Category: Linux

The Mozilla Platform’s Catch-22 Problem

Starting with Netscape 4.5, I’ve used Netscape, then Mozilla, then Thunderbird for email. I have a similar relationship with Firefox. I’ve watched with great hope and been disappointed over the years as Thunderbird bugs that really annoy me just… stay. I think I know why. It’s because Firefox and Thunderbird are built in such a way as to create a catch-22 situation — one that actually discourages new contributors.
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Ubuntu Linux 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” upgrade report

7.04 (meaning “the major release planned for 2007/04”, not meaning “the minor release following 7.03”) was released on April 19th. I upgraded today and it went pretty well, with a bit of manual cleanup required. More details after the jump. Continue reading “Ubuntu Linux 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” upgrade report”

Ruby Deeper Impressions

For two weeks (ending on this past Wednesday afternoon), most of my days and nights were occupied with a self-administered crash course in the Ruby programming language, outside of the Rails framework. I had struggled somewhat with Objective-C in January, partly because of the massive combined burden of learning the language, the Cocoa framework, the Xcode IDE, and the odd but brilliant Interface Builder. So, I wanted to try and attack Ruby in isolation.
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Ruby First Impressions: Backup Scripting

I started programming in Ruby this week, and so far I like it a lot. From my initial use of Ruby as a backup automation scripting language, here are my thoughts.

You might be wondering, why am I working on backup scripting now? Don’t I have some big project I’m supposed to be working on 24/7? Yes, and actually this work is in the critical path of that project.

My super fast laptop is still away being repaired for a video problem, so I’ve taken a major hit in terms of the resources of my main computer: 90% less MHz, 36% less display area, 50% less memory. In the meantime, I’ve been avoiding tasks that need a lot of CPU or graphics performance and instead working on things that are easier on my old desktop computer.

This week, I decided that I would pause working on the design and implementation of my startup project, until I had really sorted out my server backup and monitoring situation.
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