Nothing Fucks Up Productivity Like Installing Linux
I don’t really drink, do drugs, or spend my money on anything other than food and tech. Most of the reason I play guitar is all the cool ass technology you can buy for it. So far I’ve got a Pod X3 that I plug a Line 6 Acoustic guitar into to fuck around. Holy fucking shit I love the Pod. I also have a Boss Micro BR that sucks ass, a travel guitar that rocks, and other fun stuff.
Most importantly though I bought a new computer. A desktop computer this time. After 10 years I decided to go absolutely ape shit and setup what’s probably the most insane computer setup I’ve used in a while. I’ve only got one friend who has something “better”.
Lookin’ at all my stuff I figured I’d make this post about all the random shit I’ve got going on that’s keeping me from doing the important awesome shit I should be doing. Hell I have so much gear that I think I should just write about it all and how I use it. Until then I’ll just drop some random thoughts about the last week and my ultra nerd heaven I’m building.
Rubiverse Podcast With Me
Mike Moore over at Rubiverse has an interview with me that he did right after I posted Rails Is A Ghetto which you can download in mp3 format. Take a listen, and especially list to when I talk about conferences and how I’d like to do something like the Highline Festival for geeks.
The podcast was a blast, and I must say the BlueMic Snowball I used fucking rocked. I may start doing a podcast so all you nerds can hear me scream some of these rants. I’ve actually wanted to write and read my rants so that even the blind can bask in my brilliance. I’m sure that’s what the blind need more of in their lives. Give them something to look forward to at the end of a hard day.
It Hurt Like This The Last Time I Committed Suicide
Which is to say, it hasn’t hurt at all. Friends sent me this link to an O’Reilly cover about how committing career suicide which is actually a pretty awesome cover. Yet, my Rails Is A Ghetto has done the inverse. I’ve received offers from Microsoft, Google, tons of start-ups, and I’ve been asked to keynote conferences—even Rails conferences.
Check it out. I’ll be speaking at or going to:
- Ruby Fringe—July 18-20, 2008 Toronto, Canada
- Caboose Conf—May 29 – June 1st, Portland, OR. I think it’s a plot to kill me though.
- RuPy—Apr 12-13, Poland.
- PyCon 2008—March 13-20, 2008, Chicago, IL.
I’m also writing an article for CIO magazine about Ruby, and have had more contact with incredibly cool people than ever before.
Overall, my open rip on dumbfucks has been nothing like a Career Suicide™. I’ve got a whole rant in the works as to why the hell programmers think that standing up for themselves will mean they will “NEVER WORK IN THIS TOWN AGAIN!”.
The best revenge of course is this:
Gotta love it. Right after I see that I’ve got my own O’Reilly cover their server crashes. Yes, sorry, but some people I’ve worked with are morons, as well as people I haven’t worked with.
She Blinded Me With Science!
I’ve always had a hatred for people who claim that TDD is so much better and that it should be enforced on everyone with a Gestapo zeal. There’s no real evidence that it does better or worst than any other forms of testing, and all of my statistical evidence and evaluation shows that it doesn’t actually improve quality but rather just maintains what you have.
Enter Mr. Skruffy and his amazing Science tricks who promptly takes the first paper I’ve seen on evidence for TDD, and tears it down quite easily. What’s his secret? See, he actually knows some statistics and he read the paper. He simply went through the data and evaluated it using his own brain to conclude that TDD actually was worse in this case.
I love it when someone can use a paper’s own data to disprove the paper itself. Lovely. Again, got an essay in the works on this one that will be more serious.
Pol Pot Was Agile Too
This Mike Mason guy is a total fuck shit asshole. Why? Is it because he’s from Canada? Nah, Canucks are alright. It’s because he seriously advocates firing all the original programmers once a startup makes it big. Yes, you read that right. He’s under the impression that the programmers that started the company make it hard to become enterprisey so fire them.
In the middle of his post he has this gem:
“As someone who’s written software at startups I know the pressures to get the next demo ready, to release the next feature for the web site. At that stage in the life of a startup we don’t even know if the company will survive another month.”
