Category Archives: Computing

My thoughts and works in computing and programming.

Grey Clouds, Sunny Outlook

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I get into the office really early in the morning. These past fews I normally got greeted with a dark sky and street lights. Each day the sunrise earlier. But each day the sun would rise, brilliant lines of yellow, orange, red and pink would form across the skyline. In the distance the CN tower, banking towers and skyscraper condominiums would cut dark silhouettes into the brilliant sunrise.

Today I see the dark grey dramatic underbelly of clouds stretching across the sky. The morning greyness feels even greyier under this ceiling of cloud.

Today I am in a cheerful mood. Two more days until my work project changes. A few more tasks and I’ll be able to write my novel without interruption. I also finished reading the book I wanted to finish before the end of Lent. Kubuntu Linux has infested my work laptop. The new upcoming release of Jaunty (9.04) feels and looks amazing. Everything works out of the box, even the webcam and the Bluetooth mouse. Finally I’ll be able to catch up on correspondences. And start working on learning Qt and maybe a natural language (French or Italian?).

An Encore

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I didn’t update my blog yesterday.  Life turned out busier than I could imagine.  I am still catching up on things.  I took on so many tasks.  I have a trip to plan.  Writing and reading just piles up around me.  I’m not sure in which direction I should concentrate my efforts.  My efforts to catch up look comical at times.  And my only wish is that I too like those Hindu gods, could possess extra sets of arms and infinitely divideable attention, so I could actually finish everything.  Yet, with all the additional emotional chaos in my life, I still manage to move forward.  In the past, I would of just curled up and moaned myself to sleep.  Today I no longer have that luxury, I need to execute my plans and execute them well.

So a quick update is in order.

Writing

I’m still maintaining my daily blog entries.  Not a simple task at times, I keep on scrunging around for topics to write about.  I’m not sure how my PWC friend, Marika manages to update her blog twice a day and still find time to write books.  I’m marking her as yet another example of the craziness, creativity and sheer amazing output that Finns are capable of.  My own novel writing ground to a halt.  Too many distractions and too many random tasks are to blame here.  However, the novel is moving towards an iteration of an earlier novel idea and elements from other ideas.  I plan on dredging up those previous stories, modifying them to fit the theme and context of this novel.  It’ll probably end up looking like a post-apoc scifi “Jungle Book” of sorts.  If you can get that around your head, great, now help me understand it! 😀

Coding

I’m changing gears at work, so hobby programming is not on my list of high priorities at the moment.  I plan on getting back to Qt as soon as the rest of my life falls into place.  Also I’m holding back from contributing to the KDE and maemo projects for a bit.  I do need a bit more motivation to get involved.  Many using the platforms more often will make that happen.  But still need a working IT before I can even think about developing for maemo.

Life

Learning to feel at home driving.  Cellphone enroute.  Things starting to fall into place.  I just need more time, to get everything done.  Working on bring some sanity and regularity into my life.  This should help on the health side, cut down on giddiness, increase productivity and increase self-satisifaction.  With the warmer weather coming, I plan on getting out there more often.  So projects might need tabling until I have more time.  And a big thing is a planned trip, which will resolve certain important and nagging questions in my mind.

Forced Update

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Ugh…  I feel so tired this early in the morning.  Normally I enjoy mornings.  My best thinking happens in the morning.  Today I feel comatose.  So Marika, if you think that you are the only one whose brain goes on vacation for the weekend… guess again.  This new entry probably comes off as forced.  But I’m willing to suffer for my art. 🙂

Friday’s Latin Mass was pretty fun.  Pretty confusing, and I got lost after the first few moments.  I’m a bit disappointed in what was supposed to be the introduction to the mass.  It came off as “Most of you never experienced a Latin Mass.  And since the Pope is talking about it…  Well then here, enjoy!  And lets discuss afterwards!”.  Clearly a very informative introduction.  I hoping this leaving people in the dark, was mostly a sign of incompetence and not maliace.  I’m not complaining about the people helping to organize the mass.  Many of my friends and acquaintances took part in getting this mass off the ground.  But I’m not sure what kind of meaningful discussion can one have after sitting blankly, trying to follow along.  And the people who are familiar with Latin masses already have an opinion, so why even bother mentioning a discussion in that case?  Still I found it worthwhile to attend that mass, and I enjoyed meeting up and talking with friends afterwards.

The rest of the weekend went by in a “meh” sort of way.  Mostly work at home.

