Grounded -- hopefully.

Forgive me in advance for my pathetic grammar, it's early and I'm trying to pass the time by writing a blog post while my kernel compiles.

I have to stop naming my titles ambiguous names. No, I am not grounded. I'm grounded in terms of my distribution-changing madness. It's over. For now. I've settled with Debian, using the GNOME interface. I realize that that's pretty much exactly where I started, but I stuck with Debian instead of Ubuntu because I like to tell myself that I actually got somewhere with this whole thing. Also, I've decided to not go with as much eye candy because it's starting to detract from my need to actually do work.

So Debian it is. And it's very minimal, which I like a lot. The brightness control works (ditched KDE because it didn't support it), and I'm fairly sure that I could get the keyboard backlighting working with some effort. At this precise moment I'm hardening my kernel with grsecurity, a tool that basically fills in a few security holes in the system to prevent intrusions. Lightweight...ness and security are the two things that I'm going for and I intend to achieve them if I can't have anything else. Also, there are a few slight differences between Debian and Ubuntu, and I like a lot of them. My only complaint is that it's not very keen on giving me compositing support, which could be due to the NVIDIA driver that my MacBook Pro uses.

I installed my system as per this guide, and the disk encryption is fantastic. Only hitch is that I deleted the Mac OS X partition that I had installed (oops) for the purpose of installing rEFIt, which is an EFI bootloader designed to not suck as much as Apple's. Thinking that this software would, you know, be written to the bloody EFI partition was apparently too much of an assumption, because it disappeared as soon as I got rid of Leopard. Oh, well. I'm currently just booting off of their handy rEFIt CDROM, which then points the computer to the GRUB partition that I have installed. So that's nice.

Amidst all of this distro panic and exam worries (thankfully I only got one B+, the rest were above!), unfortunately, I wasn't able to work on my PHP project. I'm going to try to explain myself to my teacher tomorrow, hopefully he'll forgive me. I feel pretty guilty about wasting my parents' money for an hour of us sitting around not going over the code that I've written.

On a happier note, if any of you are interested in a screenshot of my new and (hopefully) here to stay system, feast your eyes!!

Xubuntu > OSX

Ok I realize that a lot of you probably aren't going to do this, but here goes: I've replaced my OSX with Xubuntu altogether as an experiment. So far I'm not suffering, although midway through the install I realized that syncing my iPod should be rather interesting. All I really use my Macbook Pro for are web development, word processing, email, music... nothing like gaming that would really require a Windows system (all the better... less distraction!!). So I'm pretty much okay there.

I absolutely love Exaile, the media player that comes with Xubuntu. It's light, fast, and best of all includes a file browser, which means that playing a music file doesn't add it to the music library. Why is this a good thing? Well, when you've downloaded an audio file and simply want to listen to it and not deal with the hassle that is managing a heavyweight audio player like Rhythmbox or Amarok, which I do rather often, Exaile is the perfect solution. Mind you, it still has the option for libraries, and still allows playlists and live audio streams, which you can easily download from many of your favorite radio sites like NPR (for my STL readers, visit kwmu.org and click on the Listen Now button -- click on the Streaming MP3 option).

I'll admit that this post was a distraction from the massive studying that I'm doing right now as a result of the AP Chem final that's looming over my head (tomorrow at 12h00... wish me luck), but hey. This is just a study break. I had my English final today, and it wasn't half bad. The best part was when I tried to submit, which I can only guess involves some kind of FTP or SMB connection to some server somewhere on campus, and the submit operation failed. I got to go to the helpdesk and they resolved everything, but they quickly found out that everyone was having this issue and that the school's own firewall was blocking the submission process. Funnier still was the karma: the software admin was against this firewall addition, and the hardware admins were for it. The software admin pushed this "Electronic Bluebook" software to everyone's computer, and the hardware people then had to deal with the huge mess that they had caused as a result of their firewall blocking the exam submission process.

