Yay, I am now officially in the fraternity (or sodality or
whatever) of system and network engineers who work
on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. Here I
am in the EMPTY freaking building, with NO real tickets
and NO real engineering projects and NO customers
calling and NO machine problems. Free money, but I
would have really liked to kiss my girlfriend at midnight,
as is tradition.
Anyway... I have started entertaining the notion of
programming in C again, rather than doing every damn
thing in Perl. I think the last time I actually opened an
empty editor buffer on a .c file, and had to manually type
out #include <stdio.h>, I was... ouch. OK, I don't even
remember. (wait, I do, but it was to type in 'hello world'
to test see why the compiler was broken - a bad stick of
RAM, IIRC).
Its amazing what you forget. Years of Perl programming
(as my primary language, and the first with which I had
any sort of profiency, other than Javascript and HTML)
have trained my fingers in the right motions - always
end stuff in semicolons, proper formatting, and the like.
Still, I hate having to actually sit down and remember
the pointer rules, for example; how many times
yesterday did I say to myself, "Wait, did I mean * or &?
Aw, shit. Guess we'll see in a minute."
So lately, other than my autoconf hacks, I am trying to
convert some of perl scripts into C.
Going to put Rock Linux on tomorrow, assuming my
broke-ass CDRW will work. Its always an adventure,
that thing. Sometimes it works, sometimes it chokes
and dies. It seems to have a pattern where it gets tired.
It works for a few weeks, then it has to be removed from
the machine and placed in the extra hardware bucket.
After a while, I need to burn a CD, and I pop it back it
and it works for another couple weeks.
More PDA shopping. I still can't decide:
Palm: works with every OS I have in my house (Linux,
W2k, OSX, OS9). Cheaper. Nice form factor and plenty
of apps. OTOH, they might go under before the end of
the year, and the apps (and the device itself) are
starting to show a little age, despite incremental
improvements like colour and nicer screens.
iPaq: Loaded down with features and IMO the only
WinCE device worth owning. OTOH, expensive and only
works fully with W2k. Also I would be buying "last years"
model which, as anyone in the Windows world knows,
is paying large money for obsolesence. Developer
tools are expensive, and seriously non-Free. Still, for a
WinCE device it has a BADASS form factor, a very nice
screen, and very nice features.
My new machine will be running W2k, for purposes of
games, so who knows. What bothers me is, that its
lock-in. So I buy a machine for games, running
Windows. Its the secret shame of many Linux/BSD
people; they all have a machine around to play their fav
Win32 games on. (OK, not all, don't take offense at that,
I'm just talking here). So, its for games. AND, if I get the
iPaq, it now is also for my PDA functions.
I want the PDA because I want it so that when I log into
my computer first thing, I want to see: reminders and
todos, all that shit, and to have them available to me all
the time. So, given these contraints, that means I will
have to log into my game box to sync, which means it
now holds my PDA features, too.
BUT!!! One of the bonuses of the WinCE device is that it
syncs automatically with Outlook, all that stuff. So if I
want to take full advantage of the iPaq, I would need to
move my mail from my Mac desktops to the Windows
box.
Although in all seriousness, I'm going back to having
my mail on my Linux box via IMAP, like it was before it
died. That freaking ruled. Didn't matter where I was, it
was all IMAP, all the time.
So, by introducing the WinCE device into the equation, it
basically acts "virally" to cause me to spend a lot of
time in front of the W2k box, doing my "personal
productivity" thing. When allI want that box for is to play
the latest 'Dark Age Of Camelot' and stuff. I have my
OSX and OS9 boxes for Word, web design, etc, and my
Linux boxes for server stuff.
Argh. Decisions, decisions. and nothing to do tonight.