Recently my left pinky started to ache. I was at a loss until I reached for the CTRL key and felt a stabbing pain. It seems I have a bit of RSI.

So I thought, why not remap CTRL and CAPS LOCK? Try that for a while and see if it helps.

This is no problem on OSX. Keyboard Preferences -> Modified Keys; done.

This is no problem on Linux. Specifics vary, but it can also be done. (For me using Fedora, it involved installing the gnome tweak tool and using it).

This is a pain in the ass on Windows. There is no built in preference for it. Instead, you get to EDIT THE REGISTRY and REBOOT. WTF?

So at work, I have 5 computers. 3 are under my control, so I can do this operation. 2 are not, they are "corporate managed" systems, where I'm not administrator, and editing the registry is disabled as well via group policy (so no trying to use HKEY_CURRENT_USER). The SysInternals tool "Ctrl2Cap" is also blocked.

Fortunately, those 3 computers I control are also the ones I do most my typing on.

Gizmos in the control panel do let you turn on sticky keys, toggle keys, filter keys, all this great (?) stuff, but not swap CTRL and CAPS LOCK. Goddamn.

This whole bitcoin client bug is fascinating to me. Not that I own any bitcoins or plan to buy any... I'm curious on how the currency will handle this bug. Specifically, in a currency whose express design goal is avoiding central authority and the imposition of arbitrary rules, how do you convince people to voluntarily upgrade/downgrade/whatever to a different client version, when such a change may not be in their best interests. How to force/incent everyone to run a client version - isn't doing that itself an imposition of an arbitrary rule?

I'm reading the thread over at bitcointalk, and let's just say there is a "gold mine" (har har) of info there. I'll need to study it at home.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=152030.0

Many users have noted that for its flaws, Slashdot does have a great userbase that produces some excellent advice.

I was catching up on recent (ok, a day or two old) posts and came across this one: http://ask.slashdot.org/story/13/03/06/2318220/ask-slashdot-advice-for-summer-before-phd-program

There are some gems in the responses!

I'm gonna try to highlight posts like that - ones that contain really good discussion. That will exclude the OS/Politics flame wars that sometimes erupt ;) but I think if you read selectively you can learn a lot here.

As for me, I was enrolled in a PhD program once, in electrical engineering. Along the way I found that I enjoyed the CS side of things more, and before finishing my Masters in EE, I switched to CS and earned it there. By the time I finished all this, I was a bit burned out on grad school so continuing for a PhD was never the plan. Sometimes I think it would have been nice, but on the other hand, I did achieve a personal goal (Masters) and didn't really have the motivation to keep going. And I know that a PhD student in any field really needs to have a massive amount of internal motivation and drive to get that PhD.

What's also a consideration is that we, and I mean EE and CS types, are very lucky in that there are some great, interesting, well paying jobs available for all levels, including Bachelors and Masters. You don't NEED a PhD to get a pretty decent job (in the field), unlike many other areas of study.

I received the SSD and that night, had my screwdrivers out and replaced the drive in my Sager. I ended up installing Win8 after all, and then added Google Chrome (set as default browser), Steam, various Steam Games, and Guild Wars 2. That's it.

I have ~120 GB left free, so I could setup a VM... but for right now, I'm not adding anything extra. I want to be totally fascist about keeping this windows install as clean as possible, to the point of considering flash and acrobat as unwanted extras that go into a VM install, along with misc utilities and software development tools in general (compilers, editors, languages, debuggers, etc. - all in a VM). So essentially other than games, the only extra software that will go on is Virtual Box, which will possibly host a future Win 7 VM where all the uncontained stuff will go.

I use Win8 from the desktop mode, and it's fine. I have no Metro-style apps that didn't come with the install. I opted to use a local account and not tie a hotmail email address to this computer (I don't have another Win8 machine, don't plan on getting one, and don't use it as my main system so the auto-syncing and all that don't really interest me).

