The Compulsive Coder

Yeah, so I suck at keeping this blog fresh.  Sue me, I have a business to run.

Actually, please DON’T sue me.

Wow, do one’s perspectives change on so many things once responsible for owning a business.  Take that funny little “sue me” colloquialism.  One part of me enjoys the snark, the other part of me feels the cold tentacles of fear wrap around my heart.  Lawsuits aren’t a joking matter when one could put you out of business.  Never mind the fact that there’s nothing legitimate for which a party could take legal action against us; just the cost of paying an attorney to dispense of unwarranted litigation would bring the pain.

Here’s another thing you don’t care about once running your own business: religious wars of the nerd kind.  I just read a comment thread on Slashdot about Perl having moved over to using the source code version control system git.  These guys were blasting away at each other with warheads like “git takes up less space” or “subversion has better GUIs” or “you’re just too lazy to use the command line” or “git runs faster.”

These are the arguments and conversations of developers who are on someone else’s payroll.  I can tell you straight up, I don’t give a damn about hard drive space, not when I can buy a terabyte for less than it costs to pay an developer to work for a couple of hours.  I don’t care which is better, command line or GUI; I care about what will enable my developers to spend the least amount of time jacking with version control.  Nor do I care about which runs faster (within reason) as I can buy a dual-core funny car for, again, less money than a couple hours of highly skilled labor.

Simply put, owning and operating a business has stripped me of all nerdly religious beliefs.  In place has grown an agnostic pragmatism.  My goal is to get code written at the highest quality within the smallest reasonable timeframe at the lowest cost.  In our case this means running Apache on hardened Windows servers, writing PHP using Microsoft Visual Studio, using SVN to manage source code, and Python on roided up Ubuntu boxes for number crunching.

On a different note, my only conscious New Years resolution is to be more diligent about this blog.  I believe that what we’re doing and learning represents a unique perspective, but if I don’t take the time to communicate that perspective is lost to time.

After much speculation I’m happy to say that I’ve arrived at this season’s operating system depth chart. Controversy has been swirling and there have been quite a few rumors circulating so I’m hoping to put those to rest today.

First, I have some rather unpleasant news to get out of the way. As you all know there have been repeated disciplinary issues with Windows Vista. An inability to consistently connect to wireless networks, difficulties with formerly compatible software, and repeated tardiness in boot up times…you’ve all been talking about these things. I regret to inform you that Windows Vista has been permanently dismissed from the team for gross misconduct. We’re all disappointed, especially given the anticipation surrounding this operating system.

With that out of the way, I’m happy to say that I’ve elected to give the starting nod to the operating system that has proven itself successful in past seasons, Windows XP. XP has matured into a reliable OS that does what I need it do, makes good decisions, and has all but eliminated the BSOD fumbles of prior seasons. We’re looking forward to continuing successful operation into the next few seasons with Windows XP at the helm.

I know there were hopes that Ubuntu Feisty Fawn would be given the starting nod. Feisty did great work with the opportunity it was given and exceeded our expectations. However, Ubuntu still needs at least another season of development before it will be starting material. There are some weaknesses to be resolved such as poor wireless handling, but the improvement we’ve seen has been incredibly encouraging. Expect to see Ubuntu via VMWare during situations when things are in hand and the opportunity to build experience presents itself. Our hope is that Ubuntu will be ready to take the starting snap when XP steps into retirement.

That’s all for now. Thanks and we look forward to a successful season.

It’s been a couple of days now since I installed Ubuntu on my new laptop. Since that time, I’ve spent, oh, almost all of it goofing around it.

Pros:

Beryl - Windows Aero what? Oh my goodness Beryl is the most beautiful window manager ever built. It’s not something you can really verbally explain, so just go check out this video:  http://www.youtube.com/v/ZD7QraljRfM

Synaptics - The package installer works quite nicely and it’s rare that I have to drop down to the BASH shell to get things working.Community - UbuntuForums.org is a godsend; most of the answers I sought were found there.

