Quickie thoughts and links.

Posted on Tuesday, October 01, 2002 03:09 AM

Hi! Welcome to October! Here's some quickie thoughts for the evening. All in one big long post so I don't have to battle with my FTP client for bandwidth.

I wish there was a more condensed version of Redhat. With just the cool stuff and not all the extras. A one CD distrib. I know, I know, everyone has a different idea of what cool is, but 3 CDs is a lot to download. It's going to take me two days to get it all down if I'm lucky! At least Redhat has a clue and the size of the .isos are under 650meg... Mandrake made me go out and find 700+ size CDs to burn their distrib. I'm going to be happy returning to Redhat, actually. I tried out Mandrake and I liked it, but after Scott's vicious attack and some other stuff I've read I think it'll be better to use "the standard". Actually, my first Linux install was my server running Redhat 6.1... It never gave me any trouble and was up for over two years without coming down on it's own (flaky California power is another thing...). There's really no reason to switch and this version of Redhat seems to be getting praise. We'll see...

According to Dave's blog, Roller is on the list of competitors to Skribe, another Java journaling app with an dot-com business model (MiniBlog didn't make the cut it seems...) Sounds fine to me, but don't these guys REALIZE you can't use that quote from Jobs until you actually deliver your product? Sheesh. Amateurs. Dave was thinking their business model might be what I need:

Hey Russell, this might be the ticket! Pull an all-nighter, add premium categories to MiniBlog, and fund your trip to Esther Dyson's big-blowout in Berlin. "Want to know how I feel about lawyers? Just enter your credit card number and hit the submit button."
Nice. It'd be kinda neat if someone wanted to pay me to blog... but I'm not sure I'd like the pressure. I used to be a journalist in a long-past life. deadlines and me never meshed well (as you can tell from my coding deadlines...). It requires a discipline I never had.

Actually, I was just thinking about adding another feature to MiniBlog today: I have this running todo list that I'm always mailing to myself from my email account from work. It'd be nice that after I log into my weblog, my picture would be replaced by a blog-owner-only todo list and calendar. All private, but it'd be a nice organization tool for me. But no new features for MiniBlog until I get off my ass on my other projects. Procrastination has gripped me and isn't letting go, so I've got to be firm.

Hey, Ugo and his wife have lost 3kgs in the past couple weeks on the Atkins! Yeah! And fell less hungry too! Woohoo! Did I tell you or what? It really works.

Did I ever mention Chris Kelly? He's an expat blogger in Sofia, Bulgaria! He sent me kind words about my blog and some advice on Linux stuff... He's been trying to download Mandrake 9.0 without much success due to the rain. Oof. I can't imagine what the telecom infrastructure is like there.

Another expat-blogger, Kief, is no longer an expat blogger!! Kief's working in London now! Woah! What happened? He was in Turkey and then *poof* he's now hanging out in England marveling at all the bandwidth at his new job... Kief is an American with a British wife, so I'm not sure if being the U.K. counts as being "expat" or not. I think you get 1/2 expat points for being in another country that speaks your own language. There are still cultural differences, but it's not like you need to memorize 16 verb tenses to talk to your wife about your day at work. Kief thoughts on being back in London:

...living in London is like going to college, drinking beer is a constant, with frequent nights of getting shitfaced. Brits buy pints of beer in rounds, so if you don't keep up with their pace and aren't careful your pints will queue up. It may take me a while to get back up to speed.
Yep, that reminds me of hanging out with Irish expats back in San Francisco. There'd always be 2 or 3 (literally) full pints in front of me at all times. Man what is it about the people on those islands? I guess if I had to live in that climate I'd be an alcoholic too...

Speaking of bad climates... Madrid had 3 days of good weather, but that's it from now until May. Cold, grey and wet from here on in. I've GOT to find an excuse to live somewhere else. Ana's talking about 3 bedrooms in the North part of Madrid (where we were taking a pleasant walk on Sunday) and that's starting to frighten me.

