Rantings of a Lunatic

So, I go through and blog about my computing opinions yesterday, and today I find this, kde goes cross-platform with windows mac os x support. Maybe I will have to give it a shot at work as long as I can still access all of the web apps I deal with on a daily basis. I will also have to make sure that Jeff, our company’s IT guy, won’t care or notice. I did actually write “Its been a while since I used KDE, but version 4 came out recently, and I am considering giving it a shot.” yesterday, so I probably will jump right on it. Plus if that means that Kate will run on Windows, that could be helpful. Its not Bluefish, but I have heard a lot of good things about Kate even though I haven’t run it myself. Being a K app is the only thing that has been holding me back from trying it out. Though that shouldn’t have been holding me back, I have the K libs installed so that I can use K3B, because nothing on Gnome comes close to burning discs anywhere near as well.
Although, I have to wonder about a 600Mb install size. I find it difficult to understand why it requires that much space to host a desktop environment, though I am sure that includes other packages that aren’t really necessary. And, I don’t have a Windows Explorer frame of reference. I am sure that IE shouldn’t too terrible, but it can’t be that great either. I had somewhere around 13 tabs open at one point yesterday, and IE was using well over 150Mb of “Virtual Memory” and was swapping to disk. I will keep my progression noted on here.

So Matt was having some people over the other day, and he was going to setup a video-chat with me for a few minutes as some mutual friends were milling around. I had to remind him that I have given up my MBP from work, and at the same time I took the opportunity to explain to him that I had become happy recently as I have switched to a completely Linux based computing environment at home. Kelly still has her Windows laptop from work, and she still has my old powerbook that I use occasionally when I need to do something in Photoshop, but I have completely switched to Linux otherwise. There was some more explanation about the distrobutions and their locations, which would be expected from any two geeks who are talking about computers. After this, Matt caught me off guard with a question that I had to think about. He asked me if I missed OS X. Which is an odd question, but a very valid one. Matt is probably one of two people that I can not imagine sitting infront of a computer without thinking of a mac. In fact the two people I am thinking of were both using apple machines when cd-roms were 1x, and probably much earlier. Anyway, do I miss OS X? That is a difficult question. My response to him was that I miss some of the apps from my mac. I really miss textmate. Homesite is not a decent replacement, and getting Bluefish to work has been a pain in the butt that still hasn’t been fruitfull in my Windows environment at work. I also really miss Transmit. That aside, I miss some things about my apples, but after using Leopard for a while, I have realized that it just didn’t matter to me. I miss the Quake style terminal that I had enabled, and I will need to find a replacement for Quicksilver, but in all I am happy. I can’t say that I have been missing OS X. Its very wierd. I really enjoy OS X, but in the end, its just a means to getting the things I need done. And while there is glitz to it, if I were trying to use it on this 1Ghz Dell with 640Mb of ram, I would have a terrible user experience. But I am running the latest version of CentOS on here, and its working well. There is less flashyness, but my favorite text editor is VI. I don’t need compositing capabilities to use text commands in an 80×24 terminal.
I couldn’t convert to a command line for all the things I do, but there is a fair amount of my computing time that is spent behind a command line, and realistically, they aren’t that much different between the systems when you are talking POSIX systems. There are some differences between the shells, but really, if you are connected in and editing a file, VI is the same on any system.
Quicklook is a cool feature of Leopard, but I never really got into it. I know I should have, but really I try to name my files well, and keep them organized, so I haven’t gotten into all of the file search and identification functions that have popped up over the recent history of computing.
Its been a while since I used KDE, but version 4 came out recently, and I am considering giving it a shot. It seems to be getting some good press, but at the same time it looks very similar to Vista, which I have to question about KDE. It has always seemed a little like a rip-off of Windows with a Gear attached somewhere. Gnome is generally more simplistic looking, but it has its own features which is welcome to me, such as the top and bottom bars. There are other Window Managers and Desktop Environments that I should probably consider, but I do like that I don’t have to do a lot of configuring. I have seen a few good themes for BlackBox, and Crystal-fvwm was looking good for a while. I remember that I originally switched to OS X because of Aqua. It was a kick-ass interface that looked great, and had an awesome underlying system. I did enjoy OS X for a long time when I was using Final Cut Pro every day, but these days I just don’t find myself doing things like that anymore.

