hey, just upgraded to the latest Wordpress on a new server and a new OS. Lots of things broke… like the last theme I had. I’ll post more about the hiccups that happened when I have more time tomorrow.
Please let me know if you notice any glaring bugs.
Trendier
Originally uploaded by Reid Harris Cooper
This Perrier ad that I see on the BART is growing on me
At work we use Bazaar. It gets the job done, but I’ve never been able to
wrap my head around it. Besides the obvious fact that Bzr is a Distributed RCS, I cannot distinguish or compare it to any other DRCS tools. The main reason behind this problem is the lack of decent documentation. For example, go to their site. Click on Docs at the top. Click on Bazaar User Manual.. it is the only thing that looks comprehensive and detailed. Its basically devoid of any real information. Seriously, do you come away feeling empowered. Do you feel like you know how to use the tool properly? Is there a possibility that a lack of proper knowledge may allow you to shoot yourself in the foot multiple times… machine gun style? I want to code, not mess around
with DRCS systems. I’m not alone. The same thing could be said for Git, and a lot of people
I know (which is not a huge number 
) have stopped using it for the same reasons.
Contrast that with Mercurial/Hg. I’ve been seeing some great posts about it lately. It looks pretty easy to use and its as fast as GIT. That is saying a lot since Linus is pretty good at coding and Hg is mostly written in Python. It also just got some huge project wins: Mozilla and OpenSolaris. Now, go to the Hg website. Without going too far down, you can click on the docs. Click on Distributed Revision Control with Mercurial the unofficial manual. Bam! An entire book that can pretty much get you where you need to be. You can skim the table of contents and see that it is pretty comprehensive. If you are just starting out, you can dive into the sections relevant to you. When you are ready to level up later on, you can come back and dive in some more. High fives to the Hg team. This killer combination of open source, great technology, and great documentation is a gift to the human race. I’m totally going to give Hg a try on my next project.
We’ll still use Bazaar at work in the meantime, but I have to wonder a bit about the project. It looks like the only thing going for Bazaar is the millions of dollars er. support by Canonical. I would truly like to understand why Bazaar is better than ‘the rest’, but their documentation and website just won’t let me.
This interesting article compares the font rendering technology of Microsoft and Apple.
Yet…
Why does everybody forget about the big dog down in San Jose which represents most of what we see? If you have looked at a PDF, a Flash application, or a web site that had text rendered to gif/png by Photoshop.. then your seeing the result of the Adobe font renderer. I would bet that the output would look pretty similar to Apple’s renderer since Apple licensed their technology and NeXT originally used Display Postscript.
This guys blog post on the state of most math texts strikes a chord with me. I have often been frustrated with some of the books I have purchased on technical/science topics that I would like to have in my toolchest. I’ve been left with the feeling that the field really needs to write to a larger spectrum of readers.
Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I understand why this happens. Its just another area where there is a lack of attention. Without attention, the economics don’t work out. The result is the landscape we have now. I have great hopes that the internet will solve this frustrating issue.
I have some personal machines in a colo. It is a bit of a drive and not so easy to work at. The OSs really need a big update to a modern distro.
Is there any safe and reliable way to remotely migrate the machine to Xen? Something better? How about Ubuntu?
Have we left the era of: backup, burn new distro, cross fingers?
If I can get the machine on Xen, then in theory I would never have to worry about installing an OS on the machine that could render it useless.
Thoughts?
Somehow, I have this feeling that a station wagon with 9-track tapes is in my future (* reference to the old Tanenbaum college text on data communications)
About 3 weeks ago, I was going to setup a Solaris box we acquired for a particular task in the office. I chose this box and Solaris since I had read great things about ZFS. In the past I would play the role of ‘early adopter’ and try things out when they became available. Unless I absolutely need a particular technology, I now take the ‘late adopter’ role when we’re talking about Operating Systems. Too many companies release tech that isn’t stable.
At any rate, I remember the original ZFS release into Solaris. It was announced, and then it was held back because it wasn’t ready. No problem, I can wait. I thought that by now, after all the hype, things would be perfect. We would finally have a decent raid and filesystem from Sun without worrying about the capabilities of DiskSuite or shelling out $$ for Veritas. It took Sun a big kick in the head to figure out that, now, 10 years later, they needed to innovate.
So I go through the hassle of downloading Solaris (more on that later). I start the install. Things are going smoothly. I get to the partitioning step, I’m ready to see the magic. I have two hot-swappable 18 gig drives in this machine. I want to setup a mirroring system.
Fzzz. Show stopper. No ZFS. Where is the ZFS? I downloaded the latest Solaris… what is up?
Ah - after hitting Wikipedia’s Article on ZFS, I notice in the limitations:
ZFS is currently not available as a root filesystem on Solaris 10, since there is no ZFS boot support.
No boot support!
I stopped the project right there. The whole reason I wanted to use Solaris was to be able to have a reliable, high-uptime system… and that means RAID. No boot into UFS and then mount ZFS.. I want a real RAID
Oh well, I’ll try again next year.
I sure hope Apple users will be able to boot ZFS when they get it in Leopard.
Update Some people have asked? Why not download OpenSolaris which just added this? Ah, yeah - see ‘late adopter’ above. Then read this “Where do I download OpenSolaris”?
