the corner office

This morning I finished The Art of Unix Programming, by Eric Raymond. A good book and introduction to the Unix mindset with applicability to software development in general. An added bonus is that it provides a fairly broad introduction to the myriad dev tools that Unix offers - many of which I've heard of but never really understood, and generally been rather intimidated by.

I must admit to wondering at times whether ESR is merely observing or trying to actively influence. If you compare his recent flip-flops re Java, the hacker emblem et al, you get the sense that the man has aspirations of being more than just observer and anthropologist a la The Jargon File and The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

To me, it shows in this book. A few too many case studies are for his own software, for example, and while it shouldn't be an issue for an author to do that, given the context, it left me a little cynical. A few too many places it feels like he's preaching rather than simply codifying. Again, that's inevitable - an author's opinions will come through, but the motives are the issue. Obviously, ESR is entitled to say whatever he wants, and I'm in no position to decide whether he's talking crap, but again, the broader context left me questioning some of what he says, simply because of who's saying it. I ended up questioning whether this is Unix as it is or whether it's Unix with a good dose of what Eric Raymond wants it to be.

I think that's the problem with the book. I have to wonder whether the book wouldn't stand to become even more iconic if Raymond's personality didn't run so clearly through it.

In all though, it's a worthwhile read and I have no doubt that it will become a classic. It's done one important thing for me: it's increased my determination to spend more time working on Linux this year than Windows. Ultimately, Unix is geek heaven, and The Art of Unix Programming paints a very appealing picture of that heaven.

Four years ago today I plucked up the courage to tell Ronwen that I held her in very, very, very, very high esteem and asked her to be my gal.

Against all odds (we weren't even living in the same city at the time), she accepted, and here we are, four years later. I hold her in even higher esteem and she's still my gal :-)

Happy anniversary, m'dear!

Found out this afternoon that Tupac gave birth last night. A litter of 8, all as cute as can be. I popped in next door and had a squizz: 5 jet black like their mother (one of them has the same white spot on its chest as its mother, as well as 'secret socks' white on the edges of its paws), 3 beige labrador-style. I still have no idea which dog in the neighbourhood fathered this lot.

Tupac looked ragged, but I can imagine pushing out 8 of the critters must take it out of you somewhat.

(Update: apparently the father is an Alsation/Huskie type dawg. Tupac is not Alsation/Huskie size. Poor girl.

I just saw this post at Bob Congdon's site, and it reminded me of something pretty amazing from when I was down in Durban at Christmas.

Someone in the family received a message on a Nokia cell-phone, announced with the usual irritating beeps.

"Someone's got a message", says I. My gran, now in her 80's, says "someone got an SMS. Those beeps are morse code for SMS".

Which absolutely blew me away. My gran was a radio operator in WWII, and hasn't touched morse code in nearly 60 years. She suffered a mild stroke two years ago and her memory has had erratic spells since then, but I was completely gobsmacked.

I found this link which also discusses it: if you have a Nokia and your message alert is set to "Special", you'll get

which true enough, spells "SMS".

My little life lesson learned today is this:

If you discover a tool or utility that will make your life easier, learn to use it NOW.

I've known about the screen utility on Linux for ages. I knew what it would do, and how useful it would be. But I always put off learning how to use it, worrying that I wouldn't have the time to really suss it out. On a whim, I opened the man pages this morning, and within minutes I had the basics, and it was an epiphany. I can't believe I put this off for so long. Stoooopid.

Old Unix/Linux hands would read this and think 'pfff. Dumb mullet.' Guilty as charged.

Screen rocks. It creates a virtual terminal (screen) on a Linux (Unix) box, which you can then connect to and reconnect to as you need, without interfering with the underlying terminal applications. Think Alt-Tab on the command line.

If like me, you like being 'interactive' with a Linux/Unix Domino server console, then screen is a godsend. Start the Domino server inside a screen session, and you can get to it (and leave it) whenever you need, from other machines, ssh sessions, whenever, wherever. No more having to worry about cconsole, which is the crappiest piece of software that Lotus ever wrote.

A quick google this evening found a decent introduction to screen (and some Linux terminal concepts) at Linux Magazine.

I'm converted. Today screen, tomorrow Emacs! ;-)

... and even more busy. Too many projects to do and not enough time to do them. I'm going all-out for the next week or two, and then early March I need to get started with the studies.

