techiehenry

This weekend, I’ve been trying out other operating systems on my home machine.

At last I’ve found some time to try out PC-BSD, whose install CD I got from the FOSS Fiesta a few weeks ago. It was apparently a repackaged FreeBSD, with an additional twist: binary installers a la Windows, called PBIs, are available.

The install process, including the update, took about an hour on my machine. I spent another 30 minutes or so installing the PBIs, which came in another CD. It would be safe to say that, to create an environment that is suitable enough for me to do my day-to-day tasks, I need less than 2 hours if I want to use PC-BSD with it.

On the plus side, I think people crossing over from Windows to BSD would never feel left out with PC-BSD:

• The PBI installers have a very Windows-y feel, it even gives the user an option to install a shortcut icon on the desktop.
• The whole setup process is quite simple. Descriptions for each step are well-thought out.
• The use of KDE is also a plus, since this appears to be the closest that users could get in terms of having a UI that looks and feels like Windows.
• I don’t know if it’s just me, but it appears that KDE runs more stable with the BSDs more than it does with any other Linux distribution. Never did any application crash during the time that PC-BSD is installed on my machine.

However, PC-BSD also have some kinks left unsolved:

• The FreeBSD name can be seen everywhere: the boot sequence, even in the start screen of the KDE Control Center. I think the BSD license permits changing this to PC-BSD. This may give the idea that I may be nitpicking, but why not take the extra effort to change these so that the distribution won’t appear to be hurriedly done?
• Newbies may get stumped with the BSD way of setting up partitions. For Linux, you create a separate partition for the swap, the root, and others. For Windows, it’s a similar process with Linux (although terms may be different, the logic of creating a separate partition for each mount point is the same). With BSD, you allocate one big partition first, and then subdivide it into the root, swap, etc.
• If users have an nVidia video card, they would need to install proprietary binaries in order to use its full capabilities. PBIs are available, however, in my case I still had to tweak xorg.conf for the proprietary driver to work properly.
• There are issues with loading multiple instances of the same driver to memory. This is being investigated by the PC-BSD team at the moment.
• Antialiasing and font rendering in-between applications is inconsistent. I may have been spoiled by Ubuntu, Mandriva, and Fedora — but this is quite annoying nowadays. I can do a little bit of tweaking though, but can’t this be made available out of the box?

So to cut things short, I removed PC-BSD and I’m back with Kubuntu. I never saw any compelling reason to switch full-time to it. However, I recommend PC-BSD for Windows users who want to dabble with BSD Unix systems for being user-friendly as compared to other distributions.

Through the years Firefox has been gaining momentum in terms of market share as compared to other browsers available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. One specific feature that separates it from others is its support for third-party add-ons that either enhance or add features to the base browser.

However, there are some plugins that I consider to be a mandatory install on every computer that uses Firefox. This is what I tackle on my post for the day.

1. NoScript - The single thing that can help prevent your system from automatically running scripts that may have malicious content.
   
2. Fasterfox - Download pages faster by automatically tweaking the settings from within Firefox.
3. Showcase - Shows a thumbnail view of all tabs, which I think is similar to a feature added to IE7.
4. Flash Player - Do you want to see those clips from YouTube and other sites that use the flash video or flash animation format? ‘Nuff said.
5. Java - To be able to load parts of sites that feature Java-based content.

There are still other application specific plugins that I also deem necessary — a special mention is in order to media player plugins that lets you play multimedia content from within Firefox. However these can be subjective. Just make sure that the corresponding plugin for that media player (I use VLC for Linux) is installed if you want content to be played automatically.

Think you’re not up to the task of writing full articles for a regular weblog but want to set up one to share what you come across as you surf the net? Try setting up a tumblelog instead!

A tumblelog is, simply put, a blog that contains information on random topics — it may be a picture, a quote from a book, a link to a website — just about anything. Usually the posts in a tumblelog don’t have titles. This is a contrast to weblogs of late, where information is concentrated on a specific topic or with a specific person’s everyday experiences, with long textual posts, and a title that describes the topic of a particular post.

Another analogy could be that a weblog is your regular electronic diary/journal, whereas a tumblelog is your electronic scrapbook.

So far I’ve been regularly visiting two tumblelogs:

1. Tumbleo
2. Projectionist

There aren’t much tools specific for tumblelogging at present other than tumblr. However, you may still use existing blogging tools like wordpress, movable type, etc., but you may need to do some tweaking if you want to remove the titles of your posts.

I’m trying to get my wife to blog, but she thinks doesn’t have the time to create the usual posts required of one. Maybe this can finally convince her to share her thoughts to the world.

Shown around February 2006. Pre-iPhone, post Minority Report. Really impressive when you think of integrating these things to large-screen home media center devices.

I should have…

1. …studied making good algorithms first before learning how to program, not the other way around. It took quite some time to ‘unlearn’ something I’ve gotten used to when I was still a student. I could have made a lot more programs ‘better’ in a shorter period of time.
2. …accepted at an earlier time the fact that at one point in my life, I’ll be more of a leader who steers a group of developers on how a program should be designed and take a backseat in implementing that design. That way I could have prepared myself for the leadership task instead of sulking that I won’t be the one implementing my own design anymore. I could have avoided learning about project management the hard way.
3. …placed more comments on the codes that I have created. That way, a lot more people could have understood how I implemented something, and a line-by-line walkthrough of the code could be deemed unnecessary.
4. …stored a mini-library of functions that I have created. Not those ones that control a device or something (I’m restricted by a NDA), but the generic ones. I could have a function or two at my disposal and tweak it a bit for the intended purpose, instead of ‘reinventing the wheel’ everytime something similar comes along.
5. …learned to do that wrist exercise and took care of my wrists earlier. My hands are slowly being taken over by carpal tunnel syndrome. Even though I do that exercise right now, the pain is relieved for a while, and then after a few hours the pain goes back.
6. …made friends with some Japanese engineers when I was sent to Japan to do debugging and evaluation work. I could have understood and appreciated their culture better with someone explaining things to me. I remember giving someone my copy of Book III of the Lord Of The Rings to help him study english, but after the project we never got in touch anymore.

I want you, the reader, to…

1. …study more than what’s taught at school. That way, whenever a job application is at hand, you can offer more than what is expected of you. The extra knowledge may come in handy in situations you never expect.
2. …never stop learning. There are a lot more things to discover, a lot more things to know about outside school life, your job, your community. Take the time to join civic groups, take part in user groups, read the newspaper, read a book, befriend a stranger.
3. …keep old books and note papers. At one point in your life, you will need them. Trust me, I’ve been saved by old college books and old notebooks more than once.
4. …choose a field or career where you do something that you consider as ‘play’. Believe me, you’ll never notice the difference between ‘work’ and ‘play’. I consider tinkering with computers akin to playing with my toys when I was a little boy. The only difference is, now I get to earn money while doing something that I enjoy.
5. …cultivate a good working relationship with your co-employees. This isn’t really something that comes at a short time, as my co-engineers and I have experienced when we were sent on working visa to Japan. It sure came in handy when we experienced having flu all at the same time, working overnight to finish a task, and getting homesick as a result of staying in a faraway land.
6. …understand that geeks who blog about technology don’t necessarily mean that they have nothing but technology to talk about. Maybe they just restrict the topic to technology, or they just love writing about it.

Am I getting sentimental? I don’t really know. Now that I’m reaching my 10th year working for the technology industry, it may be time to share some things that I have went through.