Whoa! Hold up! That sounds like management is to blame for being a bunch of crackberry infected dumbfucks who couldn’t plan a picnic to a fucking McDonald’s. See people, when things are going bad it’s always management’s fault. Management hires the wrong people, dictates design when they aren’t qualified, buys hardware that’s not needed, never listens to the experts they hired, makes insane demands and plans, wastes money on useless shit, buys your chairs, your office, sets business direction, everything!
If you want to fire someone, it’s management. Fire the assholes who focused on making everyone cram for some shitty demo to moron VCs instead of focusing on the quality of the mother fucking code in the first place.
A Monstrosity Of A Computer Medusa
I recently bought a Velocity Micro that’s sporting a AMD 64 Dual Core, Nvidia 512MB with dual head built-in, 500G drive, and a 24-inch HP w2408 that compliments the 19” I already have.
It’s now sitting on my desktop staring at me, challenging me to make it do what I want. I’m slowly getting used to it, but my fucking god is that a lot of screen. Before I used a laptop so my setup was designed to give me the max out of a tiny viewport into my code. Now that I can have everything I need just right there on two screens I don’t really know what to do with my setup. It seems kind of useless, but I’ve got plans for some cool stuff soon.
I use ArchLinux as my primary desktop machine and I love it. It never fucks up my installed software by overwriting it the way Debian or Gentoo has in the past. Linux is the best lean mean coding machine there is, especially since you can customize and optimize the fuck out of it. Here’s just some of the software I use that makes my life trivial:
That’s just a bit of the stuff I use to make my super optimized coding and writing desktop. It pretty much only does that, with chat and other stuff in for good measure.
Linux however fucking sucks donkey cock when it comes to anything media. Permissions on nearly everything are all wrong or incomprehensible. Sound cards are barely functioning and difficult to configure. Video is totally ghetto and even worse on 64bit because there’s no Flash (so far) so I have to use youtube-dl and mplayer to play them. Composing music on it sucks, playing music on it sucks, just about everything sucks.
Linux will not conquer the desktop this way. But, I don’t use Linux for media and instead I have a Mac Mini (good little machines) to play stuff, and an Apple TV for getting TV shows and other stuff I want. Nice thing is my new monitor HDMI support so I just plug the Apple TV in and use it when I want, rather than juggling cables and shit.
Music Stuff
I’ve also recently purchased some cool gear for playing guitar. I’m still rusty and have been going back through the songs I know and relearning. Like I said in the beginning of the post I’ve got a bunch of Line 6 gear including their emulating acoustic guitar and the Pod X3 to name a few little things.
Line 6 does great technical music products that don’t seem super geeky but inside pack a ton of great nerd qualities. My guitar can emulate 9 other guitars all with a physics modeling software system they developed, but it doesn’t look like it has much extra gear on it. It’s just a regular guitar. The Pod is very small and built solid like it’s an old tube amp, yet it emulates about 600+ different little devices and lets you mix the in a virtual mixing board that’s very easy to use.
I’ve got a whole thing on my music setup in my apartment full of pictures and how I crammed it into a tiny little bit of space in the corner.
Next Conference: Zed’s Suck Nerd Rock Fiasco
One thing many people at conferences asked me to do was bring my guitar. The problem is my setup is put into a rack in the corner of my place. I also don’t really play much for other people since I’m really not that good. I’m like an expert amateur at best, if that.
But, you gotta give the people what they want. I went to a few of the guitar shops in NYC and picked up this awesome Traveler Guitar Ultra-Light and I got a Boss Micro BR which means I’ll actually be able to bring enough of my gear around to play at conferences. That stuff, some headphones, and a harmonica and I’m set.
The Travel Guitar is the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen or heard. It looks like a fret board that’s got a pizza oven wooden spatula slapped on the end. No knobs, dials, or pickups. You plug it into the Micro BR (or any amp) with a single patch cable and it sounds like a full electric guitar. It even plays nice considering its size. Yet, I can’t figure out how this fucker works. There’s no pickups and the strings just bind into the body where the nuts are after passing over a plastic tube to separate the strings. It honestly looks like three chunks of wood and nothing else yet sounds like it’s got three pickups.
