lumpy blog

I love ubuntu, I’ve been running it for a couple years now and have been pretty happy over all. Let me restate that: I have been running it on desktops and am pretty happy. In my quest for the perfect distro I went through many iterations (I won’t name names since they are all better than windows IMO and we are ultimately on the same team) but settled on ubuntu for a few reasons.

1. It is quick, easy, and brainless to setup a new box - pop in the CD and click ‘Next’ until its done.

2. Package Management - I found apt easier to setup and use than yum

3. Upgrade path - Huge! This is why I also like gentoo. Who wants to rebuild their system every 3 months. Not me and Ubuntu provides a way to just upgrade to the newest release

4. Its quick, easy, and brainless to maintain your box. I’m an embedded developer and spend enough time wrestling with embedded linux. I want my development host to just work without a lot of effort.

All this being said, ubuntu isn’t a great choice for servers. I do come from an older school of thought perhaps but I like to know what’s on internet facing boxes and have fine grained control over those packages. Case and point, while installing updates on my laptop today I noticed that bind and dnsutils where installed. ??? There is no need for those on my laptop - why are they there. That’s the sort of thing I don’t want to have happen on a server. I often notice upgrades are being installed for packages that I have no use for. I’d rather go through a more tedious install and know exactly what is on the box than have so many random packages.

I found the solution to all my procrastination problems! It’s the most simple thing that has been avoiding me all my life… You ready for this? Got a pen and paper? Here it is:

DO IT

Yep - it’s that simple. Why are you still reading this? Get off your ass and go do the thing that’s bothering you right now; you know, that thing that you were supposed to do a while ago but never really got around to? Well it still needs to be done so go do it right now, no questions asked.Does this bring a whole new meaning to the Nike “Just Do It” campaign? Do you understand it now? I sure do… I’m off to clean my office…

Is it really news that the RIAA sucks? Their latest victims seems to be small towns that hold free summer concerts. While I agree that artists (and the rest of us) deserve to be compensated for their work I don’t think any good will ever come from the RIAA lawsuits. I also think the sky is blue and other obvious things too. In the story the RIAA lawyer says “We’re not some big bad corporation trying to squeeze money out of [the little guy]”…Really? I thought that was exactly what you were. I agree that they also try to squeeze money out of artists too, perhaps he meant to say that consumers weren’t their only revenue stream. I hear a lot of kids singing copyrighted songs on the T - I think the RIAA should go after them as well, I mean they are rebroadcasting copyrighted material which is fine to do…so long as they pay the licensing fee. No one (except fried dough vendors maybe) makes money on these free concerts and they bring small communities together. Glad that the industry is doing everything they can to squash this blatant disregard for their yacht payments.

To play devils advocate for a minute the RIAA is only asking towns for a few hundred dollars in licensing fees. Even in the town I grew up in, which was too small to have these concerts, it would cost $0.50 per resident to shut the RIAA up. My wife’s hometown of 5000 could shut them up for $0.04 per resident.

Audio available after 10AM EST

My wife has a wizzbang Garmin GPS navigator and its worth every penny she paid for it. Driving in Boston is pretty much the worst fate a human can suffer but its quite tolerable if you have a smart navigator. Being a diy guy I’d like to build my own and thanks to the open source world it looks like I can pretty easily using roadnav and a small in-car computer. The festival (text to speech program) support means that your navigator can read directions out loud to you as you drive. If I get around to building this I’ll make sure to show off the results.

I have just posted a write up on an elegant mutexless circular buffer without concurrency issues. A colleague shared the theory with me and I wrote it up. Its implemented in C without many dependencies since it is intended for use in a kernel module so I didn’t want to loose any clever tricks when I left userspace.

Full description and code are posted. See the above link.

I have often complained to the lumpypear crew that nobody uses EXIF data for comments in images.  Instead you have to maintain an external database that somehow relates the comment to an image.  Inevitably this database will be lost, the filename will change, or something else will happen and all that work is lost.  Thank heavens there is still some sanity in the world.  xSite pulls the comment out of the EXIF data stored within the image itself - renaming, moving, or otherwise modifying the image doesn’t matter (there are way to destroy the EXIF data so don’t do that).  Just point it to the directory containing the images and it will generate the xHTML

Girl #1: As Shakespeare once said: “Thou shall not kill.”
Girl #2: No, that would be God.
Overheard at work is a funny funny site and I wanted to remind you that its there. Here are New Yorks most popular.

This picture pretty much speaks for itself…

I only had my cell phone handy as we drove by but had to get a shot of Condom World on Route 3 in Puerto Rico. This is somewhere between San Juan and Rio Mar.

We’ve certainly fully integrated into normie society. In high school I had to try really hard to hide my geekiness but now everyone just seems to let it all hang out. I guess since geeks are good with computers and gadgets, and everyday about 10,000 new gadgets come out it only makes sense. Recently I saw the geekiest thing I have ever seen though. I mean this is a whole order of magnitude geekier than pocket protectors and chess club…

This was taken in the men’s room at Joe Sent Me in Waltham, MA. You have to be pretty drunk to scrawl ‘jboss’ into the wall of a men’s room.

It’s been a long time since I switched back to a “normie” phone from a smart PDA and pretty much got used to not having the net with me 24/7. One thing I do miss is not having my Google Calendar with me at all times. With the PDA, it was easy to let someone know if you can make it to their thing since you had your calendar with you at all times.

Just as a side note - for some reason my phone hates mobile.google.com (I have Cingular, not sure if that’s the problem) The service I found and currently use is www.goosync.com - it lets you sync your phone calendar with Google calendar. It supports repeating events and reminders. Unfortunately there is no automatic sync so you have to manually sync your phone with goosync.