I was replaying one of my favorite Flash animations the other day and came across a weblog entry by the animation’s creator. A Neal Stephenson fan, the ubergeek ended up being invited to a party for Stephenson’s Quicksilver release tour. It’s a pretty cool read, if you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if you ended up somewhere in a small setting with a celebrity whose work you greatly admire. I haven’t read any Stephenson, but the more I hear about his stuff the more I think I would like it. I am very fond of William Gibson’s work, as some may know.

Oh yeah, ubergeek’s Mac switch parody is about as good as the Linux switch animation I mentioned earlier. IntelliToast is good, too, if you’re a computer geek.

Man, I have to stop letting drafts in this blog pile up on me. Perfectionism is not always your friend. In fact, I often find it to be my delusion-inducing side kick. The idea that any of these latest posts are complete, much less perfect, is insane. Maybe it’s just medium-grade procrastination and not that high-brow perfectionist stuff.

After another foray into desktop Linux, I am back to OS X. I have burned 18 hours this week just getting my email to work at a mediocre level without junk mail filtering and failing to get Bluetooth GPRS working on a Linux 2.6.7 kernel that seems to be all set to go for Bluetooth. I was searching for some resource links for a guy when I came upon an entry in Jeremy Zawodny’s weblog entry titled “I’m sick of doing things the hard way”.

Yeah, me too. I am sick of it after only a couple of weeks.

You know, alpha geek tendencies toward doing hard things even when they are unpractical reminds of some of my vegetarian friends. When I first moved into the city, I found that lots of the new people I met were vegetarians. At first I thought this must be something with a really great health benefit. So I asked them, but most of them said that they have to eat things to supplement the protein they do not get by eating meat. Some also informed me that their diet starves their bodies of other key things that it needs like amino acids, etc. So, they have all these quite convoluted ways to supplement the very thing they are abstaining from, with no direct benefit.

Desktop Linux is alot like that, especially when you are running on a hardware platform other than x86. If you don’t believe me, browse on over to the Debian PowerPC port mailing list archives. Mac OS X does everything I need in open source development, and most of what I need for Java development except WebSphere. And, like Zawodny says, it “just works”. Do not underestimate the value of an operating system that is powerful, highly open source friendly, and does what it is supposed to do.

So, I have been in an official IBM training course for WSAD this week. Course WF311 - Servlet & JSP Development using WebSphere Studio Application Developer V5.x For those who don’t know, WSAD is the less-than-savvy acronym for IBM’s WebSphere Studio Application Developer. That’s the integrated development environment (IDE, translated tool) for software development that’s offered by IBM.

My experience so far has been close to what I expected. It has lots of bells and whistles, with the ability to do all kinds of things in a single wizard if you are willing to careen into vendor lock-in at the speed of light.

I experienced an especially disturbing thing with WSAD today.
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If you travel for work, and you have friends, family, or associates that do not travel for work, then I know you have heard that phrase before. If not, then you have heard a derivative of the same idea. It’s almost always posited by someone who has never traveled for work, or at least has not done it recently enough to remember what it is like. This entry is for you, my bretheren.

In the interest of enlightening my non-traveling friends and relatives, I thought I would compose this little photo essay of sorts. I have been threatening to do it for some time, and something today convinced me to go ahead and pack the camera in my laptop bag. I can now say that the timing could not have been better, because this trip has thoroughly sucked.
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Well, I finally admitted my trouble with Bluetooth on my PowerBook to the Debian PowerPC list. Per the usual, I had sound advice within the hour. However, it sounded to good to be true: take a stock download of the Linux kernel from kernel.org, compile it, and away you go. Could it be?

I was able to start the effort late last night, attempting to match the current config for my 2.6.5-rc3-ben0 kernel. Comparing a new 2.6.7 config to my current configuration file took hours, since several compiles were necessary for testing certain things. I awoke to the sound of my own snoring while sitting with my head slung over the back of a wooden chair at the kitchen table at 4:15 a.m. well after my last compile had completed. Upon booting up, bingo, Bluetooth worked just fine. I ended up with only 3 hours sleep, but it was worth it. It felt so rewarding to have a working kernel of the current version released by Linus just this week.

If I am able to get my GPRS connectivity and email set up properly on my Debian instance, I will be very close to declaring my official move as complete. I am at about the same point now with Debian GNU/Linux as I was with Mac OS 9 in April 2001; functional, but with a ways to go. That comparison actually gives me hope and a relative sense of progress.

This bit of Flash animation makes me laugh