Bob's World » Computer Science

Ubuntu-lu

Bob Hentges — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 11:39:13 +0000

I just would like to tell you that a Luxembourgian Ubuntu-LOCO team is on it’s way. We’ve got a wiki entry, a mailing list (ubuntu-lu@lists.ubuntu.com) and an IRC Channel (#ubuntu-lu) on Freenode.

At the moment I hope that some Lilux (LiLux – GNU/Linux User Group Luxembourg) members will help me to get some people motivated to join, it will be quite a problem, to get a critical mass of members, otherwise.

Once we are a bunch of people we could try to do some Ubuntu Advocacy.

Computer-related fairs and exhibitions can certainly benefit from an Ubuntu presence! The LoCoComputerFairHowTo suggests ways to organize a booth, volunteer staffing, et al. Canonical can help with CDs, and in the future hope to have a conference pack with posters and related materials.

Another possibility for advocacy is to help ensure that Ubuntu gets coverage in your regional press. There are Linux magazines all over the world that highlight and review distributions in every issue, sometimes even distributing CDs. Help us get Ubuntu in the magazines you read! Those magazines also sometimes want to interview local people who are using the distribution – share your success stories.

UbuntuFriendlyHardwareSuppliers describes how you can organise contacting and listing PC suppliers in your area, asking if they supply Ubuntu friendly (or even preinstalled!) hardware.

If Perl is dead…

Bob Hentges — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 11:17:00 +0000

If Perl is dead, then it is by far the most vital, active and useful deceased programming language I have ever come across. Perl is, in fact, alive and thriving, and it is uniquely suited to a variety of programming projects with its flexibility, power, and extensive code base. I write in Perl because it provides everything needed to support enterprise software applications. I write in Perl because it is actively being maintained and developed. I write in Perl because nothing else gets the job done better: long live Perl.

Doesn’t really need a comment, or does it?

Found @ Perl is Dead. Long live Perl on O’Reilly via Digg.

Programmer Personality Test

Bob Hentges — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:33:42 +0000

For whatever it is worth, though I guess it’s not worth much:

Your programmer personality type is: PHTB

You’re a Planner.
You may be slow, but you’ll usually find the best solution. If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.

You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it’s parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.

You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We’re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

If you’d be interested to do the test, here’s a handy link.

LDAP on a mobile phone

Bob Hentges — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 09:22:16 +0000

Yesterday evening while laying in bed, I once again had one of this strange thoughts. And again I was too lazy to get up right away and note it down. Anyhow.

Have you ever thought about why we do not have any LDAP support on mobiles? (Now this might exist somewhere, but to this date I have never heart of it.) Imagine kicking of the telephone book you are used to and switch for a national solution to the problem of “How on earth am I supposed to find the number of this and that person”?

We’ve certainly all been subjected to the case where we just couldn’t either remember of find a number in our digital or not address book. What was the solution? Well, either call a service who is going to query their database for you, or look it up in the telephone book (if then the telephone book is listing mobiles).

Now, instead of having a telephone book for the wired connections, we could have one for mobiles as well. Heck, best would be to only have one decent register on where one has to search.

Now imagine you are on the way, say somewhere in the country side. And as many people nowadays you carry your mobile with you just about anywhere. While sitting somewhere under a tree (heh, I can even try to be romantic) you suddenly want to call an old friend of yours.

Virtually impossible at the moment, it might not be in the future.

Now, getting back to LDAP support on a mobile. Imagine if there was a national LDAP service running, where you could type in the name of the person you want to query it for (intuitive, isn’t it) and it would give you as you type your results (imagine the “as you type” part once the input of the user has reached more than 3 or 4 characters – the connection speed and all make it impossible in my opinion to fetch or get a huge new list at every new character the user enters).

Technologically we have it all. I mean, there are Linux smart phones out there. And as many modern day mobiles have (Lord, here we go) Java capabilities everybody could just download an application allowing him to reach this service. The connection speed of the devices get’s better all the time too. GPRS should already be plenty fast, UMTS would be even better.

I can imagine though, that some people would feel uncomfortable with such a solution. After all, it’s your numbers available to just about everybody. And even though there are people who would have their name and numbers in an offline register – read: telephone book – they wouldn’t allow you to have their names and numbers in an online register. After all, every technology involving the internet is dangerous…

I sincerely hope that this service doesn’t exist yet. Not because I will make myself some kind of ridiculous if it does, but because otherwise I could have saved myself some minutes of typing.

Anyhow. Anybody of you got an opinion on this?

