Older blog entries for topher (starting at number 2)

Hrm....it seems that I'm still stuck at 'Observer' despite being certified above that...it wouldn't bother me much, except that I'd been considering posting an article. Oh, well, I guess it'll just have to wait...

Distro Wars, distro wars, let's all play in the distro wars....

I was gonna write up a big oppinion piece on the different Linux Distributions, but then I realized that I didn't care to write it, and no one would care to read it, either.

I think we all just need to remember that fanaticism in any form is a Bad Thing (tm). Personally, I've never seen much in the way of Debian users bashing Red Hat. In fact, my experience has been that Debian tends to be one of the 'quietest' distros around.

It reminds me somewhat of NetBSD, among the *BSDs. FreeBSD pushes themselves fairly strongly, and they work actively to promote themselves and their OS. OpenBSD pushes themselves as the most secure OS (Personally I feel administration is a *much* more important factor, and consider OpenBSD to be more Hype than real, but that's just my oppinion, and not the topic I'm discussing here).

NetBSD, on the other hand, just runs. In fact, it runs on more hardware platforms than any other OS. But, most people, even those who've heard of Linux, FreeBSD, and even OpenBSD, don't know about NetBSD. They also don't know it's the oldest of the three *BSDs. NetBSD is more concerned with themselves, their quality, and getting their jobs done, than they are with making a lot of noise.

Debian tends to be the same way, in my oppinion. They have no commercial backer, they have no publicists or marketing people, and they aren't well known among the media or public. They don't try to be the 'end all, be all' distribution for everyone. Instead, they quietly work towards making their distribution as good as they possibly can, for what they want to do with it.

This is the first time I've heard someone claim that Debian users looked down on Red Hat users. The few times I've heard that complaint, it was usually FreeBSD users looking down on Linux people, or Slackware people looking down on Distro-With-Package-Managers people. Or, more often than either of those, it's Linux people looking down on Windows people. Luckily, not everyone is like that. Let's all try to remember not to look down on others as well.

Life....

Okay, in other news, I only slept for an hour and a half last night. (The joy of finishing a 20 page group report, doing 2-3 page reaction paper, and then reading nearly 5 chapters and studying for a test at 9am this morning.) Needless to say, I'm rather exhausted, so I'm going to bed. G'Night everyone. ;-)

Spent a good portion of the day Scheming. The language was something of a mindflip at first, since most of my experience is with imperative languages, but I'm really starting to like it now. I think I'm definitely going to play with it more in the future.

Ponderings....

I'm thinking of resurecting my old popcheck program. It was a simple command line program that connected to a pop server and told you if you had any e-mail. If you did, it would tell you how many, who from, the dates they were received, and the subject lines. I'm thinking about rewriting it, as I first wrote it when I barely knew what I was doing.

I'm also considering rewriting it in alternate langauges. It was originally written in C....I'm thinking it might be fun to rewrite it in C++ and Perl. A good learning experience, and it might also be helpful for others to see how a program can be implemented in various languages.

Curious...

One thing I Just noticed about this site, is that I seem to have lost my 'certification'. Last time I was here, I was certified as a Journeyer. Now I'm not showing myself certified as anything when I check my page, and the full listing shows me as an Observer. I have a couple people who've certified me as Apprentice (people I don't even know, interestingly enough) and a few more who certified me as Journeyer. Seems odd. Everything looks like it should check out. Oh, well, prolly just a little bug or something.

Spent most of the day learning Scheme. It's definitely something of a mindflip when all your previous experience is with standard procedural programming languages. It's fun, though. I'm starting to get the hang of it, I think.

Gonna try to put some work into popcheck later (description and info on it posted then).

Planning to try to Debianize Ankh's lq-text project next week, too.