On linux

A friend recently forwarded me Neil Stephenson's essay "In the beginning was the command line". It includes, among other things, an amusing comparison of operating systems as if they were car dealerships. MS windows OS=station wagons, mac is a nice sleek eurosedan, and BeOS - it's an old essay - is a Batmobile. Linux is...well, see below.

I read this years ago and found it vastly entertaining. I even printed it out and had it in the bathroom for "quality time" reading. It was well worded. Persuasive. And I believed it. (well, mostly)

Re-reading it this time, with the jaded eye of a few more years of pain..err, experience, I particularly like this bit:

With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.

HA! In a word (or four) I beg to differ.

Just like the M1 abrams, linux requires a dedicated team of specialized technicians to change a bloody tire. The literature states that they never, ever break down but in reality they do. (however, given that they're usually run by said highly trained technicians this troubleshooting is not seen as a drawback, but part of the fun of driving the beast!)

You can drive them on most roads, but you do need a drivers manual at hand at all times, and it contains such cryptic instructions as "if the street is composed of < 64% composite asphalt mix with a 3/4 minus gravel substrate at a 3' depth you will incur a 20% damage likelyhood to the road as well as wear the ball joints prematurely. Recommended procedure is to install track upgrade 3.41, but make sure you're running wheel guidance rods 2.11 (the titanium coated pre-graphite charged ones) else you'll completely burn up the gearbox and the treads will fall off and the tank will blow up."

The keys are in the ignition...if you can find the frickin' ignition. The control panel is covered in lights and switches that let you control every last bit of the innards of the beast and keep you informed of the relative humidity of the thermo-coupled rheostat junction...which is located right next to the speedometer. But instead of reporting speed, it has the rpm of each individual crankshaft and you're expected to extrapolate that (on the fly, in your head) to actual speed since you might be running the .301 diameter driver wheels or the .278 driver wheels...

Put your grandma in one of those and ask her to drive to church. What do you get? Smashed roads. Fire hydrants knocked off. Terrified pedestrians. And one ticked off granny.

(and %diety% help you if she found the main bore's autoloading mechanism and accidentally let loose a few sabot rounds...)

Don't get me wrong. I like the M1. It totally rocks. It's an unparalleled piece of modern weaponry. In it's context it totally rocks.

I like linux. It is absolutely appropriate for certian kinds of folks, in certain kinds of situations.

But use one as my daily driver...you know, when I just want to be able to drive on the local interstate and get to work? Maybe if I was a complete military nut, owned my own UNIMOG and restored tanks for fun. But otherwise, no.

The real difference between mac and PC

So my parents were down for the weekend. And Ruth, my oh-so-awesomely-technical stepmom brought her new macbook.

It was (is) a thing of beauty.

It's been a good 10 years since I've regularly used macs. Yet they're still consistently touted as "better" than PC's. Easier to use. Of course, the mac faithful take that to a bit of an extreme but still.

As I used her OS 10.5 (?) Leopard system, I was struck by just how...organic...the whole experience was. 1001 things, all of them subtle.

A few examples...when you "minimize" in the system, the page kinda-sorta squishes into a "down the drain" shape and slurps down to the mac-equivilent-of-a-taskbar. But it's not linear...it speeds up through the process. Slower as it starts, and then faster as it slips down the drain. Subtle. Very, very subtle.

I launched Front Row and dinked around with it, showing "Nana Ruth" (that's what my kids call her) how to navigate. And I marvelled at how the highlight moved from button to button. It didn't blink off one, and onto another. It somehow slid ~ again, in a nonlinear fashion ~ from one to the next. Not "ok now I'm still...now moving...now still." It started slow, then sped up, then slowed down.

Again, supremely subtle. I seriously doubt any casual user would have noticed. And this is A Good Thing. They're not supposed to notice. They're just supposed to feel, at some subconscious level, that the mac just "fits" better. Is smoother. "Feel", "fits", "smooth"...all these are subjective, squishy, difficult to measure qualities.

I've also been tweaking my father-in-law's new Dell quad-core for the last 2 weeks. It's running Vista Home Premium. This has been my first real extended use of Vista and while it's taken some getting used to, overall it's nice. The system is certainly fast enough. And it "does" all the same things.

But it's not a Mac. I could be objective and comment on where Redmond decided to use transparency. How Media Center's selection works just fine. But in the end it just doesn't "flow" as well.

Is the mac more stable? No. Is it "more" secure? Not likely. Does it "feel better"?

Hell yeah.

I have a few theories as to why. All of them paint with a pretty broad stroke. So I'll leave that for another post.

Regex presentation from Boise Code Camp 2008

Thank you all those that showed up for code camp 2008. 370 folks at last count. It warmed the cockles of our collective hearts to have so many geeks wandering, learning, and eating pizza.

As promised, here are links to the code and the powerpoint from the session. Enjoy!

Here are the tools/tutorial I referenced during the talk:
RegexDesigner.NET
http://www.sellsbrothers.com/tools/

30 Min Regex Tutorial:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/regextutorial.aspx

Cheers!

