Planet Larry pr0n

At work we have a VPN. Which is a worthless invention I despise, but aside from that, when I’m connected to the VPN I’m subject to the rules, firewalls, etc., that the VPN establishes. When not connected there is nothing really to stop me from doing what ever I please on the internet. So sometimes while taking a break I forget to disconnect from the VPN and I still attempt to go to my regular websites, mainly open source related stuff with some weird things like Wired magazine thrown in for fun. So when I encountered this screen, I was more than amused.

The loop

I won’t lie, I’ve been out of the loop for a while now, if you couldn’t tell already. Various reasons are there but i won’t really divulge any of them. I have noticed some very interesting developments though during my period of more-or-less absence from the scene.

Anjuta, the open source development environment has made considerable progress. The features that have been implemented since my last use of the program are things it needed badly in order to stay competitive in a market flooded by IDEs. Things such as Glade integration along with what appears to be a Vim plugin (still in the works) are all adding up to make Anjuta my would be IDE of choice (if I used one). Also, being written in C/C++ I find it much easier to like than its Java based counterpart Eclipse.

Geany, another IDE, also looks to be coming a long nicely. Its still very lightweight and is still missing a number of features but the developers are rolling out new features on a regular basis and is quickly catching up with the best in the biz. If I worked on another IDE this would be the one I was afraid of.

Paludis, my favorite package manager of choice (regardless of distribution), is making considerable strides toward full release. One of the nicest features that was recently implemented was sorting i-node instead of filename. Nothing like saving your hard drive from wasted RPMs. This along with set names being supported in various configuration files makes the latest and greatest version of Paludis the only package manager any sane Gentoo-er should consider using.

KDE, while more of a glob of programs than a single entity, is make vast strides toward having version 4 be more than just eye candy for news websites. With each release its stability and functionality increases considerably, making it a desktop environment thats hard to ignore.

Fedora is getting equipped with Ext4 in its next release. While this same seem silly Linux hasn’t really seen any real push in development as far as filesystems are concerned. As far as I know XFS was the last big thing to happen in this arena and its not only old news, its pretty unused as well. Ext4 should bring a much needed performance boost to Ext3 along with increased capacity. Both will be welcome changes. Fedora deserves a pat on the back for pushing the envelope with this one.

A lot is happening right now to be excited about, and I’m only scratching the surface with this post. I might post more developments tomorrow.

Enjoy the Penguins!

F1 Race Schedule

I don’t suppose there are very many US Americans out there who watch F1 racing, but for anyone who does and would like a calendar to import into Thunderbird (or Outlook, possibly more calendar apps I don’t use) I have made one with all the races. The SPEED channel schedule only goes up to April, so after that the races are “All day events.”

F1 2008 Race Schedule (.ics)

Enjoy the Penguins!

My new MacBook

We’ll start with what I know you really care about:

• 2.2 Ghz Intel Dual Core
• 1G RAM (will be 4G soon)
• 120G HDD
• 13 inch wide screen
• white

It was the best I was willing to pay for. I think it should last quite a while too. It feels sturdy and well built. If I pick it up by a single corner with one hand I can’t feel any flexing or bending in the case. The monitor is attached securely and doesn’t actually latch, its magnetic. My last laptop’s (DELL 8200) monitor joint broke so I find this important. OS X is smooth, pretty quick (with only 1G of RAM mind you) and seems to be very stable thus far. The only problems I’ve really had is with Safari. It basically sucks. I seem to have massive memory leaks with it. Its the only Apple program so far that I’ve used that has this problem.

The other Apple apps like iCalendar and Apple Mail are good programs but their incredibly lacking in the feature department. Thunderbird has always (in my opinion) been on the feature shy side but it has nothing on Apple Mail for missing features. Same goes for iCalendar though Apple did make sure that the two integrate well. I’m afraid I prefer open source for this one.

The iLife suite is nice and actually provides for a lot of professional level editing, which is great, but only if your a professional. If your like me GarageBand is really to complex to really do to much with. I don’t own any midi keyboard or microphones to use. And I know very little about audio editing. So its great but I can’t really do much with it other than act stupid. I’ve never used any open source products that I can compare to garage band and I haven’t really used the rest of the suite so this one is up for grabs.

Apple did make sure to include the ability to write both docx (MS’s new open format) and the odf files. No extras to download there. Though the built in text editor is terrible. I think Apple makes more of a full fleged office suite but I’m not going to buy it. For two reasons really. One, MS’s office suite is still as good as it gets. And two, OpenOffice.org is as much as I’ll ever honestly need. Mark one for open source.

People constantly harp on distributions like Ubuntu for not including audio formats by default with the OS (specifically wmv). Well, neither does Apple. So anyone who complains about that again can put it you know where. If Apple, ran by the demi-god Steve Jobs, doesn’t do it then you no right to complain about Linux not doing it either. In fact, I found it much easier to get the codecs for Linux then I did with OS X. Open source has Apple beat here.

Finally, the best part for me, Vim. I found MacVim which is a fully integrated (into Mac OS X) version of vim. As opposed to just being compiled for Mac OS X. It takes full advantage of the magic menu bar at the top. I highly recommend it. Its way better than text editor Apple has written. Not to mention I’m not about to pay for a text editor that just runs on Mac.  Chock another one up for open source.

Enjoy the Penguins!

An update or two

I once again updated my vimrc to include a font a change and size specification. Which I’ll probably have to modify actually because I don’t think my current setup will work outside of Windows. I also added some code off of LinuxQuestions.org that remaps your F3 and F4 keys to run GCC and/or run the program once compiled.

And for work I now have to use Eclipse. It crashes on me constantly. To be sponsored by IBM you’d think they could do better. In IBM’s defense though all my problems (I think) are stemming from a plugin.  I’m still not really digging this whole Eclipse + Together. Its painful.

Enjoy the Penguins!