So, there are a bunch of things I can’t discuss at work, but they are going crazy. Some things are awesome crazy, and some things are bad crazy, but hopefully I will make my way through them before too long. For one thing I have been tasked with developing an intranet. This is an cool thing, because it is allowing me to try to think about how best to develop a site that will be useful to the company and will provide the content that they are looking for while still providing extensibility for the things that they don’t know they want yet. In addition it is a chance for me to help shape some workflows and to help people to realize the workflows of other departments. To that end, I am looking towards Drupal to be the framework of the site. I have read a lot of good things about it, and a ton of the documentation that the community provides. I can already tell that it has a very steep implementation curve, but I am excited about working with it and rolling it out. The difficulties in initial implementation are a detriment, but they are also a necessity because they provide a vast amount of flexibility in what can be done with the site.
Another thing that has been going on is the move from disparate locations all over the building to one area. There is a definate benefit in this, in that all of the New Media department is going to be in one areaa, and mostly in one room. Charlie will be across the hall from where he is now, and I will be back in my old office, and the rest of the team will all be right outside of Charlie’s door. They will be capable of talking, conversing, and sharing knowledge without having to trek across the building. This should also allow us as a team to change the content that we are pushing out to our site. Instead of just covering the same content that we have covered on broadcast, we will be able to delve deeper and cover more relevant local news that augments the news we cover on broadcast.
Yet another thing that I am working on is hiring a New Media Designer. The job requires a thurough understanding of both Flash and Photoshop, which is whats making it difficult to fill the position at the moment. That is the reason that I had to give up my MacBook Pro. Which is another thing that I will post about shortly. Or rather, a comment that someone made to me about OS X.

So, I have been working more technically at work again, and I am really enjoying it. I find the challenge invigorating and actually am looking at expanding upon my capabilities in that arena. When it comes to linux, I have traditionally prefered to utilize debian based systems. This is partly a function of the principles that Debian professes to adhere to, and it is also a function of past experiences. I have always had good experiences using aptitude and its specific repository system. In contrast, when I first used the Redhat systems a long time ago, I had a lot of bad experiences with RPM-based upgrades. In the process of doing my new job, I am finding myself sitting infront of Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 Server (RHEL) more and more often, and I am getting to know it pretty well. Though I still value the ideals of the debian community, I do have an appreciation for what Redhat has done as far as a reference platform goes, and I am trying to get to the point where I can take advantage of that more. I have a bit more research to do, but I am using CentOS on an older laptop at home now, because they claim to be binary compatible with RHEL, and built off of the Redhat suplied source rpms. I would be interested in purchasing the actual RHEL system and utilizing that, but I find it difficult to justify that amount of money on a machine that is this old. To give a perspective there, it is a Dell Latitude with a 1Ghz PIII in it.
And, from that digression, I have to admit that I have been thinking about a newer machine recently. It will be a while before I have the funds to purchase a new machine, but I am looking for something in the ultra-portable space. Apple did just release the Macbook Air, but that is still much bigger than what I am looking for. I don’t mean in thickness, which by the way, I think it might be a little too thin, rather I am talking about the screen size. I am currently being tempted by the Sony Vaio in the TZ or TX series with the 11.1 inch screen. I think it is realistically a bit expensive, but, with a solid state disk drive, and an optical drive it is definately better than the Macbook Air.
Anyway, I just felt that I needed to write, and recently its been linux and laptops for me, so thats what I was writting about. More will come in a few days.