In related news, a friend's netbook died and they needed a computer. I offered over my System 76 (that had Qubes) after restalling the Win7 home premium 32 bit version I bought for it. I'll miss having that system around to play with linux distros on, but I went to help my friend. VM's are again the answer - unfortunately Qubes in particular won't run in one, since it is based on the Xen hypervisor.

Oh well, that's OK. I will potentially pickup my parent's old Mac Mini this Christmas, since I'm getting them a new one. They have a 2005-era system and its a PowerPC Mac Mini. Maybe I can turn it into a linux system. Or perhaps it won't be worth the trouble since I'm sort of trying to simplify my home computer inventory.

More updates in the fascinating series, "thoth's home computers". ;)

My linux notebook (System76) is now running Qubes, Joanna Rutkowska's OS built on lightweight disposable VMs. It uses the Xen hypervisor with a template VM based on Fedora 17. I've had it working for about a months, and so far, I really like it, it works pretty well considering what's going on under the hood. I have some issues getting specific menu items to appear, but if I were handier with KDE that might not be a problem. I installed common software packages into the template VM and update about once a week.

My windows notebook (Sager Midern) is lumbering along. I've toyed with replacing it with a build-to-order system from Velocity Micro, but budgets being what they are, I decided instead to upgrade the hard drive to an SSD. I just now ordered a 256 GB SSD off NewEgg, and plan to do the swap as soon as it comes in and I have a few hours. I toyed with upgrading to Windows 8 at the same time, but decided instead to stick with Windows 7. This system is essentially for games, so I'm going to clean install it and put on Steam plus a handful of other software.

My mac notebook (17 inch MBP from 2009) is getting also getting along fine, even at its advanced age. ;) I've gone back and forth about replacing it, upgrading it and finally decided what do to: get an iMac. Yes, after 3.5+ years of no desktop computers (at home), I'm getting another one. I've loved the portability notebooks give me, but something quite surprising happened a few months ago that changes my need for notebooks. That event was: I bought a Google Nexus 7 and that thing is simply awesome.

Yes I know, you reading this HATE tablets and think they are a fad. Great for you. The thing is, when I travel, I'm generally not coding. I'm checking email, surfing the web, reading books, or playing simple games. The tablet is perfect and now it is what I take when I go somewhere for the weekend or overnight. Work issued me two notebook computers (a Dell E6420 windows notebook, and a 15" MBP with OSX), so if I travel for work, I'll take those (hopefully just one and not both!).

Anyway, I'm looking at the 27" iMac. It'll be nice to have a larger screen again, and my non-gaming windows needs can be solved with a VM. I'm excited that two of my favorite windows games are coming to OSX, so I may not "need" the windows notebook to play them (I'll reserve judgement until I get the iMac in and see how those games actually play).

The comment here illustrates what I think is a pervasive confusion among commenters, and people in general for that matter. That is, the belief the free market is just *awesome* but the consumers are idiots.

That's just puzzling to me.. some folks (and extend that to politics) absolutely worship the free market. It is the saviour of mankind, it is better than omniscient, it always decides fairly, it can't be questioned, etc. But when consumers actually exercise their free market choice, they are called clueless, idiotic, etc. WTF?

The cognitive dissonance here is that consumers may make choices that conflict with some other belief (i.e. I don't like Apple for a zillion reasons I'll now bore you with ZZzzzzzz.... so therefore why doesn't everybody think like I do?????. OMG it can't be a problem with me, or the free market, therefore people are stupid sheep!)

I think these people are idiots. No, that is too kind. Raging dumbfucks is more like it, but that is perhaps not polite.

I'm by no means a free market disciple. It serves a purpose, can be studied and modeled and works pretty well at very specific things. But I do enjoy thinking about how a free market works, and how it also fails. Something I think more free market advocates need to spend serious time also doing.

