Blogging Ottinger (tim)

So I’m browsing and I get a popup that says a trojan was detected, then my browser went full-screen and the attached image appeared.I would have been afraid, except there were two mistakes.

The first mistake is that firefox doesn’t allow you to eliminate the borders of a window (at least the way I have it configured) so I could see it was in a browser and not my desktop. If I were an IE user, it might have convinced me it was my desktop. With FireFox, I wasn’t impressed. I could tell. Lesson #1: use open source, or at least use browsers that allow you to configure your javascript more intelligently.

The second mistake is that my desktop couldn’t possibly look like that. I don’t have a C: drive. Or a D: drive. Or a “Shared Documents” folder. Or “My Documents” folder. Nor the blue ’system tasks” bit. My computer runs Linux, and so all my hard drives look like a single big file system rooted at “/” instead of “C:”. Also, although the various Unixes have allowed spaces in filenames for decades, Unix users don’t use spaces in filenames. It’s considered uncouth to make people wrap quotation marks around file and folder names. We can, we just don’t. Lesson #2, use open source, or at least Linux.

Maybe some day a jerky attacker like this may put up an attack versus linux machines, but we all have custom desktops, themes, backgrounds, window control themes, and the like. Would the jerk write it against Gnome? KDE? OpenBox/FluxBox? XFCE? What? Another advantage to having more choices is that it’s harder for bad guys to predict.

Nice try, no buy, goodbye bad guy.

The origin… from Agustin Eguia on Vimeo.

One really cool tablet netbook with 10-15 hour battery life. Has ARM processor instead of the standard Atom processor. It has a touchscreen (as tablets do). It is open to several operating systems, though it ships with its own flavor of Linux. Sam Hart mentioned it to me, so I mention it to you.

Everything is amazing.

Windows lacks a package manager. If you want to work in windows, you have to find and install all your software yourself. Each program has a different installer, and there is no batch mode. Search, find, download, double-click, run, click boxes, click-click-click, accept licenses, click, and finally you have the first program of 18 you actually need. Lather, rinse, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Sometime tomorrow you’ll be doing some actual work if you still have the energy for it.

Holy cow, this sucks.

Debian/Ubuntu Linux have a really good package manager. For just about any software, you ask for the program you want and it pulls down the most recent versions it knows about and installs all the bits your software depends upon. You can install with any number of gui or command-line clients. It’s really trivial by comparison. And quick. Did I mention that it’s very fast? With the command line, I can write a script or a line of text and you have software ready to go.

And in Debian/Ubuntu, the software all is updated through the same mechanism. Not through one mechanism per source. It is so effortless for the user/consumer.

I don’t know how people think that windows is easy and linux is hard. I think the opposite.

Where to get your installer cd.

You just have to read this for yourself.

This seems so sad. I suppose have trouble imagining that people have that much trouble with Linux when they bounce between windows versions, play station, game cube, Palm, and so many other operating systems in the course of a year. Especially when I have seen so many people switch over with so little difficulty.

I have seen people have some trouble. Of course, the comments under the article also says that the linux versions are not being installed well. Given any bad installation of any operating system I would want to give it up. My phone has windows mobile on it, and I can’t tell if it’s not installed well or whether it’s not a very nice operating system to work with. Of course, I am not returning it just because the OS is too clicky for navigation and a bit squirrely to operate.

I think that I would love to have a Linux phone and I would love a Linux netbook. Maybe they’ll make the returned merchandise available to us and I can stick Ubuntu light on it.

I’m looking at setting up a new blog for my professional musings, so that this blog remains a random life blog. I will move my more popular papers to the new location and blog all the work-related, agile, TDD, Python, management, etc to that location.

I’m having trouble with personal branding here. Do I make the name include “agile”, or “object” or what? Do I just call it TimOttingerBlog? Agile Otter? What is too whimsical and what is too bland?

Please drop me some feedback, and let me know what you think.

Agile Otter is the new blog.

I find that not everyone was born using bash, and sometimes people are surprised at some of the little tricks that we old guys have been using for years. Here is one little tip:

Sometimes you have to do something that is just too large for a command line. In some cases, it’s better if you can fire up some editor and make the commands “just right” before firing them.

You can simply type ‘fc’ and (provided you set FCEDIT or EDITOR) you’re immediately editing your last command in your favorite editor.

Better yet, lets say you have a bunch of files you have to manipulate. You can one one of them by hand using the usual trial-and-error technique and then use ‘fc’ to pull it up the successful command in the editor. You can open a separate pane into your directory listing (or in a vim variant you can do “!ls”. Now you can easily repeat all the commands for every other file you need to manipulate. When you exit the editor, your commands will execute as if you just typed them in one-at-a-time. Only much faster.

If the commands to manipulate the first file spans many lines, use the history command to spot the range of lines. If it runs from roughly line 480 to line 520, type ‘fc 480 520′ and then edit out any unwanted lines (syntax errors, etc). You can even save the contents into a separate file to use as a script.