I had a talk with the software admin later on, and joked with her about the firewall and how pointless it was to install it in the first place, saying that I could get around it easily and that I frequently did. "Exactly," she said. "We're constantly spending money on firewall systems just to get you guys to find a new way to get around them!" I suggested to her after that that we should try installing Linux on the school computers. Here began my sales pitch: It's totally free, it's completely scripted so it's 100% customizable, it's incompatible with 99.9% of the viruses on the Internet, and it isn't Windows-compatible, so students can't waste their time playing games and pirating Windows software, potentially getting my school into legal trouble. She said that she'd see if she could get it installed on a machine so that she could play around with it a bit, so we'll see. But how cool would that be!? I also told her that she should talk with the sysadmin at Whitfield, who runs a one to one laptop program and uses Ubuntu instead of Windows on all of the systems. Should be interesting to see how that unfolds!

Still saving up for that Das Keyboard... I'm also thinking about upgrading this compy's RAM and HDD to 4GB and a 120GB SSD. Speed should be amazing considering it's running Xubuntu, has all of that RAM and blazing fast read/write speeds! This thing is becoming by dream machine. After extensive amounts of typing, I've realized how much I've missed this keyboard. I have my awesome bumper sticker stamped on the back of it too, thanks to Randall Munroe's wonderful xkcd store. It's big, blue, and has OPINIONS! on it in bold white letters. I was at the Boston Logan airport and this lady pulled out her white MacBook with all of these "Go Wildcats!" and "Stop Abortion" bumper stickers plastered on it, and I gleefully pulled out my laptop... she glared at me for a few seconds and then put her laptop away. It was awesome. This baby hasn't let me down yet... I'll tell you guys how the Linux-only testing goes!

Hardly Workin'

Hey all,

So I've decided to try and make this a daily thing again. I'm typing this up on the car ride home (don't worry, I'm not driving), and I'm pretty much just trying to hang on. All of this excitement about colleges has been making me relax, for some strange reason, and now more than ever I really need to get my head in the game. My college counselor, my parents, and I all met today on where to go, and now that she's tailored my list a bit I have a bit of a better idea on what I'm going to do. Here's my new list of colleges:

- Boston College, Boston University
- Brown
- UC Berkely, UCLA
- Carnegie Mellon University
- U Chicago
- Harvard University
- Haverford College
- Macalester College
- MIT
- McGill University
- Northwestern University
- Pomona College
- Reed College
- University of Rochester
- Swarthmore College
- Trinity College
- Union College
- Washington University in STL
- Wesleyan University

...so yeah. Exhaustingly long list, I know.

Another contributing factor is this freaking Linux obsession that I've been having. I've successfully installed Xubuntu and have compositing working (Gnome-Do and Docky can actually work, huzzah), and yet it's still just not perfect for me. I tried OpenBox but I'm clearly too much of a noob to manage anything remotely non-GUI oriented, although I'm really loving XFCE. The boot and shutdown times are absolutely outstanding, and I got Conky to work with weather services and a Gmail checker. Mutt's installed, and I'm actually writing this post from Nano because I love the Inconsolata fixed-width font so much.

Finals are only in a few days... I'm kind of freaking out, even though I only have 2 exams. The funny part is that only one absolutely terrifies me, and it's AP Chem: everyone (except me, becuase I was in France at the time) got their labs back, and were subsequently moping the entire rest of the day. Apparently it was one of those assignments where getting a good grade is out of the question and you have to just hope that it doesn't hurt your GPA too badly.

Really haven't been able to get developing on PHP lately, I should start working on that again. My teacher's going to be pretty frustrated when we meet on Saturday and all I'll have done is re-written my code to have it be object-oriented. I have ban functionality working (with an awesome image, thanks Vijay!), although it really doesn't look pretty, which bugs me. I wish I didn't specialize in PHP and Perl so that I could actually design a nice frontend for this thing. That said, it didn't stop Zuckerberg... who am I to underperform Zuckerberg!?

Hope finals are going well for everybody. :)

Totally gave up.

