Computers

Dropbox… interesting

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The other day, whilst parsing webpages in my usual manor, I stumbled across a nifty service called dropbox. So far, it seems to offer all the perks of rolling ones own solution but with better OS integration, and a network server. I’m planning on putting it to the test for replacing my existing rsync based system.

What dropbox is capable of, is not far off from what one can do using rdiff-backup and your own server. Main difference I reckon is tone meshes well with SSH and the other relies upon SSL. The way dropbox claims to integrate with the OS however, would more than make up in time lost to configuration.

My main gripe of course, is that dropbox does not yet offer their desktop application for FreeBSD :-(. Which effectively limits how much I can use it until suitable builds become available for testing.

rdiff-backup can solve the problem just as well for me, since my home server is about as reliable as the rock of Gibraltar; the only problem being the software involved. The lowest common denominator among versions of rdiff-backup available for my platforms, are not compatible enough, 8=). Which is why my computers rely on a custom set of scripts built around rsync: rs-mgr rs-pull, rs-push, rs-touch, and rs-vars.

If dropbox became suitably available under FreeBSD, my life would be a heck of a lot easier, and vectra’s roll could be reduced to backups rather than storage central.

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In my web travels, I’ve just come across an interesting web-focused application and service, called Teambox. So far it seems to offer, a rather interesting stack of tools. Assuming it could be suitably extended into the neccessary work flow, by adding things such as SCM integration, code reviews, and issue tracking, it would be darn freaking useful.

Little old me, is used to projects where the best things in life are e-mail, XMPP, and Git, hahahaa!

gfire+freebsd

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A week or so ago, after updating my machines to a newer GFire plugin, I had the problem with it breaking xfire support on my laptop. Making me have to roll back to 0.8.3 :-(. Today I’ve just sent a message to the `gfire team`, in the hopes they might have a clue to to solving the issues.

Really, since my laptop isn’t for gaming, I don’t care as long as I can sign in / chat. Being able to do file transfers (finally!) and have the right status message displayed however, are worth the upgrade. I just recently noticed that status messages weren’t being updated from my laptop lol.

I guess, on my laptop I’ll just have to change my nickname on xfire to match status, e.g. ‘Spidey01 = AFK’ or something like that. No wonder people keep messaging me when I’m marked AFK, or ignoring the big I’m not here signs. No matter how bad a mood I am, generally I won’t take it out on someone unless they’re at the root cause of it; but when I’m marked away or busy, it means don’t expect a reply within the next 5-15 minutes: unless I happen to notice the message and have time to answer it. Assuming I’m even seated in front of the computer!

RvS+Linux !

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Installed and patched it easily, I’ve got 1.0-1.60 uber patches saved for every language I could find. Only hitch was the DX setup flunked, but it wouldn’t matter much anyway (there is no real DirectX on Linux).

As far as I can tell, the client works properly, but I can’t actually use it. My desktop panels overlap the window, and being as RvS forcefully sets the resolution down to 640×480 whenever it hits the menus, thus creating about 1″ blocks where the mouse leaves the games focus. Luckly fixing that after a ‘quit’ in the console, is a simple xrandr invocation. Odds are, I could just setup a quick bare bones fvwm session. GR has similar issues but is actually playable, not surprising as it was a much more professional quality bit of handy work than Raven Shield.

The second test however, was using the Dedicated Server setup — which worked perfectly! How much the performance is impacted by WINE and how much by the heavy network utilisation I’ve got going, is beyond my calculation though, lol.

First date with that red headed Linux, and dropping the ’64

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After so many years of dodging RHL and company, I finally opted to give Fedora fair chance. Since it’s a big disk set and I lack the spare DVD medium, I opted to d/l the net install and live cds. For the sake of wanting to try it, I also opted to download the x86_64 version, since the machines processor is an Intel 64.

Round one: a very nice setup using the netinstall disk, only to find out, as anticipated it was cram packed full of network drivers (as any sane distributor would do), even had the necessary crypto support! Just not a driver for my fairly common wireless card. Even more irksome, whether by virtue of bad design in GRUB, BIOS, or a foup up in Anaconda, on rebooting the system, I was greated with a load of gibberish in the terminal, where in pressing enter goes to the Intel Boot Agent for PXE based booting 8=). Odds are my knoppix disk can nuke the MBR back to a stock without trouble, or I could just reach for my FreeBSD disk and correct the MBR.

