Something Swift this way comes…

You’ll notice that the site maintenance warning is gone. That means that this site has officially been switched over to a larger hard-drive (120 GB instead of a 4GB) and should run for a while without space worries. The other hardware it’s running on currently blows, but hey, we do what we can when we can. So, the freeze on posts is officially over.

Sorry for the interruption, and thanks for your patience.

S

So it’s been a little bit and I’m still kind of at a loss as to what to post here regularly. Seeing as how my readers seem content just to read whatever I put up, then I guess I’ll just put up whatever! MUAHAHA Command decision. Since I love linux that’s kind of what you guys are probably going to hear about most. Ah well, I’ve almost converted one or two of ya, or at least gotten you past the idea of fearing change enough to give it a rational chance…Which is all I can really ask of anyone.

One cool thing that I did the other day was write a script - I know most of you are probably thinking ‘I didn’t know he wrote screenplays!’ no. Not that kind of script. Put down the air-freshener and seek help. The type of script I’m talking about is a shell script to do something that I find rather tedious, automatically. See, everyone who knows me knows that I play online text based games (called Mush/mux/moo/mu*). Well, I use a text based client to log in to my different worlds - fitting no? - and whenever I log in, it automatically logs everything that I see on my screen. I set this up a while back within the client to auto-log on connection (the client, by the way is TF5 - Tinyfugue 5) and when it logs, it goes to a directory (folder for you windows users) under my home directory named ’share’. So the path looks like /home/swift/share. Now, underneath share is a directory for each ‘world’ or ‘character’ I connect to. TF automatically seperates the logfiles out by the world, and names the file in a MM-DD-YY.log format, so that I can look back on a particular day and find something. Neat, but what happens after abou three or four months worth of logging? Yeah! You get spammed when you go in and list the directory contents by a bunch of files that look like 08-18-08.log. I mean a /bunch/. I connect a lot. So, usually once a month I go through near the beginning of the month, make a directory underneath each character/world directory named in a MM-YY format, so it’ll look something like this - /home/swift/share/Swift/07-08/’all of july’s files here’

Needless to say I can do it fairly quickly but when you consider that I’ve got eight or nine characters/worlds that I connect to regularly, this shit gets tedious after a while. That’s fifteen or twenty minutes I could spend doing something else…like playing on my game! So I decided after getting fed up with having to hand organize these files “You know what? This is the perfect thing to provide a bash script to”, so that’s what I did. After a bit of trial and error, I came up with a script I call tflogarc.sh that I can schedule to go through once a month and do the following things:

• Go into a game directory recursively
• Make a directory that is named for the last month’s numerical-current year’s numerical (07-08 ferex)
• Move all files that start with the numerical month matching last month’s numerical month into the correct directory.
• Go back up to /home/swift/share
• Rinse and repeat until all played worlds are organized.
• Leave me with free time each month to do something else!

Okay, that last one didn’t really occur to me until about halfway through the project. I just started out seeing if I could do it, and with a little help, I did. Thus is the power of linux! And looking at it now, weeding out all the comments (I tend to comment heavily so I’ll know wtf I was thinking six months from now when I go back to tinker with it) the script itself is only 37 lines long*. Not a huge program at all, and if I were more experienced at scripting it wouldn’t have taken me the couple of hours it did to get everything just right. Add in the fact that with a single line in my crontab (file that the linux/unix cron daemon uses to schedule commands to be run) that it runs every month at 1:05 am for the length of time it takes to do the work (about 3 seconds) and then goes back to sleep until the next month. With windows, I’d just be completely shit out of luck unless I wrote it in something like python or perl, or (God help us) Visual Basic. I suppose you could try and script a .bat (batch file) to do it, but then you have to wrestle with the windows taskmanager and all of that. With this, it’s a built in scripting language that lets you do as much or as little as you want, to your own level of ability, and there are plenty of folks out there online willing to help out when you have questions, which is a bonus. If you’d like to take a look at the script it’s at http://swift.homelinux.net/tflogarc.txt.

* - for the command pipe that gave me that answer it’s grep -v \# tflogarc.sh|wc -l
What this does is greps (searches) the file for everything except the # symbol in the file tflogarc.sh then pipes all of them out to the wc -l command which does a wordcount (in this case -l tells it to count lines only, not words.) Wha? You didn’t think I’d actually count the lines by hand did you?