Ok, so Gentoo kind of failed miserably. I'm not going to try and save face by hiding the fact that I couldn't get Gentoo to work at all, something about the X server not seeing my displays even though they were in xorg.conf and I had properly run X --configure. I'm irritated that it didn't work, but there really is no way that I'm going to try starting over with that mess all over again, so I'm going to try a different flavor that's actually at least somewhat forgiving. I've been using Zenwalk Openbox for about a day, and while I really think that it's great, it's definitely not my favorite choice. I don't know if it's the Zenwalk or the Openbox, but quite frankly it looks hideous. Despite attempts to fix this with themes and countless .conf files, it's still ugly, and I want to get rid of it. So as I'm typing this post, I just want to let you all know that I'm downloading xubuntu. Hopefully it should be light enough to not run as slowly as normal ubuntu, but it'll also have all of the commands that I'm familiar with. XFCE is annoying, so I'll be trying out Openbox for a little while before giving up completely.

If I ever have the time, I'll try moving back to Gentoo and installing Openbox. I like Openbox a lot, I just don't like not being familiar with any of the commands. I'm not a big fan of Slackware, which is what Zenwalk was based upon, so that settles that. I'll probably check out Gentoo and Openbox next weekend, after I'm done studying for exams and all that jazz. I'm definitely not doing myself any good by putting off studying for all of this Linux crap, and I'm probably wasting time now anyways by installing xubuntu and writing this blog post. But I guess it'll be a little something to do before the studying commences, which I suppose is what I've been telling myself for the past week. Mais bon, whatever. The important part is that I get studying soon, which is exactly what I'm planning on doing. Planning.

I'm also really annoyed because Gentoo took ages to compile, although I happily played along. I then complied GNOME, which took an entire evening, and then, after compiling GNOME, I realized that I hadn't compiled an X server. So I compiled an X server. The amount of time that this consumes is staggering, I never really grasped why installing programs on Gentoo took forever while installing on Ubuntu usually didn't take over a minute for most files. Does Gentoo do some funky compiling thing that I don't know about? Whatever it is, it took freaking forever, and all the time spent on it went to waste because I've erased the disk and installed Zenwalk for the time being. Pretty annoyed.

Anyways, exams are coming up and I'm getting kind of freaked out now that I realize how close they are. I really have to get studying for chem, I guess I can just use the review packet that she gave out. Thankfully I only have 3 exams, though, because I'm taking 4 classes and one of them is a project. Taking English the first day, Chem the next, and French last. Study time!!

Gentoo

Insistent upon ignoring Randall Munroe's cautionary tale, I've decided to go ahead and move on from Ubuntu. Ubuntu was great until I had used it for too long, which meant that I would have installed some programs without removing them, or I would muck with the system a bit and end up breaking something or other. I'm moving on to Gentoo. Or should I say, I've moved on to Gentoo. I've successfully compiled the kernel and now have a basic CLI (command line interface) upon booting up. Not too shabby. Hopefully at the end of today I'll have enough time to compile GNOME and have a full X environment up and running. So far I really like the customization options. The USE flag is basically a dream come true for me: upon the installation of a program, you choose what programs you want it to have support for. On Ubuntu, it installed support for everything, hence the speed issues.

Another beneficial factor of having to compile everything by myself is the fact that I'll be lazy about installing programs and hopefully I shouldn't install one unless I find it absolutely necessary. Of course, I'm installing a GNOME environment because I have no idea what I'd do without one. I'm still not entirely Ubuntu free, mostly because I've been spoiled rotten by GNOME-Do and Docky. I realize that not choosing XFCE probably leads to a bit of a slowdown, but I'm giving it a try anyways and seeing what it's like. One thing that I'm somewhat concerned about is the boot time, I've looked at it and it hasn't been as stellar as I would have hoped. Ubuntu was really fast. Like, really fast. Clean installations booted in less than 15 seconds. Gentoo seems to be a bit slower, mostly because the dhcpcd client keeps looking for dhcp servers on the network, of which it finds none because eth0 isn't and probably never will be connected when I start up.

Which brings me to the other issue. Wireless. I'm going to emerge wicd when I get back home today, but for now the OS doesn't allow for WPA or WPA2 wireless authentication. That said, it could have been a lot worse seeing as iwconfig actually sees my wireless card. Only time will tell, I'm still in the early stages of building it and hopefully I should have a running GUI by the end of tonight. Another concern is the fact that I'm actually doing this during the week before finals. I always seem to have these huge projects that pop up during high-stress times. Probably for distraction purposes, and I have to say it's working a little too well. Ah, well.

