NetworkManager (0.7.0-0.6.7.svn3235) works with WPA security! That’s great news because every time I visited my in-laws I had to use a wired connection. I have been wanting to change their wireless to use WEP so I could connect more easily, but I don’t have to anymore. Kudos to the NetworkManager folks, you’ve made my laptop life that much easier.
I use xargs a lot especially with find. Many times I want to pass the arguments as parameters to the command I’m trying to run with xargs usually somewhere in the middle. Today I found it 
Time for an arbitrary example, this is completely made up to illustrate the point so don’t bother with “why are you using xargs for that comments”. So you want to find .png files that are different in /foobar/tmp and /tmp/.
cd /foobar/tmp; find . -name '*.png' | xargs -n 1 -I imagename diff imagename /tmp/imagename
The -I argument tells xargs to replace the string that follows -I in the command arguments with the values from standard input. This is totally cool, and beats the old way I did things which was to write a simple shell script and call that from xargs
There are many ways to do what I did above, but hopefully folks find this xargs tip useful.
Yesterday I passed the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) exam. I am now officially an RHCE! You can verify it here.
Since FUDCon is in Raleigh this year, I was able to attend this most awesome conference. Max did a great job with the State of Fedora address. He received a standing ovation and introduced the new Fedora project leader, Paul Frields.
Michael Tiemann had the 10:15 slot all to himself as none of the presenters wanted to go up against his talk on Fedora in the Enterprise (this is not a way to replace).
We had BarCamp which is a great model for defining a conference. Typically a conference defines the sessions and times upfront. With BarCamp the session topics are defined at the conference itself. They are placed on the board and everyone chooses what they want to attend. Based on the number of votes determines what rooms they are held in. It’s a great format.
In between volunteer efforts badging folks up to the 3rd floor, I’ve been able to attend a few talks. I went to the revisor talk after lunch. Revisor integrates with cobbler and allows you to create customized distros. I can’t wait to give this a try now. I’m signed up to see Seth’s yum talk as well as Adrian’s FUNC talk.
The one thing I have found out is that I seriously need a laptop. Everyone here has one and it’s very useful. I’m using an old loaner laptop from my department, but I need one for use all the time. 
I released zmugfs 0.1 on October 31st, 2007, but I haven’t done anything else with it since then. I’m overdue for finishing it.
Next up is to add the write mode capability to the file system which will actually allow you to upload your photos to smugmug.com. Here’s a quick list:
Stay tuned for more.
Note to self. The default window manager for GNOME is stored in the following gconf entry:
/desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/default
I had to use this to replace a busted compiz setup on my mom’s Ubuntu installation.
As many of you know already, Red Hat’s CEO Matthew Szulik has resigned as CEO, but will continue on as Chairman of the Board.
Can an airline exec run Red Hat? You’d be surprised
an unexpected turn of events
“The king is dead, long live the king” sounds wrong.
ceo
I’m stuck on Quicken 2002 and have thus neglected using it for almost 2 years. We’ve been managing the household finances the old fashioned way by hand and with the help of online banking.
But I wanted to have a bit more control and a better “view” of where the money goes. So I tried using Quicken 2002 in a virtual instance of Windows XP running on VirtualBox. But Quicken 2002 is just a few years out of date! And the thought of upgrading it just pains me. So I set out to find financial software for Linux.
I started with GnuCash but I was just completely confused with how it treats categories as accounts. The whole double entry accounting just made my eyes water.
Next up I tried Moneydance. I’ve tried it before when I was using OS/2 but it was too “java-y”. Looked out of place. Well, it still looks way out of place with the ugly Metal look and feel of swing. It was easier to get started than GnuCash as it felt more Quicken-like. But I couldn’t get over how ugly the UI was. I know it shouldn’t be about looks, but it was: rm -rf /opt/moneydance.
I thought, “maybe there’s a webapp out there that does this” which led me to CheckItOut a Ruby on Rails application. CheckItOut uses Mysql to store the data and runs using Webrick. But it was a royal pain in the butt to setup. Ruby, Rails, mysql all installed great. CheckItOut even started with a small change to database.yml. But once it was running creating a new account would cause it an error. I started to try to debug it then realized, screw this if I have to debug the app I can’t trust it to keep track of my finances. So out it went.
Next up? Grisbi. It looked promising. Nice GTK look and feel, pretty decent features as well. But I had a hard time using it. I kept tripping over things. So I moved on, though I left it installed just in case.
Gnofin lost purely because it was an older GTK app. It was just too ugly to even bother. I didn’t even get to the download point.
KMyMoney2 was pretty nice. It had one of the nicer feature sets and felt pretty natural to use. I was up and running in no time. But as you probably guessed I like the GNOME look and feel, and I couldn’t get past the ugly KDE candy toy look: yum remove kmymoney2.
Last up was Kapital was one of the better looking apps, IMO. It was the closest to Quicken out of them all. But it wasn’t open source. So it never got to the download state either.
Wow, I ran out of applications. Well, I actually went back to GnuCash. I remembered what a friend told me “learn your tools”. So I decided to sit down and actually learn GnuCash. After about an hour, I got a pretty good grasp on how it works and it is really a great replacement for Quicken. It has the GNOME look and feel which I love, is open source, handles all the accounts I have, imports from OFX and QIF formats as well.