No real work on my writing.  Other than the realization, that I could recycle ideas from a previous attempt at a novel.  This will change the plot of the novel a bit, but not the general theme.  And the older work, which was supposed to consist of short stories in a larger overarching story will work well for this novel.  In fact you can say this novel will be the distilled ideas that I’ve toyed with for over 5 years.  I’m hoping the final product will turn out as amazing.

Also my Internet Tablet officially died this weekend.  So sad.  Glad it is still under warranty.  I miss that gadget already, it proved quite useful and usable.  I managed to extract all the information I needed from the device.  I’ll call Nokia for support sometime today.

Also disassembled two laptops yesterday.  And assembled my old one back again.  Interesting how the design of different machines is similar but with enough difference that components aren’t easily replaceable from one machine to the other.

Of Clouds and Computing

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Cloud computing is one of Silicon Valley’s current obsessions. So is defining what Web 2.0 and how number of eyeballs magically translate into number of dollars. The promise of cloud computing seems to be always available web applications. Applications that automatically scale inside the cloud depending on load and need. The cloud being a vast network of servers, massively redundant in number and by geographic distribution. The theory being that if you run an application on the cloud, you will also be able to use this application and get to your data anywhere at anytime. And you can do so regardless of how many users use the same cloud or application, even if part of your cloud gets clobbered when a small asteroid annihilating the city where part of your datacentre was in.

At the moment, only Amazon offers its servers’ capabilities as a true cloud computing platform. Also you can build your own, if you have the financial clout to do so. Various vendors offer various tools for monitoring, deploying to and even developing all inside a “cloud”. But for the most part, cloud computing is a buzzword that brings together wide-eyed engineers and ambitious businessmen.

Still we are a long way from the dreams proposed by Charles Stross in his book Accelerando. We still need to build out a global multi-vendor cloud that spans the globe. And thankfully we do not have to fear the cloud turning into a physical nano-engineering solar system consuming matroska brain filled with aggressive hyperintelligent posthuman AIs. Fear not the cloud computer. Yet.

A Quest for Easy Multiblog Setup

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One of the downside of sporting the ‘Y’ chromosone, is the tendency to setup new kit without reading instructions.  In my case a similar thing happened with my sites.  I bought a domain and hosting.  Then I installed Drupal hearing all the wonderful things I heard about Drupal. What I didn’t do was research to find out installing Drupal on GoDaddy could be problematic.  And that Drupal is complicated to setup exactly how you want to.  Also it turns out that Drupal is a pain to maintain.  At least  for me it seems that way.

Maybe the problem is because I am writer.  As a writer I tend to view in the lens of literature.  World history becomes a story, the Internet looks awfully like a multimedia capable library and all my websites morph into glorified blogs.  I just can’t wrap my head around on WHY I actually need a CMS.  I fought around with Drupal to get to look not half arsed.  And then I installed WordPress for my blog and everything… just… worked!   Out of the box.  No questions asked.  No fiddling around with .htaccess files.  No monkeying around for modules just to do something useful.

Now I plan on transitioning my stealth project sites to WordPress.  However I don’t want to handle multiple installations.  A separate installation for my own personal blog is fine.  But not for a separate installation for each project.  Especially since all of my self-hosted projects will actually stem from one central project/system.  I looked at WordPress MU but it looks too complicated to setup and maintain.  I’m trying to avoid hacks if possible.  But the WP Hive module/plugin looks promising.  I’ll keep you updated on how things progress.

Notes: Excuse if some of my thoughts seem cryptic.  Those in the know will understand why I can’t speak plainly about my upcoming projects.  Those who don’t know will find out later, once I’m ready to announce my ideas to the rest of the world.  And dear GoDaddy admins, fear not.  I am not going to start a massive blog network on this hosted space.  I just need a single tidy installation to run a few very related websites with different domains.  So please don’t swing Thor’s ban hammer at my account. 🙂

A New Era in UNIX Timestamps

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If you haven’t heard it already, today the UNIX timestamp rolls over 1234567890.  Apparently that is how many seconds  have past since the beginning of the UNIX time epoch: January 1, 1970.  So get your geek on, and party like it is… well… 1234567890 seconds since January 1, 1970.

The Story of the GNU

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Last Thursday I received a package from the Free Software Foundation (FSF).  Along with a nifty t-shirt, I ordered my stuffed gnu.  Now the penguin on my desk has a new friend. The reason for the penguin is obvious, I am big fan of the GNU/Linux operating system. The penguin is the de facto logo and mascot of Linux.  But what is up with the gnu?