I wonder what Kief feels like being back in an English speaking country again. It must be so odd. I've been here since April 2000... it's a long time. (For the story about why I'm in Spain, check out my About Me page. I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever be go back home again and be happy.

-Russ

46% down....

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If you're bloggin' you ain't workin'

Posted on Tuesday, October 01, 2002 11:47 PM

And that's me right now... so I'm going to get to it. The in-laws are up in the city for a bit and they just left. The kid's on his new schedule, so he's in the crib (we're listening to him talk to himself as he falls asleep right now on the monitor).

Thoughts:

If you're looking for some icons, there's the "standard" Java icons. and then there's the amazing Gnome ones by Jakub Steiner. Kick-ass.

Please god, someone post to Simpleface.org besides me.

There's a nice Swing tutorial on Sun's site. I wish I could learn better via a web page, but I think it's just practice as always. Eventually I'll learn how to learn online. Until then, I just ordered The Weblogic Server Bible from Amazon.co.uk in preparation for my new job. I saw a decent review of it on Slashdot (without many negative thoughts in the comments) so I decided to get it to help me grok Weblogic.

There are three states of understanding for me: Bewilderment, Familiarity and Groked. The last being total understanding... it's from a book somewhere that I never read, but I like the term.

Man, Raible (who's Matt to no one except his mother it seems) has a nice bandwidth. I only was able to download Redhat 8.0 disc 1 last night. I was thinking MAYBE it'd be done before I went to bed which is why I started it early, but nope. So that's why I'm not starting downloading tonight until just before I go to bed. Disc 2 tonight and Disc 3 on Wednesday evening... I'll be ready to play with Redhat by next weekend. :-) (Maybe Jeremy's mirror will help a bit... )

Is it just me, or is Charles preaching to the choir? I love OrionServer. It kicks ass... but no one I've ever applied with has said to me that it was a good thing I knew about it. Right now JBoss doesn't pay the bills. It'll be a while yet before it does.

Jeff's talking to me, I can tell:

My biggest problem is that it is all talk. No code makes for a very dead open source project. I learned this the hard way with FreeBuilder. All I did on that project flap my trap. If I had instead focused on code, there might have been a much different outcome. Worst case, I would have much better Swing Java skills.
Damn, alright! Alright... I'm getting off my ass RIGHT NOW. Hot code coming your way (which is where the title of this post came from. I'm typing as fast as I possibly can to get back to coding).

Here's a good example of just that. Henri just published his personal code library - very nice. I downloaded another Java blogger's personal library the other day too. Who's was it? Now I can't find it... urgh! It had a Splash-screen I thought was useful...

Is anyone paying attention to O'Reilly's Mac Conference? Seems like lots of good stuff... wish I was 1) There 2) A Mac owner. (Oh, hey... it looks like Jeremy is blogging it. Rock on! Hey, speaking of O'Reilly - the new Safari was launched and it's as good as their email said it was going to be. I'm psyched... going to use it a lot more now.

Greg's wondering why I dislike Canadians. Because they suck? (I'm sure I've ranted before about Canadians and other English speakers on this blog before... you can do a search on it. No reason to rant again until I'm really into it).

Hey! I like Greg's yet-to-arrive new computer... I want one! But how much? I couldn't find any prices on that site...

Kief says he's still an expat. Yeah. Right. Pah! (Oh, and his wife is from Turkey! I was assuming a bit too much from one of his posts... Sorry Kief!)

Jabber's got a new website and logo... hmmm. All these "J" references are going to mess me up. (via Raible).

Niel's got another PersonalBlog user! Yeah! I've been meaning to help Niel out getting his source code onto SoureForge. It's a PITA... you have to get SSH set up with your CVS and on Windows, that can be a challenge. Ugh.

Whew. Done. Like 1/2 hour... could've been worse.

-Russ

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