WINNER: GnuCash!
There are times I want to print out a man page or redirect it to a text file for other reasons. Everytime I did man iptables > iptables.txt I got a bunch of control characters.
IPTABLES(IPTABLES(8)N^HNA^HAM^HME^HE iptables - administration tool for IPv4 packet filtering and NAT S^HSY^HYN^HNO^HOP^HPS^HSI^HIS^HS i^Hip^Hpt^Hta^Hab^Hbl^Hle^Hes^Hs [^H[-^H-t^Ht t^Hta^Hab^Hbl^Hle^He]^H] -^H-[^H[A^HAD^HD]^H] chain rule-specification [options] i^Hip^Hpt^Hta^Hab^Hbl^Hle^Hes^Hs [^H[-^H-t^Ht t^Hta^Hab^Hbl^Hle^He]^H] -^H-I^HI chain [rulenum] rule-specification [options]
Well there a nice little utility called col which filters reverse line feeds from input. Go figure. Here’s how to get rid of the noise.
man iptables | col -b Which results in
IPTABLES(
If you redirect the latter to a file, you can print it like any other text file. Enjoy!
As a software engineer, I am usually called upon to be the family tech support person. Under most circumstances I am more than willing to do it and actually enjoy it. At home we have weened off of Windows for almost everything except iTunes. That’s my only weakness as I like how easy it is to buy songs and put them on my iPod.
Friday, I had to fix a printing issue with my mom’s laptop. I tried to help over the phone but it is too difficult to do. The printer would print from the media card but not the computer. Turns out there were almost 30 print jobs stuck in the queue. I removed them all and the printer worked again. Not quite sure what the problem was, but it worked. As I’m writing this I completely forgot to open up the VNC port for remote debugging oh well next visit. I forgot to mention my mom’s laptop is a Dell 1501 running Ubuntu. It has Windows XP Home installed but we don’t use it at all. Ubuntu meets all of her computing needs. Also, it’s not one of the Dell Ubuntu laptops either, we bought it before that happened.
My father-in-law was having some serious computer issues with his machine, a Shuttle XPC with an Athlon XP 2600+, 40GB hard drive, nVidia onboard video and 512 MB RAM. Not a speed machine but still very usable, well it should be considering Liz’ PIII 733 with 512MB ram ran just fine until I upgraded it.
So the problem with his machine was, well, it had TOO MUCH SHIT on it. The 40GB drive had about 100MB free. I have no idea how that can get full since he does email, word processing and music. Plus the machine ran slow as molasses. I mean slower than the PIII 733 I mentioned earlier. First thing was to backup his data to a portable Western Digital 80GB Passport. I then removed unused programs. I found 7 versions of Java installed 1.4.1, 1.5.0, 1.6.0 plus updates of each taking up 800MB alone. This was NOT his fault, but the way Java updates itself on Windows. This is one place Linux shines.
There were 4 media players: WINAMP, Windows Media Player, Musicmatch, and iTunes. There was a Spanish version of Microsoft Office 2003 Small Business edition including SQL SERVER! Windows Live OneCare and Mcaffee anti-virus suite, and a bunch of other crap.
What makes me annoyed is not that fact that he asked me to help him with his computer because I like doing it. It’s WINDOWS! That’s what I really hate. Data files and config files are scattered everywhere. No easy way to get a list of the programs installed or to uninstall them, especially if the uninstaller gets corrupted. Above all Windows is a pain in the @$$ to install as well.
I can re-install a Fedora Linux based machine in a couple hours. I backup /etc, /home, and rpm -qa to get a list of the software. I then install Fedora, setup livna repos, yum install the missing packages I need after a fresh install, then rsync back /home, and any /etc configuration I may need (usually not much). DONE! FINITO! FINIS!
Windows? Um, that’s just a hellish process. Install Windows XP with SP1 (part one of the problem). Install drivers for hardware (usually several CDs worth), create users, download software from different places (no repositories like Linux), connect to Windows Update a bazillion times to get all of the proper updates, install other software from CD, copy back data that was backed up and hope we got it all, reconfigure all user settings as that wasn’t backed up. Not to mention the bazillion reboots required in the process.
In the process I mention how easy it was to setup Linux and he asked if I could set him up with it. I declined because there are some programs he has that won’t run on Linux like LESSONmaker, iTunes, and many others. I know I should be spreading the Linux word, but I knew there were some problems I couldn’t solve easily for him.
This got me thinking, so who is the Linux target market? In my opinion there are two types of users that make great Linux users: 1) folks like my mom who are new to computers 2) power users who understand how computers work and don’t mind tinkering. The hardest people to switch to Linux are those that “know enough to be dangerous”. Because they buy or use esoteric software off the shelf that have no equivalent solutions in Linux, do lot’s of media i.e. music playing, downloaded, etc with their Windows PCs, or don’t have the patience to tinker. This is a difficult segment to crack.
After almost 4 hours of dealing with Windows, I gave up and brought the machine to my house to try again without any time pressures. Maybe I’ll install VirtualBox or VMware with a Linux image so he can try out Linux to see how it works for him. It would certainly make my life easier to deal with Linux than Windows.
Even with this ordeal I’ll still keep helping him with any computer woahs, not just because he’s family, but because I still like computers and tinkering.
