Penultimate Reality

Playing with this 133Mhz laptop has made it abundantly clear just how much faster computers are today than they were even 5-10 years ago. We use applications today that no one would have even bothered with back then. And as much fun as it is to wait 10 minutes for Firefox to start, I can’t help but think I have better things to do with my time.

Maybe I should dig out my old 286 and play around with that. Only downside is that I can’t install Linux on it. Besides, I think it needs a new motherboard, and finding a replacement might be a bit difficult nowadays.

I’m currently the owner of an old Thinkpad 760ED, a very old laptop. For comparison purposes, it has a 133Mhz Pentium processor and 48 megabytes of RAM. It’s certainly not high-powered, but might be good for something. I have no idea what.

Long story short, a couple of years ago, I managed to install Gentoo on the thing, and it ran fine (for some definition of fine–it was difficult to compile anything, as I had set it up using another computer to compile binary packages). A couple of days ago, I decided to revive it and install Debian on it, since that would be marginally more effective. (It’s run Debian before.) Unfortunately, the Debian install CD was refusing to recognize the hard drive and CD-ROM drive.

Eventually, I discovered that I had to manually modprobe the ide-generic module. My, that’s inconvenient. In any case, Debian’s happily installing now (over the blisteringly fast 115.2k serial link, no less). There are plenty of other quirks about using this laptop, but I should probably save them for some sort of book on the horrors of buying IBM. At least I got the thing for free.

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.

It’s come out slowly over the past couple of weeks that Mozilla Thunderbid is looking for a new home, as the Mozilla Foundation wants to concentrate more on promoting Firefox. I’m not entirely sure what to think of this, but it does bring up something that’s bothered me about certain free software projects out there.

Mozilla’s been mired down in what I’m going to call corporate bloat for a long time. Since it ultimately came from Netscape, this is more due to its history than anything else. The creation of the Mozilla Foundation only cemented this further, which leads to the biggest problem I see with both Firefox and Thunderbird: their development cycles are incredibly slow. Then we move to large businesses (or the so-called corporate world) where development cycles are on the order of a couple of years. For instance, we see a new version of Windows about every 3-5 years. We’ve seen a new major version of Firefox every year or so, I suppose. For the end user, this can be somewhat slow, but maybe it’s okay for most people. In particular, it helps to provide a more stable platform, and like it or not, that is an important thing for many people and businesses.

Finally, we move down to small groups that tend to follow the “release early, release often” mantra, where you can sometimes see major releases every couple of months. Staving off major feature improvements for a few months doesn’t bother me so much, but sometimes simple bug fixes can hide in the Mozilla (other projects aren’t immune, of course) repository for a year or more before it finally sees release. It’s kind of disappointing, really, but I wouldn’t entirely blame Mozilla. Large, mature projects tend to fall into this trap a lot, and while the Linux kernel isn’t incredibly large, it isn’t small either, and it seems to have maintained a rapid development cycle.

In any case, I wish Thunderbird well, wherever it ends up, since I do currently use it as my primary mail client. But something tells me that with regard to web browsers and e-mail clients, it’s time to get back to more rapid, agile releases that truly innovate. But maybe I’m just too wed to the bleeding edge… that’s life, I suppose.

(As I’m sure you can tell, I’m not a very regular blogger. At least Google Reader can completely hide feeds with no new headlines, so don’t hesitate to subscribe, on the off chance I say something interesting someday.)

Wikipedia has taken a lot of flack recently from various people about its supposed inaccuracy. There were a couple of interesting comparisons with Encyclopedia Britannica, which just goes to show that nothing is ever truly completely correct. I look at Wikipedia as a stepping stone into learning more about a given topic. I suppose the biggest problem with Wikipedia is the fact that it’s not fact-checked prior to publication, but I know I personally try to correct blatant errors or poor work on the off-chance I come across them.

The key thing to remember is that when using Wikipedia (and I’d say the same thing for any source, be it the Encyclopedia Britannica, the New York Times, or a blog written by some 8-year-old in Argentina) is that you shouldn’t ever trust a single source about anything. People make mistakes, and people are occasionally even wrong. It’s in your best interest to read a variety of different sources from people with different motivations in order to eliminate bias and factual errors. In the end, you probably won’t get an entirely correct picture either, but it’s better than nothing. Just don’t throw out Wikipedia entirely due to a potential for error. Use it as a guide for subjects to research in more detail, and if you find something wrong, correct it. We may as well improve our collection of human knowledge while we’re at it.

(As a side note, Citizendium looks like it may develop into an interesting alternative, but especially with some subjects, I’d be just as wary of content written or reviewed by so-called experts, because of a potential source of non-random bias, but it’s just another reason to read a variety of sources instead of relying on one place. Citizendium might prove a slightly better “one stop shop”, in that factual errors are more likely to be bias instead of simple random nonsense written by some random person. But we shall see.)