I’m still using Ubuntu on my laptop and it just keeps getting better. Clare and I have started up a website project which has meant I’ve been doing more in depth php development work. I really love how easy it is to get a LAMP system up and running for seamless local web development. This makes it really simple to tweak and play with things on the fly. This discovery was really great and I’ve been loving it for the last couple of weeks. However, I’ve just now discovered something that might make all of that obsolete.

I started reading the Official Ubuntu Book and it casually mentioned the Connect to Server feature. Basically you drop out the Places menu, hit Connect to Server and give it the ssh details of your remote development environment. It then opens up the remote filesystem as if it were a standard window. I’m now accessing my server on the other side of the world as if it were sitting on my local system. Admittedly it’s a little slower than working with files locally, but it’s a damned sight better than buggering about working through ftp on a Windows system. Additionally, ssh is nice and secure whereas ftp is most certainly not.

Until now I’ve been working on my site locally with the idea of gzipping up all my files and my SQL database and uploading it to the server as a job lot once I’ve done. Now that I’m armed with this knowledge, I’ll likely just start working directly on the server. It’ll mean less uploading hassles ultimately. The only danger is that I may be tempted to use more absolute paths in my code, which is just poor form. Oh well, I’m a bad man. I might just stick the whole site behind an .htaccess file to avoid the great unwashed getting a look at it while I’m done and buggering up my brand integrity. (Shit, can you tell I just did a marketing subject? It’s getting into my brain.)

It’s exams time for me at the moment, and I just put away a three hour accounting exam. THREE FREAKING HOURS! It was brutal but I’m fairly sure I passed. The day was not without incident, however. There was a storm raging all last night, and at some point in the night something tripped the circuit breaker. I’m not sure what it was, but the result was that my alarm didn’t go off. I woke up 30 minutes before I was due to sit down, completely freaked out. I managed to cram in a shower and breakfast and get to the exam only 10 minutes late. So I didn’t lose much time, but it did mean I couldn’t revise my notes before heading in. Nevertheless, I think it all worked out.

Just gotta get through Management (gah) Marketing and Economics.

I just got Ubuntu installed on Clare’s laptop. It only has 256meg RAM that’s shared with the video card so it was running like a pig even with XP. Honestly, who manufactures a system with only 256meg of RAM? It was a battle because the Ubuntu and Kubuntu livecds require at least 256 to run, and they were both failing. Xubuntu started up, but ran like a dog.

Any of the three versions will run on systems as low as 128mb, you just need to use the standard installer rather than the livecd. Only trouble is, because I’m stupid, it took me a while to figure that out. Anyway, I downloaded the alternate installation cd and eventually got it happening, and now I am the smartest man alive.

Also, the kde desktop looks pretty cool except for the fact it uses Konquerer. If there was a version of kde that used Nautilus and Firefox I’d be sold. Nevertheless, I might check it out in the near future, since it looks cool.

Lately I’ve been somewhat doubting my choice of degree and career. The basic thrust of my thinking has been “Given unlimited resources and time I’d spend my days tinkering with electronics, obscure software and the odd mechanical device. That said, what the hell am I doing in a business degree?” And it’s kind of been bothering me. When I forgo doing my lecture readings in favour of mucking about with a homebrew Wii sensor bar, shouldn’t I take notice of that?

What I’ve come to realise in the last couple of days, however, is that while I like doing those things, I’m not going to get paid millions of dollars to do them. Sure, I could pursue an electrical engineering degree, but there’s a couple of problems with that:

1) There’s a lot of mathematics involved. This is something I could probably overcome, however it would be hard, and would probably limit me.

2) I’d be limited to a technical role for a long time, if not forever, while working for someone else. Engineers can make great money, however they can’t make CEO money. It’s also a lot harder for a pure engineer to be self employed. They either start an engineering firm, for which you need to be a great manager and not a great engineer, or they invent something brilliant that the whole world can’t live without, then license it to a corporation and make a trillion dollars. That’s kind of a risky life strategy.

So where that leaves me is: “There are other career paths that might interest me more, but business and marketing do still interest me, and they don’t limit my future earning potential.” Which basically translates to: “I’m a complete mercenary who is sacrificing life happiness for money” or “C.R.E.A.M. suckah”. Now I’m not entirely unhappy with that. I have no compunction in saying that money is a major motivator in everything I do. Money buys things, and I really like things. Nevertheless, it still niggled at me a bit. There was still margin for error there. Was I really making the right call?