Anyway, back to the quote. Some idiot anonymous coward is raging about how Apple is out to destroy computer utopia, because people are clueless you see... if only they would do whatever the idiot anonymous coward would do. As I posted in response, you can't have it both ways. More importantly, when people have choices THEY MAY NOT PICK THE ONE YOU WANT THEM TO. That doesn't make them clueless; as a economist would no doubt say, they just value various facets of the product differently.

The real clueless and stupid here is the anonymous coward.

I've decided to wipe out my linux notebook (a System 76) and install... wait for it... Windows 7. Sorry.

The reason why comes down to 3 things:
1) The system would be more useful to me as a backup/spare game machine. I play games (now and then) and would like to have an extra system for a few Windows-only games I have, another system for Steam, etc. It'll be handy for the occasional dual-box scenario (rare for me but I'd like that option), and for travel situations.
2) The system would be more useful to me with wireless. It's frustrating, and I just feel that in 2012 a notebook or any portable system should have the wireless option. I could not get my wireless going on the system. Yes, I googled a lot. I downloaded wireless driver source, built it, tried to load it, etc and on and on and fiddled endlessly and I couldn't get it working. It was fine since I kept my system connected via cable, but recently I've been wanting to move that system to another floor... basically I want wireless now.
3) I want to run at least 2 linux distributions (Fedora and Debian), and tend to experiment with others a lot. If I were running N linux distros, N-1 would have to be in a virtual machine anyway, since I don't want to partition and reboot constantly.

So, I dug up a spare Windows 7 DVD I had and installed it. Once all the patching is complete and I'm done installing "base" software (OpenOffice, VLC, Virtual Box, Steam, some other games, etc.) I'll install Fedora 17 (beta), and Debian Wheezy (testing) for starters, and configure those just like they were installed directly. Previously that system had run Ubuntu (what it came with), Mint, Debian, Fedora, and Qubes for a bit (it error'ed during the install so I didn't do much with it).

I plan to use Fedora and Debian, so I'll be installing software from languages to libraries to databases and all sorts of stuff. In fact, even though the host system will be Windows 7, I'll probably have that system largely running virtual machines in full screen mode. I do have a primary Windows 7 notebook for gaming and development; this configuration will let me fiddle with linux all I want and be more useful due to #1 and #2 above.

I don't get the tablet hate. I'd think tech enthusiasts would welcome them. They represent another step towards ubiquitous computing, and may even shake up the desktop dominance of Microsoft, shifting towards Apple (iOS) and Google (Android) who are also the major players in cell phone computing.

Yes, they aren't suitable for many tasks, but they don't need to be in order to be successful. Convenience, ease of use, accessibility (by that I mean Wifi AND cell-network enabled), cost, and most importantly, being more than adequate (arguably nearly ideal) for the typical tasks of an average person - which would be web browsing, chat, social networking, light gaming, email, not whatever various power users have convinced themselves is typical usage - will win the future.

As far as cost, Apple currently charges a premium over other similar devices, but when the iPad was introduced, tech pundits were shocked at how "low" a price it was: $500 for the base model. I can't imagine Apple can retain their high profit margin in the face of intense competition from Andoid tablet makers, and eventually Microsoft Metro/Windows 8 devices, but the future market is enormous... Apple will sacrifice some profit margin to remain competitive.

But ultimately, I think tablets (and mobile computing in general) have a huge future, surpassing desktops, for the reasons I listed above. There will always be a need for desktops, and servers, and even bigger systems, but I can easily see a world where a significant portion of the world's population can get by with either a tablet or phone as their primary computing device. Seriously. The upside here is literally 3+ billion devices, that will drown out the current installed base of desktops. It'll take some time but that's where this is headed.

I don't get the tablet hate. I'd think tech enthusiasts would welcome them. They represent another step towards ubiquitous computing, and may even shake up the desktop dominance of Microsoft, shifting towards Apple (iOS) and Google (Android) who are also the major players in cell phone computing.

