Penultimate Reality

One thing that comes back to haunt me almost every time I start a new project is my rampant indecision. When working on a new web site, I find myself bouncing around several possible languages and frameworks. One minute I’m settled on getting to know Ruby on Rails, and the next I feel that the best solution would be a more traditional PHP-based site with phpBB as a backend. Shortly, I’ll discover that the phpBB backend feels too constraining and decide I should write the entire thing myself. This naturally leads me to discover that I have to write a lot of basic code like template, database, session, and authentication handling. After deciding that’s ridiculous, I resolve to use Django, only to discover that it doesn’t provide a very full-featured authentication and authorization system, so I find myself back to PHP and phpBB. The cycle continues.

The same problem seems to plague me regardless of what I’m writing. If it’s a regular GUI application, I’ll find myself unable to decide among several languages and frameworks. Should I use Python and wxPython? Or maybe use wxWidgets directly in C++ or even GTK+ using pure C. It’s frustrating, to be sure.

Once I have an established code base, it’s a lot easier to add features or fix bugs as necessary, but sometimes getting that code base started is the most difficult part of the journey. It’s one of my strongest weaknesses, and I hope I can work on improving that in the future. What kind of things have you done to avoid this kind of problem? Pick a language and framework and stick to it, working around its problems as you come to them? Rolling a die and picking one at random? It’s an interesting problem that I haven’t found a solution to just yet.

Maybe I’m just unusually indecisive.

As a long-time Gentoo user, I notice that every time I try a new distribution for a short while (in this case Ubuntu), I find myself eventually with an urge to switch back. It never takes more than a month, really. It’s kind of strange, but I suppose I’ve become attached to Gentoo in some weird way. The short of it is that I started feeling the urge again today. (My desktop and server still run Gentoo, so they’re not even an issue. But then there’s my laptop.)

Don’t get me wrong. Ubuntu is a fine distribution, and everything I said in my previous post still stands. It just never quite feels quite right, however. The straw that broke the camel’s back in this case was that I went to install a particular game and the version in Ubuntu’s repositories was slightly old. I know the newer version will be available in just a few short months, but there’s something comforting about being able to access what I want almost immediately in Gentoo.

It’s looking increasingly likely that I’ll make the switch back to Gentoo in a day or two, but there will definitely be a few things I miss about Ubuntu. First, upgrades so far have been a breeze. There haven’t been that many, but they installed quickly and simply. I’ve never experienced a major upgrade, however, and I’m not sure I ever want to. One advantage of Gentoo in this respect is that the upgrades get spread out a bit instead of thrown all at you at once. You have time to explore each upgrade as it comes in, with whatever new features it happens to bring. With the Ubuntu way, thousands of packages will be upgraded, and I’ll have very little idea just what changed. The system may completely change under me with no transition. It’s an unsettling feeling.

Also, NetworkManager has been nice, but Gentoo’s networking isn’t completely awful, and actually works reasonably well at this point. I’ll also miss not having to configure a kernel. It’s not difficult, but there are a lot of options, many of which I have little need to see.

Other than that, there isn’t much I’ll miss about Ubuntu. When it comes down to it, both Ubuntu and Gentoo are Linux operating systems and the differences are less important than one might think. The one point that Gentoo has going for it is that I’ve never switched away because it didn’t feel right; only to try new things.

Maybe I’m wrong, but at least I won’t feel so unsettled.

I recently read a post from Steven Oliver mentioning his experience with Project Euler, which seems to be a collection of math and programming problems one can attempt to solve, with widely varying difficulty levels. I figured I’d give it a try.

Thus far, I’ve only worked through the first ten to avoid spending my entire day on a single thing, but the problems certainly seem interesting enough. I’ve been using Python as my language of choice so far, though one of them I did in a text editor with a calculator (the lowest common multiple of the numbers from 1 to 20). We’ll see how the difficulty progresses as I get down the list. My first instinct would have been to use C, but with C, you end up with more boilerplate code and don’t have as useful data structures (strings and lists, mainly) at your immediate disposal. So, Python it is, at least for now.

Something that sees a lot of neglect in the computer world is simple occasional cleaning of the interior. You know the horror stories. The ones where grandma’s computer needs fixing of some sort or perhaps an upgrade, and you go over to take care of it, only to open it up and find a one-inch thick layer of dust. I know it’s one of my favorite experiences.

I’ve done my part for routine computer maintenance, and used some compressed air (really not air, but some other particular gas or combination of gases) to clean out the air vents on my laptop. The result? Nothing short of a 15 degree Celsius drop in temperature at full load, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. Keeping computers clean, especially the moving parts, is an important part of computer maintenance, and I’d encourage everyone to take a moment out from their lives and give their boxes some much needed attention. They won’t thank you (yet), but your wallet just might at some point.

Up until recently, all three of my machines (a virtual server, a desktop, and a laptop) have all run Gentoo. With the release of Ubuntu Gutsy, however, I thought I’d give it a try on my laptop, to see how much it’d improved since I’d last used it. The major selling point was that I could use the alternative installer to fully encrypt the disk, which I had been doing under Gentoo. (The last thing I need if my laptop is stolen is for the thief to have easy access to my data.)

To sum it up briefly, I see no reason that the laptop will ever migrate back to Gentoo, unless Gentoo improves its desktop integration experience. Ubuntu’s been stable (with one caveat), the wireless network support has been great, and most of my major media playing concerns have been taken care of. In short, it’s an excellent desktop experience, and it saves me a bit of time going through the updates each morning. The large upgrade every 6 months will take a few minutes to go through and see what’s new (I still have that micromanagement bug). We’ll see how things go over the next few months, though.

I’m still not ready to transition my desktop. While it would probably work fine, I really rely on some of the applications it runs, and I’m not particularly interested in the downtime. That said, I can’t think of any real reasons to keep it running Gentoo, other than the reasons stated in my popular post on why I use Gentoo. So, I suppose I’ll transition it at some point, perhaps. But perhaps not.

My only major gripe about Ubuntu at the moment is that the desktop effects are rather unstable with my NVIDIA card. I can almost certainly make the thing freeze very quickly by using compositing effects. I hope the nouveau project successfully gets a good open-source driver for NVIDIA cards soon, because using the binary blob just leaves issues like this unsolved for the most part, which is a shame, because some of the effects are actually useful, and not just eye-candy.

In just a few years, Ubuntu’s gone from new kid on the block, to a coherent, simple-to-use desktop experience that the most technophobic person could use. I’d wholeheartedly recommend it over Windows to a new user.