Comparing and contrasting ...

I'm sure that my beloved wife doesn't read this. If you are reading this, stop now. And you've been touching the monitor with a KVM. Windex it, please.

She's had bad luck with laptops, so she has decided that she wants a desktop PC. It's the season, and Jesus would want Kerry to have a PC. That's fine. She's been using my #2 because her last laptop is flaky with networking and I don't know why. I suspect it's the cheap PCMCIA wireless NIC. Anyway, it's an old machine in poor shape, so why not.

But she wants Windows, and she wants Word.

It's 2am. Nearly 2:30. I wake up in five hours to go to work. And I've just found the magic to fix this:

The Windows Installer Service cannot update one or more protected Windows files.

That's useful. That's really useful. I mean, that tells you exactly ... nothing.

I had to Google it, and there I found out about the magic of Event Viewer.

Product: Microsoft Software Update for Web Folders (English) 12 -- Error 1933.

The Windows Installer service cannot update one or more protected Windows files. SFP Error: -536870654.

List of protected files:\r\nc:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\40\bin\fp4autl.dll

So there's a DLL for a web server extension that is causing installation problems. Meanwhile, I point out, it's for a web server. This is Windows. I want as few open ports as possible. So, web server?

I'd also point out that, right before, I installed Google Pack and OpenOffice.org with absolutely no problems. Just click and go. This is Microsoft's flagship software. This is the product that keeps Bill Gates in Hohos. And it installs that stupid?

I keep considering in contrast the zen simplicity of sudo apt-get install foo...

Talkin' All That ... Rock ...

The Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame has the new list of inductees out.

• Leonard Cohen
  
• The Dave Clark Five
  
• Madonna
  
• John Mellencamp
  
• The Ventures
  
• Little Walter (sideman category)
  
• Gamble & Huff (non-performer category)
  

Gamble & Huff? TSOP! Yeah. Little Walter? Blues, but 'bout time. John Mellencamp? That'll work. Madonna? If we have to. The Ventures? I'm surprised that people who aren't me remember the Ventures, but yay.

But Leonard Cohen? The Dave Clark Five?

I say this as a fan: Leonard Cohen has no Elvis in him. He's folkie who eventually bought an 80s Casio that sounds every bit as cheesy as an 80s Casio should. With a voice that brings women to their knees in waves of pure pleasure. Rock is something he does not do.

And someone has to explain the inclusion of the Dave Clark Five, because I just don't get it.

Thinking "That Doesn't Work!" ...

That, again, is the result of sending an image through Verizon to Blogger.

I shall have to write a script that edits the text but sends through the image.

Snowy Day

Thinking about simplicity ...

Last night, Mark reviewed a book called Laws of Simplicity, which he simply declared was a good book, but a less-good website.

Anyway, I hit the website this morning, and found the fourth law: Knowledge makes everything simpler.

I'll get back to that.

Kerry wants Windows because she wants Office. She wants Word. And I've seen enough of Windows that I would not willingly choose it if I had any other choice. So I keep saying "OpenOffice.Org can write Word documents". So, finally, she decides to try it, and she complains that the person on the other side could not open it. So, I have her send it to me.

She isn't Ms. CS, but she's been in computing longer than me, and far more connected to word processing than I have been in the last 15 years. So why didn't she understand the concept of Save As Word Document?

It seemed perfectly simple to me, but then knowledge makes everything simpler. I got the concept. When I install Office, I always put in all the conversions, because you don't know when someone wants you to read a document written in WordPerfect on a Mac. Somehow, somewhere, she missed it.

I have knowledge on this, so it's simple to me.

Thinking about mail ...

I use Thunderbird for mail. I use multiple mailboxes to segment my life. I have one that my bosses use to mail me. I have one for some friends. I have one I put on my resumes. I have one (strictly speaking, it's at least 6, potentially more, but one mailbox) that I've been at forever, and it's where most of my mailing lists go, where my parents mail me, and where I can bring the awesome power of Procmail to trigger abstract code through a mail filter. Plus one from my cable company that I don't really use.

Anyway, I use Thunderbird, because it's easier to watch all those mailboxes with one thing than it is to have seventeen windows open. I have Procmail for one mailbox, GMail's server-side sorting for two others, and contempt and Thunderbird's built-in filter for the campus mailbox. So, when I get mail from mailing lists, it goes to the list. When I get spam, for the most part, it gets trashed. Very fine-grained control over what goes where.

And very coarse control over alerts.

