Camels in the Mist

Where to start? these past several days have been crazy. The biggest thing of course being embarking on this crazy job of migrating from windows to linux. I haven’t run into too many problems per se, but there’s the daunting task of actually converting all my archives and documents (~40+ gigs of stuff — probably small by some standards, but big enough for me) to something that linux can read/write to. This, of course, means not-ntfs. I can only assume there’s some good reason that linux ntfs will always default to read-only. I’ve taken a course or two^Y^Y^Y^Y^Y^Y^Y on operating systems so i know that there’s a lot of crap that goes into something as complicated as a filesystem that i don’t know about. Who am i to complain unless i’m willing to pull up my sleeves and write the drivers and stuff myself. right? right?

Anyway, suffice to say, when you’re embedded in a windows operating system with a large amount of “stuff” that you’re relying on for day to day access, it takes 2 things to make a move. Firstly, somewhere to move to. Linux, obviously. Which distro? well, i answered that question in my last post. As for the second thing… the ability to make the move. For me, that meant the ability to make paranoid backups of everything so that *just in case* something went wrong… in case all my paranoia and precautions, something went fubar, i’d still be able to recover and be back up and running.

The second thing came a month or two ago in the form of a usb 2.0 external encloser packing a 200 gig harddrive. Plug her in, and there you go… all your data’s backed up. now it’s just the process of copying everything back onto ext3 from linux. maybe reiserfs would have been a better choice? i don’t know enough about these things to be making that sort of call yet.

Aside from the data transfers, the workspace tweaking has gone over much better than i expected. i discovered a neat little utility called XBindKeys that allows me to make key-combination additions to the global keymap for launching custom scripts. it also comes with a gui configurator in the form of xbindkeys-config. Much more powerful than the WinKey utility i had been using to the same effect under windows. Not being able to launch firefox with a quick win-z or a pop-up notepad with win-space has been driving me nuts. Now i’m happy again. I’ve also found pseudo-equivalents for the built-in windows defaults key combos win-r, win-l, win-e (not really, but life isn’t fair), and am actively seeking the cure for win-d (although, apparantly ctrl-alt-d does the same thing?)

I have also been tweaking wordpress a bit, writing my own plugin for spidering the blogs i link to in my blogroll and looking for rss feeds and looking at those rss feeds for updates so i can give “last updated” times. There are probably Better Ways Of Doing This, however, mine requires a minimum amount of knowledge about the people you’re linking to (ie, just a url) and it’ll figure the rest out for you automa(g|t)ically. This allows me to be less not-lazy. yay me. It’s still in alpha, so you can’t have the source yet. It currently only reads rss 2.0 feeds. When i’m not-lazy at a future date, i’ll be adding other feed readers, more because Neothermic will keep complaining at me if i don’t. (This is because, of course, his SEO sucks and there’s no obvious versioning of his rss feed in his <link> title attribute. Which means that any spider, mine included, requires an extra remote call just to figure out what kind of document it is rather than being able to make use of hints as provided by the link title attribute)

What else has been keeping me busy? Oh yes… my resume. I’ll be applying for work at various places in the near and present future, so, fairly soon (probably later-today after sleep occurs) i’ll be posting up my resume, as i’ve been polishing it off a bit recently. Any recommendations will be appreciated.

Last night, i went out (i don’t get out enough) for food and gpg fingerprint trading. Nothing like having a bunch of geeks show up at a bar, pull out peices of paper and tear up little strips and pass them out like trading cards or birthday invitations. “Hello, can we get 3 pitchers at this table? thank you…” Afterwards, we went out to another bar for more beer and desert. Due to a certain team member always passing around slices of tiramisu (coupled with the fact that i didn’t know what it was nor had ever tied it), i had to try out this places reputedly “best tiramisu in vancouver” (scroll down to the -very- bottom). In a sort of insubstantial way, it tasted like a lot of tasty nothing… very little body for having a decent volume. However, i can’t be totally negative about the place. The time i’d been there before, they served up a rather kickass slice of cheesecake. The reader is at this point encouraged to determine for themselves how the adjective “kickass” may or may not apply to cheesecake. Let us not forget that they also Serve Beer. I haven’t tried it yet (i was the designated decoy last night) but i hear good things about their Oatmeal Stout.

All of today was spent helping the rents install (large|hard)wood flooring in the latest chapter of home renovations. In the following pictures, you may see resting on a couch a box of hardwood flooring. It contains about 21 square feet of flooring and weighs in at about 70 pounds. Yesterday was spent moving several hundred square feet of flooring out of the garage where it’s been in storage for a couple months into the primary living space, in bulky 70 pound batches. Hence the title, picking up Heavy Things and putting them Down Again. (Some of my friends use this phrase as a euphemism for weight-lifting/ going to the gym… publically announcing excursions to the gym rapidly destroys geek cred, unless you’re capable of demonstrably maintaining your geekhood, “Sure i lifted weights last friday, but the day after, i wrote a spider to generate some really neato graphs based on blogroll linking, and i came up with this theory that…”)

As i was saying, we were installing hardwood floors. I took some pictures at various stages. Feel free to take a look. Enjoy =)

Currently Listening to:
[ Good News For People Who Love Bad News ] Modest Mouse - This Devil's Workday
"I could buy myself a reason.
I could sell myself a job.
I could hang myself on treason.
All the folks I know are gone."

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 17th, 2005 at 3:10 pm by Xore and is filed under All, People, Technology, Life, Home, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.