All posts from July, 2006

Yes, this blog is still maintained.  Sorta.  It’s just that I have this new job, and I’m working about 200x harder than at my old job (which, curiously, is a good thing.)  Also, my new job so far has been entirely hacking on WordPress, the very WordPress which runs this blog, so you can understand if good ol’ WordPress is pretty much the last thing I want to look at when I get home in the evening.

One thing about my new job… and, keep in mind that I am trying to think of a non-geeky way to say this, but… Microsoft Windows really blows chunks.  I have gotten conflicting opinions from different people about whether or not it’s OK to install Linux on my computer at work, and I decided I would not be a whiny boy, and just buck up and use Windows like everyone else.  The move back to Windows has been… difficult.  To wit:

• Why won’t iTunes let me copy music off my iPod?  I have to use some shareware thing, download the music into a temporary folder, and then ask iTunes to import that into my collection.  Then, I have to delete the files from the temporary folder.  A pain!
• I have a text editor on my machine that is supposed to open and save files via FTP.  Except that one of the servers I work with only supports SFTP, and so I have to use a different text editor for that.  Oh, and it’s shareware, and pretty soon I’m gonna have to ask my boss to pay for it so I can keep using it.
• Said text editor won’t let me edit files in UTF-8.  Or rather, it’s supposed to, but it doesn’t work.
• WS-FTP also doesn’t support SFTP, so I have to use two different programs for moving files between my desktop and the servers.  They’re both really ugly and hard to use.
• AOL Instant Messenger thinks it’s cute to open three different windows full of advertising every time my computer starts up.  So, I installed Trillian, which is without ads, but is totally weird and hard to use.  (It’s pretty, at least.)
• I installed a little Microsoft add-on that gives me four different screens where I can put windows, just like Linux (this may sound like the height of geekitude, but programmers usually have a billion windows open at once.)  Except it’s really buggy and causes different programs to misbehave in different ways.
• I tried to open a text file in Excel the other day, but apparently support for .csv files wasn’t installed on my harddrive.  In order to install this, I needed access to some mysterious drive “X:” that wasn’t available.  So, I had to give up and figure out some other way to look at my data.
• Omigod the Start menu.  Holy crap.  It takes me forever to find anything.  I’m used to programs being organized in folders like “Web Browser,” not in folders named after the company that makes the software.

You can scoff if you like, but I never had any of these problems before I went back to Windows.

So, tomorrow at 6pm, when my day is officially over and people start to go home, I am installing Linux.  I noticed that several other people at work are using it, so it’s not like I can get into that much trouble.  Plus I’ll still be leaving Windows on my harddrive, I’ll just be… not using it.  With extreme prejudice.

My very generous former employers gave me a cute little iPod Nano as a going-away gift. I had been avoiding iPods because they need special software (iTunes) and I was afraid they wouldn’t work well with Linux. A few years ago, I bought an iRiver IHP120, thinking it would be easier for a geek like me to use. It turns out that it wasn’t: there’s some weirdness w/ the harddrive makes it lock up every so often for a minute or so while you’re trying to copy your music. Also, that 20GB hard drive is almost too huge: trying to keep all my shit organized on that thing was like staring at a sink full of dirty dishes every day.

Anyway… I booted up the computer, plugged in the iPod, and… beauty! The system picked up on it right away, and you can even browse your music collection and add to it right from the file browser, something which I don’t think you can do even on a Mac!

As for Amarok, iTune’s feature-heavy and strangely-accented European cousin, the iPod integration works very well. The user interface is a little confusing and takes a while to get used to, but once you get the hang of it, it’s very easy to add music to your player. There’s even a sweet plugin you can download that will automatically convert your OGG files to MP3 as they’re uploading. Music in other languages (with weirdly accented letters) comes through perfectly on the iPod, something that was a constant source of frustration with my iRiver.

In short: I’m hooked! I finally understand why people love the iPod so much, and after four years of struggling to get Linux to do some of the things that other people take for granted, I’m delighted to find so much thought and effort put into this. (Also, I’m in love with SuSE’s new mounting properties tab.)