Some game quotes

Bob Hentges — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 16:54:33 +0000

I am playing “Vampire – The Masquerade – Bloodlines” where in the villa of a Malkavian I have stumbled across a note book, with some quotes that I’d like to share with you. And while they might not be that hilarious, they are (at least to me) special enough to be shared.

Perception at once shapes the Mind and rules over Time. Time however erodes human perception and than in wraps the Mind. The Mind is capricious, having various effects on Perception, Time and the Mind itself… with harmony progress is made.

Chaos, like the Mind can be understood only through the scientific process. Order, however, is only as good as the Perception thereof. Time is the key that links the two and bears witness their ebb and flow.

That’s it already for today. Move along.

Where am I heading in life?

Bob Hentges — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 12:00:11 +0000

Last night, I have asked myself the question where I was heading in life. While I am studying computer science here in Innsbruck, my destiny as such seems not to be very clear. Which means, that while I am indeed interested in what I am studying, I haven’t gotten a single clue on what I will realize with my studies one day. Of course, one could argue, that it would be a reasonable approach to just let time go by and see what will happen – yet that is not the way I am used to do things.
You see. In this first semester you will not learn anything new, or let’s call it anything really new. Many of the other students are making their first contact with Linux, or programming. So, different lectures are generally based on teaching you the basic stuff you need to know. The actual matter that gives me headaches is “Software Engineering I”. We get to do some exercises. Alright – I haven’t gotten a problem with that. I actually like to do those little applications. But, the way we are told to write them is more than bogus in my, in this case not so humble, opinion.
The language we are working with is pure C. At the beginning I though – awesome. At least a decent language. Actually, I feared that they would throw Java at us right away. Now, the exercises are basic things – which means they are not very complicated – mostly because the problems aren’t difficult or complex to be implemented. But, to work out the exercises we aren’t allowed at the beginning to use very simple and every day things like loop. And by loops I mean things like a for loop or do – while. Great! We now officially have to type tons of lines, because we haven’t seen those techniques yet in the lecture.
The whole situation gets even better. At the beginning of the semester, everybody was told to enroll at a C crash course. Where a professor briefly went through all of the basic techniques – including but not limited to loops in general.
Where I want to go with this long introduction is, that I feel that even after I have gone through the extensive years of studying, I will not be any further in practical terms. Sure, I will be able to calculate resistances of different circuits. I will know how to calculate how a capacitor will “load up”, and how electromagnetic induction will change this and that. – I will also have an in-dept knowledge of different algorithms and procedures. – And I will definitely know way more on hardware near programming. A matter which interests me quite a lot.
At the moment, I see studying more like of a school where you are taught to learn. Which is interesting and very useful. However, I am used to try and research until I can solve a given problem. And while this hasn’t always been true, at this point in time it is.
Note that I am massively dramatizing the facts here. But what on earth is all this about? I really can’t tell you at the moment. So, what about giving up studying and take up work? Great idea indeed. However, there are some limitations and problems about that. Most importantly, there are still many things I have to learn, which is about normal I guess. I guess, studying is by there a necessity. Another point is, that probably nobody is going to hire you anyhow. (If you are wondering what all the fuss is about at this stage, you can happily jump out.)
However, how many people are able to exactly tell what they can realize – or even better, what they can not… I do not know. But I imagine I should get back to the topic. I am not great at telling stories, so let’s cut short on those.
I thought about what it would be like to work for Google. That’s right I am talking about the company some people are big fans of while other people would want to see them doomed. Working at Google seems to be great. I do not want to say that working there is as good as spending your free time with your friends. Certainly not. Work is work after all. What I am saying is that there are a lot of people who know what they can do, and what they can not do. Which implies that nobody is going to try to persuade you that they can do something, which they can’t. I imagine this to be an intrinsic consequence of the fact that somebody who doesn’t know how to realize decent things in his particular matter of expertise will not be found there.
Where am I heading? At this point I do not know. Sure, it would be great to work at Google. Sure it would be great at a company which worships actual knowledge rather than a degree in this or that, or a paper in this or that matter. However, the chance that I will ever be able to work at such a place is very close to zero. How come?
Well, I think that we touch a major problem our world is in at the moment right here. While I can not understand why anybody would act that way, companies seem to prefer to employ people with degrees, rather than people with the motivation to deliver a great work. The strength of somebody who wants to realize something, is in my opinion far greater than the possibilities of somebody who has enrolled somewhere, because the company was interested in hiring somebody with a degree.
What I want to say by there is actually, that the blog entry I read the other day, over at the official Google Blog, has kind of gotten me into thinking about the situation I am in. This post has actually shed another light on Google, as I knew it. And it was indeed very interesting to read about some the people working for them. – Because those people were motivated. – Because they could change something. At such a place I would like to work one day, not linger in some basement programming stuff, and never seeing the daylight. At such a place I would like to work, because the people respect each other; and I or you for that matter won’t be the freak from the basement or the freak from next office who is the only one not to have any social contacts with co-workers because he is lost in his world of bits and bytes. At such a place I would like to work, because the people running the company have understood that atmosphere and motivated people are worth a hell of a lot more than people who “frequent” the office, because they gain money there. People at Google are motivated, because they can change something, or at least they got the feeling they can.
Imagine a place where you do not have that feeling. That is not a place I want to work at, and by there that is not a place I will head to. By there, I plan to one day sent my resume in.