Ronwen otoh is having a ball with her near-far-Eastern-fliffle-floffle-I-can't-remember-the-names archaelogical subjects. She's so diligent she's starting to make me look bad. She's now starting to learn Sumerian and Egyptian just for the hell of it. I'm waiting for her to teach me how to say 'yo momma' in these languages.

Gym is settling into a routine, we've moved away from the 7am slots to slightly more human times, and Warren and I agreed on two sessions a week, rather than the 95 he was originally suggesting. I then supplement those two weights-based sessions with as many cardio workouts as I can. This is cool for me - I had to explain that I wasn't in as much of a rush to get all Adonis-like as I am just to get healthy and stay healthy and sustain things until they're firmly entrenched as a part of my life. That's the most NB thing, not doing boot camp for 3 months and then flaking out because it's too exhaustive and the rest of my life is falling apart.

Having said that, I'm in my third week and while I don't think I've lost weight, I do feel like some long-dormant muscles are re-asserting themselves as functional parts of my body.

What a cool day (literally). Apart from the fact that I'm sitting at the office, it's perfect BMW weather (yes, that expands to weather weather, but that's how we say it).

It started raining yesterday and didn't stop until this morning. I'fact, at one point last night it was raining so heavily that the noise woke me up. I opened the curtains a tad to see the trees outside our window get pummelled, and slowly dozed off again. That, to me, is bliss :-)

I hate sending SMS's on my cell phone with a passion only the most horrid and unpleasant things deserve. As a touch-typist, I find it the most frustrating thing. Beep-beep-beep-H-beep-beep-E-beep-beep-beep-L-throw phone out window.

Vodacom has an SMS page on their web site. Nowadays, if I want to send SMS's via their site, I have to register (for free, nogal), but I must now be a Vodacom subscriber. I get access to a million features I'll never want to use, and I can only send SMS's to other Vodacom subscribers. Ditto for MTN. This means that if I as a Vodacom subscriber want to send an SMS to an MTN number, the only way for me to do it is to sit and ham-fingeredly beep-beep type the message on my cellphone. Given that I am a condescending git, I also flat refuse to use cellphonese and instead type words out properly.

What pisses me off the most is that in the good old days you could send cross-network SMS's, with absolute ease. These bastards were so eager to get you to their website vs the competition's, that even international SMS's were only URL away. Now that they have everyone hooked, we get a million more 'features' but the core service is completely crippled.

I think someone else said the same thing in another context today: this is not what I call progress.

(Why am I trying to SMS? It's nearly 4, and there is no way I'm getting up to meet my personal trainer at 7. Hope the SMS doesn't wake him, except that he gets up in an hour's time anyway, poor dude).

A pet peeve of mine is the 'serving suggestion' label on all food packaging. I'm not sure if this is purely a South African lunacy or whether the whole planet is afflicted by this drivellous, misguided notion of "value-add". In case you don't know what I'm referring to, it's when food packaging which has a picture of the food in some happy "eat-me" pose, has a small label somewhere on the side of the picture saying "Serving Suggestion."

That would be great if great opulent feasts and tantalising displays were depicted on the tin, packet or box. Displays pushing us to ever greater and more appetising ways of serving our daily foodstuffs. Instead, it's the drollest, boringest, least-inspired photograph of the product, au naturel or close enough to that.

Never in my wildest dreams, and assuming I ate them, would I have thought I needed a 'suggestion' telling me to serve baked bloody beans in a bowl. What are the alternatives? On toothpicks on a platter? What kind of patronising marketroid thought we were too dumb to figure these things out for ourselves?

Anyway. That's a long-standing issue and these days I'm largely over it.

Today, though, I saw a new beauty. I popped into the local Woolworths to buy lunch and a few groceries, and noticed that the pork bangers I bought have a nice pink little heart-shaped label saying "Valentine's Breakfast Solution"

Woolworths is now selling a Valentine's Breakfast Solution.

That is just too wrong.

I'm such a lazy git. I'm still using an old version of Mozilla. So I'll wait for the dust to settle.

As an interesting aside to the fact that Firefox 0.8 has been released today, LinuxJournal has in interesting article about Firebird the RDBMS. I keep forgetting that Firebird is basically Interbase. Mixed reviews, I don't think I'm going to confuse myself with a third open-source RDBMS package just yet.