Yet another collection of random links and rantings of a greying unix geek with a photography bent. Pass the Guinness and Grecian Formula.
That’ll learn ya Go see a real doctor next time. Oop too late. Well, be an object lesson for the rest of the spam-pill-buyers then. Don’t buy pills over the internet. Especially from spam.
Hmm, this might kill Manitoba’s biggest export if they get caught up in this mess as a side effect. Oh well. Prescribing over the internet was a dumb idea from the get go.
How to make Linux succeed on the Desktop
Ay-yep. Living and Loving it for 2 years now. Go read the link, I won’t give it away here.
These came in via Novell’s Brainshare event.
Can’t wait to see the one where Linux has a fight with it’s wifi card or has the pleasure of Solaris trying to NFS Mount it. (I can crash RedHat in about 15 seconds flat if I have a Solaris machine and try to use NFS-over-udp to a RedHat NFS server)
I like Linux for servers, it works reasonably well for certain roles. Solaris is my personal preference though, for the stability of operation, interfaces, etc that it brings to the table.
I used to be Linux-on-the-desktop guy for 10 years, 1996-2005, but I eventually grew tired of the something-is-always-broken syndrome. Whether it was a Linux-weirdism that didn’t match Posix standards, or subsystem foo upgrade broke subsystem bar, or what have you.
There’s less chance of that happening in a server environment because you simply shouldn’t load up every package under the sun onto a server. Minimalism is best.
Desktops, you tend to experiment around and try new things, but not upgrade core os components every other week with resulting breakage of something like your wifi not working for month and 10 patches after that. With Linux doing this to me, long term stability for desktop use was never there.
For desktop, I’m a Mac guy through and through these days. For the most part, It-Just-Works, and I can go play with various bsd stuff in the unix guts if I like but the main os core just chugs along, doesn’t get in my way, and lets me get my day to day work done. More importantly, it doesn’t barf all over itself and render usb doa or wifi mia for weeks or months at a time until certain patches finally come thru (or you give up and roll back to a reinstall point).
There does seem to be a swelling tide of sysadmins and developers out there using the Mac OS X platform now. Something about stability and not having antivirus/antispyware crud getting in your way, nevermind the things that they supposedly protect you from.
Anyways. Good Try Novell. Too bad we see through you and your deal with MSFT. As I’ve said before, you have signed your own death warrant and will be a non-relevant factor in the server world in a few more years. We’ll have fun watching you gasp for breath as Balmer cuts off your air supply . . .
During last year’s vacation to Hawaii, I started to get more interested in photography via attempts to capture the Maui sunsets. The lady staying in the condo next door remarked about the sunset photography one evening and brought up that she disliked manipulation of photos. If I recall correctly, it was in terms of extreme photoshopping and similar post-processing manipulation.
After I received a digital SLR and some photography books on ’seeing’ for Christmas, I realized that no photograph is a true representation of the world. This makes sense in retrospect, but at the time I was somewhat stunned by this revelation.
Between the limitations and differences in how a camera processes light and the choices in composition, lighting, etc, you end up with something that may be good, may be bad, but most definitely is not exactly representative of the world. It is an artistic expression. (Quality of the artists vision, expression, etc is another matter entirely).
. . . the dirty secret is that all photographs lie; an earnest nature photographer determined to represent Truth still carefully selects her subjects, compositions, exposure, color palette, focus, and depth of field, and inevitably edits her work to find the one shot that best represents her artistic vision. Her truth.
Yep. Exactly.
I’m working at becoming better at ’seeing’ and capturing what I ’see’ but an artist I am not. Or at least I wasn’t thinking of myself that way before this past Christmas.
Even if I only produce photos that end up as my own personal computer desktop wallpaper and nothing else, it is worth the journey, the exploration of this part of me that I never thought of before.
Here is an example of what composition and camera settings differences can produce.
First the wide-angle shot that more closely approximated what my eye was seeing, physically.
Next, what I ended up with. Something I knew was there, in my mind’s eye and possible to be captured.
I waited a few more minutes for the colours to change, but more importantly I zoomed all the way in and set the camera to underexpose by 0.7 EV. The finished product also had DxO run over it to lighten up the foreground slightly, and to add a bit of a film grain. Really very little post processing though.
The clouds in the shot below are almost exactly what I saw on the cameras (tiny) lcd review screen immediately after capturing this image.
A whole pile of preposterous questions in this list, except for this one :
“Emacs or vi?”
Why wouldn’t that be a good question? It should invoke an emotional response and the answer for most environments I have been in is:
Emacs or vi? vi of course, because it is on nearly every system by default, where as emacs is not. You can not, most times, go around installing your favorite editor on every system you have to admin.
If you need emacs, or some other editor/ide/whatever for large coding projects which you do on your local workstation, notebook, or management server… fill your boots.
If you need to make a quick change to /etc/fstab on a random server in the datacentre, you had damned well better know how to drive vi adequately to do that.
Knowledge of ssh, screen, and rsync are also absolute requirements, as also is the ability to “think right”.
Looks like I will have to think up one of my past ‘interesting’ problems that I have had to solve and use that as a way of probing a candidates thinking abilities tomorrow, when they show up for their 2nd interview (I wasn’t in the first one). Something like this problem someone had with Macs and Lotus Notes.