Glass Panes That Separate

Tomorrow, I embark on a new journey. I’ve been working at an office supply shop doing computer and network service for the last few months. It’s been fun, but there’s just been something missing. My coworkers are great (they’ll probably never read this). I’ll miss Tom, Jeremy, and even April too. Denny…not so much. Actually, I go to church with him, so it would be tough to miss him when I still see him.

My new job will be as Technology Coordinator at DCC, our local community college. I’d give you a link to their website, but I don’t want anyone to see it yet; at least not until after I’ve had a chance to clean it up a bit. I’m pretty excited, as there will be a lot more of what I like to do there, but most importantly, its where I believe God wants me to be right now. I can’t ask for anything more than that (and I won’t).

So, farewell, old job. Hello, new job!

Ok, so a combination of crazy things happened way too close together, and Dreamhost ended up having to disable the Mysql account for Wordpress. Firstly, I was trying out whoisi.com and added several friends and family, along with myself. I then reported a bug to the author, who then happened to mention it on his blog, which happens to be syndicated on Planet Gnome. In the middle of all this, I was finishing up migrating that last of my photos from Gallery to Wordpress. It just so happened that yesterday, I finished the last in a series of 10 ‘gallery’ posts that included around 700 photos of my family history. I then proceeded to make a final post that included links to all 10 of those galleries.
So, a word to the wise: Don’t write a post that links to ten other posts which include over seven hundred photos the day after you get mentioned on Planet Gnome.
As before, you can get to the Gallery via the link at the top of the page, and shortly, I’ll have the random image block back on the sidebar too.

In three days, m-day hits. ‘M’ as in moving. We’re moving back to Glendive (scroll down the page to see more) and I’m super duper excited.
Today was also an m-day of sorts. This time, ‘M’ as in mobile. Canonical, (the backers of Ubuntu, arguably the most popular linux distro) announced Ubuntu Mobile today. Now some people are saying, “who cares?” But seriously, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve got to realize where mobile technology is heading. Apple is supposed to be opening (or may have already) their iPhone SDK, so you’ve got a semi-open platform there. Nokia has been working on their Hildon platform for several years, and it keeps getting better and better. Google just launched Android recently, and has several companies with semi-functional prototypes. And now Canonical releases a Mobile version of a Ubuntu. In case you didn’t know, Ubuntu is Debian-based, which means it inherits a massively large package repository, second to none.
But now that I’ve gone crazy on you here, let’s get down to the real business, and that’s our poor ignorant friend Russell whom I alluded to previously. Does this release really matter? I’d like to take this moment in time to debunk all the junk that Russell would have known if he wasn’t a severe pessimist. I’m convinced Ziff Davis only hires cynics, and that an optimist wouldn’t last three days over there. Have you read any recent columns by John Dvorak lately? That guy is always good for a laugh. But I digress, again. I truly am sorry for that, so I’ll get on with it.
In his article, Russ says, “Unless the device manufacturers and the carriers come on board and truly open up their networks and UIs to these applications, we’re looking at nothing but niche, hacked applications from coder fanboys.”
Hmm, that’s interesting, because Ubuntu already has a test platform. Even better than Android, which has semi-functional prototypes, Samsung already makes a device that supports Ubuntu Mobile. And last I checked, AT&T already has an open network. Apparently, Russell still believes that the only folks who work on OSS (open source software) projects are ‘hackers’ and ‘fanboys’. Well, I suppose most of them probably are ‘fanboys’, but he puts it in such a negative light, it’s disgusting. One would almost be led to believe that there are no high-quality OSS projects anywhere. Never mind that 2 of the projects I just linked to have NO KNOWN BUGS. Even though the author has offered cash to anyone that could find one. But he’s just a ‘hacker’ that doesn’t know what he’s doing. The Apache folks are apparently incompetent as well, even though they own the web server market.
And then he has his example. His one, lousy, lame example that isn’t even an OSS project, it just happens to be a very popular app that runs on linux. His thoughts: “wouldn’t it be easier to just download and install Skype from the Skype site?”
Well, no, actually it isn’t. If you had used Ubuntu for any period of time, you’d know that installing apps is easier than going to a web site. I can open one program from my menu, type ‘apt-get install skype’, press ‘y’ to confirm, and it gets installed. And for those who can’t navigate the command line, you open a different application (synaptic), search for skype, check the box, and press Apply. And it’s that simple for over 23,000 different packages. Try that on Windows, and have fun with it too. Then when you want to get rid of it, you never know if it actually is gone. “Whoops, we missed a couple files, and some registry entries, but you’ll never notice, until after the twentieth application has come and gone, and your computer runs at half its original speed.” No such uncertainty on linux. Remove the program, and it’s gone. Worried about some dependencies it had to install? Alt-F2 and ‘apt-get autoremove’. There, it’s done. But again, I digress too much.
His last stab at a pathetic argument is this, “please understand that enthusiasm for your apps ain’t gonna bubble up from the mobile device user base.”
Oh, that’s right, all the publicity that companies put out to generate user buzz is not actually for the users. But of course, these are the ‘mobile users’. No one ever tries to get enthusiasm out of them, cause all they want is txting, and the ‘basic features’. All this time, companies have been making them web-accessible, and adding cameras, and music players, but the ‘mobile users’ don’t want any of that, so stop it. Just give them a keypad, a 2 line display so they can see what they are typing, and the numbers they are dialing, and they’ll be happy.
My bad.

