one, it’s just that until now a few key tools I need at work weren’t available for OSX (VMWare for example).

That being said, I can’t help but drool over the iPhone. The touch screen looks beautiful and the fact that it’s backed by a OSX sounds very powerful. From a developers point of view this is very compelling to me as Palm development is, well, nasty. I love that there are hundreds of good Palm apps available for download or pay but OSX is just such a powerful platform that I would much rather do OSX development than Palm development. J2ME is fun but I’ve only tinkered with it. It will be very interesting to see how Apple will release the development tools.
Here’s the features that I really want to find a little more about before I think of dropping $500 on one though.

1. Processor. Will it be truly fast enough? One problem with Treos and many other smart phones is that the processor is just fast enough for normal use and dog slow when you need a little more juice.
2. Battery life. Really, spouting stats at Mac World based on lab usage and real world stats are 2 completely different things.
3. Voice quality. Again, the thing that makes people the most happy with a cell phone, first and foremost is the quality of the voice connection. Do calls drop? Is the call clear and free of distortion? I think this hurt the Blackberry early on.

The only other thing that would hold be back would be Cingular. Sorry, been there, dropped them. Their coverage in my neighborhood was horrible. I literally had to stand on my back porch to make a call. So we went to AT&T with not much more luck. I have been very happy with Sprint and it will take a lot to convince me to go back to Cingular.

The bottom line is that I really want one, but I can wait until revision 2 comes out. Hopefully by then it’ll be opened up to more carriers and a few of the early kinks will be ironed out. Until then I’ll just be drooling.

(Yes I’m a week late in posting this, been a litttle busy.)

It’s hard to believe that another year has come and gone. Ben is about to turn 4 in a few months and is constantly amazing us. Amy’s business is growing so much we are converting the garage into her full time studio and office. I had a workshop built in the back yard. We took a few vacations to the coast, the Davis Mountains, Ft Worth
This year we have lots of big projects around the house. Painting the house, a deck, the garage studio, new phone system for Shutter-Happy etc. Per Paula’s suggestion I made a list the other day and was a little overwhelmed as it kept getting longer and longer and longer.
At work I moved to a different project with lots of new challenges and learning opportunities. On a sad note though a good friend is leaving our department. Heather, we’re going to miss you and Darrell (and the cookie crack) tons. Rackspace is growing by leaps and bounds though. I am in a very small minority that has been at the company over 5 years (I hit 6 back in December). Despite the growing pains this is still a kick a$$ place to work.

This year my cousin Seth is getting married, Amy has a couple of photography conferences scheduled and we are going to finally make it up to Chicago to visit Myk.
2007 should be a good year. Bring it on!