08 Jun 2003
Sun, 08 Jun 2003
Long Time No Blog
It all started with a filesystem crash about a month ago. I'm one of those people that classifies sysadmin like a special form of addiction such as smoking or drinking. I can look all this sysadmin work straight in the eye and it feels destructive, wasteful, unfulfilling; yet, at the same time, it's intoxicating because each new problem breeds a solution that creates new problems. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The filesystem crash occurred on an old Micron box that I had been playing hot potato with for a while. I always liked Micron for the "bragging rights at the bar, I've got the baddest computer in the land" effect but this experience with the only Micron I've ever owned has taught me a lesson or two. After watching the machine crash in very strange ways under virtually every OS I ever installed on it, I concluded it was some deep down bug in the BIOS, condemned it, and gutted it for parts. So I've got a spare disk in the Toshiba, and an extra burner and DVD-ROM.
I'd been putting off fixing the damn situation because when it crashed, I had a backup box that easily swapped in minus a month or so worth of blog entries and email. Yikes. That'll inspire all manner of violence from the wife.
So, I've been waiting for the ClarkConnect folks to release a 2.0 beta based on Redhat 9 and in the meantime I had grown tired of dealing with their slightly out of date release and subsequent apt-get massive attack.
I basically jerk around with 3 linux distros - redhat, mandrake, and clarkconnect. Each of them inspires a love-hate relationship.
I love redhat for it's sensibility but hate it for the lack of the GUI bits that mandrake provides like the ip masquerading proxy wizard. I love mandrake for the wonderful wizards, but can't quite get everything to work because it's not quite ubiquitous and there just aren't as enough eyeballs trying some really strange stuff like trying to run ASP.net on top of Apache 2. And then there's clarkconnect - the headless linux server for the home. It's a great idea whose time has come - run linux on an old box and use it as your proxy/gateway. It's a pretty common idiom these days. But I inevitably run into those situations that require the linux box to have a head. Did you ever try to install Image Magick headless? Run certain Swing stuff? Oh yeah, sure, the docs say it works great. Not on my hardware.
This weekend I installed Mandrake 9.1 and wrestled with configuring all the server bits that I require (arguably a lot more work than clarkconnect). But I've got most of it working tonight. I'm gonna take a look at the clarkconnect 2.0 beta this week and I reserve the right to go back to clarkconnect if it looks compelling.
I have managed to get out on the SV a few times a week despite the horrendous rain. I thought when I left Seattle, that situation would improve. Heh. On friday, I got back up to Tionesta via route 62 which is one of PA's unusually smooth snaking 2 lane made-for-motorcycle roads. It runs comfortably around 60 MPH though I did manage to find a variety of slow moving vehicles which I've learned to pass with the following protocol: click down one gear, apply throttle, swerve into oncoming traffic, swerve back into proper lane, cut throttle. Elapsed time? 5 seconds. My arms feel like Freddie Kruger after one of those sessions.
I'll leave you with this morbid mystery. I was working with mono's C# compiler, mcs 0.24, this morning. After all of the evolution that these compilers have been through, I can cast an assigment to an enum type beyond the values specified in the enum's declaration. Oh sure, you can argue that the compiler falls back on the underlying type of the enum for it's range checking but surely this isn't what they meant when they said, strict typing. Hmm...
using System;
class Hello
{
enum morality
{
bad,
good
}
static void Main()
{
morality m = morality.bad;
m = (morality)27;
Console.WriteLine(m);
}
}
Posted at: 21:58 | permalink