Vista stinks. There, I said it. Add me to the growing (and long) list of people dissatisfied by Microsoft’s latest excuse of an operating system. Maybe ‘operating system’ is a misnomer. It should probably be classed as a Bungling System instead. In it’s latest escapades, it ran amuck in our network, and caused all sorts of havok. We currently have two 5-megabit pipes feeding the internet to our campus. We’ve tried several different things to load balance these connections and finally struck upon something that is supposed to work. In fact, it does work, because we’ve done it on a non-production box. The first phase of this was to setup a central server as firewall/content filter/router. This machine would then use an iptables rule to forward all traffic to one of two ‘passthrough’ gateways. Well, before we got that far, we set it up just to forward all traffic to a single ‘passthrough’ gateway. All looked good, we were testing things pretty well in our office with a couple macs, and a few linux boxes.

The next day, we started receiving complaints about sporadic connection issues. We did the math, and figured out it was because of the switch we had done. The odd thing was that we had experienced no issues whatsoever in our office, or the computer lab. After several more complaints, we realized that it was only computers running Windows Vista that were having any issues. We did more testing, with several different variations on the firewall, and still nothing changed. Everyone could browse fine, except the poor folks on Vista. It’s now five days later, and we decided to see if it was something specific on these machines, or just Vista in general. So I installed Vista on one of my machines, and started to use it. Then, all of a sudden, I got the same thing. On the network, everything was fine. But I couldn’t get any traffic to (or through) the gateway. After several hours, it had come and gone multiple times, but I couldn’t find a fix anywhere. Finally, we were forced to move the routers back into their original places, and put things back to the way they were a week ago. Everything was beautiful. Everyone had internet access again. A pox on Vista and their family too.

Started looking into a (sort of) new technology lately called openID. It allows you to use an existing account to login to a new site, instead of creating new accounts everywhere. Example: I’m at someone’s blog that only allows registered users to comment. I can enter my openID url, it asks me for my yahoo (or aol, or any other openID provider) credentials, and then I’m allowed in, without having to create a new account. It’s not widely adopted, but it’s pretty slick for the places that use it.

That’s about how my brain feels right now. We’ve been looking for a job for some time now (since May of 2007). After Thanksgiving, we were starting to think perhaps I should finish my Computer Science degree somewhere. The likely suspects were Evangel University and NDSU. Now, there’s another piece of the puzzle thrown out there (I think that God is is just toying with me at this point). At any rate, there’s a job opening in my home town that seems quite promising. I’m applying for it, but it’s almost too good to be true. And you know what they say about things that seem too good to be true. Well, I don’t think ‘they’ (whoever ‘they’ are) are always right, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed.
I’ve also been delving back into the area of Bible study software. My favorite has always been Bibleworks, but just recently, I gave gnomesword another try. I’m not sure it’s a replacement for BW, but it sure is pretty good. You can even download some freely available content from biblegateway.com and crosswalk.com into it if you’re clever enough (or find scripts written by someone else who is even more clever). At any rate, it’s a nice interface for browsing, but the greek and hebrew lexicon integration of Bibleworks makes it the ‘king of the hill’. Maybe someday I’ll join the gnome sword team, and help them integrate cool things like that…

