I have been going back and forth on what to buy.

Let me start by saying, that I love Linux. People that I talk to regularly, who haven’t totally stopped listening to me know that I can be rather tough on the open source community. A community I might add I count myself part of for what it’s worth.

In my opinion, if you don’t know what you hate about something, you probably don’t know what you love about it either. Think about a new girlfriend. If you still think she’s perfect your relationship is either very new or you wear a helmet from a terrible brain injury. Only after you realize that you disagree with her on some things do you realize that you respect and love her enough to internalize and compromise on the things that make you mental about her.

That’s how I think about Linux. I love it. I use Linux every day. Every. Day. There is not a day that goes by that I do not log into a Linux machine and do some bit of work. I don’t remember the last time I went a day without touching a Linux box.

But I have just about had it with it on my laptop. On Saturday, I was reading my rss feeds, and came across one that linked to a Flash video. I clicked on it, and I remembered “Oh yeah, that’s right, for whatever reason flash is messed up on my laptop, and it is going to make horrible screeching noises”. That was it. I needed a new laptop, I had the money saved up. I have had it with Linux on my laptop, and there was no way I was going to use Windows. I wanted the power of Unix, with the 3rd party support of Windows.

On Sunday I went down to BestBuy and grabbed a new Mac Book Pro. The 15″ 2.2Ghz Quad Core.

I hate that my work flow has been taken out back and shot in the head. But I resolved before I left the house to buy it, that I was simply going to change my workflow to meet it’s demands. I have done what I could to make it behave the way I wanted, and otherwise I am simply learning the new keybindings and retraining my hands. It’s going fine.

I also hate the regular angle of the edge of the machine in that I can feel it digging into my wrists.

I hate how tacked on Spaces feels.

I hate that the best package management system I can find is not much more sophisticated than an elaborate series of make files. (Shout Out: Sorry rest of the computing world, but when it comes to patching, and package management, the Linux community ate your freakin’ lunch)

I love that watching a Flash video doesn’t set my crotch on fire and make having kids an impossibility.

I love the feel of brused aluminum under my hands. It feels solid in a way that a Dell never will.

I love the backlit keyboard. It’s a simple design choice. I can’t believe how nice it looks, and how easy it makes it when I need to look down.

I love the sound through the speakers. Gone is the tinny soup can sound of my Dell.

I love installing software from 3rd parties.

I love the trackpad. The gestures and smooth feel are worth the price of admission.

Much like I love the cohesiveness of proprietary Unix command line syntax, I love the cohesiveness of a proprietary Unix graphical interface. I have a serious fetish for command line arguments that are the same across utilities. I have the same fetish for the graphical UI.

On and on. Things I love and things I hate. But mostly, it all works out to a laptop I really like. At the end of the day, I have a quad core i7, and that’s really all I wanted. :)

Oh, and the thing I hate most about using Linux on my laptop? Giving those self-satisfied mouth-breathing neck-beards the jollies of seeing me use Linux. Zealots, no matter the cause, are usually tedious wads.

Happy hacking!

But it occurred to me, how very real Carpal Tunnel is for people in my field.

How many readers here, have either carpal tunnel, or some for my hand/wrist/arm pain they think is related to using a computer?

I haven’t had much problem in a while. And I think tonight is just something arbitrary, so I am going to say, that I have no pain as a result of the massive amounts of time I spend at the keyboard.

What say you?

I am usually in a constant search for new programs that might change the way I work. I end up trying a lot of software and then dismissing it as not meeting my needs.

In a web heavy world, javascript execution time is king. We’ve seen recently all the work being done for future versions of Firefox as well as the Crome browsers js interpreter.

After getting fed up with Firefox’s abysmal performance on some js heavy sites, I decided to try Opera.

Before you break your mouse hand looking to leave a comment to blame Firefox’s performance on an add-on I have installed, stop. The first reason people give for Firefox being a great browser is “It’s got all these great add-ons”. And it does, but if they make the browser unusable for everyday surfing, it’s not a win. So sure, I could use a Firefox with no add-ons installed, but that’s a lot less compelling.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not planning to write much javascript without Firebug, but if I can’t scroll in Twitter without it hiccuping, it’s not really usable.

So besides blistering js execution speed (yes, I know that is coming to Firefox and when it does I will give it another go) in Opera, the other thing I really like is the ease in which I can change keybindings.

I have remapped the keys so I can use vim navigation for scrolling (jk/up and down, hl/side to side), but I also finally have M-w/C-y for cut and paste.

There are some things I don’t like.

Because it has a smaller userbase, and isn’t the darling child browser among developers, sometimes sites break. I am not sure if it’s the site or the browser who is to blame, but the sum total is, sometimes I have to use Firefox to get at some content. That sucks.

And finally, and this is a big one for me. It’s not Open Source.

The license page however acknowledges several open source frameworks and toolkits that it benefits from. Clearly they know the benefits of free software.

If they opened it up, I think they could eat Mozzila’s lunch.

