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Deftly bridging the gap between the technical and the spiritual for over 10 years.
I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul. - Calvin (& Hobbes)
I give. I had grand ideas about posting up all I've discovered about putting Gentoo on my Eee 1000, but I have to yield. After several hours of trying, I can't get user-level access to the Bluetooth stack, and the wireless just won't play nice with NetworkManager. I don't know what to try next, and I won't live without either. I hate hate hate this. I really wanted this to work. I don't like splitting my attention, but I don't have any intention of putting Ubuntu on any of my other computers, and I need this thing to work.
To get the wireless card driver even running at all, I had to go to the very latest gentoo-sources kernel, and specifically enable the "playground" drivers. Then I had to download the driver from RealTek so that I could grab the firmware. I'd be fine with all of this, but during all the reboots to sort to make sure I had done things correctly, I've seen the machine get hung so badly that I had to unplug the power and pull the battery. Twice. Well, that's worse than getting dumped back to the login screen on Ubuntu, so back I go.
I'm tempted to put Win7 back on. It was great. It's just that I'd spend days downloading and configuring the various programs I take for granted on Linux.
Yesterday, as I worked on my main computer, I watched my Ubuntu-powered Eee 1000 restart the login session, on its own, while I wasn't doing anything. Twice. I don't know what's up with that distro. They finally, seemingly, fixed the problem where every single web browser I could run on it would lockup or die every 5 minutes, but then they've introduced a new problem where you just get spontaneously logged out. So I finally decided to rip it off and put Gentoo on it. I had been working on a VM for awhile, so I had a stage 4 install basically ready to go.
Now, I've avoided this exercise because I know that -- despite its flaws -- Ubuntu was doing an enormous amount of configuration work for me. Well, I'm starting to see just how much. I was running Gentoo on my work laptop a couple years ago, and it wasn't bad, as long as I didn't care about getting the thing to sleep. I convinced myself that I could live with just starting the thing up and shutting it down, and everything else worked fine.
Now I'm trying to bring up Gentoo on this thing, and I find the Linux world is in a state of flux. All the configuration I'm used to has been supplanted. Normal group memberships have changed. There's a move afoot to the new policykit/consolekit structure, and I'm having to pull in all sorts of packages from the unstable side of the portage tree.
I've FINALLY gotten NetworkManager going, but bluetooth is up in the air. (And, in true Gentoo fashion, getting it going is going to require pulling in lots of unstable libraries, which will force me to recompile a lot more packages that depend on them.) The audio is MIA. And I don't want to even THINK about power management yet. Hey, at least the Xorg guys have their act together. I didn't even NEED an xorg.conf file.
I've already spent too many hours on this. It's getting really close to just scrapping it, going back to Ubuntu, and hoping and waiting for them to fix their problems.
Twitter has officially joined Facebook in my open and cordial invitation to bite me. I can't stand needing to delete a twitter-spam follower or two every time I make a post. I briefly experimented with the idea of creating another account to follow my main account so that I could make my main account private, yet still excerpt it here, but that would require passing credentials as part of the viewing process, and that's probably going to be a security hassle. I also looked at creating a Rails-based Twitter app to do the same thing, but Twitter apparently lost my app registration half-way through the process, and I just can't be bothered. I wondered how else I might use Twitter in a way that let me post publically, but only allow friends to comment. I can't find it, though I'm sure I'm not trying hard enough. Meh. What's the point of it when this is the site I want to spend my energy on? Posting from a cell phone? I could code that here, but I don't even have a data plan! Tweeting with my friends? No one I know of my generation uses it. I guess we're just too old. And frankly, I never got the whole 140-character-limit-as-an-advantage idea. I think leads to useless posts. What would this post have looked like on Twitter? "Twitter sucks. KTHXBAI!" That's not the underlying point. I think it's great that other people think it's great, but it's just not for me, and there are extenuating circumstances why that happens to be the case, but I couldn't have even posted those on Twitter. I think that last run-on sentence alone would have been too long!
When I was little -- I'm thinking about 6 -- my beloved grandfather (who was an E9 in the Marines) painted his old footlocker orange, with black hardware, and gave it to me to store the toys I had at my grandparents' house. Many years later -- I'm thinking after I bought my first house -- my grandmother reminded me of the trunk, and asked if I wanted it. Of course! And I used it to store all my old treasures. I'm not a really sentimental guy, but I had, most importantly, all of my old Legos, an old RC car, lots of magic sets, a couple yo-yo's, hackey sacks, Silly Putty eggs, Slime buckets, a Rubik's cube, along with other toys like it, etc.
The point of this post is that I also had a Big Trak stored in there. This thing had survived my dad kicking it across the floor when I was a kid, though he had killed the dumpster I had that plugged into it, but it had still worked as of the last time I tried to make it go, so I've kept it, now, for something close to 30 years.