Jabber Client

Bob Hentges — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 10:28:50 +0000

I have been on a long quest for a Jabber client that fits my needs. I have tested and used for some time quiet a few different ones. PSI (Linux, OS X), Adium (OS X), Gaim (Linux) and some others of which I have forgotten the names. Still none of them really did the job I intended it to do.

PSI is great, but it crucially lags a decent integration in Gnome. Even worse is the fact that it doesn’t “understand” the “geometry” flag. Aside that it really does about everything I could imagine.
Gaim is nice as well, it has a nice integration yet it just doesn’t stop to get in my way. Of course this can be an intrinsic consequence of my non-existent skill to configure the piece of software correctly; but still. I just can’t work decently with it.
Adium falls out of the row, as I have stopped using OS X for my every day work some time back. It’s not that I do not like it anymore, or that I think that it is broken or whatnot. My notebook is my main workstation at the moment because I am doing trips from Innsbruck to Luxembourg quite often these days.

Today I found what I think is a gem in terms of perfection regarding Jabber Clients. It’s called Gajim, and it really does everything I want it to do, which is great, and best of all, it even has a nice integration into Gnome.

Edit: Cut out some truely useless stuff.

On the London bombings

Bob Hentges — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 07:31:23 +0000

Something to think about:

I am astounded at the number of commentators, like Thomas Friedman (“Muslims in danger,” Views, July 9), who refuse to link what happened in London with what is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq. Britain and the United States are killing Muslims by the thousands in these two countries, yet we are shocked when there is reprisal.

There are not just extremists as Friedman would have us believe. They are humiliated people fighting back with the weapons they have available. When the dust settles and sanity returns, the war on Iraq will be judged as one of the great catastrophic blunders in all of history.

This is a quote of a Letter to the Editor to the International Herald Tribune, by Robert Billyard, Langley, British Columbia, published on June 12th. The highlighting is my own, and has not been reproduced as in the original.

When consumers do the work

Bob Hentges — Sun, 21 Aug 2005 08:30:42 +0000

This is another old blog entry of mine I want to have available again. Be assured, I will not start to republish my entire blog. Partly I am way to lazy to do this, and partly that would be extremely bad manners in my opinion.

The reason why I republish a bit of the blog entry over here is not only because I like it, but because I didn’t think, of the situation the quoted article describes, in such a way before. Look at the situation like at the famous egg of Columbus. Which ultimately makes me look like a stupid old fish, but well… It’s interesting, in my opinion.

The article has been written by Nicols Fox and has been published by the International Herald Tribune on Friday, May 6th 2005 on page 11.

It began in the 1970s. Or at least that’s when I became conscious of it. Americans began cleaning up after themselves in fast-food restaurants.

I had been living abroad and didn’t know about such things, but my children, faster to pick up on American cultural expectations, made sure I took back my tray and put my trash in the appropriate bin.

Cleverly, the restaurants made this choice not only easy but gratifying. Customers were given the sense of being good citizens or helping out the teenage minimum-wage workers who wiped off the tables.

I was never fooled. I knew what was going on. We were doing the restaurant’s work, and if we didn’t we felt guilty. My children would shrink into their coats while people stared disapprovingly if I tried to abandon a cluttered table.

Having a quick look on Google just revealed me, that the IHT got an online version of the partly quoted article.

As ridiculous as it might seem. I decided that I would no more clean up my desk in fast food restaurants. I am actually not used to visit McDonald’s. The only fast food I like is the one you can get at Burger King. That said, they do clean up the tables (at least the Burger Kings I have visited – over here, in good old Europe), which means that you do not have to do it.