So you see, sometimes I get on a little kick and make my life a little easier by using the tools that are around, laying there, free for use, all we have to do is pick them up, brush them off and put a little effort into learning to use them.

More later,

S

So. Holy crap. I actually have people reading my blog - not like a huge amount of people, but constant readers that I know and care for. You guys really know how to make a geek feel guilty. I feel like I’ve been letting you down by not posting! *laughs* Ah well, here’s another one for you.

My grandmother passed away this past week and she did it in a style that is so like her. She waited until everyone in the room had dozed off and then just packed up her bags and left without a lot of fuss and no goodbyes. We buried her yesterday in a small ceremony with family and friends gathered, and she would’ve wanted that too. I dare say though there was a great lot of sadness, there was some relief in the folks gathered as she’s been rattling around in that big old house by herself now for around fifteen years. I know she missed her family, her husband, all her loved ones who have gone through the veil that seperates this world from whatever is beyond. I know there has been some strife in our family that has caused rifts that may never heal, but I think some small bit of healing took place this weekend. At least I hope it did.

On to other things, I sat in there tonight with my girls while the wife sat in there with the boys, getting them ready for bed, and going through the nightly ritual of bedtime delays. I held my oldest girl and talked with her - she’s getting so big! - and she crawls up into my lap and said something that melted my heart. Daddy, will you rock me? Ugh…never thought that I’d be such a big softie. She absolutely holds the key to my heart, I tell you. And those big blue-green eyes of her as she smiled up at me. So we rocked and I sang, and she sang with me, and I thought about heaven, about the things that we try to busy ourselves and not think about because some of it can be frightening. I thought about the fact that heaven would be like this, that I would be able to see those that I loved so much again, that I wished I could have just had a little more time with, maybe curled up in their lap and said ‘Granddaddy, rock me?’. Sometimes these things are not chance, sometimes they’re not mere happenstance. Sometimes the turning points of our lives take place between wake and sleep, and we’re better off for it - something that can be so blessed coming in a week that has been so absolutely difficult to deal with. I pray that if you ever have a hard time, that you can be the recipient of such a blessing at the end of your hard walk. I hope that you can feel the love that emanates from those around you, for you, that you can take solace and healing from it and drink from the well that is so deep and eternal that it is everlasting and never runs dry.

Thank you all for spending a little time with me today, and I hope that you have a great week.

S

So it’s been a little while since I posted last. I’ve had a lot of heavy work between then and now. I’ve managed to stay pretty much on top of things, just sometimes it feels like staying on top of things is a lot like getting run over by things. I was at my parents’ house tonight for a little while visiting with them for the first time in a couple of weeks and mom kept saying how dark the circles are under my eyes and how she’s worried about me because she hasn’t seen them that bad before. Had to go through the whole rundown of have I been having any stomach troubles, chest pains, headaches, etc. with her. I know she’s just worried about me, and it makes me smile to know that she still mothers me when she’s worried. Somehow mom can make it all better just by asking me if I’m alright, how I’m doing and if I’ve been feeling okay. I guess it’s because most people these days couldn’t care less how you’re doing or feeling as long as they get theirs and they’re doing alright…it feels good to have that love and concern. I guess those who love us can hurt us the most in our lives, but those who love us really and truly are the ones who can heal us too. Funny to think of that double edge sword of hurting and healing, but it’s got a good beat and I can dance to it, so I think I’m going to go with that as a truth right now.

So, I’ve not heard anything back from you guys…the two or three of you who actually check back here. I’m guessing that I probably ran everyone off with all the geekspeak. I guess that to be passionate about something you have to be truly blind to the fact that nobody else really cares about what you’re passionate about *laughs*. Maybe that’s the case, or maybe everyone has just been busy doing their own thing. It’s not like I advertise this place or anything, and not more than a handful of people even know about it - I guess it’s odd to expect a few people to give much in the way of feedback. I’ve thought about advertising it somehow and trying to drive up readership, but to what point? This is the kind of rambling diatribe that I usually give and if it were me reading it from someone I don’t know, I guess I’d probably turn the page too *laughs*. Anyways, all that said to say this - if you guys want to see me talk about something or see my thoughts on something, feel free to leave a comment in the little box down there at the bottom and I’ll see about it!

