TechSmoke

So i moved to gentoo I’ve been a Slackware user, pretty much since I started using Linux about 6 years ago. While I like Slack and it’s philosophy, I just don’t have the time to maintain it.

I met up with gregf in #slackware on OFTC. He’s a gentoo guy. I was telling him about wanting to move away from slack and why. We discussed a few options, but ultimately decided on gentoo. I’m slowly but surely learning the gentoo way. It’s pretty nice having the system handle deps. I also like that it’s source based.

short and sweet.

I’ve been wondering how to do this, but haven’t had a chance to search out a way to do it. Happened upon it in the LinuxJournal news letter.

BRAIN TRUST

This submission comes from Shashi in India:

As a research astronomer I work mostly at the command line in one or
more xterm windows at a time. Most of the time, data reduction jobs
are handled by writing simple one-line shell commands or
concatenations of various commands using pipes. Depending upon the
type of data being handled, mostly ascii catalogs, the commands can be
quite complex but still too simple to write full blown shell scripts.
To keep track of which sequence of commands were issued to arrive at a
given result I have included the following lines in my .bash_profile
to make per session:
HISTFILE=$HOME/.bash_history/bh_`echo $HOSTNAME | awk -F . ‘{print $1}’`.`date
+%d%b%Y.%I_%M%p`.pts`tty | awk -F / ‘{print $4}’`.log
HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
HISTIGNORE=”f:df:w:dmesg”
HISTSIZE=2000
export HISTCONTROL HISTSIZE HISTFILE HISTIGNORE

My home directory is NFS mounted on various nodes of a cluster of
workstations, each with their own storage and processing capabilities.
At any given time I have quite a few xterm windows running on various
hosts running different data reduction and analysis routines. bash
uses the HISTFILE environment variable to save the session history. So
I came up with a solution that dynamically sets the HISTFILE
environment variable when bash is executed. The back-quoted commands
are executed first and their results concatenated to the environment
variable. For example, on the node “arches” a bash shell executed at
10:06pm on 19th of April, 2007 with an associated tty file of pts0
results in the following being used as the history file:
/home/shashi/.bash_history/bh_arches.19Apr2007.10_06PM.pts0.log

The HISTCONTROL environment variable is set to ‘ignoreboth’ which
means that consecutive duplicate command lines or command lines
beginning with a space character would not be saved. HISTIGNORE is set
to a colon separated list of commands that are not to be saved in the
history file. HISTSIZE is set to 2000 commands (default value is 500).

Locating the sequence of commands resulting in a particular output
file is then a simple matter of running grep on the history files for
the relevant filename. The grep can be speeded up by pruning the
.bash_history directory once in a while to remove irrelevant or
trivial history lists.

I just picked one of these up. Pretty nice so far I guess. I got it mainly to run OpenWRT (Be sure to check out X-Wrt as well)

I ran into a bit of trouble. For some reason OpenWRT doesn’t want to grab a DHCP address from my DSL modem, I’m sure it’s PEBKAC but kinda sucks it would require any user intervention. The X-Wrt addon really polishs the web interface. OpenWRT is more for the geek crowd in that it’s made to hack everything via the CLI. I’m fine with the command line, but it requires more knowledge than I currently have. I’m by no means an elitist and like the easy GUI that has hints and tips/tricks. X-Wrt has a graph section that can show so cool stats, but alas firefox 2 thinks it can’t read them and prompts me to search for a plugin. owell. Hopefully I’ll get that sorted soon too.
There is built in stuff for QoS and asterix.

I suppose that’s all for now

We’ll it’s a good thing thing no one but the spam bots read my blog so far

I have 2 new jobs at the moment.

The first is a Java Dev programming position. Only part time, and not a for sure life time endevour. Even though it is Java, the position is enjoyable. I have found out one thing, my coding skills suck. I got an A in both Java classes I took in college, and yet I feel like I just looked at the language for the first time sometimes when I sit down at my laptop. Luckily I have a mentor/senior coder/guru (what ever you want to call him) named Kevin. He’s very understanding, and knows his stuff. It’s nice because if I have any questions, doing something stupid, or going about things the wrong way, he’s there to help, and point me in the right direction. To be perfectly honest, I’m surprised he’s kept me around as long as he has. (Thanks man :))

My second position is a Junior System Administrator with a large webhosting company. I’ve wanted to be a sysadmin for about 5 years now. I like it a lot. I’m totally remote, so I don’t get to play with the hardware, be it shiny and new, or old and dusty. They have some tools (scripts and what not) set up to make things easier to do, while other things can be a pain in the butt. I’ve been there a couple months now, and while I’m still a JSAI I have gotten promotions. I’ve learned quite a bit, and there are some very knowledgeable people I get to work with. I hope to get promoted again soon so I can make a little more scratch.