Well before Linux got off the ground or even existed, Richard Stallman (RMS) started the GNU project.  GNU stands for GNU is Not UNIX. Yes, GNU is a recursive acronym, one of the many cute jokes circulating in the hacker community.  The goal of the GNU project was to build a working and totally free (as in freedom) operating system.  RMS settled upon porting UNIX, not because UNIX was the be-all-end-all of operating systems.  Rather older versions of UNIX came with source code, and so that the new OS could be based off studying the way the old System V UNIXes  worked.  The project progressed well with the development of an entire toolkit: source editor (EMACS), compiler (gcc), linker (ld), and all the other necessary tools to build an OS.  Then came the difficult part of writing a kernel.  Unfortunately the original kernel (GNU Hurd) never got off the ground.  In fact to this day, the Hurd kernel is more or less in delayed development.  Fortunately at the time a kid in Finland-Linus Torvalds-started hacking on a kernel based off the Andrew Tannebaum’s MINIX source code.  Torvalds decided that the GPL would be an excellent license for his kernel.  And thus the dream of a fully viable free operating system started.

We have come a long way since those humble beginnings.  GNU/Linux looks like it will be the dominant OS of this century.  Also the ideals of free software are now fully realizable.  We still have a long way to go to running free software conveniently and comfortably, but we are getting there.  We should thank RMS and all the GNU contributers for building such a great free software toolkit.  Also thank Linus and the other kernel hackers for creating such a robust and flexible kernel.  Finally give a big thank you to all the contributers of the free software and open source movements for making this dream of free computing a reality.

Wubi, How Much I Miss You

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Dual-booting on a Vista machine turned out to be a really, really bad idea. At least when you are trying NOT to kill Vista in the process. Now cleaning out GRUB, reinstalling Vista’s MBR and re-extending all the partitions is in order. The number of hoops one needs to jump through, especially if you don’t have Vista install media is incredible. I personally tried deleting my GNU/Linux partition, then installing it again. Then I tried running Super Grub Disk to get my Vista MBR back. But that failed. So instead I downloaded and ran EasyBCD and rewrote my MBR that way.  EasyBCD unfortunately is not libre software, but it does a wonderful job of making the Vista experience less painful.

After that could I remove the GNU/Linux partition via my Wubied installed of Kubuntu. All that is left is for me to re-extend the main partition when I get around to it.  I’m NOT going to do that again.

So advice to anyone wanting to run Ubuntu GNU/Linux and NOT kill your Vista install for whatever reason, go the Wubi route. Always go the Wubi installer route, it will save you a lot of hassle. You the additional advantage that you can always uninstall Ubuntu GNU/Linux if you need to.

The New “Mojave” Experiment

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I have a few friends working at Microsoft.  And a usual conversation goes in the direction of which is better Microsoft or Linux.  Then the flames roll in from across the horizon, and everyone ends up agreeing in disagreeing.  I’m planning to bring this fight to the next level. With any luck this will end up on the Linux Hater’s Blog. So in valiant attempt at freetard glory and to fire the next salvo in this eternal epic battle, I present the following:

The link to the original ZDNet Austrialia article is [here].  From this video we learn that: KDE 4 kicks ass (thanks KDE and Qt devs), Aussie geeks also have a sense of humour, people like flashy, swirly things, Windows 7 soooo ripped off KDE 4, and that we can learn absolutely nothing from silly experiments.

justCheckers on Hold – Again – Kinda

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justCheckers logo

justCheckers logo

I’m putting my involvement with the justCheckers project on hold for a while.  Progress ground to a halt when I started to dig into the code.  In its current state most of the application’s core functionality needs reworking.  Meaning to go forward someone would need to reimplement slides and jumps that allows for multiple jumps and so-called “flying kings”.  And the GUI needs refactoring to run in a multithreaded manner and with a main game event loop.  I already devised the algorithms for the core game engine.  But I need to translate that into real code.  I plan on implement those eventually.  But the amount of effort to reward doesn’t add up at the moment for me.  So justCheckers will not be on my high priority list for the next little while.

Just to be clear, I am not abandoning the project.  I still want to work on it.  But there are higher priorities on my list.  If anyone wants to step up to the plate and massage the code, I’ll gladly help.  And when once I get my other higher priority tasks done, I will return to hacking on justCheckers.