Hope everyone has a great weekend.

S

I know, I know…haven’t posted in a little while. I already feel guilty enough about it. However, I will recline on the fact that I’ve been busy as hell the last two weeks and I’m more tired now than I have been in a very long time. I’ve been wanting to post and let everyone know that I’ve been alive, but I’ve just come home from work every night and crashed either on the couch or the bed for a few hours before getting up and maybe grabbing a bite to eat, checking email, then getting back to bed. In the last two weeks we’ve built 145 computers for a school system in the techroom at my work. Some people may not think this sounds like a lot, but those some people have never tried to build 145 computers from the bare case out with a time limit on their heads. Considering the fact that there is no real assembly line setup in the techroom, I think we did pretty well. Actually only 5 units failed the boot up test, so we were lucky with the parts we got. That all said, I actually got off from work a couple of hours early today and went and helped dad fix his bush-hog mower - it’s a tractor attachment designed to cut larger areas - fields and such. Got that fixed in a little less than an hour and sat and talked with him for a few. I think that the wife and I may go out on a date tomorrow night - something we do rarely, and we might even catch a movie! Wow! Something we haven’t done in a loooong time.

Aside from the 145 systems that we built, we also lost one of our team members. Our bench tech has gone on to learn to manage one of the other store locations, and while that’s cool, I’m gonna miss him. We got along very well together and seemed to just naturally click in our work rythym. We picked up a new guy for me to train to bench tech, and while he’s alright, I also know that I’m not going to have the same working relationship with him that I did with the other guy. Sometimes change really blows, ya know? Ah well. Such is life.

Anyways, More later,

S

(Just to break up some of the geekiness that’s getting thick in here - teases :-*)

Introductory Chemistry at Duke has been taught for about a zillion years
by Professor Bonk (really), and his course is semi-affectionately known
as “Bonkistry.”  He has been around forever, so I wouldn’t put it past
him to come up with something like this.  Anyway, one year there were
these two guys who were taking Chemistry and who did pretty well on all
of the quizzes and the midterms and labs, etc., such that going into the
final they had a solid A.

These two friends were so confident going into the final that the
weekend before finals week (even though the Chem final was on Monday),
they decided to go up to UVirginia and party with some friends up there.
So they did this and had a great time.  However, with their hangovers
and everything, they overslept all day Sunday and didn’t make it back to
Duke until early monday morning.  Rather than taking the final then,
what they did was to find Professor Bonk after the final and explain to
him why they missed the final.  They told him that they went up to UVa
for the weekend, and had planned to come back in time to study, but that
they had a flat tire on the way back and didn’t have a spare and
couldn’t get help for a long time and so were late getting back to
campus.  Bonk thought this over and then agreed that they could make up
the final on the following day.  The two guys were elated and relieved.

So, they studied that night and went in the next day at the time that
Bonk had told them.  He placed them in separate rooms and handed each of
them a test booklet and told them to begin.  They looked at the first
problem, which was something simple about molarity and solutions and was
worth 5 points.  “Cool” they thought, “this is going to be easy.”  They
did that problem and then turned the page.  They were unprepared,
however, for what they saw on the next page.  It said:

(95 points) Which tire?

Well folks, it is now official. You the common man (or woman as the case may be) can no longer buy a retail copy of Windows XP for your own use. Technically you probably can still go into stores and find a copy that is lingering on the shelf, however these are only stock copies and they will no longer be making and selling retail copies of Windows XP. See the link here: Microsoft Ends retail sales of XP

So, now that it’s official and you the masses are being pushed to using Vista on the machines that you own (good luck with that unless you’re running a relatively beefy machine) and most machines that you’re going to be able to buy in the near future, you’re going to be seeing a great learning curve in how your computer works and interacts with you. Be prepared for things like annoying popups that constantly ask you if you’re really really sure you want to do what you just told your computer to do - trust me, I’ve dealt with this in Vista, and it pops up damn near every time you click on something and/or try to do something other than sit there and let the eye-candy rot your brain out from the frontal lobe back. So, let me be the first (or maybe second or later) to suggest to you that if you’re going to be forced into using a system you’re not familiar with and virtually re-learning how the inner workings of your operating system goes (don’t ask about printing in Vista…), if you dear reader are going to go through all of this, let me suggest to you that you take a look at some of the free operating systems out there of the linux/unix variety. I can hear the groans from the back of the court but hold on, stay with me for a minute. You the common user are going to have to relearn how to do the simplest of tasks, everything is going to look different, and you’re going to be unhappy with it until you relearn it. This is a /perfect/ opportunity for you to step outside your comfort zone and begin to try out a different operating system. I say step outside your comfort zone because it does take a bit of a leap of faith to download and burn that first ISO, to run it from livecd and figure out what all the new things are that you’re seeing means. That simple leap of faith though is well worth it.