I don’t know what else to say, so I’ll leave it at that. I hope to be able to write more often, and maybe longer posts sometime soon.

Till the next post (will be soon, I got some shiny new hardware for a new box )I bid you ado.

http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html

Was a fun read.

Well I decided to post about making text larger on a web page. Why is it such a pain with most sites out there. I have a 20.1″ LCD. I like to have larger than 8 pt text to read. So I make the text larger with ctrl +. the text gets larger, but is confined to a 3″ wide column. So if I want larger text, I get 3 words per line. WTF :/ So I have a 3″ wide center column, with 3 words per line, and 3″ wide columns on either side with ads and links to other “stuff” and the 7″ of space is empty. This, to say the least, sucks.

I think this has to do with CSS (or maybe poorly implemented CSS) I’m pretty sure I have seen CSS designs that allow you to use all of you screen real estate for browsing. I need to find a firefox plugin to “fix” this. I think grease monkey has the ability to fix this as well.

technorati tags: text size, webdesign

Well I had my first experience with eXtreme programming. More specifically “pair programming”. I must say it was rather fun. Pair programming has 2 people one keyboard. It allows you to bounce ideas off each other as you code. This has advantages and disadvantages. Most everything I’ve read talks about a coder “getting into the groove” and pounding out code. Any interupptions cna get you out of the groove. This didn’t appear to be the case. I think it boils down to both people thinkg about the same problem.

We discussed different ways to tackle the problem, and both explained why we thought a certain solution wouldn’t work. We did this untill we both decided on a solution that would work. This actually allowed us to solve the problem faster. Kevin, the guy I was working with, is a much more experienced developer than I am, and he said we probably saved about an hour, maybe 2 hours worth of time.

I hope I get to do more of this in the future.

technorati tags: XP, agile programming, pair programming

Well I was just reading something and the unix philosophy of “do one thing and do it well” came up.  This is a rather good way to go about things. It was also mentioned that that would not be a philosophy os a *nix OS. I would think quite the contrary would be true. With computers if you can do one thing well, you can take that same one thing at make it run simultaneously. To the OS it is only doing one thing. It doesn’t care that it is doing “one  thing” so fast that to us it appears it is doing 10,000,000 at once.

technorati tags: os, programming,

Well I graduated in July of this year. I recieved an Associates of Science in Computer Information Systems (CIS). Fancy title for what boils down to programming. I had perfect attendance, and a 4.0 cummulative GPA.

I started out in the schools Computer Networking Technology (CNET) program, or “System Administrator” if you prefer the easy name. I’ve wanted to be a sysadmin for a long time. After talking about the two curriculums with some friends, we decided that the CIS program offered the “best bang for the buck” so to speak.

Now it’s on to finding a new job. This has proved harder than I thought it would be. I’m a brand new programmer, and most every job I’ve looked at wants atleast 2 - 5 years experience and/or a bachealors degree. I have neither. I have been looking for “Junior/Entry Level positions” and maybe this is why I’m comming up with nothing. Alot of the jobs are looking for Senior programmers to manage the Junior programmers. Well how do I get to be one of the Junior programmers. I found an article via google that talked about the changing definiton of Senior/Junior programmers. The guy was talking about how what he considered a Junior level position is now being called a Senior level position. This involves tasks that any competant Senior level programmer wouldn’t even consider. Should I start looking for senior level positions, even though I consider myself a junior level programmer?

What I am really looking for is to become an apprentice to a Senior programmer or sysadmin. I want to work with someone that is willing to train me, and share their knowledge. I want to be the pimply faced youth to a BOFH. I’m not sure what the equivelant is in the programming world. I wouldn’t really mind even writing documentiation or maintaing/updating code for the first year or two. Granted I don’t want to do this forever, but I am willing to put in my time as the low man on the totem pole.

I have applied to a few different places.  One place was specifically looking for entry level/junior programmers. I contacted them, and got a “Sorry we only accept applicants with a Bachelors Degree.” grrr Another company wanted more experience. Good ol’ catch 22 at work there I guess.

I actually found my dream job. I even interviewed for the position, and aced it IMHO. I asked when I would know whether or not I got the position. The interviewer told me, “next Monday”. Next Monday came and went, so I called them back on Tuesday. They said they have been really busy, and a few things came up, and they would get back to me soon. Well 2 weeks went by. I emailed the assistant, and got a respoonce back about a week later. Unfortuneatly it was rather hard to understand. The last sentance said, thank you for your time, and your resume and application will be kept on file. Not a definative yes or no. I would assume that menat I didn’t get the position, but I think we know what assuming does. I’m going to call them tomarrow.

technorati tags: work, programming, system adminstrator

August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web (Ftrain.com)

execellent amazing and scarey at the same time