I’ve been here, there, and everywhere. Back in August we went to western Montana, and camped out a couple days for our honeymoon. It was absolutely gorgeous there, and I think I have some photos around here somewhere. I’ll have to post those later. On the way back, we got a call from a hospital in Sidney. They offered me a job, but I declined it. I might be crazy, but I just didn’t feel right about the job.
School’s back in full swing, and work has been nuts. Lots of new people to explain the same old stuff to. “Here’s your password for the eightieth time, and no, you can’t change it.” Otherwise, there’s been lots of fun. We’ve got a new feature to be added to the college website soon, and I’ll give you a sneak preview. It’s a lot of fun, and you’ll get an extra laugh if you’ve actually been to Trinity.
In other awesome news, Apple just released the iPod Touch, which is fantastic. I really want one. Really. I’ve never been big on mp3 players, as I had one once, and only ever used it on long road trips. It also didn’t help that it went through 4 AA batteries in 2 hours. Ouch. But this one does more than music. Of course, it does video, but it also has built-in wireless, so you can surf the net, browse Youtube, or even shop the iTunes store and buy music right to your iPod. It also has a few useful tools like a Calendar and Contacts.

Just read this article, and the last question just made me laugh. If I was a company worth three billion dollars, and MS and Google both submitted offers, I’d go with Google (no matter the terms), because they actually get open source software. Here’s a brief recap:

• Who released Picasa for linux? Google
• Who released Google Earth for linux? Google
• Who supports a browser that works on any OS? Google
• Who has a browser based chat client that works on linux? Google
• Who ports .NET to linux? open source coders
• Who ports wmv to linux? open source coders
• Who ports wma to linux? open source coders
• Who supports a browser that only runs on one platform? Microsoft

The point is, Microsoft is evil, and with all their money and influence, they try to push others down. Google doesn’t have as much of either, and they sponsor the Summer of Code which benefits open source projects greatly. Sure, maybe it helps their business to give out money for programmers to work on free software, but I’m not seeing it. They also host projects like AWN for free.
I have to admit, I would probably be classified a Google fanboy, but I’d rather wear that label than support MS.

Some days, I look back and go, “did I get anything done today?” So here’s me recording for the world what I did today. You can stop reading now, because it’s going to be really boring. I promise. Really.

1. Read from I Chronicles
2. Installed Ubuntu ‘Feisty Fawn’ on a server (yikes)
3. Updated three other Ubuntu servers (web, mail, and DNS/DHCP)
4. Took Amanda to work
5. Pulled a VGA cable and some Audio cables in the new preaching lab
6. Gave a friend some references on HTML and CSS
7. Started installing Gnome on my Gentoo VM
8. Created a PDF from a Word document for Justin
9. Made copies for Amanda
10. Helped with the EHS play tryouts
11. Found out the NORCO DS-1220 just needs proper drivers for linux
12. Used too many acronyms
13. Debated Vista with Mike Hume (he’s going to try Ubuntu first)
14. Picked up Amanda and took her home
15. Made burritos for dinner…yum
16. ‘Fixed’ a login problem with empower
17. Unblocked a website for Steve
18. Found more errors in the ‘proxy’ blacklist from urlblacklist.com
19. Traced the snack shop phone line to the pedestal (it stops there)
20. Re-punched-down said phone line
21. Gave up on said phone line until more snow melts
22. Applied DST patch to four Windows 2000 servers
23. Re-installed the NORCO DS-1220 on blackhole
24. Upgraded a couple packages on my work computer
25. Fed fish (three times)
26. Gave guineas more food and hay
27. Finished this list

This is a reminder to myself, and dissemination of ‘general knowledge’. If you run linux, and you want to change the resolution that your computer displays the console on, this is for you. Read more