Let me give you a perfect example, a test case as it were. I of course and an iron-clad graven in stone linux user, so I try to incorporate that as much as I can into my daily work (I’m a network technician and I repair computers/networks for a living). The gentleman who works with me as a bench technician is a good friend of mine, an older gentleman in his fifties and before he came to work with us, he was a standard user - never even cracked open a computer case and so much as looked inside one before. Over the last six months I’ve trained him up as a bench tech on computer hardware and the Microsoft operating system. Doing this hasn’t been hard, actually it’s been quite a pleasant process. However, he’s always (as a user) used Microsoft products, and he’s used to seeing Microsoft and dealing with troubleshooting the systems that we have come across our bench on a day-to-day basis. However he’s also been, little by little, exposed to some of the things that can be done when you use free and open source software - I can troubleshoot a Microsoft system further and better with linux based tools than I can with MS ones - and he’s begun over the past month or so to become more curious about it. I’ve finally set aside some time and set up a demo unit to display with linux on it. Seeing as how Microsoft is forcing the user’s hand on the issue, I figured what could it hurt? So yesterday I sat him down in front of the computer that has linux on it (Kubuntu Hardy KDE 4.0-remix) and told him to play with it, try and open a word processor and save a document and run a game, surf the web - you know the every day stuff that 90% of the population does with their spare time at a computer. He, after a little bit of friendly griping at me finally dug into it and after about ten minutes said, “You know what? On the surface there’s just not that much difference in how this works and how Windows (XP) works…it looks the same, hell the Open Office even looks more like the Microsoft Office used to before they changed to MS Office 2007.” I quietly nodded and continued working on another system while he continued to play with it. Finally he got my attention and said, “You know what, I think when I get to where I can build myself a system, I’m going to put linux on there. I just like it better than I like Vista.”

Now this is from a guy who is a /confirmed/ Windows user. Someone who makes his living by working on Windows machines! He’s seen in the tech room that the systems I put linux on run and run and run and run, that once they’re configured up that they take very little adminstration and maintenance - hell 90% of our server capacity for our tech room is old scrounged machines running linux doing what they’re supposed to do and doing it without complaint. He’s seen the stability of the system from an observer’s standpoint, and he’s seen the usability of it from a user’s standpoint - and while there are oddities in the system (there will always be oddities in a system you don’t write yourself for your own personal use) he recognized and responded to it as a viable product that is useable to the average user’s standards. AND he didn’t have to revert to using the command line to get the things he wanted done. Granted he could still use the command line (this is the part that scares most ‘users’) to do any and everything he wants to, but he doesn’t /have/ to. I’ve been teaching him a few basic ‘commandline survival skills’ in case he ever wants to use it, but that’s from a technician’s standpoint. For the most part, you don’t have to use the CL unless you just want to for the speed and precision that it offers. What a system!

So, now that you’ve waded through my test case and seen that without any pushing or urging from me other than to say ‘Here, try this out and tell me what you think’, someone who was a plain-jane ‘user’ up until 6 months ago decided that they liked it better than their current operating platform. What does this mean for you dear reader? This means that you will not be alone if you decide to download and try out the linux software (I prefer ubuntu and kubuntu, but there are many distributions out there - some that may better serve your needs), that it is okay to try something new, that it may be more familiar to you than you think. And here’s the kicker. Download the ISO, burn it to a disc, put the disc in the tray and reboot your machine - try it out without fear of destroying your windows machine and the data resident there. If you like it you can always back up your data and change over to linux. If you don’t like it you can just shut it down, take the disc out and go back to windows no harm no foul. The thing is, you have a /choice/. And choice is always a good thing.

For those of you out there who want to read more about the free software response to Vista, might I suggest starting at Badvista.org, you might find it interesting reading, and it might even change your mind about the next operating system you use on your computer.