Yes, they aren't suitable for many tasks, but they don't need to be in order to be successful. Convenience, ease of use, accessibility (by that I mean Wifi AND cell-network enabled), cost, and most importantly, being more than adequate (arguably nearly ideal) for the typical tasks of an average person - which would be web browsing, chat, social networking, light gaming, email, not whatever various power users have convinced themselves is typical usage - will win the future.

As far as cost, Apple currently charges a premium over other similar devices, but when the iPad was introduced, tech pundits were shocked at how "low" a price it was: $500 for the base model. I can't imagine Apple can retain their high profit margin in the face of intense competition from Andoid tablet makers, and eventually Microsoft Metro/Windows 8 devices, but the future market is enormous... Apple will sacrifice some profit margin to remain competitive.

But ultimately, I think tablets (and mobile computing in general) have a huge future, surpassing desktops, for the reasons I listed above. There will always be a need for desktops, and servers, and even bigger systems, but I can easily see a world where a significant portion of the world's population can get by with either a tablet or phone as their primary computing device. Seriously. The upside here is literally 3+ billion devices, that will drown out the current installed base of desktops. It'll take some time but that's where this is headed.

I've been thinking about setting up a VPS system, through Linode. I figure it would be fun to have an actual server on the net, rather than just a webpage/homepage like I have had so many years. It would host a new homepage for me, and be "live" for fiddling around with other projects.

Since this is just for fun, I would start out with the Linode 512, the smallest VPS available. For $20 a month, I'll get 512 MB of memory and 20 GB of storage. Perfect! After viewing the list of available distributions, I pared it down to Debian or CentOS, since those are the two I am most familiar with.

Before opening an account, I decided to "simulate" my future Linode with VirtualBox. So I created two VMs of 512 MB and 20 GB disk. The Debian install went smoothly - I unselected windowing, and selected web server and ssh server, since that's how I'd start. Soon enough the system was ready, and I was able to pull up the "yes it's here" default web page. Cool!

I did the same with CentOS. Or I should say, tried to do the same. No matter what I did, the installer wouldn't run. Double-clicking led to no response. I thought to myself "perhaps 512 MB isn't enough for the installer to run", so I shutdown the VM, bumped it up to 1024 MB, and tried again. Sure enough, the installer started right up when I double clicked.

I'm not sure how the Linode folks actually provision their machines - do you essentially receive an empty VM with an attached ISO for you to start up and install? If that's the case, it appears I can't have CentOS on the Linode 512 because the installer won't run!

That's OK, my home server is Debian and it would probably be best if I match, so I can test things out at home (twice, once in the VM I made to simulate the Linode 512, and once on my actual physical server) before rsycing files to the live Linode.

Ok not much exciting stuff going on with my home infrastructure.

One thing I finally did do is get a better (more comprehensive) backup system in place. I've been using Time Machine on my Mac Book Pro, since it is easy to setup and works like a champ. But I like to keep my files centralized, because I want to essentially mirror my documents to my linux notebook.

After fiddling around with Backup PC, I realized that was overkill for my extremely modest needs. I wound up just making some quick-and-dirty rsync scripts, and have those execute once a day via cron. So now my fileserver grabs from the Mac Book Pro, and my linux notebook grabs from my fileserver. I essentially have 3 backups of my files: the master copy on my Mac (which I consider my main system), a copy on a USB drive via Time Machine, a copy on my file server, and copy on my linux notebook.

Actually that isn't all... some files are copied one more time: I subscribe to JungleDisk and sync my photos to "the cloud". It costs between $3.00 and $4.00 a month, which I feel is well worth it considering my photos are the data I basically cannot reconstruct at all. Sure I'd be bummed if I lost other files, but I literally cannot retake trips/vacations and reshoot pictures/movies, recontact people I've lost touch with, etc. The pictures are "priceless" enough for me to spend a whopping $50 a year backing up offsite.

On the OS front, I downloaded the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, and installed it into a Virtual Box VM. I grabbed Arch Linux and set that up in Virtual Box as well. More later after I fiddle around with both.

