Blogging Ottinger (tim)

Please visit my other blog if you are a pretty contented windows user. I am famously not, but I would like to know how you do it. I have to work in windows by day, and I would like to be happier in those 8+ hours. All comments that are remotely encouraging or useful are accepted. I will only delete “because you suck” comments, and only if they’re not also funny.

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.

Windows is running badly for more people than just me. My linux has issues too (like forgetting to support my webcam that worked fine in the previous version) but at least I don’t have to install a warehouse-worth of products to keep it running smoothly

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.

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 got to be a Mac guy for a few months. I had the nice new Macbook Pro with the 15″ monitor and lotsa ram/disk.

I didn’t become a mac fanboy. I thought the device worked well, and I fell in love with the idea of 5 hours of battery life (which I actually got with the screen dimmed and the wifi turned off). I will never get used to a normal touchpad ever again. I kinda miss the nice Control-Space finder tool.

But I didn’t like installing and upgrading software, and I didn’t have the huge supply of ready-to-install software via ports that I have with the likes of Debian or Ubuntu. The filesystem hierarchy is different (not better) and it was not as much fun to get programming tools into the box. I don’t buy software, so I didn’t try any of the Mac special software that didn’t come with the box.

The UI is quirky and pretty, and the hardware is very nice but it wasn’t enough to win my heart in a few months of use. I actually didn’t like the terminal emulator, and that was a big turnoff. It had some nice UI effects, but I generally turn those off in Linux and Windows (not that I’ve spent any considerable amount of time in Windows in the past 7 years or so).

I think that Mac is a huge improvement if you’re used to Windows or RedHat-based distributions. If you are used to APT then you’ll not find anything nearly as nice in Mac. If you are comfy in XFCE, Gnome, or KDE you might find the apple UI a little annoying. I didn’t like that the UI was not remotable like X (though you can install X on it, just as you can install it in Windows — as a second-class citizen).

It was okay. I happily recommend it to my friends needing long battery life and jet-setter portability. If you have a Windows box, definitely check out Mac. If you are using Ubuntu or Debian, don’t expect too much and you might love it. I just didn’t fall in love.

I’m working with some legacy code now, C# in Visual Studio 2005. The whole TDD thing is greatly hampered by slow builds. Today I investigated a bit. I captured the build log and sorted it, then removed duplicates. I then used vimdiff to compare the sorted file against the sorted, unique file.

It turns out that 8 minutes of my time is being wasted by 4760 file copy operations, all of them moving files from one bin/debug directory to another. This happens whether or not a file has changed, and whether I’m building the whole solution or just a small subproject.

I looked into the sln (solution) file and saw nothing that I can modify there. I then went to the .csproj files to see if I can modify the timing of the copy so that it only happens when something changes. It’s not explicitely there.

If I can remove the 8-minute overhead from my builds (most of which involve changes to one or two files in a subproject) then I can do TDD.

Otherwise we’re in a valley of despair: if the build were longer, we could do meaningful work while waiting. If it were shorter, we wouldn’t be wasting so much time and wouldn’t be hesitating to build/test. It is long enough to be daunting and short enough not to be worth a context switch.

Maybe there’s an msbuild expert in the readership of my blog?

Assuming you can do installs over the net from public sources (no private wizardry) and can use CDs/DVDs, and assuming that you have a new PC with no operating system at all on it, how long should it take you to set up a working machine with developers tools and office software? Oh, and you should have all the latest versions and patches.

On a Debian Linux box, using the netinst CDs, I would expect that I could have the whole thing up and running in less than an hour with compilers, IDEs, graphics editors, web editors, C++, Java and Eclipse, Python and one or two IDEs, C# with MonoDevelop, OpenOffice, Firefox browser, Thunderbird email, an IM client for four IM services, CD burning software, media players, and documentation for all of that. And, of course, I would have the latest versions and patches supported by my choice of OS “vendor”.

I talked to some people, and opinions vary. I am interested in “reasonable expectation” from people who’ve done this on various Windows operating systems, Mac OS/X, and various Linux systems. I suspect that I’m unfairly spoiled by Ubuntu/Debian/etc.