Crazy war stories, indeed.

http://mina.naguib.ca/blog/2012/10/22/the-little-ssh-that-sometimes-couldnt.html

I feel old, guys. I feel like the old man sysadmin with the Unix Beard and suspenders (which I continually think of as a halloween costume, less and less ironically). My coworkers are all... what would have been slashdotters had they not found digg or reddit, or whatever it was.

These are "kids" who grew up with linux. (They're all 30.) But they don't have the base knowledge that I expect them to have. They only know bash. They mostly know Ubuntu and Red Hat, although the one 'sysadmin' type dude knows virtual machines with Xen, and seems to know what he's doing most of the time.

I figured I'd pick up python, because I ordered a raspberry pi, and it seems that's what all the cool kids are doing. (I get along fine with shell and perl for most of whatever it is I do around here.) The advice I got from one of my coworkers was that I should "uninstall the IDE." IDE? For python? Seriously? It's interpreted, you use a goddamned text editor. Apparently that's one of the 'tips' from "Learning Python the Hard Way." (I'm reading Programming Python on my nook, FWIW. And I'm already yelling at it, as the examples are how to create a database from your filesystem with pickle, because seriously, if you're managing peoples' salaries, you don't want your data in flat files, or necessarily in a readable format to your other employees. But that's my cross to bear.)

When I got home, I started ranting about that to the Benny. Frothing at the mouth kind of ranting like I used to be able to do. Who uses a goddamned IDE for an interpreted language!? There's no "I" for your "DE". When you're writing C, in a complex environment, sure. When you're writing Obj-C for your iPhone app of the year, fine. You have libraries, you have interdependencies, you have reasons to have a debugger and a compiler. Python is interpreted. There's no need for these things.

Goddamned kids these days. In my day, we had emacs and vi, and flamewars about both. There was no IDE for writing shell scripts. There was no IDE for perl. There wasn't even really decent tab completion! We used 'more' instead of 'less'. We knew how to pipe things to awk and grep. We used which instead of locate. And we liked it, damnit!

I'm running OpenNMS on Ubuntu at work, using vi (technically vim) to edit all the xml files and java.properties style files. I don't run KDE, Gnome, or any other desktop on the damned thing. It's a server, for pete's sake. Not that it's lacking RAM or CPU for me to run that, but because I'm old, and old-school. Some of my coworkers (and I use that word loosely, as I'm a department of one) run linux on the desktop ... not because all the tools are there and work, necessarily, but because our IT group doesn't know how to deal with linux, and they can get away with it.

Today, I had the most peculiar experience. A (female, and pregnant, but that has no importance at all for this story) cousin of mine complained on Facebook about a virus infection on her Windows machine (I assume Vista, but I actually didn't bother to ask). Locked out by one of these ransom viruses. Worst part is that she did have an up-to-date antivirus sponsored by the Bank where here partner works.

I don't mind helping, but -of course- my first comment was. "Drop that crap OS and go to ubuntu.com and get a real operating system". I NEVER expected her to actually do that. Well, she jumped on the occasion. She was also very happy to hear what a live CD is and that she could recover her data from her current installation using the LiveCD and copy it to a USB disk. So, she managed to burn the ISO, boot to it, copy her data and install the whole thing. Basically without me helping except saying that it could be done. I also explained what dual booting was and she could do that.

She asked me one question: Why do you use Windows? My reply was: I don't, unless I want to play games (the non-Flash variants. I illustrated Flash games with FarmVille). The tipped her over: She'd go full Linux.

I was completely baffled... You have to imagine the frustration Windows had to put on her so that she would try something completely unknown, just because I say I use it.

First reactions were: Hey, this thing already has Firefox,,Thunderbird and an Office suite. Wow, I have four workspaces (she means virtual desktops). She found Ubuntu Cloud (5GB seems a lot to her, I wonder where else she has been?) and -while not Ubuntu specific- I explained her what Firefox Sync is. She also seemed to like the idea of the Software Store (I compared it to Apples App Store, I know not the same, but she has to understand what it is) and steered her to installing ubuntu-restricted-extras and explained it was to install Flash and similar.

Linux on the desktop... Yes, it can be done... She is non-IT, perhaps a bit geeky, but definitely non-IT.

My decision to rip all of my audio losslessly to FLAC has been vindicated. I rip to Vorbis as well, but I always thought it was worth having the lossless originals around too. That way, if a new codec arrived on the scene at a later date, I could rerip to that without any further loss of quality. That codec is now here. Hello, Opus!

Thanks to whoever burned five.

Wow, you get so many mod points, you feel the need to blast all 10 at me? I'm no longer the most prolific poster on slashdot, why do you bother?

Got myself 58% more screen real estate at 117.99€. The prime condition on a Full HD[*] monitor was that it must have integrated speakers. This is because it saves desk space. That's hard to find in my allocated budget of max. 149€.

Funnily enough, this is exactly the same model as my moms screen which I bought nearly two years ago. 149€ back then. I have cursed myself ever since that day that I didn't buy one for myself.

The integrated speaker isn't as great as the ones in my old Fujitsu-Siemens C17-2, but more than sufficient for the occasional youp...I mean youtube video.