It’s like walking a talking dog. It’s that weird.
That Micro BR though sucks shit. It’s billed as this portable studio that lets you load an SD card with MP3 or WAV files so you can play along with them. I was already doing this on my computer and it really makes learning a song easy. However, every MP3 I play in the Micro BR locks it up, and it just plain refuses to play WAVs at all. I’m using Lame to do the encoding and no matter what the bit-rate or the settings the Micro BR still locks up.
It does come with an MP3 and a free SD card that works, so I’ve got a chance to narrow it down, but come the fuck on. MP3 has been around for ages and there’s plenty of great embedded libraries and chips for processing it. If your programmers suck so fucking bad that they can’t properly decode and MP3 to play in your little player then go the fuck home. And if you say your thing plays WAV files then fucking play them. At least the WAV files just say “Unsuported Format” rather than locking up the machine.
Not being able to put MP3 files on the thing to play along kind of removes about 1/2 of its value. It’s still pretty handy for recording simple 4-track songs, but my main reason for getting it is to play along with those songs or to try learning more music that doesn’t have sheet music with it. My ear isn’t so good so I was looking to try a fun geek solution.
I guess I’ll have to debug the fucking thing for Roland and then write them a nice fucking rant about who they should fire for being an incompetent asswipe.
Which leads me to the other rant I’m writing about programmers.
Idiopidae Has A Bar
Kashif Rasul sent me an email after he read my post about Idiopidae and showed me what he’s been doing with XeTeX in his own works. I swear it’s the best typeset code I’ve seen. Here’s a sample that has a Textmate look to it. Compared to my latest output I’ve got a long way to go. There isn’t a publisher on the planet that can print that for cheap, and I don’t really like the color formatting in a book, but the typography is great.
He might work with me on Idiopidae when I get it usable and may help bring some similar typesetting to its output.
New Utu Work And Website Design
I’ve been working on a redesign of Utu to try out using something like a Linda TupleSpace that is nothing but a giant encrypted distributed hash table with the hate being modeled as “friction keys” on the slots. Going through the math it should work a lot easier than the previous queues off structure routing, but I’ll have to try it out.
What’s making this new design possible and even easy is the introduction of libev and Tokyo Cabinet including a few other things. These two libraries actually will make a new version of Utu smaller and use less weirdness while letting me try out the friction mapping concept.
The concept is pretty simple. All of the actors on the hub communicate via a distribute tuble space controlled by the hub, but each slot of the hashtable has an arbitrary number of keys any user of the slot must know. Some of the keys however are unknown but easily breakable if you go through the Utu hate process to find the key. Simple.
One of the motivations for the redesign is that while doing room based chat is easy with the queues, the structure routing is weird to people, and the queues don’t work so well for P2P messaging. They’re also harder to distribute out to multiple machines as any IRC sysop will tell you. A tuple space is much easier to cluster and it can support either P2P messaging or chat room style. It does take up more space though, but that’s always the trade off.
Finally, my designer friend is hooking me up with a fun new design for the Utu site that also include a vector based mascot named Moko:
He’ll be featured in the new application. I’ll be doing up the new site design very soon and putting up the latest and greatest on Utu for all the people interested in following. Stay tuned.
Gigantor Kindness Monster
Bradley Taylor took a quote from my Rails Is A Ghetto rant and turned it into a funny as fuck mp3 about the gigantor kindness monster that sounds like a black Christopher Lambert. Rock. The. Fuck. On. As soon as I can I’m going to get a sample of that into a song or make it my bootup theme.
Caught Up!
Man, that’s a lot of links. That should get me caught up with all the stuff I wanted to post little blurbs about. I can’t stand the links lists other bloggers post so hopefully everyone like this format. Let me know.
And no assholes, I didn’t get paid for any of those links. I like the tech that I use and want to share with people so fuck off.
Watch for my article in CIO magazine where I’m actually telling a bunch of CIOs what Ruby is good for in the Enterprise. Believe it or not I’m probably the best qualified person for that job.