the corner office : tech blog

So, downstairs, the new gaming-spec Dell, which with Windows 7 is more sluggish than the old Acer, running XP, now consigned to the spare room. And for development work, I'm pretty much sticking with the Acer. Now that I'm the only one using it, I'm slowly building up the energy to re-install Linux on the spare partition (extra-slowly now that my right hand is in a cast). The existing Ubuntu installation is going - thanks Mr Shuttleworth for many years of a great OS, but I'm not sure if I care for where you're taking things.

Enter Linux Mint, and in particular, the LXDE edition. Still Ubuntu based which is nice, but lighter and a traditional feel. I'm still using a years-old version of VMware which powers the wee server exposing the Acer's ext3 partition (via samba), database and source code repos, but decided to give Mint a test drive using VirtualBox. VirtualBox has come a long way since I last tried it, and it's all working so well and seamlessly that I'm wondering whether I should just stay with XP and do all my Linuxey stuff virtually. Very tempting.

I'm impressed with two excellent pieces of software.

Update: two blue screens later, which I'd suspect is down to raw partition access, I'm thinking VMware isn't totally out of the running.

Tim Bray: Network App Macroeconomics

This sort of sucks. There was a time when every client was a browser running on a PC, and most PCs were in the big picture like most other PCs, and that’s how the world was. But now, we’re in a position where client memory is very nearly as scarce and precious as server memory. Which changes lots of things.

For now, is all I will add.

More pain. Ran into [m2e-users] Introducing new dependency from code is broken. Feature gone. Pity.

Now on the other hand, I'm not loving cygwin so much at the moment. I upgraded my install for the first time in months, and suddenly git-gui is borked. Previously it worked without needing to fire up an X server - I always presumed there was enough magic somewhere to make it all work.

Suddenly, no go. This is the only discussion I could find, which told me that it needs an X server to work. I tried that, and it does work, but it's dog slow, the default window manager ain't great, and I really don't want to waste time fiddling with X, etc etc. Disappointed.

How nice to use a tool that just does the right thing with excellent results. I normally type up my assignments using LaTeX, but I needed to send a waaay overdue assignment to a lecturer pronto. Given the time constraints I scrawled out the solutions and scanned the pages to pngs.

I thought it was going to be a nightmare to get the pages converted and sized into a single pdf. Enter ImageMagick, which generated a perfect-resolution pdf using a simple

convert q*.png myassignment.pdf

Thank you ImageMagick, you rock.

Each year I do a review of what I've done technically. 2010 wasn't that exciting, 2011 even less. I think my pet projects stagnated in March. Between studies and a busy year at work, I did next to nothing tech-wise at home. Mostly because of time, but partly just being all coded out from work.

Work is where the interesting stuff has been, as usual I don't talk too much about that. I've gotten my fingers a little dirtier with Python, though it's still largely a case of Google-on-one-screen-code-on-the-other when cranking out scripts. Python is great to get stuff done quickly, but I still prefer Java for heavy lifting.

I'm not going to bother about 2012 goals yet, that kinda depends on how exams go. If exams don't go well it's going to be more of the same. Even if they do go well, after the past year, there's a good chance 2012 will be spent playing computer games and little else. Then again, I'm sure I've said that before...

I ran into the bug discussed in this Stack Overflow post: Why do some floating point numbers appear with a trailing 0?

A ten year old bug only fixed in Java 7.

The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix

I finally got around to upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04, and finally got to see why people got so worked up about Unity. Maybe it's great for new users but for me, no thanks. I like the idea of the menu bar at the top of the screen - that was a cool feature from the old Apple Macintosh world, but the big buttons and search box et al - not for me. Switched back to Gnome classic quick-spot.

Apparently Linux Mint is where it's at these days.

It's been a decade and a half since I got my first login to a Linux box, so it's hardly a revelation, but Unix rocks. Every day I find new ways in which it rocks.

I'm enjoying Python.