Tuesday, January 17, 2006
I spent some time playing with Fedora Core 5 test 2 today. I did this principally because there are a lot of nice friendly scheme RPM's out there to play with and becuase the Bigloo package on Arch Linux is little broken in that it doesn't provide bee or any sensible way to install it.
Now I was in the Fedora community way back when Red Hat first spiralled out it's non-commercial distro, and I left that community because, despite using the word twice so far in this paragraph, the last thing it Fedora had was a "community".
Even though Red Hat is freeing it's grip on Fedora a little more now, I still see some big issues that haven't faded. What's so shocking about Fedora is that despite the obvious effort and polish that's been invested broadly in the OS some really fundemental parts of the distro are still totally broken.
YUM sucks. It really sucks. Sure it's a big improvement on RPM on it's own, but compared to apt, emerge or pacman it moves on a geological timescale, is annoying to use and makes upgrading packages a painful experience.
Wireless support also sucks, Fedora is one of the few distros I've come across that can't get an IPW2100 working with relative ease. Gentoo is another, the wireless configuration there annoys the hell out of me, but at least it works. Ubuntu, Novell and SuSe can all set the card up with only a couple of questions to the user. Arch leaves it to the user, but it's well documented and the config files are trivial. Fedora wraps it in a worthless GUI that thinks the card is a normal ethernet card and gives no sensible indication that I needed to go and hunt the web for a package.
Those things are a real shame, because between them they're going to keep me far away from a distro that really has got it's house in order around development tools, and can now boast a really nicely put together Gnome desktop with Mono support.
I could use Debian or Ubuntu of course to deal with the Scheme installations. Those distro are quite well supported from that point of view (or Gentoo if the wireless config didn't make me sooooooo angry). Instead it's back to Arch - the only distro that ever really fulfills me, and where I can knock up a new package in a matter of minutes and be happy.
I spent some time playing with Fedora Core 5 test 2 today. I did this principally because there are a lot of nice friendly scheme RPM's out there to play with and becuase the Bigloo package on Arch Linux is little broken in that it doesn't provide bee or any sensible way to install it.
Now I was in the Fedora community way back when Red Hat first spiralled out it's non-commercial distro, and I left that community because, despite using the word twice so far in this paragraph, the last thing it Fedora had was a "community".
Even though Red Hat is freeing it's grip on Fedora a little more now, I still see some big issues that haven't faded. What's so shocking about Fedora is that despite the obvious effort and polish that's been invested broadly in the OS some really fundemental parts of the distro are still totally broken.
YUM sucks. It really sucks. Sure it's a big improvement on RPM on it's own, but compared to apt, emerge or pacman it moves on a geological timescale, is annoying to use and makes upgrading packages a painful experience.
Wireless support also sucks, Fedora is one of the few distros I've come across that can't get an IPW2100 working with relative ease. Gentoo is another, the wireless configuration there annoys the hell out of me, but at least it works. Ubuntu, Novell and SuSe can all set the card up with only a couple of questions to the user. Arch leaves it to the user, but it's well documented and the config files are trivial. Fedora wraps it in a worthless GUI that thinks the card is a normal ethernet card and gives no sensible indication that I needed to go and hunt the web for a package.
Those things are a real shame, because between them they're going to keep me far away from a distro that really has got it's house in order around development tools, and can now boast a really nicely put together Gnome desktop with Mono support.
I could use Debian or Ubuntu of course to deal with the Scheme installations. Those distro are quite well supported from that point of view (or Gentoo if the wireless config didn't make me sooooooo angry). Instead it's back to Arch - the only distro that ever really fulfills me, and where I can knock up a new package in a matter of minutes and be happy.
Friday, January 13, 2006
I've just put new strings no my Taylor. It's 10 years old now and starting to sweeten up nicely. It's funny how just giving it a clean and some new strings makes it such and exciting and beautiful instrument every time.
If only everything in life was so easy to rejuvinate!
Why is that then when you set out to do something simple it always spins out to something more complex.