One thing I don't get about various posters is the Gnome 3 hate. On the one hand people scream that desktops are just ripping off other well-known UIs and that there is no innovation and that's just tragic. On the other hand, people (hopefully different ones) scream whenever anything changes.

I recently switched my linux notebook from debian to fedora 16, for several reasons:

• I'm a RHCSA (yeah yeah spare me the drivel about how certifications are worthless; this one was paid for by work and I seized the opportunity) so running fedora helps me keep those skills up, since fedora (and centos) are closer to rhel than other distros, for obvious reasons.
• I want to become knowledgeable (and eventually proficient) with selinux, and that's already baked in. Yes I know you can aptitude install selinuxstuff but I'd rather stick closer to the source.
• I'd like to get LDAP going and all the instructions I found for debian on this were out of date; meanwhile the 389 project appears up-to-date and maintained, and that's closely aligned with fedora

A side-effect of this upgrade is now I'm running Gnome 3 as my desktop. And you know, it's just fine. Really. All the people finding it too difficult to switch need to HTFU as Chopper Reid would say. I expect that kind of whining from some end users, not IT types. Seriously, man up and deal.

Basically, instead of minimizing windows onto some taskbar, I just zoom to the upper left to invoke expose-ish mode, where I can scroll to a new virtual desktop, launch a new app, whatever. It works great and isn't as bad as you'd think from all the crying going on.

Fedora 16 works great for me, and Gnome 3 is just fine. I have two minor warts:

• I can't seem to get IBUS working for Simplified Chinese input. I have that installed, but the language selector won't toggle to "ch". I'll fiddle around more. I'm learning Chinese and having the ability for Chinese input (via typing pinyin on an American keyboard) would be great.
• VirtualBox messes things up... after installing vbox and vbox kernel modules, my system won't start X after a reboot. It just hangs there in text mode. I can log in, or boot runlevel 3, but no graphics. The error messages refer to problem probing the video capabilities of "virtual box something-or-other" so I had the idea of uninstalling vbox and the vbox kernel modules, and that work - next reboot and graphics could start. Basically it looks like whatever probes video for X is choking on the vbox video module. This didn't happen on debian, and I'm kinda bummed not to have virtual box on my fedora system (but then I have my other two notebooks I can run virtual machines on). If I were better at X I could probably find a config file somewhere to lock or set the video device to X doesn't have to probe; maybe this will let me have virtual box and also a graphical shell. I'll put that on my to-do list for later.

What I'd really like to work on next, as a hobbyist linux enthusiast, is either more knowledge/proficiency with selinux, or setting up the 389 Project LDAP server. If I get the LDAP server going, I'd consider migrating my debian file server over to fedora and setting up LDAP there, and eventually centralizing accounts on my various computers.

I decided to get fancy with my small home network and get a server. My goal is to make it a file server and then eventually configure other services such as web server, backup server, and perhaps others. If I really get fancy and figure out how to do it, I'd like to make this system an LDAP server and have network logins for my computers. I'll chip away at this piece by piece over the upcoming months.

I bought a mini server, an HP N36L, and two 2 TB drives to go with it. It came with a 250 GB drive, so I bought the two 2 TB drives to setup a mirror. Great little box at a good price, but it didn't come with an optical drive so I install Debian Squeeze 64 bit via USB memstick.

The first thing I want to do, after getting the server up and running basic services, is to consolidate files (music, videos). After that, get my notebook computers backing up using backuppc (backuppc.com). But before all that, I need to create a mirror using those two 2TB drives. That means using mdadm for RAID, then creating an LVM volume on top of that space.

Create a RAID mirror:
sudo /sbin/mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc

Check on it:
sudo /sbin/mdadm --detail /dev/md0
cat /proc/mdstat

Create the logical volume:
sudo /sbin/pvcreate /dev/md0
sudo /sbin/vgcreate lvm-mirror /dev/md0
sudo /sbin/vgdisplay lvm-mirror
sudo /sbin/lvcreate -l 476931 lvm-mirror -n mirror

Note: the 476931 came from the total number of PE's available in the volume group.

