Don't know why - but I really like that combination.

I've gotten off my schedule of reading Starship Troopers and TMiaHM every year - but I did just reread The Moon is a Harsh Mistress last week-end. My wife was in Ukraine and I was kind of bored but not motivated enough to do something that took effort.

I've outgrown RAH's politics but I still love the story.

For some reason magnet links that I clicked in Chrome were opening the Transmission client instead of Ktorrent. I remember doing something in the past related to this - though I think the issue then was that chrome didn't know how to handle them at all.

So I started digging and founds all kinds of people who had the issue, different solutions and most of it was pretty old. The lowdown - as far as I can tell is that chrome uses xdg-open and I'm pretty sure that is what I set.

I looked in /usr/share/applications for ktorrent.desktop and it wasn't there. I did a bunch more digging, followed some rabbit trails and then finally got smart. ktorrent.desktop was in /usr/share/applications/kde4 and I copied it a directory up. Then all acted as expected.

I think in the upgrade this got borked.

Plasma 5 is mostly pretty much working for me now. I'd have rather stayed on 4 longer but I guess it is o.k. I really just need a new machine. They keep making stuff take more resources and my little Acer just can't keep up.

Support for Fedora 21 is coming to an end and so I decided to upgrade to Fedora 22.

I don't run the default Fedora install, I use the KDE spin. I realize KDE isn't the primary desktop for Fedora, but until now it's been alright. I use Fedora for a lot of reasons but mostly because it is the distro I know. I know it because it is the first distro I used on a regular basis for more than just messing around. I did that because at my work we got a new server running RedHat.

I've really been putting off this update. It's the move from KDE Plasma 4 to 5.

It's taken me all day but I think I have it working. I'm scared to reboot and the next time I have to run an update will probably suck. I had so many stupid things happen today trying to get this to work. The kicker is my second display. Everything is fine if I use the built-in intel graphics or my Nvidia card with one display. But as soon as I added the second everything went to crap.

There were times I could only log into KDE as root. Then - and I'm not sure how - I got it fixed. I mean there is still some weird stuff happening but it seems to mostly work. Both monitors are on and displaying at the resolution I want.

Maybe I can hang in there long enough for this stuff to get smoothed over. I made it through the jump from 3 to 4.

The kicker is though - if I log into Gnome it works without any issues. It's just that I hate Gnome.

I don't use RHEL any more - maybe I need to jump over to Suse or something.

Solas agus Ãilleacht duit, a mhuirnÃn, an là seo agus gach lÃ, cibé a bhfuil tÃ.

The Offspring released a new album in 2012 and I didn't know until yesterday. There are implications to that I need to get sorted but now you know what I'm listening to all day while I work.

They have a newer song out which I heard on the radio, which is what clued me in that something had been done since Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace. (Which was the 'new album' in my brain until yesterday even though it's 5 or 6 years old. Not that that is a big deal. I also think of Seventh Son of a Seventh Son as 'new' Maiden and that came out in '88)

I may start streaming US radio stations to stay more aware of what is going on in music back home.

I have a file on my machine - render.conf

I just did the following:

        cp render.conf render-snap.conf
        mv render.conf render-main.conf
        mv render-snap.conf render.conf

And then I just laughed at myself for a bit. It made sense when I did it and as soon as I had I realized how stupid it was.

XP was a (had become) a mature operating system. I abhor the fetish of "newer is better" that reigns in our industry.

Cuireann mé marc ar an lÃ. CuimhnÃm.

I can type at over 100wpm. Slashdot's comment timer was set to 5 minutes a few years back. So if there is a particularly interesting article with interesting comments, I can comment and reply every 5 minutes.

If I'm going at 100wpm, I could write a 500 word essay as a comment. Or what happens more frequently is, I type out a nice constructive reply to someone, and am granted the text telling me I'm going too fast.

So I close the window and go elsewhere.

5 minutes between messages on a good conversation isn't conversing. I had FidoNet conversations go faster than that. I could type up and send faxes faster than that. With a bit of practice, I could send messages over short wave radio in morse code faster than that.

Even if my comment were "you sir are a moron", that leaves well over 4 minutes waiting for the timer to run out.

If anyone wants to have an intellectual conversation with me on an old Slashdot topic (like, appropriate for the genre "News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters"), find me elsewhere. Even this comment, would still have a 3 minute timeout before I could post it.

Five years...

I've been working on a little side project. I would like to have an app where people can read updates that I send out. It seemed like a fun way to learn more about programming mobile apps and it's something I could actually use if I can get it to a decent state.
 
I'm keeping it simple. I decided the app would just be an rss feed reader. And that meant I need a feed. I want it to be very specific to my app so I decided the way to go would be to just create my own back end for creating the feed. I decided to use php and I wrote a simple set up using the codeigniter framework. That gave me a quick way to set up authorization and it was easy to tie in styling from bootstrap so that things can look decent without any effort.
 
I've been doing all the work at my office, on my desktop running Fedora. I have two nice big lcd monitors and developing on Linux is just so easy. I had the environment up and running in no time.
 
Then this week my son got sick. Nothing serious - but enough for him to stay home from school for a few days. I worked from home to keep an eye on him. I've been putting off getting my Macbook set up to do this kind of stuff but now I really needed to tackle it. Ugh - what a pain. The machine itself has grown on me. The hardware is decent and works pretty well. The software isn't horrible. But oh my word - when I want to do anything 'out of the ordinary' and by that I mean any kind of meaningful work with the system, it is pretty bad. I know lots of professional developers use Macs but I'm stunned at what a pain it is to do things that are trivially easy in Linux.
 
Getting Mysql installed and running with Apache was a lot more work. Getting PHP working the way I want took more time than it ever has before. Things are far from ideal even now, but I've got it to a point where it works.
 
And now I have my code in 3 places. So I'll be using github to keep code in sync between them. It's a little more of a challenge because I have the production environment set up a little differently than the dev environment. But not so differently that it is a huge deal. I have ssh access to my hosting environment (Bluehost) so that makes it pretty easy. - Oh and that is the one thing that saves the mac - having bash. If it didn't I'd have given up on it long ago.