Today it all crystallised for me. What’s the core reason I love tinkering? I like doing things that people haven’t thought of before. I recognise areas for possible improvement that other people don’t see, and I visualise ways to fill them. I think I’m pretty good at that. For example, right now I’m part way through creating a visual basic solution that will let me quickly visualise a bunch of specific data at work.

Where I’m going with this is, what’s the core goal of a marketer? To take in a bunch of factors (customer feedback, market conditions, technological landscape etc) and divine from that a product offering that no-one else has thought of but fills a need.

So; a satisfying reaffirmation of my existing life path, or a fabulous exercise in rationalisation and justification? I’m pretty certain it’s the former, and I’m happy with where it’s left me.

That said, I still need to stop tinkering and get down to some damned study. Exams are in a week and a bit. Argh!

I bought a Wii recently with a bunch of vouchers I scored from work. While this entire thing is undoubtedly awesome, there’s one problem for me. I have a projector in my loungeroom, and the Wii needs a “sensor” bar for the Wiimote to work. What’s annoying is that this bar needs a cable that has to run across the centre of my loungeroom in order to work.

Luckily, all that’s in that “sensor” bar is a bunch of infrared LEDs. Nothing more. So, why not build your own? There are plenty of people out there that have done so, and I decided to do it as well, with a few differences from what else is out there. I’ll leave the gritty details to a future post on garagehacker. This post is merely to highlight my retardedness.

I spent an hour or so wiring up the circuit, and spent a decent portion of that calibrating a potentiometer to the right level of resistance. Unfortunately, I then wired up both points to the same leg, completely removing the resistor from the circuit.

Niiiice.

Needless to say, removing 440ohms resistance from your circuit results in Colonel Dave’s Crispy Fried LEDs. I’m not sure how many I’ve burnt but I’d say it’s at least 4-5. Financially, they’re only $1 a peice. It’s still bloody annoying, however, and I feel like a real moron.

So hence the title, don’t try and hack if you’re retarded (like me).

And I’m really loving it. I spend most of my non-work computer time using Linux, I read slashdot and I get the sudo jokes on xkcd. It’s good to be part of yet another geek subculture.

Anyway, onto the nuts and bolts of it. I started using Vista on my laptop a while ago and, while I liked it for a little while, the performance and the nagging started giving me the shits. A few weeks before Uncle Kev had been telling me about Linux and showed me Ubuntu on his macbook. While it looked kinda cool I wrote it off at the time as “linuxnerdbullshit”. When I got the shits with Vista, however, I decided to have a crack at Ubuntu rather than just reinstall XP, which seemed like a step backwards.

So I downloaded an image and loaded it up. One of the really cool things about Ubuntu is that the default image includes a LiveCD. This basically means that when you boot from the CD it loads the whole OS from it. It’s obviously a bit slower than an installed operating system, but it’s a great way to get a feel for the OS and see that everything in your system has appropriate drivers.

As it turned out for me, everything worked on my laptop (it’s a Dell) and I was really impressed with the Gnome UI that comes standard with Ubuntu. I went ahead and installed it in a dual boot scenario. Protip for people migrating from Vista to Ubuntu, the default partition resizer will bone your Vista installation. From all reports it works fine with XP, however Vista does something different with NTFS… or something. Anyway it ended up with me needing to reinstall Vista. Not a big deal since Ubuntu can read NTFS partitions (natively with Feisty, with another thing installed on Edgy) so I could back up all my files.

Install process for Ubuntu went flawlessly. It automatically installs Grub, which is a bootloader which lets you choose between operating systems upon bootup. Everything Grub related is automatically configured, however when I reinstalled Vista it overwrote the master boot record and fubarred Grub. I used the Ultimate Boot Cd to get back into Ubuntu and it was then a fairly trivial matter to fix it up. I forget how exactly, but google is your friend here.

While I did initially set it up as a dual boot, I’ve been using Ubuntu almost exclusively since I installed it. When I tried to boot Vista a couple of weeks ago I realised it had actually been expired for some time. There’s nothing I miss about XP and only two things I miss about Vista. I really like the start-menu-search feature of Vista and Office 2007 is great. However, I really hated the constant goddamned nagging of Vista. XP SP2 was bad enough but Vista takes it to a whole new level. I read a blog a while ago that lambasted (isn’t that a great word?) Microsoft’s nagware approach to security. The reasoning being that if you give someone a security notification every time they try and perform the most benign of tasks, they cease to become imporrant security warnings and start becoming “some crap I need to click in order to get my work done”. They already annoyed competent users that understand security, and now they don’t even serve to educate standard users who have no idea what’s going on.