The mirror resync was crunching along fine, so I formatted the logical volume:
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/lvm-mirror/mirror

I mounted this, then unmounted and added a line into /etc/fstab, double checking it mounted with "mount -a". So far so good!

I decided to redo my linux notebook and install either Debian or Fedora. Both Debian and Fedora have great communities and great support, so either would be fine. My notebook previously ran Ubuntu 9, Mint, and Ubuntu 10, so I cut out the middle man (so to speak) and went with the underlying distro for Ubuntu and Mint: Debian!

I downloaded and burned the Debian Squeeze netinst CD, and started the install. It went smoothly and the only thing I did differently was to opt for LVM instead of straight partitioning - I ended up choosing LVM with a separate /home, /usr, /var, /tmp. I also picked a few software packages: file server, web server, notebook, etc. I didn't choose everything, for instance I'm not interested in DNS, mail, or print server, and didn't select SQL/database since I wasn't sure what that would install (MySql? Nah, I rather take PostgreSQL) so I'll add what I want later.

Once the install was finished, I added a few more: VirtualBox, Videolan, Chromium browser, Eclipse, and a few other misc packages.

I went to test the sound, and hear nothing. After trying the volume settings and getting nowhere, I googled for help and found a suggestion that ended up working:

alsactl init

After this, I had sound. I'm not sure if that need to be done every boot, but if so I'll figure out what script I can add it to for that to occur automatically.

While fiddling with the system I noticed that "su" worked, but "sudo" didn't. It seems Debian doesn't enable sudo usage for the account created during install. After looking at the /etc/sudoers file, I saw it is configured to allow members of the "sudo" group to use sudo. So a quick:

usermod username -aG sudo

and that was fixed (I logged out and back in so the system would pick up my new group membership).

I thought I would expand on my recent comment if anybody happens to look at my journal.

I was laid off in Nov 2008. Typical story, company had up and down quarters, and held small layoffs every year since 2005. I survived three or four rounds, but was finally caught up in it. I received 14 weeks of severance, plus my unused vacation time. I had 6+ months of living expenses in addition to what I received from my former employer, and I would have been in major trouble without that cushion. My mortgage was $2000/month and COBRA was $350, so with utilities and food I was definitely spending above $3000 a month, probably around $3200 to $3300. You can cut back the obvious stuff but you still need a phone, gas, my car insurance payment came up, etc. I can now see how people that are laid off can get into mortgage trouble, and how easily you can go to affording your home to defaulting on it. Unemployment added $250 a week, which sounds small, but it REALLY helped out.

The layoff was right before Thanksgiving, so I took a few days to de-stress, and then started the job search. I looked through dice.com, careerbuilder.com, fedjobs.gov, reached out to local contacts, updated my LinkedIn profile, and so on.

I also heard from recruiters that got my info from the job boards (dice.com, careerbuilder.com). I was moderately bummed most of those listings seemed to funnel into recruiters but I guess that is the reality.
The job I wound up getting was the gov't job I applied for via their website fairly early in the process. It took months of back and forth, interviews and paperwork, but I got a phone call and job offer in June 2009, after being unemployed for 7 months.

About recruiters - it is inevitable you have to deal with them, since they do have job leads. But only one of the six different ones I dealt with seemed interested in matching me with a reasonable fit, and most importantly, keeping me on the radar of the prospective company. Recruiters get paid by placement fees from companies, so that is who they really work for. Most probably want to do the least work for the most payoff - fill interviews at companies that pay them the highest fee, and deal with candidates most likely to get a job within a few interviews. My experience was literally "two and out" - you didn't hear from the recruiter again if two interviews didn't work out. When a recruiter talks about how many companies they work with and how many "opportunities" they have, none of that matters. You'll get two or three interviews, then you become too much effort to deal with.