I started writing a small python app two days ago. It needed a database to store multiple records, each with the same three fields. To avoid mucking around distributing something like PostgreSQL I made use of python's anydbm library.
So there I am at 1AM this morning writing unit tests for queries framed as the intersection of sets of keys returned from an index mechanism of my own design. How did I get there... I don't think I'll ever know. I wasn't even drinking - or perhaps that was the problem?
Thursday, January 05, 2006
LISP is 48 years old this year (50 if go all the way back to it's inception). That's scary. It's scary that Jon McCarthy was so visionary, but from another point of view it's scary that programming languages have changed so little in 50 years.
From what I can see all that's really happened is that computer hardware has caught up with the ideas. LISP in 1958 was heavy and cumbersome, but today the "exiting new languages" like python and ruby are heavier and more cumbersome than LISP is without delivering any more power (indeed many people will argue that LISP and it's direct decendent, Scheme, offer more power than either python or ruby do yet).
What's exciting is that a larger development community is really starting to buy into some of the solid foundations that LISP originated when they see how swift and pleasant development with Python and Ruby can be. I'm even noticing that there are more and more young developers playing with LISP and Scheme themeselves. Just another sign that the increased communication and sense of community between developers that the internet age has brought about is truely changing the way we work.
They key to doing things the best way possible is to be exposed to the best ideas. Corporate environments don't traditionally expose people to those ideas - indeed corporate developers used to only get information about languages delivered to them via narrow channels controlled by yet more corporations.
Companies selling solutions found it all too easy to write off ideas coming from the university's as "Ivory tower". Just a few years ago I worked for a company who told me that languages like Python and Ruby weren't "business languages". Now I work for a business that uses Python as it's primary development language. No need to guess which company is the more productive.
A couple of years back Paul Graham said something inflamatory to the effect that if you code in Python you'll get smart developers to work for you, and if you code in Java you won't. That's a fairly extreme statement, and I realise it's become really fashionable to bash Paul Graham of late, but I have to say I agree with him. I have the strongest feeling that the average hacker from the LISP or Scheme community is a lot more productive than the average C# developer.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Ah, back to work today. A million and one things to do - the challenge is to focus on the road ahead through the mist.
The hardest part of being responsible is dedicating large chunks of time to the things you dislike doing when there are more than enough things you like doing to keep you occupied. The only answer I fear is to bite the bullet and spend some serious time improving the situation.
One of my patches to Muse-Mode got accepted and now my name's in the AUTHORS file - which still makes me smile every time it happens. Free Software can give you a real kick out of the things that are mundane in the day to day. The reason for this is anthropoligical rather than technical - you get micro-payments of kudos to feed your soul.
I'm fairly certain that peoples happiness is dependent on shared experience. The experience of bug fixing on your own, for your own project can be dull or even depressing. Having someone to tell about your fix; having someone understand your fix; having someone say, "Hey, cool!" - these things make you happy.
Sunday, January 01, 2006
Two bugs in Muse
More Muse, Emacs, etc...
muse-project-ignore-regexp
This variable is used to ignore various files in a directory. One of the things it filters out is the CVS directory placed in a directory that is under CVS control. That all makes sense. However, the function used to check paths against this regex, (string-match), is case insensitive by default, and my files live in a path that includes a directory named "cvs". This is not really the problem I expected (the issue I'd found previously seems to be a genuine bug, but not really related).
One extra complexity is that Emacs is a cross platform environment and, while my GNU/Linux environment make it valid to have a directory called "cvs" as an entity distinct from a directory called "CVS", on Windows you can't distinguish between them. Thanks to twb on the #muse IRC channel for pointing that out. Fortunately Emacs knows whether it is running on Windows and Muse already captures this info in the variable muse-under-windows-p
So I reckon I'm on the verge of submitting a patch for Muse-mode as I have it working here. Hopefully I can now make some sensible progress.
Hello 2006
There are fireworks outside, people singing in the street and I think my Muse-Mode problem may be fixed in the version of muse-project.el I'm checking out of the Arch repository now.
All is well in the world.
