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Warning: super geeky entry

For the last five or six years, my operating system has been Jinux– a custom build of Linux that I designed and created from scratch. No, I didn’t write the software, but I did write hundreds of compile scripts, a package management program, initialization software, and everything else you’d need to compile and install a full working Linux desktop or server. It was a marvelous thing. I used it on dozens of servers and a handful of desktops, and basically every hour of every work day was spent using Jinux software I’d built.

Over time, however, the mainstream Linux distributions have been getting nicer, easier to use, and (most importantly) easier to manage. Gone are the days of doing manual updates to software because of security alerts sent to e-mail lists. Now it’s all automated, with nice alerts when you login that tell you it’s time to upgrade such-and-such. Since I’d been spending the past five or six years looking at the web pages and FTP sites for hundreds of programs to see if there were updates, it was very tempting to be lazy and let someone else worry about that for me.

Well, I finally gave in and fired up a copy of Kubuntu to give it a test drive. The installer was very simple, asking just a handful of questions before doing its thing and giving me a nice desktop. The package manager was easy to use (although I had to learn a few new commands) and the updater is awesome, giving me an unobtrusive icon to let me know it’s time to get some new goodies. Here’s a list of today’s updates:

After a few weeks I decided to see if Kubuntu could do what I really need– not only the nice slick KDE desktop I’ve been enjoying for years, but also the heavy-duty server environment necessary to run the hundreds of web sites and thousands of e-mail accounts I manage in my business. It took a few more weeks to configure everything just right, but I managed to get Kubuntu looking and acting just like my traditional Jinux systems. I’m one of those guys who has serious customizations for everything I do: years upon years of shell aliases and desktop preferences and icons and backgrounds and everything else that makes up a computing environment. I didn’t want to lose any of that, and in the end I didn’t need to.

All in all the transition was successful, and I’ve been happily using Kubuntu for about a month. I still run Jinux on my servers– the next big step is converting all of them. It’s no small task to rebuild servers in a production environment without losing any data, dropping a web site or e-mail offline for even a few minutes, and having it all completely transparent to my customers. But I think it can be done, and all that remains is working out the details.

So to the folks over at Ubuntu, here’s a big thanks from a happy customer. It’s sad in a way to bid farewell to my home-grown solution that’s served me so well for all these years, but times change. I can still smile in a smug sort of way knowing that I haven’t used a Windows computer for at least a month now. Who says Linux isn’t ready for the big time?

One of the (many) things I enjoy about Colorado is how it gets nice and cool in the evenings, so even on the hottest of summer days– like those in late July and early August– we can open the windows at night and listen to the cool breeze blowing through the house.

We’ve been putting box fans in the bedroom windows to help the breeze a bit, and after a few years of talking about it, finally decided to spring for a ceiling fan in the master bedroom. It’s got a peaked ceiling, making it a little more difficult, but this week we finally took the plunge. Now we have a nice quiet fan circling above the bed, keeping the bedroom nice and cool and eliminating the noisy ten-year-old box fan.

It’s only a matter of time, I suspect, before the kids ask for their own ceiling fans. Hmm.

It’s funny how our trampoline becomes Party Central all the time. Here’s Kyra (on top of the playset) and her four neighborhood friends all playing something in the backyard.

The $200 or whatever we spent at Sam’s Club ten years ago has definitely paid off… that thing is so awesome.

Wow, everyone’s getting in on the latest book!

I read an article by some guy named Chris Hedges, where he discusses how war in general, and Iraq in particular, can turn a soldier from a killer into a murderer. Of particular note:

He goes on with this blunt assessment of the side of the war we see:

Very true. And very scary.

10 points for creativity.

From the Associated Press:

Progress. It may not be much, but at least the boneheads running airport security are waking up to the fact that most of their idiotic rules aren’t actually doing anything more than annoying millions of passengers.

Maybe by this time next year we’ll be rid of the dumbest restriction of all, the 3-1-1 Rule!

Ultimate is such an awesome game because even when you lose, you have a great time. Or at least I do.

We played a double-header tonight in Boulder, and we were up against one of the top teams in the league. They’ve been crushing all of their opponents, and although we lost we held the score pretty tight the whole game. Then we played one of the weaker teams, who came on strong in the first half and managed to eke out a victory because we weren’t able to recover in time (eventually losing by one).

Yet despite that, both games were a ton of fun. I knew many of the players on the teams, and we were constantly joking and heckling each other during the game (“He’s got nothing!” or “What was that throw?”), and mingling on the sidelines talking about this play and that throw.

All in all, it was a nice summer evening enjoying time with friends and getting some exercise. It doesn’t get much better.

Dr. Jon Miller, director of the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, has spent decades compiling statistics about scientific knowledge amongst the general population of America. The results are… underwhelming.

• American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small).
• Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity.
• Only about ten percent know what radiation is.
• One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth.

Like, wow.

The other day Craig told me he knew I’ve been really busy lately because I hadn’t been writing in this blog. It was kind of funny– he was right, because when things get hectic I find that I don’t have the time to sit and write goofy musings or read the news stories about Bush that get me all fired up. Since he’s one of maybe three people who actually read this (even Laralee doesn’t) I figured I need to keep him entertained. So I’m going to calm down, stop working so hard, and write more.

So here’s a shout out to my homey Craig…