I visited my new work today to meet my new boss and get the lay of the land. It is going to be great. Not only do I get to work on a product that will help the helpless, but I will be able to uniquely contribute. I will be working purely in Linux. It is all C/C++. It does not get much better than that.
Betty Blonde #499 – 07/15/2010
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Last night, I spent a couple of hours replacing Windows 10 with Xubuntu 15.04 on my most powerful computer at home. I currently work on three projects where Xubuntu is just better for my development needs than Windows. I had changed my cheap/travel laptop to Xubuntu 14.04 and was happy enough with that, that I switched my server/archiving computer from Windows 8.1 to Xubuntu 15.04. There were no monster differences that I could tell between Xubuntu 14.04 and 15.04, neither of which is the latest version (15.10), but every time I try a new version it is incrementally better than the previous version. I am not sure whether the work that I do has morphed into stuff well suited to be done on Linux or the tools and quality of Xubuntu has gotten better, but the whole endeavor has now arrived at a threshold where the way I use the computer is better accommodated by Xubuntu than by Windows and profoundly better than a Mac. Everything just works.
The main tool I hear does not have an equivalent in Linux is Microsoft Project, but I never use that. In addition, I cannot use my browser of choice (Opera) to watch certain kinds of encrypted videos from on of the major video providers, but I could facilitate that by viewing them with the Chrome browser. I am sure it will be available in Opera soon, too. The only computer in the house now that runs Windows is the one Lorena uses for schoolwork. I think we will leave that one as it is.
P.S. Both my buddy John (serious developer of cross-platform, internet-centric code) and Christian (my Electrical Engineering PhD candidate and very math-centric son) both run Debian stable (the Linux distro that used to underlie Ubuntu) on their main computers. I was going to do that, too, but decided I better stick with what I know.
Betty Blonde #426 – 03/04/2010
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I installed Xubuntu Linux the day before yesterday on a brand new Windows 8.1 (dual boot). When I got home last night from our Bible study, I found a note on another computer telling me Windows 10 had downloaded and the computer was ready to be updated. I started the install, then went off and did something else for a bit. I think the whole process took my computer about half an hour. I tested a few things without any trouble–I will have to do that more extensively tonight, but it actually looks fine for my most important stuff. Neither of the installations were any trouble at all. They just worked.
What struck me as odd is that I can do just about everything I want to do on both the Linux box and Windows box without any trepidation or confusion. Both are intuitive and just do all the things I want to do. Even more odd, I do not care that much whether I am on one or the other. They really are just appliances to me. I do not know whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. The days of extreme enthusiasm for one OS over another appear to be over for me. The only time I notice is when the computer does not do something I think it should. Now, my only considerations are utility and cost, in that order. It is like when I go older, I quit buying cars because they were really fast and looked fancy and started buying them based on comfort, price and utility.
Found a great little article on what to do right after Windows 10 is installed for the first time. I hate it that all these guys spy on us. Also, go to this page and opt-out of the personalized ads for “this” browser and opt-out of the personalized adds from your Microsoft account. If you do not do that, Microsoft will track way more stuff than you want them to track.
Betty Blonde #389 – 01/12/2010
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The “scratch and dent” computer I bought from the Dell Outlet website with a discount coupon arrived today. I think I got a screamin’ deal. I bought it because I needed a Linux computer for some contract work I am doing in the evenings to get one of my old employers over the hump with a product they are trying to get out. So I spent most of yesterday evening loading all the tools I need to do the development onto the new computer. That included Xubuntu 14.04 LTS, Qt/Qt Creator, OpenCV (finally moving to version 3!), a subversion client, etc., etc. I needed to build OpenCV in a specific way required by the application so I did that, too.
The upshot to all this is that I needed to sit and wait for things to finish downloading, installing and building. During that time, I found a great article about three phases through which civilizations pass: Barbaric, Vigorous and Decadent. Here is the premise of the article titled A Tour of Our Decadent Civilization on the Sultan Knish blog:
It’s easy to find examples of barbaric and decadent civilizations. We can find all the barbaric civilizations to suit an entire faculty’s worth of anthropologists in the Middle East. And then back home we can see the decadent civilization that employs their kind to bemoan the West.
Vigorous is what America used to be when it was moving west, producing at record rates and becoming a world power. Decadent is what it is becoming.
Christian and I had an interesting talk about all this on the phone a couple of nights ago. The thing that amazes me is that the vast bulk of people in America do not get it. In our conversation we attributed it to the fact that most people under the age of 30 get their information from Reddit, Slashdot, Comedy Central and Huffington Post while people over 30 get their information from Facebook.
I think we are partially right. People buy into the pseudo-scholarship of Richard Dawkins, Bart Ehrman, Marcus Borg, Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris and the like who represent their false ideas based on personal agendas and/or ruminations way outside their fields of expertise. It makes its way into pop culture because it allows people license to live how they want in the moment rather than do the hard work and self denial based on morays driven by objective truth.
The conclusion of the matter is the same as it has always been. Our chunk of civilization in our time and place will wake up one way or the other. Unless there are changes, it will be a very rude awakening.
Betty Blonde #388 – 01/11/2010
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My buddy John from my last job in Prescott and I stay in pretty close touch. Neither of us are anywhere near retirement. He has kids still in school and I think of retirement as working when I want to work rather than actually quitting work. Are skills are complementary and we like to work together, so we decided we ought to do a demo project so that if, someday, we ever have enough money set aside we can consult. There is a good likelihood that will never happen, but it is always fun to take on side projects.