If you have any questions for me about linux, microsoft, free software, or just want to natter a bit, leave a comment and I promise to reply next time I check in.

Thanks for sticking with me,

S

So, found an interesting article at Linux.com that caught my attention. Normally I just scan the articles seeing if I can find an interesting tidbit or three about software that I might want to try or to get better performance out of, but this article really kind of nailed me to the spot. The reason it caught my attention so heavily is the fact that I help manage a ’small’ network for the county I work in, and I can tell you that the problems that people face on a daily basis there are a multitude of issues. I can’t help but see an article like this and wish that I could implement something similar to this on the county network because I know it would do several things:

• Save the county money
• Save the taxpayers money
• Advance the use of open source
• Create jobs for users of Open Source software
• Ease administrative tasks
• Allow the users of the system to be more productive
• Allow the IT budget to be spent on much needed hardware upgrades

There are other points that something like this could help out on, but these are some of the biggest. The money saved would lower their total cost of ownership (TCO) and raise their return on investment (ROI). These are the two biggest concerns in any IT situation - they are the two things that always get the accountants attention because it means that the money spent on IT, which is always a blackhole of money anyways, is being better used. Advancing the use of open source software may not sound like a big issue until you realize that things like Microsoft’s plan to end retailing OEM copies of XP on June 30′th (Microsoft.com) means that businesses will be pushed into upgrading to Vista when they have to purchase new systems. Anyone who has used Vista knows that it is a beast - it has to have plenty of higher end hardware to run on to get any kind of performance out of. This means that when they purchase new systems, not only are they generally going to have to invest more in their licensing structure for their company, they’re also going to have to invest in higher end hardware that will end up only performing as well as their last-gen hardware they are replacing - this is NOT good business sense. And you consumers out there? You’re going to have to use Vista if you want to keep your Microsoft. This means you’re virtually going to have to relearn how to use your computer because all of the layouts in Vista are different than what they are in XP. This also means that you’re going to have to dump more money into the family computer to either upgrade to a system that can capably handle Vista or to purchase an entirely new system that can handle it. Monolithic indeed. The move to supporting Open Source software in a computing environment means that generally you can run it on lower end hardware without flinching - you can get as good or better performance out of it than you can on an identical machine running windows. Now, in all fairness, let me note that Microsoft is extending the life cycle of XP on ‘ultra-low cost machines’ but this still means that you either have to buy a crappy machine (not good for workstations in a working environment) and that you still can’t go into dealership and buy a nice system with XP - the system you know and are addicted to already - installed on it. At least until 2010, fully 4 years before the planned release of whatever OS Microsoft comes out with to replace the snafu that is Vista. And we all know how well they stick to a planned roll-out of an operating system.

The fourth point is obvious - a lot of IT people are Microsoft users. Those of us who are versed in Those Other OS’s ™ generally have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for jobs and still do MS administration mainly - at least in areas like south Georgia and other IT dead locations that are just now beginning to realize that the advantages to having a solid IT infrastructure can actually /help/ your business. Ease of administrative tasks is also somewhat of a hard argument to make - it takes a good bit to get everything set up just right in a linux environment - refer back to the article above about their troubles with printing, however once you get something set up and running, it generally doesn’t take major overhauls and fixes every six months to put out whatever fire has sprung up at that point ala Microsoft. Regarding point 6, when the users don’t have to focus on where the software is coming from, where their documents are going, or getting a specialized piece of software budgeted into their next round of buying, they can simply request software from the IT department and get it, no fuss no muss. This also leads into the final point about allowing the IT budget to be spent on upgrading hardware. This is a special hot-button issue with me. One of the agencies I help take care of has the worst hardware in an organization I’ve seen in a while. We’re not talking about just slow machines, we’re talking about machines that were installed in the location almost a decade ago and have been limped along up to this point. Just finding memory for these machines can be a chore at times, much less trying to add any type of new software to them or capabilities that the users would like to have. Let’s just say that if people realized what kind of machines this agency was working with, they would have serious doubts about the county’s efficacy to handle things on that end of business. Taxpayers should really look into things like that - find out what your county budget for hardware and software are, generally you’ll find one or two agencies within the county that end up scraping the dregs out of the barrel with regards to budgeting, and they usually have the most problems - ending up costing the county and taxpayers more in man-hours spent limping the machines along, lost productivity as systems crash or slow down to handle too great a load on their already overstrained equipment, and the cost of having to buy parts at retail prices to try and keep systems up and running for just six more months. It’s pathetic in all honesty and it’s a situation that could be entirely avoided with proper planning and education - no matter /what/ OS and software you’re running in the environment, but especially with the freedom that Opensource software allows the consumer, the sheer multitude of choices that people have is staggering and goes largely unknown by the end user.

