Older blog entries for mrcsparker (starting at number 89)

Voting In Texas

Okay - I need to post this information somewhere so that if someone is voting in Texas and is unsure where to find info he/she will get this in google.

Call this number to check voter registration: (713) 368-VOTE

Check this address to find out where to vote (this is for Harris County in Houston):

http://scotthochberg.com/ziplist.html

Thanks. Hope this helps someone in the future.

Jabberd 2

I have written two patches to Jabberd 2. One for imap auth and the other for sqlite support. Sqlite support is currently kind-of borked but as soon as I finish a big project I promise to finish it up. Promise.

Python

I have been reading the threads on Python/Mono/Java. I have been learning Python and it is refreshing. Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems like the one language that actually considers itself a tool and not the one-and-only-true-language. In the book that I have been learning from it shows how to write extensions in C - and it seems simple and natural.

Plus, the idea of every file being a module is pretty darn beautful. Still trying to get my head around the syntax, though. Years of programming in c-like languages has really retarded my ability to grow.

Ltunes, Lphoto

I downloaded and ran Linspire's Ltunes and Lphoto on my Gentoo box. They do not really live up to the hype. The interfaces of Ltunes looks like Rhythmbox/Juke and the interface of Lphoto looks like just about any photo management application out there. I am not sure why they are spending the time developing these two products when the alternatives are more mature.

RHAS 3

I finally got RHAS 3 in for my Itanium 2 box. HP might not be high on my list, but Red Hat rocks. I love up2date and the whole rhn.redhat.com site. Not sure if it is the Itanium 2 or RHAS but the box is really, really fast. Have not had time to really do benchmarks, but we are going to get in a few running HP-UX (uhh) so I will have a better idea in a few weeks.

Hewlett Packard Itanium 2 and Red Hat Advanced Server 3

Okay, I am getting frustrated. Red Hat Advanced Server 3 was supposed to be released for HP Itanium 2 last Friday and I just found out it is now (maybe) going to be released this Friday (maybe). I keep getting different answers and I am fed up. I have a server sitting in the back collecting dust and I am stuck with it.

I should have gotten a Sun Opteron.

This was just a test system to see how the Itanium 2 servers are, and after a few months of dicking around I have no clue how well the Itanium 2 works. We are not going to be ordering any more, though, due to the crappy quality of HP customer service. I wish that I could just get a clear answer. I would use Advanced Server 2.1, but I am being told that 3 is coming out "real soon".

Plus, the box was supposed to come with raid installed, and it came in another box. The card hardly fit in the server.

My advice to anyone looking at the Itanium 2 - unless you have a direct phone to Carly, look elsewhere.

company I think that the biggest hurdle GNOME has is the poor state of developer documentation creates a high level of entry. There is not one place that I can go to find current documentation.

By the way, I am not trolling. This has been confirmed - for me at least - when I did the KDE KDevelop tutorial this morning. The KDE docs are fantastic - second only to the PHP docs. I avoided KDE for years, not liking Qt's pseudo C++, but it is too well written and well-integrated to pass up.

Yea, I know that I am not a big-time developer around here. I have posted patches here and there where I have found problems. I still like Free Software development and I really wish that GNOME would stop worrying about C#/Java and just write good documentation. The GNOME language bindings are great, but there is no consistant way to develop Python/C/C++/Perl GNOME programs. Anjuta is very cool, but every time I developed applications with Anjuta/libGlade I would find out that Glade was using deprecated widgets.

Please, someone correct me. I would like to know that I am wrong.

After using GNOME for two years, I decided to emerge KDE on my system this weekend. The reason being is I have been looking through the KDE source code for various projects here and there and I have been very impressed by the thought that went into designing such a large system. Everything is so well integrated and "just works" the way that it should. 3.2 is also hella fast.

There are some little inconsistancies in KDE, like some of the settings tools marked "Configuration" and some marked "Properties". The dialogs also have way too many options IMHO and when I open most apps it is a bit overwhelming to have so many options in the default dialog. I also miss the Ximian icons, and the beautiful Industrial theme.

KDE is excellent, though, and I plan on sticking to it. After two days I can honestly say that my productivity has gone up by using it.

Also, the documentation is excellent. The GNOME documentation leaves a whole lot to be desired and much of it is out of date.

The HP Way

Just got my new Itanium 2 server in from HP last week. Of course, it is not being used and there is no operating system even loaded on it. Right now it is just collecting dust in the server room.

I ordered a small, dual-processor, 2 gigs of ram, raid pci card (etc...) box to run Red Hat Advanced Server 3. It is pretty much to evalutate running GNU/Linux with our current applications on Itanium rather than RISC. Good enough.

So, I find out a week after I order it that HP is offering Opterons for a lot less. A HP guy came in and told the Unix Administrator that the Itanium 2 is "less proprietary" than the Opteron and that the Opteron is not as good as the might Itanium2. Okay, I figure, we ordered the Itanium 2, I will let this slide knowing that all sales people are pretty much full of shit. By the way, I heard from someone inside of HP that the Opteron announcement was a bit of a mistake.

We get the box in - no Red Hat box, PCI in a box, and missing a couple of parts. Yea! We call HP and find out that they are going to send in an "Installer" to set up the box. It has been about 4 working days and we are yet to hear from the "Installer" after leaving multiple messages.

What crap. And I know that HP is really trying to get more servers in here. Guess what - it is not going to happen. IBM has been much more attentive and we already purchase Thinkpads in the hundreds. Right now we are running our critical systems on HP-UX/PA-RISC and they are going to slowly fade out. HP-UX has been great but it seems like it is in limbo with updates, and Linux is not only getting better every week but it is a hell of a lot more easy to use for developers and users.

So, I have a new system sitting just collecting dust. No word from HP yet and I alot of people that need some processes waiting to be moved to that machine.

Been writing my shell scripts in C. Not sure if they are shell scripts, but they do the same thing as a normal shell script would do. Anyone else do this?

I was writing them in PHP, Perl, or Bash, but I write pretty much the same app in C in the same time. Plus, I don't have to have a manual open in front of me ("How do I do this in BASH... google for it... hmmm") so that I am doing it the "correct" way. I would make a crappy sysadmin.

By the way Muine really rocks hard.

Yeah! Java is not going to be free software

Smart move, Sun. No ANSI, no ISO, and now no code. Sure, but you have to JCP, which is almost like a standard - if you look at it sideways and you have no clue what makes a real standard. Dum dum dum dum dum.

Gnome 2.8 Roadmap

Yea. Just read that all of the GUI stuff in GNOME is moving out of GNOME libs and into GTK. Smart move. So no more libgnomeui?

Downtown Houston: 700+ people are getting visas a day to work in Iraq for Haliburton. There are lines going around the block with people waiting so that they can go over. No matter what you feel about this, it is still odd that this is not being considered news-worthy. I haven't seen anything about this on the news, but the lines are there.

In other news, working on focaza. Creating more of an object-like system.