This side project involves a BeagleBone Black single board computer, a camera and a wifi link. We have a couple of great ideas about what to do with it, but want to put a ton of infrastructure in place so we can produce quality work quickly when we decide what we actually want to do. This morning, I bought a BeagleBone Black, a USB Wifi Adapter, and a 64 gigabyte microSD card on Amazon to get started. I already have a webcam we can hook up to it. I am setting up a Linux computer as a temporary server to use to archive our work–temporary because I do not have a whole lot of confidence in the computer nor the hard drive. As we start making some progress we will probably make some other arrangements.
As we make progress, I might describe some of what we are doing here so that we can have a record of what we might contribute as consultants if everything is not already completely obsolete by the time we get to doing that.
Betty Blonde #366 – 12/10/2009
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This last weekend, I spent most of the weekend taking Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah around and working on the learning/development stuff I have described here over the last few weeks. It has felt like I have been trying to drink through the proverbial fire hose in an effort to learn too much stuff at once, so I have started to break it up into bite-size chunks. When I did that, I realized I needed to do some infrastructure work before I even started. So this weekend, I decided to spend most of my time getting set up to work rather than invest a lot of time in learning. I held to that for the most part; the exception being that I started in on a set of tutorials on how to use GIT.
So, here is what I did:
Next, I am going to start working up the learning curve on Machine Learning with R and continue to code on my previous projects. All-in-all, it was a great weekend. Lorena and I even went out to eat a couple of times. Now, all I have to do is start working in a few walks and my life might arrive at a sense of normalcy again.
Betty Blonde #303 – 09/15/2009
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Day 885 of 1000
I have been reminded the last couple that it is hard to learn new stuff. The sad part is I am trying to learn a bunch of old stuff and it is still hard. At work, we use a Linux server with a Wiki, a file server, and a bunch of other handy tools to communicate with each other, share files, record stuff in a common place we might easily forget, etc., etc. I decided I should do this at home now that the kids are about to head out so we can have a common place for stuff we want to share. The process of installing this stuff is currently owning me. I am going to do this, but it might kill me in the process.
Betty Blonde #51 – 09/25/2008
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Day 602 of 1000
This is the third in a series of posts on how we taught our children to program, what we did wrong and how we think we could have done better. You can see the introductory post and index to the series by clicking here.
In the previous post in this series I explained how Christian got his arms around the software build process using the configure, make, make install process. A good example of how he got pushed through this learning process occurred on a trip we took to Monterrey, Mexico to visit the kid’s Grandparents when Christian was ten. The only computer we had to take on the trip was a Dell 1300 that did not have too much power nor too much memory. The computer was dual-booted to both Windows and Linux. Christian had a very lightweight browser for Linux called Dillo that did not use very many resources. It ran in Linux, but not in Windows. Because of the lack of resources, Christian wanted to be able to run Dillo on Windows, too.
Dillo was made to be used on Linux, so Christian started digging around and found some instructions on how to compile the program for Windows. Here is a website that has instructions on how to do exactly that. The problem was that, in 2005, the instructions were not so good. The normal configure, make, make-install process did not work, so Christian had to look for resources on forums to figure out how to get Dillo to compile and link properly. The support libraries were not quite right and there were tons of problems. Christian spent most of the time in Mexico when he was not playing with his cousins trying to build Dillo for Windows. The make files hold commands that perform the compiling and linking of the program. He had to learn exactly how the compiling and linking worked to modify the make files properly. He made some major breakthroughs and felt like he was almost there when we had to pack up and go home.
Even though he was not ultimately successful in making Dillo run, he says this set of events helped him learn more about compiling and linking than anything else he had done before or has done since. He had to dive into the make files to change the order of the internal commands, learn the structure of folders that held support libraries, and generally just learn a lot of minutiae about the compiling and linking of a fairly large program. The reason he could stick to it was that he had a goal that he wanted to accomplish. I think that is a very important principle with respect to learning to program. It is also the reason class-based learning (of programming in particular) can be very ineffective.
Day 112 of 1000
This week is finals week at Wake Technical Community College. Everyone in the house except me studied for finals. I worked on a project for my new job which involved mostly study about a new product. I am going to be glad for three weeks of non-study activities starting next week. The one fun thing that happened this weekend was Christian’s Macroeconomics project. He had to put together a brief video of some macroeconomic principle. The first pass was not so good, so he decided he would try to learn how to do animation and use that to smooth over the rough spots. This is what he produced:
Update: He did it in Linux with Kdenlive, Inkscape, pencil, paper, scanner, and his Nikon d90.
Day 62 of 1000
The kids are completely swamped with homework. I am completely swamped with the need to learn more about SQL and data mining. We are broke (and still a little big dizzy) from having attended the North Carolina State Fair yesterday. So, breaking our normal routine, we went home for lunch (rather than Wendy’s) after church and ate leftovers. We left Mom to study for her Financial Accounting class, and made our way into the stacks rather than to the first floor conversation area of the library where there is a lot more college drama, but a lot less studying. Now we are hard at work in the fourth floor stacks with photographic evidence that we are on task.
I decided that I needed to upgrade my Ubuntu to 11.10, load up MySQL and find myself a project that has to do both with SQL and BleAx to kill two birds with one stone–SQL and BleAx. It is really three birds because every time I go over to our buddy Lyle’s blog, I get Linux envy.
Update: I updated VirtualBox to v4.1.4 and Ubuntu to 11.10. I turned off that horrible Unity thing that the Ubuntu guys want to impose on us, I struggled for about 5 minutes to get full screen mode going again in VirtualBox with GuestAdditions. Now I am installing MySQL Server, MySQL Client, and MySQL Administrator. I am not sure that is exactly the right thing to do, but it will probably get me started. We will head home to the house in about five minutes.
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