Running is therapy

So far so good. Only took me a few minutes to get the madwifi driver working. A little tougher to get eclipse installed though. I had to actually uninstall a bunch of things and then install eclipse and then reinstall a bunch of things. They were mostly related to Gnome, OOo and Lib files. We’ll see. If worse comes to worse I can always re-rsync gentoo back in an hour or two.

The other annoyance so far is that it appears that the Gentoo bash-completion package was a little more robust. This is not auto completing my known_hosts whilst ssh’ing. I am sure it’s probably a config option that I need to set, but that is hot stuff on Gentoo and I am not sure why others wouldn’t emulate it. However to be fair I have had Ububtu installed for all of a few hours.

Installed ubuntu tonite. So far so good. I had been thinking lately that the gentoo install was getting krufty, and I hear good things about Ubuntu. Installed xfce4 and have it configured the way I like it. Now I need some developement tools outside of vi.

Thursday night I was working on making some Java/JSP/Servlet stuff work and it looked fine, I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. As usually happens with me, after I have exausted my usual troubleshooting ideas, I just start blindly trying new things. This has actually worked out for me on several occassions.

Basically it was a simple login page that had a servlet as the action for the form, the servlet validated the input and upon sucess dumped you to the page you needed. But it kept 404′ing on me.

I went to bed without it working.

In the morning I was trying various things which were all guesses (this happens because I don’t know what I am doing half the time and I just want to get it to work). finally I put a forward slash in the url pattern of the servlet mapping. Bang, it worked. Frustrating.

So in an effort to learn Java, I of course need to interact with Tomcat. Now tomcat has this little game it likes to play. Namely not shutting down when I tell it to. So I had been issuing by hand ps aux | grep tomcat and then finding the parent pid (cuz you just know this thing spawns 10 million children) and then doing a kill -9 $PID. I can tell you that got old fast. So I was talking to my buddy mello and he was writing some bash for a work project using awk. Having been a perl fan I never really used awk that much so I asked him for some advice in grepping out the pid and killing it. He showed me a little awk and I came up with

ps aux | grep tomcat | awk -F" " '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

Yes I am sure there are cleaner ways (feel free to post them in the comments) but this took care of that crap with doing it by hand. mmmmmm, xargs.

I was watching 60 minutes tonite. The main story was about Neil Armstrong. For almost the entire interview, I was impressed with how grounded this man was. I was thinking that a lot of people never get over some great moment in their lives and go on to do other things. He seemed quite grounded. Until the last line of the show. Ed Bradley asked him i fhe would go to the moon again on a new mission (since this seems to me the US’s intent) or to Mars. He said “I don’t think I’ll get the chance, but I don’t want to say I am unavailable”. To me that seems sad. We see this a lot in American society. It’s most evident in old rock stars that can’t let go of a career long since gone.

I can’t identify with this. I have done, what I consider some interesting things, but they are all in the past now. I have moved on to other things I find interesting. My life will never be defined by one moment or era in time. I am not saying I deserve a medal for that, I am just concerned about people that think they are only one thing. Move on. Find out what else is out there. There are so many things that are there for the learning. No one should be defined by one act.

So I was using windows today, and I like to use ‘QuickLaunch’ icons, because lets face it when you have a bunch of windows open, trying to find a desktop icon sucks. So I put two icons on there that I figure I will use. However the icons are very similar and that is just dumb.

One is the ‘Show Desktop’ icon and one is the ‘Control Panel’ icon…annoying.

in a ‘BoingBoing’ linked story, part of a sentence read:

“elecotrocuted and died”

That is redundant. Electrocuted means “to die from electricity”. It’s similar to saying, “He was killed, and died”.

I only bring it up because some folks (myself included) at work were talking about the meaning of the word.

The mono projects documentation is not the greatest (it’s getting better all the time) and msdn does have more complete documentation (this is in reference to .Net). However one strinking difference…

Go to msdn and click on the little pluses on the left there…and watch the page reload…then do the same at mono and watch it update withOUT a reload. TAKE THAT MICROSOFT! :)