I am using Bloglines, and you can easily spot the feeds you are no longer reading, they are the ones with the (200) beside them. Bloglines will only keep the 200 most recent entries for you, after that it starts to kill off the old ones. I think it’s a sensible default. Frankly I find it refreshing. Most of the time developers are so afraid to make a decision that I would have guessed they would have cached things to a much higher number (assuming that infinity is not an option due to database constraints).

At any rate…Consistently Digg’s tech rss feed would be at 200 entries. I hate the Digg rss feed. It takes you to the comments and not the actual story. Digg comments are unmitigated clap trap. Not only are they particularly bad, they can make me quite angry.

I was getting ready to delete my Digg feed, when Bob suggested I could actually get an rss feed of the stories that he dugg. This was perfect, Bob would be my Mechanical Turk and weed through the crap and then I would see a distilled feed of Digg.

So far it’s been an interesting experiment. I have found a couple of things amusing. 1. Either Bob is too busy to keep up with much of Digg, or there is very little to “Digg” these days. I don’t get that many items in the feed. 2. It often occurs to me that this is largely how censorship would work, except my censor has a particularly bizarre sense of humor and a penchant for articles on alternative energy. 3. I wonder, and maybe Bob will speak up, does he ever think about what he is Digging now, and perhaps, change his behavior, if only subconsciously? I know that if somone were subscribed to my rss feed, I would go out of my way to make the feed really disjointed and fill it will bizarre entries…just to be funny.

As for the latter, I doubt it, however, what if all I could get to on the net were sites previously viewed by Bob (or anyone really, not picking on Bob), would that change the way the censor surfed? I bet it would, I know I would think about my every move online if that were the case.

The install didn’t go as smooth as I would have hoped. Initially the clock was not set properly after having been turned off for an extended period. As a result the desktop would never load. I was able to kill the x session, and in gdm switch to failsafe-gnome, and set the clock. I completed the installation, but when I rebooted I was dropped at a grub prompt, and not the grub menu. I decided to run through the install one more time to make sure I hadn’t missed something. When I booted the live cd this time, with the clock not out of sync, it took me right to the gnome session, and I completed the install. Upon this second reboot, grub came up as expected.

Overall I was a little disappointed. I am happy to have the hardware, and now a functioning OS, but this was Sun hardware (albeit E.O.L. hardware). This should have just worked.

At any rate, there are lots of exciting things going on with OpenSolaris, and I recommend you take a look.


npowell@delilah:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
324 ls
266 cd
243 clear
105 svn
100 ssh
80 vi
58 sudo
24 cp
21 rm
19 ll


ll is an alias to `ls -l`. I started off on Red Hat and they always included that by default. Kind of boring. I am surprised that clear was not the top spot, as I type it by reflex constantly.

I have a big history file (that’s what she said) on purpose, and being able to search back through it is nice. However one thing always bugged me, and I never got around to solving it, until today.

I would hit C-r and start typing, and then I would hit C-r a few more times to get back to the command I was actually looking for, except I ALWAYS got overzealous and went right past it. So I would hit C-c and start over. Then I thought, I bet you can go forward. Like any good Gnu/Linux user I typed man bash in my terminal and then /reverse.

Sure enough,

reverse-search-history (C-r)
Search backward starting at the current line and moving ‘up’ through the history as necessary. This is an incremental search.

forward-search-history (C-s)
Search forward starting at the current line and moving ‘down’ through the history as necessary. This is an incremental search.


That should work then. I pop out of my man reader, and hit C-r ssh


(reverse-i-search)`ssh': ssh nathanpowell.org


Whoops! I meant to only go back to the one BEFORE that entry :). So I hit C-s…nothing. So I went to the modern forward slash of information, google.

I found this bug. It appears that, for whatever reason, C-s gets trampled on by C-s (stop). If you apply the workaround suggested there, it does indeed start to work. So I pushd the following onto my .bashrc (bad bash joke, and ultimately untrue since I added it to the bottom of the file, not the top of the “stack” *sigh* *groan*)


stty stop undef


I don’t use stop in the shell so this will suffice for now, but it’s an interesting bug. I installed xterm, multi-gnome-terminal, and konsole, and only konsole was unaffected by the bug. So it’s an environment thing somewhere that konsole is not reading.

Does everyone else see this?

AoE couldn’t be easier to set up.

On the machine that will export a partition or hard drive, install vbladed. I installed it on my knoppmyth box here, as root:

$ apt-get install vblade


Then fire it up on that machine, I export /dev/sda3 on eth0, as slot 0/shelf 0:

$ vbladed 0 0 eth0 /dev/sda3


Then on the client machine install aoetools. I just used my Gutsy laptop:

$ sudo apt-get install aoetools


Then discover, print out the drive details and mount the drive:

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/aoe
$ sudo aoe-discover
$ sudo aoe-stat
e0.0 244.249GB eth1 up
$ sudo mount /dev/etherd/e0.0 /mnt/aoe/


Now, let’s watch some tv using ATA commands over Ethernet frames:

This gives us pretty cool low cost alternatives for SAN set ups.