I really, really want a website of my own. Having a wiki would be awesome, and not dealing with Blogger would be awesome...er. And yes, in case any of you are wondering, I haven't posted to my French blog in ages. How exactly am I supposed to explain compiling a kernel in French? My vocabulary doesn't really go that far.

Actually Posting Tech Stuff

So I know that you all are probably looking forward to reading a few facts on my visit to France. Well, I kind of intended this blog to be my daily blog as well as my posts for tech, so those who don't want to read this post can either close out of this window or read it clutching their head whilst making tortured noises. It's really up to you.

Recently I came across a few items thanks to my newest obsession: Google Reader. I have to admit, I had tried it out for a while and it never really made sense to me until I actually started following multiple blogs: up until then, the only blog that I checked frequently was Make: Magazine. After needing to consume more internet material thanks to an absence of actual internet, I decided to, in my twenty minutes of daily internet, save all of the content I possibly could from every tech blog I could find. After getting hooked to said tech blogs once we found a wifi network we could access from our house, I needed a way to constantly check them all in one place. So I tried out Google Reader, and from there I discovered a whole array of things that I've been missing out on.

First to come was Gnome-Do, a utility which I absolutely have no idea how I missed. Gnome-Do provides you with an interface to search for files, create calendar events, play music in your Rhythmbox library, manage tasks on your Remember the Milk account, post to Twitter, and (my personal favorite) install new applications with apt-get. But that's just the tip of the iceberg; Gnome-Do comes with a plethora of plugins that enable you to interface with a whole variety of other resources, and it even has a dock mode to let you imitate the famous OS X staple (except said staple does not include a do-it-all search feature). The downside: It's only for Linux, and the plugins, from what I can tell, are not third-party but rather developed by the Gnome-Do team, so development of new plugins is really up to them. Still, it really is quite an amazing feature, and I've never been so happy with my Linux system.

Also, after browsing Google Reader for some time, I began to get a bit tired of the interface. For one, I was tired of skimming everything with my down-arrow-key held down to find some content that I actually wanted to read. Also, there was no way for me to be able to share the links on Twitter or Facebook. So when I stumbled across Feedly, a Google Chrome extension / Firefox add-on, I was instantly hooked. Feedly takes your Google Reader, Twitter, and Flickr accounts and merges them all into a start page, allowing you to see all of your content at a glance. When you click on an item, it expands to show a preview, which you can either open into a new window or preview the actual webpage in the same window. Thanks to Feedly, I can now tell you what is latest in Fail.

Finally, the last thing I wanted to talk about was Springpad. Whilst browsing Lifehacker, I stumbled across a positive post concerning a certain piece of online organization software called Springpad, and I decided to try it out. Springpad is essentially a single place for you to put everything: contacts, calendars, to-do lists, products, books, bookmarks, wines, and all kinds of other stuff. You can use these different data types in different ways: for example, a to-do list for a bunch of wines, a shopping list for various products, etc. The really cool part is that it pulls various information from the web concerning the various items you post: Springpad might add an Amazon purchase link to a product you list, or a review concerning the wine you're currently interested in. It also lets you organize everything into apps: categories with specific layouts to help you get more organized, for instance, a school planner you can fill with various books, or a trip planner complete with events, packing lists, ideas, and even an itinerary created from the various addresses you've linked to the aforementioned items. My only gripe is that while it does integrate with Google Calendar, the synergy ends there: It appears as its own calendar, doesn't pull existing events, contacts, notes, tasks, bookmarks, or anything else from your Google account, and doesn't synchronize with other popular organization services like Remember the Milk. But it's still in beta, so it's likely that such features are down the road.

So that's pretty much it. To those of you that have read this without wanting to, I will now give you an update on France: Not much is going on, but we have managed to buy a car-turtleshell that will let us ride with more space and ever-increasing dorkiness. But we bought a van to begin with, so I guess we should have expected that. We're off to Rome on the 31st, and we're going to meet my grandmother and my aunt there to go family-tree-hunting with the Mazzeis. Also, as you all may have read, I now have internet in my apartment, so message me! Well, that is, if you can stand the 7-hour time difference.