Several years ago, I got the wild hair that I would open up the trunk, and let my kids play with what was inside. I didn't see it coming. I thought I could impart my love and care for my "things" to my children. I was wrong. Lots of stuff is now missing, and I know I'll never find it again. I started losing control of "my" Legos to my son, who immediately fell in love with them. Now, that's what I wanted to happen, but I didn't understand how his desire to play with them would interact with my deep-seated need to prevent him from breaking or losing them. I started to lay down some rules about them, but then my aunt and uncle found a PILE of Legos in a garage sale, and we've made those "his." I've since re-packed "mine," except that I let him have all the minifigs and accessories, since "his" didn't have any. Most of those I'll probably never get back too. Sigh.
So, yesterday, we had our big, neighborhood-wide garage sale. We did pretty well. What didn't sell, and we could fit in the van, we took to Goodwill. What didn't fit, we put at the curb. An hour later, the desk, mini-trampoline, and box springs were gone. We got a lot of "stuff" cleaned out, which is great. It was a project that allowed me to link together lots of reorganization in the house, garage, and my office. In the process of doing all of this yesterday, I noticed that the Big Track was out of my trunk and sitting on some shelves. I made a mental note, because I knew that I would be reorganizing my "stuff" soon.
Well, this morning, I dragged my trunk in from the garage, cleaned it off, and started putting some things in there. I went to get my Big Trak, and I found that one of the wheels had been broken clean off. I'm... disappointed, and thinking I'm going to go rounding up all of my old "stuff" that I can, including any Lego minifigs I can find.
UPDATE: While in the process of throwing away the Big Trak, I decided to give some epoxy a try. We'll see how that goes...
Some time around 2006, I was completely fed up with my job, and started looking around for something else. I got a hot lead on what seemed to be a good match. I talked to their HR rep on the phone. She seemed very interested. And then, all of the sudden, the lead got cold. She wouldn't return calls or emails for several days. I finally got a terse email stating something to the effect of "we're just not interested." Given how well it had been going, I was left to wonder what it might have meant. I realized that I had written some things here that I was pretty sure would have offended the HR rep personally, and I'm about the easiest guy in the world to Google, so I settled on the conclusion that they had searched for me online and hadn't liked what they had seen. Since I was still looking around, I didn't want this to happen again, so I immediately deleted all my content except the front page, and edited this space to say something really generic about what happened. I'm still not being completely transparent about the incident, but that's the way it's going to be on this site now.
After a year or so, I started to get frustrated with not having my web site up and running. Along with needing to go back and filter all the content, I decided to rewrite the programming. At the time, it was a "half-blown" PHP application. Though it was all served out of a database, I still had to edit the content manually, and then upload it. During the rewrite, I moved to using the Smarty template system over top of my application, and had made it possible to edit pages in place on the server. While there were some advantages, I hit a brick wall with the security model. Since there's just one user to authenticate, I didn't want to write a real authentication system. I just wanted to continue using HTTP auth methods. However, I just couldn't make protecting my admin pages in a subdirectory (with a custom .htaccess file) work with Smarty (and my way of including common headers and footers), so I gave up, and the site sat untouched for another two years.
Now I have had a new job for about a year, at the time of this writing, and two things have happened during this time. The first is that the new people in my life have gotten to know me, and therefore have at least some context about what I may say here. While I have taken down the material I suspect got me in trouble before, I still have potentially controversial things posted up here. It is my hope that those around me will understand that I'm not as harsh as I can sometimes come acress in this format. (Even when I go back and read what I've written here, I sometimes cringe and think, wow, that's harsh.) But I'm not the same person I was back when I wrote a lot of these things. Some of this content is 10 or 12 years old! I'm going through and rewriting what's here, but this will take time.
The other thing that happened is that I learned Ruby on Rails. As was suggested to me, this has indeed increased my productivity with writing web applications. In fact, adapting all the data in the database to be Rails "friendly," rewriting all of the programming, and getting a new hosting provider and setting everything up, probably only took about 22 hours. That may or may not seem like a small amount of time to some people, but I contrast that to the fact that I had taken weeks to rewrite this thing in Smarty before I got stuck. I just got a wild hair, based on some success I had had on a project at work, and cranked this out over a busy weekend. As I've continued to pick away at the details of the formatting and presentation, I'm more and more impressed with the framework.
So, as before, this is where I get to talk about the things I want to talk about, but now I'll be "speaking" in more measured tones. While it's certainly true that I'm not as critical as I was before, I guess I've also learned how to use some tiny measure of tact along the way. I thought about limiting myself to only what I would say to a total stranger, but that may be too restrictive to be interesting. I'll be targeting my comments here for the imaginary person who might only have known me for a week or two. I guess I'll see how this works out for me...
Yet another micronaut prepares
to take the "fantastic voyage!"
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