This brings me to my final point - a lot of my friends pick on me about proseletyzing about Linux and Opensource software, but the truth is, if nobody brings it up then your average Joey Bag-a-doughnuts is just going to go on buying the Microsoft line simply because that’s why they’re trained to believe, and they’ll go on spending too much money on too many unstable/unsuitable products and wonder why they always have so many problems. It is up to us, the IT people to educate others about things that are good and healthy for their systems and networks, and if we do not take every opportunity to gently remind people that there is a freedom of choice out there, then shame on us. We have no right to bitch about the systems in use if we can’t take the effort to learn something new and share that with others.

S

So not a lot has been going on lately, work wise. I’ve been going and doing and enjoying the things that I get to do - it’s good to have a job where you at least love the work itself. In my family however, another change is about to occur. My grandmother on my father’s side is almost 100 years old, she’s lived a long life, most of it hard - she’s always been a hard woman to be close to and I guess that’s where I get some of my standoffish nature from. I went and saw her this past Sunday and she’s reached the point where she doesn’t want to go on anymore. She’s stopped eating and can only take a little liquid without sicking it back up. She’s not in any pain, just in a pure misery. She’s reached the point in life where she’s just tired of living, and feels like she’s ready to go I suppose. I know that a lot of it has to do with the fact that her husband, my grandfather, died almost twenty years ago and without him I guess she probably has little to truly live for. I don’t know whether to feel better about her passing because she’s truly in a misery with life, or to feel sadness…a sorrow for the imminent passing of the strongest woman I know. I guess it’s going to end up being both. It’s strange, my grandfather’s death hit me like a hammerfall, stunning me with grief at his passing when I was 13, and I railed against it wishing it undone. Now, almost two decades later, I’m a grown man and I’ve come to understand a few of the complexities of life (not all by any means) but I can understand how she can be just so tired of living alone in that big old rambling house that she’s spent the majority of a century in.

She told me while she was there that she wakes up at times, confused, afraid, that she doesn’t know where she is, and it’s an hour or more before she finally tells herself that she’s at home. She says that she’s tired of it, and I believe her. I guess death holds no candle against the loss of one’s mind, the firm knowledge of your place in the world, of who and where you are. I can only speculate at this point, but I know that the idea of becoming so senile that I have to depend on someone else for everything scares the hell out of me, and I’m a young man yet. I can only imagine how hard it is on her - a woman who helped raise four children through the depression, through two world wars, through countless life changing events that she could never have dreamed about in her wildest imaginings as a young girl in south Georgia. She has seen things happen that are the stuff of science fiction, and we take it all in stride as everyday ordinary blase occurances that are part of the natural order of things - in our blind reckoning, they’ve always been this way and they always will be, how little do we realize the earth shaking events that occur in our own time, blind to them by complacency that the world will never change, that we will be young and in possession of all our faculties forever…I suppose that when the time comes for me to pass away, I can only hope that I will be at a place where I will be grateful for my life’s passing, and not regretful that I didn’t live life up until the very end. I’ll miss my grandmother when she’s gone, but in this, the young middle of my life, I can look on it with a different eye - one that sees the passing as a blessing, an answered prayer to ease the misery of being alive day after day without a reason or will to live. May God bless her and ease her passing, and may He hold her hand through the end.

Thanks for reading, I know it’s a little depressing this time around, but I guess you pays your money and you takes what you get.

S

For those of you who are interested in seeing the photos of the trip, check out my flickr stream:

Here

Other than that it’s back to business as usual, but you know how that goes, so I’ll spare you the indignity of walking through a day of setting up yet another network. I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and had at least as much fun as we did, and that you did /not/ have to suffer the indignity of having to pull over and puke in the middle of the street in pouring rain. Yum.

S