Skip to main content

My New Laptop

Celebrating both my new bussiness and my birthday, my wife and I purchased a new laptop. I'm in hyper-joy over my new geek toy and I'm still settling into it. I've decided, for various reasons, to leave XP installed on this one. I haven't used Windows, for anything besides checking my e-mail, in nearly four years now. I remember most of what I need to know to keep things running, but it will be an expirience to get back into things. I've had some trouble getting my NFS shared visible to the laptop, and decided to just migrate to Samba instead. I was disappointed to find out about DVD decoding being a little off with Windows, I suspect for anti-trust purposes, so I might have to pay ten bucks for a decoder. Overall, I am very happy with my new laptop. DVD burner, S-Video input, large screen, faster than my desktop. I was walking around the house carrying the laptop to test the WiFi strength, and its pretty good.

I've finally got Samba running, and learned how to get those shares accessable by all the users on the laptop by setting up a batch script to configure the drive mappings triggered by all user logins, even though I'm the only user. I've exposed my subversion repositories so I can collaborate with myself, and I've installed all the usual tools I'll need for Python work. I might still be missing some dependancies, but I'll work those out as I find them. I'm surprised that I'm actually missing linux packaging, because as much as I complain about it, at least it usually has automatic dependancy installation handled pretty well. I've had to search for some missing python packages already with no errors indicating them at all (pythonw hides all errors onto the console, so be careful for that).

Yay.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...
1 comment
Read more

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...
1 comment
Read more

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro...
4 comments
Read more