Speed - One of my primary issues with Vista is that it is molasses slow; this is not the case with Ubunu, even with Beryl running. The boot time is literally a third of Vista’s (I timed it).

Cons:

Wireless - It refuses to work on boot unless I go into the Network Manager interface and quite literally just goof with it until it works.

90% - One can find free alternatives to most of the software that is necessary on Windows. Unfortunately the majority of that software is only 90% as good as what is available on Windows. The GIMP (Gnu Image ManiPulator) vs Photoshop is a great example. GIMP will do a lot of what Photoshop will do, but it’s…just inferior. The UI isn’t as good, some of the tools are named identically but have slightly different functions. It’s confusing.

The Gmail Notification client is another example: it works, but it’s buggy and carries the potential of getting an nastygram from Google asking you to stop drilling their servers via 3rd party software.

Bottom Line:

I frequent Slashdot therefore I’ve heard countless Windows vs Linux discussions. Many of those discussions center around the fact that those offering opinions have religious beliefs when it comes to operating systems. Those religious beliefs spring forth and, as some religious beliefs tend to do, they undermine the objectivity and rational nature of the individuals in question.

Once upon a time a young woman I interviewed for a position made the statement that “Linux is free if you don’t value your time.” This is a perspective that is frequently overlooked during these holy wars; when the issue of time or of a learning curve is mentioned, the counter-argument usually alludes to laziness on the protesters part.

Laziness is not the issue.
ROI is the issue. Does using Linux as a desktop OS yield ROI greater than that of using Windows XP? I know that using a Linux OS for a web application server yields a tremendous ROI when compared to using Microsoft; I have hard numbers to back that up.

More to come…

Since I hated Vista so much right out of the box, I decided to install Ubuntu 7.04, otherwise known as “Feisty Fawn.”  I don’t know the onomastics of these names (two builds ago it was “Dapper Drake,” then it was “Edgy Eft”, so obviously they’re being alphabetical).

I followed the “How To” written here:

http://apcmag.com/5046/how_to_dual_boot_vista_with_linux_vista_installed_first

It went pretty smoothly, although I made a few mistakes that were easily avoidable.

1) ALWAYS VERIFY THE CHECKSUMS!!!!  If you don’t know what a checksum is, here is the deal.  A checksum is basically an alphanumeric string that is derived by analyzing the contents of a file.  If said file is identical to another file, the checksum will be the same.  If the file is different, the checksums will be different and you will need to redownload the file.

Windows makes a command line utility to verify checksums, so use this one, not the multitude available for download at a cost:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841290

There are  couple of ways to verify the checksum.  You could dig through the Ubuntu forums to find the sum, or after download you could just take what the aforementioned utility gives you and Google it.  If it’s solid, you’ll get a ton of hits, if it’s wrong, you’ll get nothing.

FWIW, here was my checksum: e296e3468358789904097fc8df29609a.  This was for the file “ubuntu-7.04-desktop-i386.iso”.

2) Burn a copy of “System Rescue CD.”  The ISO is available at “http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=85811&package_id=88964

If you don’t have a utility to burn an ISO, use this one.  It’s free and (gasp!) it works on Vista:

(link coming soon)

Why do you need the SRCD?  Because in case you screw up the install (like I did), there is a good chance that before you screwed the install, Ubuntu told the computer to boot it every time and not Vista/XP/whatever.  So the next time you boot, you’ll get a “Missing Operating System” error.

I’ll do another post on how exactly I solved this problem (with screenshots).  Most of the help I found by Googling was 50% of what I needed, which allowed me to piece together what I needed to do to get my ‘puter to boot.

Hopefully these two tips help someone else make the move to Ubuntu.  Number 2 would not have been necessary had I followed Number 1, but given the volume of results when “Missing Operating System” is queried on Google, lots of people run into this.