I like mailing lists. I'm on a lot, on a few subjects where I'm not the master and not going to be soon. So I collect great gobs of mail and use search functions or grep to find exactly what I'm looking for. But the alert function has just on and off. I don't care if there's a flame war on the opensolaris list, or discussion on new forms of statistical analysis on the Bioconductor list, or a flame war on the guitar list, and the alert function that tells me about that is stealing my focus. What I want is alerts for the people in the office, my parents, my wife, my children, a select set of friends, and complete silence for everyone else.

I'm going to have to write a module, aren't I?

Looking Nevada and feeling Indiana ...

To explain, first....

Solaris is becoming opensolaris, licensed under a Stallman-compliant but Torvalds-grumbly license to keep the coolest parts out of Linux. This process is lead by Ian Murdock, former head of Progeny Linux, whose goal was, in part, making an installer for Debian that didn't suck. Progeny died, Ubuntu make the Live CD, and Murdock went to the LSB and then to Sun, where he's in charge of the process of s/S/opens/.

The old code base is code-named Nevada, the new code base is code-named Indiana, because that's where Ian lives. And it has a dev release Live CD. And I tried it out.

Years ago, I had a specific Celeron box. It was the only PC I had that had a real ATX motherboard rather than a proprietary Compaq oddball thing. So, when I tested things, I tested them on that one. BeOS wouldn't use the network card, so I didn't stick with BeOS. (Otherwise, Be was so choice. It had speed on a 500MHz chip that I would now barely expect on a 2GHz chip.) Later, I installed Windows .Net 2003 server. Again, no networking. If it couldn't network it was of no use to me.

Now, I have the opensolaris live CD. That specific 500MHz machine has been dead for a year. I tested it on this machine, a Compaq desktop I got from a friend whose company was salvaging old desktops. 2.26GHz. Over four times as fast. That'd fight the image that it's Slowlaris. And it looks good. It got that machine to run 1600x1200 on a screen that Ubuntu Feisty refused to run at more than 1024x768.

But, it couldn't find my NIC. What good is a machine that cannot talk to another machine?

But that's a good thing about a live CD. You can test the hardware and see if it works.

I'll try it on my #1, a Dell GX260, soon. In the mean time, can anyone point me to a FreeBSD live CD?

ETA: It works fine on my work machine, a newer HP/Compaq. I'm writing on it right now. It doesn't to TwinView or Compiz. Which is fine, I guess. It's supposed to work, not look pretty.

The live view, this time, required a login and won't give a gterm. It didn't do either when I tried it before. Odd.

Blowing it again ...

Or perhaps still.

Fuse went right as I walked through the door. So, I spent my time wondering how I was going to get anything done, rather than getting something done.

Sometimes, I think I should get a laptop.

Then again, you don't get 2560x1024 on a laptop.

So, this means I did nothing today.

"Nothing" include "not reviewing Beautiful Code".

However, I did read some Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Solutions using R and Bioconductor. Which is pretty much what I do here. But I couldn't try any examples, which sucks.

Reading Beautiful Code, Chapter Two ...

I was reminded of this by reading an article on keeping all your important files aligned with Subversion. Chapter two is on Subversion's Delta Editor. Delta means change, and Delta (&916;) is math for change.

I cannot claim that the beauty of this interface was immediately obvious to me. My quick read of the interface sees tight but well-commented code. I'm hesitant to dive further in, as I'm already lots of review behind. The part that I think is most worthy of comment, right now, is that it's an interface. This differs from previous standards for code beauty (the author lists Duff's Device and rsync's checksum as examples) because it's not an algorithm, and because it's longer than what would fit on the back of an envelope. Five pages in the book, mostly comments. But the beauty of Perl that I see every day is that I can abstract, for example, the process of downloading a web page from a series of network pokes to something close to get($url) ;. If the foundations are solid, you can build on them. But nobody normally looks and says "My, what a great foundation."

Exclaiming "Mea Culpa! Mea Maxima Culpa!" ...

On Thursday, I said I would do one chapter a week.

On Friday, I said I'd do Chapter Two over the weekend.

On Monday, I failed to do anything.

I am in a state of sucking wildly. Suckety Suck Suck Suck.

At least I admit it.

And I'm putting the book on my desk right now.

But I'll mention two things.

First, there's a Perl program that replaces the "READY" text on your office's big HP printer. It is easily adaptable to, for example, take a string of weather information pulled from Weather Underground or whatever source you choose. The author chose Geo::METAR , but I found that too verbose for my purposes. And I am considering creating a module for HP Printer Job Language communication. It'd be my entry into CPAN!

Second, A post on O'ReillyNet brings up an interesting question relating to database inquiries and, as it turns out, a weakness in Perl's sleep. Well, limitation, at least.