Ubuntu, I feel, has the balance right. It’s secure-by-default so it still asks for a password when you modify system settings and things like that. However, there’s none of this garbage about asking you twice whether it’s okay to open a file you’ve just downloaded. Also, there’s no need for virus scanners since with Linux vulnerabilities are patched as they become apparent.

Since my first install of Edgy I’ve done a bit of tweaking. I used the beta of Feisty for a while, then ended up upgrading once the final release became available. I’ve also toyed with a few applications and plugins, which I’ll detail in another post.

To sum it up, I’d wholeheartedly recommend Ubuntu for anyone not entirely satisfied with windows. Even if it’s just some tiny thing that bugs you, fire up a LiveCD. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. It’s really easy to get a hold of (no more Linux of old, no manually mounting drives) and really easy to use. Get it done.

Okay so this blog sort of fell by the wayside lately. I admit it, I’m crap. However, a new age is dawning.

Alex Dolton recently found this blog by googling his name. There are two things to come out of this:

1) Alex is really vain and he got sprung for it.

2) It reminded me that this thing was here and that I haven’t posted to it in ages.

So I’ll be getting back into the swing posting about junk. I’ve even got stuff to talk about, mainly geek related. I’ve switched to Linux (Ubuntu) in the last couple of months and I’ve been doing Wii related modding stuff. Also there’s been general Uni business and work  and life junk happening.
The other thing that may help me out keeping this updated is letting people know this blog exists. Up until now it’s just Alex that’s read it (without my knowledge) and bots that make spam comments about car parts and nudie websites.

So mark this day, non-existent readers. It will bring a new dawn!

Scary Go Round

I was shown a leaflet from The Greens today by Krystal and it got my blood boiling about our partisan political system… again. The below is a cut and paste job from a private forum.

http://www.nsw.greens.org.au/materials/reports/Dev%20Map.pdf

I agree with some of their points, however, all their ideas are about how to spend money and none of them are about how to make it.

This is what shits me about partisan politics. Both sides are caricatures of themselves. The Left wants to save the environment, let in all the refugees and increase welfare spending. The Right wants to privatise everything in sight and encourage the economy via free enterprise.

There needs to be a freaking balance. However, that’s never going to happen with the way our political system currently is. Most people don’t vote on issues, they vote for the party they’ve always voted for because their mums and dads always voted for them. Then out of the people that do vote on issues, most of them get their information on said issues from Today Tonight and A Current Affair.

It’s for this reason that the political parties paint their policies and standpoints in big, primary colours that are easy to digest within a 15 second soundbite. “We’re the Greens, we like the environment!” “We’re the Nationals, we like guns and farmers!” Because that’s the only way they’re going to fit into the tiny portion of mindshare that Australians have allocated for politics.

The Democrats were the only hope we had for a decent centrist party but they’re well and truly dead now. I am feeling decidedly unrepresented in the current political climate.

Also, just to clarify, this treatise is in no way against you, Krystal. You’re one of the good guys since you actually think about these things.

Saturday night was Clare’s uncle’s 40th. It was commemerated by a major bash at his place, complete with ridiculous amounts of alcohol, service staff, very little food and a karaoke setup. Needless to say, this is an explosive combination. No-one knows how to throw a party quite like Alex.

I managed (as far as I know) to avoid completely disgracing myself in a drunken mess, which is always a plus. However at some point we decided that karaoke was a fine invention. I forget what songs I ended up belting out, but I’m sure they were forgettable.

Sunday was spent in recovery mode. Did general house crap, pruned the garden, washed the vehicles etc. I also got a bunch of my tax crap done (finally). There’s still a bit more information I need to collate before I can put it to bed, but I’m getting there.

I tried out a new dish on Sunday night. It’s something my mother used to make a lot (she may still) and that Luke’s been telling me I should do because it’s awesomely cheap. Mussels with a tomato and white wine sauce. It didn’t actually end up being all that cheap for us. Not overly expensive, but not incredibly cheap either. The mussels cost us about $10 to serve 2 people. I think they must be out of season or something. Anyway, the recipe is nothing revolutionary but I couldn’t find anything online so it’s a David Banham Original.

Ooh, and I finished Tony Hawk’s Project 8 on Friday. Definitely an enjoyable game overall. The bail physics still annoy me but it’s not enough to completely kill it. That said, now that I’ve finished it I probably won’t be revisiting it to play back through the challenges. I’m really looking forward to playing some GRAW though. Should be good.