HalfLoaded.com

So, I found a way to download, burn and install Fedora. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal but I’m roaming house to house until Rose and I find somewhere to live. I survived Iraq with Fedora 8 and I really wanted to try out the latest. I really enjoyed 8. It was stable and served me well on my journey.

But, being the geek I am, I couldn’t resist but install the latest and greatest. And, two days later, I have no regrets. I can honestly say that this is the best distribution I have tried. I used Ubuntu 8.10 as soon as I got home to see what had changed on the Debian front. I wasn’t all that impressed. While it operated smooth, it was missing a few bits which I really wanted. It was lacking the latest OpenOffice.org, Mono and Eclipse and it excluded the Empathy IM package which I wanted to try. It also didn’t have a ready-to-go NetBeans installation in its repositories.

There is really nothing much to say about the installation of F10. The installation was smooth and easy. Everything just worked. When it first booted, I noticed an immediate difference. Not only did the boot process look different, it also booted a lot faster than F8. This is due to the inclusion of Plymouth as a replacement for RHGB. I wasn’t sure why it looked so plain though. It was just a black screen with a progress bar across the bottom. After some searching, I found that adding “vga=0×318″ would allow a more graphical boot screen at 1024×768 with 16M colors. After the change and a subsequent reboot, it looked more like one would expect.

I would have to say that the folks working on NetworkManager have done an outstanding job. I didn’t my Kyocera KPC650 Verizon card with me during installation. However, it didn’t matter. I just plugged it in while working from the desktop and NetworkManager detected it and I was able to connect in seconds. This was much smoother than using wvdial or any of the other older methods. It is also considerably better than Windows approach.

After adding all my bits, I found that I didn’t need to reference any documentation to get my system 100%. It just was. Everything was there and working. I did add the RPMFusion repos to yum but this is as simple as clicking on the download on their site. Viola, libdvdcss, gstreamer-ugly, et. al. were all there and ready.

I do have one complaint with Gnome. The default image viewer application is just too simple. It doesn’t offer any photo touch up tools or anything. I really wish the folks at Gnome would begin pushing gThumb as the default. It is fast, lightweight and simple enough to use as the default. Yet, it offers those that want to crop or adjust color the tools necessary to get the job done.

In conclusion, I would recommend F10 to just about anybody. It is as stable as any release I have ever tried. It is also as bleeding edge as they come. Those two rarely come hand in hand. It’s nice to see they got it right with Fedora 10.

I have been flipping between Windows and Linux for quite some time now and I’ve finally decided to stick to Linux for the remainder of my “vacation”. I’ve been looking into object oriented programming for a while. I think it’s time I either get serious about technology or get out of the sector.

Java offers a unique opportunity. Sun has announced plans to open source java and it is beginning to take shape. I think this will help guarantee it will be around a while. On top of that, Java and C# share a lot of similarities so it won’t lock me in to one language for life. I find I actually use more Java based programs than C# based. So, I began looking into learning Java and found that it is a real pain trying to get any software in this part of the world. I plugged in my linux hard drive and found that I already had Eclipse installed (an open source IDE (Integrated Development Environment)). Next thing I knew, I had everything in front of me to begin coding away. The best part is, it is all free. Free as in beer. Free as in speech.

A little searching on the web found a plethora of Computer Science courses related to OOP and Java. And people wonder why I love the internet and open source so much.

I finally got around to the latest version of adumass. This was a major release as it fixed some pretty serious bugs and also greatly improved the UI and backend code. I also added a few functions for data validation. Thanks to all those that have helped and submitted support requests. The next version should have a translation pack for those users that don’t habla englais.

So, I am pleasantly surprised with Fedora 8. This has to be the best release yet. So far, the only thing I am missing is Cinelerra. I’m having some dependency issues with the freshrpms repository so I guess I just need to compile from source. The only other issue I have had is with NetworkManager-vpnc. Removing NetworkManager and reinstalling it form the development tree fixed the issues. I check the changelog and it looks like the fixes should make their way into the tree.