Round two: go scp myself the the live cd ISO, and burncd it. Only to find it increadably slow and not very agreeable. However the blasted thing was able to auto load the necessary crap for my wireless, connecting after I supplied the nearly 500bit code for the system. While I don’t care much for yielding the package selection (or screwing with the running image in slow mo), it shouldn’t be hard to adjust things post boot and tune Fedora to my tastes. That’s kind of one plus of the distribution, it’s more of a screw with it until you break something sort ;). However the installer wouldn’t function off the disk, so back to the drawing board….

Round three A: cart the entire freaking kit to my room, and hook it into the router with a spare Ethernet cable. No thanks, there are distros that ‘like’ my hardare.

Round three B: Download and burn five disks of Fedora 12…. and shout loudly if the driver isn’t included.

Of course, I could likely have show horned the driver from the live disk into working with the net install disk, pardoning kernel panics, if I hadn’t chucked the disk already >_>. That is also assuming that the installers demands could be appeased!

In the end I took round three B, finding that Fedora x86_64 and for sake of testing, Ubuntu x86_64 really do not like my hardware! So much for having suitable kit >_>. Rather than trouble myself further to fetch a set of Fedora i386, I dug out a two year old (8.04) Ubuntu 32-bit disk and installed that. Did a quick set of updates to bring her to the new 10.04 LTS.

After installing about 900 extra software packages… I think I’m done, lol.

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With my laptops updates finished last night, I’m finally ready to go green on setting up Fedora 12 on my desktop. Although I could always wait ~two weeks, I’d rather see how the system tkes the upgrade to Fedora 13. I’m also interested, to see how SWAT 4 and Raven Shield play with it, both in the client and server role.

The main thing that concerns me, is doing the install of Fedora ver the network. Generally speaking, I have had much better hardware support from modern BSDs then I have Linux distributions. On the other hand however, Fedora tends to be more ‘cutting edge’ and bloated to kingdom come, where as most distributions that I favour, tend to be more focused on stability and share my view points on minimalism. So hopefully, Fedora will take well to it.

In waiting for Dixie to sort the compiling, I spent much of it reading up on more of the finer details of Common Lisp, including CLTL. While I knew that modern lisp was a rather huge beast, I am now convinced that it must dwarf C++, in which case you have to take the C++ standard (and occasionally Cs) into sequence, along with Boost and numerous issues of developmental expertise. Most of which, I reckon, are rather learned by living with classy C++ code, or having to put up with shitty code when you know there’s better.

Now where did I store my CD-Rs… lololololol

Clear mailboxes ftw!

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You know, after so many years of watching space usage rise, it’s so odd to be down to ~150MB of email, coming from well over 2GB lol.

I am currently using 148 MB (1%) of my 7451 MB.

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I’m really starting to get addicted to Google Chrome’s ability to auto-resize it’s windows when dragged and dropped into the right spots. It’s a feature of some unix window managers that I’ve rarely used, that’s starting to make me wish it was built into Windows XP, instead of being a trick of the Chromium trade 8=).

Fedora Vs Debian Vs Slackware

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Now  having less need of maintaining a Windows XP install, last night I began more thorough computations about setting up a GNU/Linux distribution on my desktop. I would certainly like to see how the SWAT 4 support has come since my last outing, and this time I intend to use regular WINE.

As always, the real question is which distribution to use? Arguably the least trouble would be to setup Ubuntu 10.04, but I’m more familiar with Debian and Slack’ based systems as it is. This time, I was thinking about going with Fedora: I’m not fond of Red Hat Linux and it’s modern relations, but it would be a fresh change.

The main thing that concerns me with Fedora, is the stability and upgrade path, mostly the amount of time needed to abuse things. Ubuntu is fairly painless, at least when you run Long Term Support (LTS) releases on your stable systems. My only gripe with Debian, being it can be a chore to get reasonably up to date debs, and sometimes (for example with Pidgin) it can be preferable to be ready op on that. Although I’ve no big qualms about building from source, when the developers actually knew wtf they were doing about getting it building in the first place.

I’m more of the OpenBSD type, but Linux as a “For the masses” system, is much easier to live with for me, then Windows XP. With 350~360 gigs of disk space free, running full development environments in twins won’t make a dent either.

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Oy gevalt, this port is compiling gcc44 as a build dependency. What is this, karmic retribution for my refusal to upgrade gcc45 today? HAHAHAHA