Today was a wickedly weird day. First, at one point today I was walking through the halls at work, as I headed into the area known as “Master Control”, where all of the equipment that makes running a television studio possible lives, I found a dog sitting in the hallway. I just turned the corner and up ahead was a dog. It was a cool looking dog, just sitting in the hallway chilling, and it made me stop and do a double take. I have seen dogs at work before, and in some places it would seem right at home, like when I worked at the ale house. This dog just seemed out of place though. It was like the shot from a zombie movie, before the zombies have been revealed. Where you know you are at a zombie movie because the poster has a zombie horde on it, but the story is still beginning, maybe a half hour in, so that you are getting to know the family who tragedy will invariably befall. And then you see an animal out of its normal surroundings, and its serene, then its master walks by with a bowl of water, and you don’t think about it. But you know in the back of your mind that dog will be in a latter scene eating the flesh from a dead zombie and become a zombie itself.
And just now, I had the tv on while I was eating dinner, and the DVR had an error on it, as it was out of space. So I figured I should make it record Grey’s Anatomy anyway, and deleted a couple of episodes of Pushing Daisies, which I can’t recommend highly enough. So, because I am new with this Time Warner abomination they call a DVR, I figured I would watch the episode and make sure it recorded it for Kelly. She was at her rehearsal, and would not be happy to find that it hadn’t recorded. Anyway, long story short, I saw an awesome commercial for this TV show called Eli Stone, which features none other than the infamous Zero Cool. Now I know that Jonny Lee Miller has been in plenty of other things, but there is no way that I can see him and not think of the movie that gave us such classic gems as “Spandex, its a privilege not a right”, and “You in the butter zone now” when refering to a “28 dot 8 k b p s modem”. And I feel that if you blame me for this you are just being rude, because Hackers was the movie that told me that it was OK to Rollerblade around the city, and play video games in the middle of Rollerblades while aspiring to “stand around and look pretty” all the time.
And another weird thing I did today, well at least if you know me, is to make the transition from a Mac to a Windows machine as my primary computer at work. This is extra alarming if you realize that I work on average over 9 hours a day, and that time will all be in front of a Microsoft based operating system. I was actually reading an older post I believe the other day on the interwebs describing the differences in the font rendering of Safari on Windows and Internet Explorer. The conversation centered around Mac font rendering sticking to the type designers design, and clear type rendering sticking to the pixel grid of the screen. The result is that the mac fonts were “blurry” and the windows fonts were “crisp”, or at least that was the decision in the article. I personally prefer the font rendering of the mac. The characters are much easier to read because they have varying weight, the fonts all have a presence. I feel as if I am blinded by the space between characters when I stare into a Windows GUI, and frankly I don’t like it. Especially when I am provided the alternate way of rendering at the same time.
Now to be completely fair, I am transitioning my computer at work because of my new role, and the responsibilities of that role and the responsibilities that no longer belong to me. I used to be the primary designer for creative materials for the sales department, and to a lesser degree the overall website designer. I am now in the position that I am managing systems a lot more, and dealing more with backend systems. While I would still prefer to use a Posix based system, its just not economically viable for the corporation that I work for. And I am therefore giving my super sweet souped up MacBook Pro to the person who will fill the position I have vacated. I honestly will miss the 4Gb of RAM, but I will also not be dealing with video or running a virtual machine 8+ hours a day. When it comes to raw power, I will have similar power out of the desktop, though the RAM will definitely be lower, but I will put that in for an upgrade in the future. I was going to upgrade it with some RAM I had lying around at home, but it was DDR2, and the machine only has slots for DDR. And, while people might balk at the idea of spending your own personal money on upgrading your systems at work, I have to kind of accept it, because it is where I spend the greater portion of my day. If a personal expense of $100 every so often makes me not hate sitting in front of my computer at work, thats OK. But on that same token, if I am willing to put $100 into that computer, the company better be willing to put 10x that into it every so often. I am not talking every 3 months, I am talking every 2-3 years for the contribution from each of us, but I think thats fair. If they can’t justify that little RAM bump, or the specific brand of mouse, and I feel its superior, I am not against providing it myself if it makes life better.
OK, 3 topics, thats enough ranting for now. If I go on too long, what will I write about tomorrow?