Boise Code Camp 2008

Boise Code Camp 2008 is happening this coming Saturday, March 8th. Visit the site. Sign up.

Why should you come?

• It's free
• beginner & advanced asp, .net stuff
• free pizza
• NJM*: There are presentations on ruby, java, oracle
• Currently 57 presentations (as of tonight's tally @ netdug)
  
• they feed us
• "just for fun" tracks like hardware hacking
• great swag
• demos on tools that'll make you faster, better, more likely to get dates.**
  
• Rub shoulders with other like-minded geeks in the Treasure Valley (and beyond)
• Awesome value
• Some dude named Hanselman will be presenting too
  
• They're feeding us

*Not Just Microsoft
**Ok, I stretched on that last bit.

And yes, I am doing a session on "intro to regular expressions". But don't come for me.

Then again, if it'll get you there, come for me!

Undo...undo d##n you!

There are times when I just have to laugh at myself.

(insert obligatory self deprecating comment about that being most of the time)

But seriously.

I'm sketching out (on paper. in pencil.) the data access layer for a project. Trying to figure out all the access methods I'll need.

I erase one to better fit another in.

I suddenly realize that I completely forgot what I'd just erased.

And it's erased thoroughly...

The first thing to run through my mind was the completely sincere thought: "Not a problem. I'll just undo.."

(ok. it was funny to me)

Internal notebook ATA100 vs USB2 vs eSATA

Holy hot hannah, batman.

I requested an external drive for my poor-little 1.6ghz pentium m notebook. (Dell Latitude D610 w/2gigs of RAM)

The internal drive (upgraded from a 4200rpm 30gig model to a 120gig 5400rpm 8mb cache seagate) was still slow. And when I tried to run a vm onboard...look out. Empires rose and crumbled to dust in the time it took to boot 'em. Everything else slowed to a crawl as the host OS and VM duked it out for access to the drive.

So I wanted an external drive. Well, for virtual machines as well as local backup.

At first I thought a nice, simple (big honkin) usb2. Then I thought "hmm...wonder how much faster an external SATA (eSATA) drive would be?)

After a bit of research, I selected the following. (all hail newegg!)
VANTEC NST-360SU-BK 3.5" eSATA + USB2.0 Enclosure
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA Hard Drive
VANTEC UGT-ST350CB SATA PCMCIA Card

Everything went together like a charm. On a whim, I decided to run Simpli Software's awesome HDTach against my internal drive, the external drive using it's eSATA connection, and the external drive using it's USB2 option.

Note the cpu utilization differences (as well as the fact that the eSATA option is faster than the internal...guess that PCMCIA bus can move some data..!)

Internal drive (Seagate ST9120821A - ATA100, 120gig, 5400rpm, 8mb cache):
Average read speed: 31.4MB/sec
CPU Utilization: 5%

External Drive, (7200rpm, 16mb cache) using usb2 (onboard)
Average read speed: 27.3MB/sec
CPU Utilization: 29%

External Drive, (7200rpm, 16mb cache) using eSATA interface
Average read speed: 56.2MB/sec
CPU Utilization: 0%


HDTach results:

The notebook's internal drive:




The external drive, USB2:




The external drive, eSATA

Doing the proxy picking pickle polka

Has this ever happened to you?

Minute 0: Take your corporate laptop home (to, you know, do some MORE work…) connect to your home broadband, launch IE (or firefox) and…awww crud.

Minute 1: Tools-Options-Advanced-Network-No !$@#$!# Proxy-ok-ok.Or (for IE) Tools-Internet Options-Connections-Lan Settings(That’s six clicks (best case) for Firefox and seven for IE.)

Minute 5: Whoops. Need to get into email. Launch the corporate VPN.

Minute 7: Get back into Firefox.

Minute 7.1: WTH?! Ahh. that’s right. Need to turn the !!W$!W# proxy back ON. (six more clicks)

Minute 15: Hmm...need that file on the wife’s computer. Whoops...can’t get to it because we’re CONNECTED TO THE CORPORATE VPN!

Minute 17: Disconnect from the vpn.

Minute 18: Copy the file.

Minute 19: Go back to the knowledge base article on the browser..aw crap. Proxy back off. (six more clicks)

(queue inspirational music)

There is a better way!

(no, it’s not [auto detect settings] as that spins and spins and takes a good long time to decide if there’s a proxy or not.)
(waaaaay too slow)
(At least for me.)
(because I’m impatient)

For IE: ProxyPick

Follow the link. Grab the exe. Install it.
After install:

Click #1:


Click Two and Three


That's all it takes. Three quick clicks, about 1/10th the mouse travel. (no, I didn't measure it. But I could. If, you know, I was that retentive. Come to think of it...)


Firefox is (naturally) EVEN EASIER.

Quickproxy has your number…

It adds a little button to the status bar (down there in the bottom right hand corner)

One click toggles between proxy on and proxy off.

Enjoy!