Other than those little things, everything works like a top. I am constantly amazed at the quality of software put out by the community. It’s too bad more people don’t see what OSS does and can do for them. I can’t thank the community enough. With their help, I’m able to do everything I could ever imagine on my pc (and more). They are the ones who have and will be helping me keep in contact with my family while I am deployed to Iraq. Thank you!

I just ran across a great cgi:perl script for running anonymous proxies. Its called CGIProxy. An easy way to find it around the net is to google: nph-proxy. Also, here is a link to the home page for the beta version: CGIProxy Beta.

I was on my daily (actually, more like hourly) visit to slashdot and was amazed when I came across a story mentioning a school I had attended. The story was on the use of Wikipedia as a means for students to submit their research papers. This is one of those things that seems so obvious. Yet, this is the first time I have heard of it. What happens to normal term papers? They get graded, returned to the student and thrown in the recycle bin. If only more educators would embrace open sharing of knowledge and ideas, these type of ideas would be mainstream. There is a real hatred in academia of wikipedia, especially as a source. It always stuck me as odd. The whole premise of what wikipedia is and why it has become a staple in internet society seems to be much of what educators preach. Yet, they seem to scowl at the mention of wikipedia.

A lot of the comments left on Slashdot had some great ideas for educators.

• Have students update wikipedia articles with citations and corrections
• Have students submit articles for peer review by thousands instead of just classmates
• Have students expand on stubs or missing information in articles

The interesting piece of this all is that academia is already required to publish much of their students work in journals. However, journals do not offer the freedoms that wikipedia does. Wikipedia separates rich from poor, haves from have nots. It allows anybody with internet access a portal for finding solid, general information about a subject. It cites references for further research.

My personal belief is that the distaste for wikipedia in academia is not because the information is not factual or inaccurate. It is because students (and people in general) have a hard time deciphering fact from fiction. It takes a certain amount of effort to actually look at something and decide whether the information can be taken for fact or should be looked into further. This is just the same for journals though.

Teachers should spend more time teaching common sense… If that is possible.

So, I am constantly looking for ways of automating tasks. Too many admins do not take advantage of scripting and scheduled tasks/cron. Just this last week, I was implementing a new print server. Besides just building up the new server, I wanted to actually offer the users something new and useful.

I’ve been wanting to setup a network pdf printer for quite some time. I have played around with setting up a network PDF printer using cups. However, we seem to be so MS centric these days that I decided to use PDFCreator’s print server. It was really a piece of cake. Just install the server portion, setup the service, create a share and watch the PDF’s spool.

I quickly found that the folder where PDF’s were written to, was quickly filling with PDF’s as users were not removing them. So, the solution was to write a little vbscript to purge any files older than an hour. There were two things I wanted:

1. I have a file named “!FILES ARE PURGED AFTER ONE HOUR!”. I did not want this file removed. It serves as a warning for uses.
2. I did not want to purge the folder every hour. I wanted to remove any files that were one hour old or greater. That way, if a user creates a PDF at 2:59pm, the 3:00pm run won’t delete it. It will be deleted on or after 3:59pm.

Here is the script I came up with:
[vb]
strFolder = “C:\Folder\”
Set objShell = CreateObject(”Shell.Application”)
Set objFolder = objShell.Namespace(strFolder)
Set objFSO = CreateObject(”Scripting.FileSystemObject”)
For Each strFileName in objFolder.Items
If len(objFSO.GetExtensionName(strFileName)) > 0 Then
Set objFile = objFSO.GetFile(strFolder & strFileName.Name)
If DateDiff(”N”,objFile.DateLastModified,Now()) > 59 Then
objFSO.DeleteFile(strFolder & strFileName.Name),True
End If
End If
Next[/vb]

The great thing about this is that you get a free network PDF printer that can be left alone. Your boss thinks you are a genius and there is no sweat on your brow.

Cheers!