Please close my account. I've grown tired of the fluff that seems to make up Raph, and the constant bullshitting and crying by ChipX86, and the "I'm no longer a corporation, I'm Super Man" type of horse dung being flung about by Michael Crawford. I hope you boys keep playing with your worthless technology, and have fun racing to dictionary.com's Thesaurus in search of more filler for your .... eh'hem.... blogs :) Advogato.org sucks, it's slow, and it's a waste of the digital space.
Today has been a wonderful one, sort of :) Read on! No, it wasn't me getting to class or anything. My attendance this semester has been awful, I think I am just burned out from college (not like I am close to completing a Bachelor's Degree or anything) and the long drive to the school, which is 55 miles one way. I think physics is interesting, but that hasn't been enough to get me to come to class to hear the professor append this statement to every single thing he says: "sound sensible, it should be". I wish that professor would get off his hight horse and realize that maybe he sounds like a drone. His drawing up diagrams is even worse. I think it's safe to say that most of the students in this course have quit taking notes in class, because he waits until the students have taken a ton of notes, THEN says "you don't really need to know this".
Wait a second, didn't I just say my day has been a wonderful one? Haha! No, really, today I set up a dual-boot of Windows 98 and Linux Redhat 8 on my wife's machine. That's the time I *should* have been in class. :) Everything went pretty well, and I left some notes for her in an opened gedit file, so she can resume doing the few things she always does with the computer (create word docs, surf the net, work on her recipes log). In the notes I didn't mention that she could reboot the machine and log into Windows 98. I wonder if this approach, though a little sneaky, might be better for helping newbies such as myself become acquainted with Linux?
When I got to the college to work my shift as a Computer Lab Assistant, I decided to try and ssh into my box at home. It worked! From there, I ssh'd over to the machine that my wife uses, to edit that note I had left open for her. Hmm, that just reminded. Since, there was already an instance of the note open, maybe she won't see the changes I made to it. If she does, than that is some cool stuff :) My next task will be to see if I can download a large file like an ISO or maybe somethin smaller like the j2sdk, and see if I can burn that file remotely. Already, I have learned that you can't run apps with gui's (or can you?) such as GTK. If not, that is fine with me. What I have going now is very pleasing to me, since that means I can do away with floppy disks and even zip disks, and just copy my college work to the machine at home. Or, rather I can access the home machine and copy the stuff to the machine in the computer lab at the college.
I spent dang near four hours last night getting my path set right so that bash would see the java executable that I wanted it to see, not the first thing it could find (/usr/bin/java). Somewhere along the way, from following the advice of multiple persons, I had messed up the path and created a faulty sym link. And, seeking help online can be very tedious and sometimes perilous. So, I can use the j2sdk1.4.1_01 now. I've always thought that Java was a beautiful language, just the downfalls of it (speed of the jvm, not very low level) turned me off. But, now, having grown a little wiser in my computing years, I'm ready to tackle Java for fun.
I know that a lot of people come to advogato to learn new things in computing, and I didn't offer much of that. Hopefully, though, someone can take what I wrote in light of "pitfalls a linux newbie should watch out for" and maybe write up a document or tutorial on this.
Who would you like to screw you the least?
For all those out there watching the "sniper chase in America" closely, I present this question:
What if the sniper(s) really aren't driving a white van, but are driving a pink YUGO?
I think this whole case shows how messed up law enforcement is, and how the media has the police waving their guns in the dark.
Terrorism at its best, unfortunately, and I don't even think it's really started. Stay tuned.
How do I get involved in a project? I've been to freshmeat.net and sourceforget.net (are the two related or hold the same projects?), and besides the enjoyment I have received from downloading and installing some of the projects (and shaking my head in disgust at some of other borked projects), I have not really gotten a grasp on how to get started reading the source code and possibly submitting patches as time and coding skills improve and permit.
This IS something that I want to do. I've been using Linux far, far more than I do Windows anymore. I really have no use for Windows anymore, except for having to use it at the college or to do something for my wife on that computer. If not for the frustrations in trying to get printing working (my SAMBA skills are shot) on Linux and getting the printing to look presentable at that, there would be no reason for my wife and I to be using Windows.
Some have told me to take a look at CVS (I think), but after going cross-eyed looking at the documentation on that, I still got no where. Having said the above, I wonder this: how in the world does patching really work, anyway? Perhaps an article could go up on advogato about this? For us newbies? If you submit a patch, and it wasn't really to fix a bug but to add what you feel is a cool feature, how does someone else deal with not liking this new feature? The concept of patching confuses me. Or, what happens if you and someone else at the same time download a version of a project and you wind up submitting the same patch as the other person? Won't there be a conflict in submission of the patches?
Lately, I've decided to do away with the arm-tugging of peeps who decide that their programming language of choice is the better one for a newbie to focus on, and have decided that C and C++ are my route. I really feel naive for saying that, because besides scripting languages, there really aren't that many more compiled (or are there?) languages that I could choose from. Anyway, I am enjoying learning C, and am just now ready to tackle pointers and structs. Actually, I am holding off C++ until I feel I have a firm grasp on C++. Baby steps! I don't feel I am going to hired in this area of shortage of programming jobs for a long time anyway, so I have a lot of time!
Later, and be cool :) And, now before anyone goes off writing that "bytesplit is probably playing mind games again", I'm not :)
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