On a related note, I start to have quite a few "spare" LCD screens now.

[*] As much as I'd love to have a 2560x1440 monitor, there is no way I want to spend 400€++ on a monitor.

I don't program much these days any more, but due to a not very important reason, I wanted to do a little something with Java Server Faces. Being a sysadmin by day, I thought that setting up such an environment would be easy-peasy, as long as I stick to the default packages, I'd get an environment that would be more than sufficient for my modest needs. Basically, my idea was that

aptitude install tomcat6 libjsf-impl-java

on a base Debian squeeze would do it. I mean change a config file left and right, drop the webapp in /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/ and point my browser to http://dusky.sharks:8080/megasuperextremewebapp

Well, apparently, it's not that easy. I took this as test web application, as it looked extremely simple. I immediately got greeted with a ClassNotFoundException on com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener. That seems to be one of the core JSF classes. No problem right? Just a classpath problem right? Well, I do remember that could get quite complicated. To make a long story short. The JSF jars are in /usr/share/java where you'd expect them. Superficially there didn't seem to be an entry to that in the classpath, so I added it manually. Didn't help.

Well, let's try adding a few symbolic links to the web applications WEB-INF/lib part... namely jsf-impl.jar and jsf-api.jar. Nope... Then I read something that can't do that but need to copy the jars to make it work. I do so. It still doesn't work, but the ClassNotFoundException is gone (replaced by another one). WTF?!? Java doesn't work with symlinks?

It's pretty much at that point that I decided to write this, because despite all my Googling, I found no references on how to do this (using default packages on Debian). All instructions basically are quite Windows centric, instruct you to download software here and there tell you to copy jars nilly willy, which would be okay if they explained why. I don't like "just do this" instructions.

I'm a big fan of the central repositories, but unless I have a blonde moment, server-side Java doesn't play nice at all...

So, is there anyone who ever tried using just the packages and have it work?

I'd forgotten how much I hated Javascript. I very much appear better suited to server programming than to web programming...

It's my full Raspberry Pi kit: I was lucky, the two high speed 4GB SD cards were 5€ each on sale, and the power adapters were on sale at 7.50€ each.
The RS Components Pi was 39,16€. The Farnell/Element 14 Pi was 42.05€ (including the t-shirt!).

The whole shebang was thus "only" 106,21€....
The SD cards are both loaded with the default Raspbian, with SSH enabled (just added links manually in /etc/rc[2-5].d)

Called them up Wednesday to ask why the order never shipped. They confirmed me that it was because of an expired card, and if I wished to cancel the order. HELLO NO!

*grin*

Some people think I'm paranoid. I wouldn't say so. It's just that I pay more attention to the potential worst case outcome that some. So when it comes to storage, I have a mirrored RAID array in my home server. The contents are backed up to a separate disk in the same machine. I also have an offsite backup in a datacentre.

My offsite backup machine died, and is now sat at home waiting for me to rebuild it. So it was somewhat alarming when my backup drive also died. Uncomfortable about running with less redundancy than normal, I immediately went out and bought a replacement drive. When checking the drives in the machine to see which one I needed to pull out, I noticed that one of the mirrored drives had also failed and the array was running in degraded state. Eeeek! Of my four levels of redundancy, three had failed. If I'd had fewer, I'd be screwed right now!

I'm not sure why I wasn't notified about the RAID failure. Normally I automatically get an email when the array enters a degraded state. That's something I need to look into. For now, the array is rebuilding. I'll fit the new backup drive when I get home this evening.

I'm not a Windows fanboi... Far from it. Yet, Windows 8 might not deserve the bad rap it gets in the tech world.

I think this because I remember how the tech community reacted to Unity on Ubuntu. Hey, I did react violently too, because Unity in 10.10 to 11.10 definitely sucked. I continued to use it and I have to admit that in 12.04 it has become good. Sure, perhaps a bit dumbed down for the average power-user, but I can live with that.

If you read here more often, you might think "why for hells sake did you continue to use it if you didn't like it". The reply to this is that I use Ubuntu (LTS) for a "drop and forget" for non tech users. I was utterly dreading giving them Unity.

My worries were unfounded. When my dad had to go to the hospital (twice) earlier this year (He has COPD as we've now been told and has been on the brink of death twice), I provided him with a low-weight dumpster-diven laptop (CoreDuo/4GB RAM, if you must know) on which I quickly installed Ubuntu so he could surf and email. Not a single question was asked... None. Sure, my dad is Windows power user, but really, no question at all.

I upgraded my Mom's computer to 12.04 LTS in May.. Not a single question either... My mom is no tech...

I will say it how it is: Mark Shuttleworth was right, and the tech community wasn't.

What has this got to do with Windows 8? Simple: the interface is radically different, just like Unity. It's radically simplified, just like Unity... We techs all hate it, just like Unity. However, has anyone ever bothered to sit down a real non-tech user in front of it? That will tell us the success of failing of it. Normal, non-tech users, will probably like the simplicity.

I predict that, if Windows 8 doesn't have other problems, it might not be the disaster we techs think it will be.