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Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Ugh...Moving sucks...Selling a house sucks...

Joey and I are in the final stages of selling the house and are basically fried from this process. We may have only 10 days to move out, but that's what you have to do to CLOSE!

Then I strut around with my phat wallet full of cash money...

Anyway, good Lehrer program last night. Jimmy Carter was on, talking about the Israel / Palestine conflict. He seemed to slant towards the Palestinians and their plight, and though I agree that these stubborn orthodox settlers / archetheologists (if there is such a word) are not helping the matter at all, lobbing rockets at them in retaliation ain't exactly the answer either.

Since I'm a genius at merging words, perhaps the solution is to unify the two countries into Pisrealistine...

Also, a moving, thought-provoking essay on suicide by Richard Rodriguez. I did a quick Find On This Page search for the word "victim", with no results. This is odd. Almost always where the word suicide comes up in a sentence, you find the word victim (e.g. "victim of suicide"). And, I would argue that, in almost all those cases, the "victim" is the one who committed suicide. As a person who has gone through the suicide of a best friend, it is this part I find to be complete gay. Everyone around - his family, friends, everybody - were the victims of his suicide. With a suicide bomber or kamikaze, the victims include innocent stangers (albeit supposed enemy strangers) and useful vehicles. IS THERE NO END TO THE SELFISH DAMAGE THESE SELFISH SUICIDERS INFLICT?

Sorry there...It's actually not these two stories that got me so riled up; they just helped pop the shiny bubble filled with bad gas that had been developing in me from the real pieces of news of late: the break-ups of Spears-Federline and Anderson-Kid Rock.

The Anderson-Kid Rock one, whatever. Federline, though. I have no idea what it is about him that makes me want to vomit so roughly. His obviousness? The un-originality of his entire persona? The fact he got to poke on Britney?

Your comments may help enlighten me on this...

Almost ready for my final MCSD exam: the 70-300. If I pass it, I'll give what I can out to you, my beloved readers who care. I can already say that anyone who has done any programming / development already, especially involving databases, will have a much more comfortable disposition when first taking a look at this exam. I can already suggest that, if you're thinking of taking this exam, download the MSF white papers as well as this paper on ORM. Look for some sample case studies by Microsoft, too, especially any with included project documents like Visio diagrams, spreadsheets, etc.

Okay all, until next post...

~simon

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Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Linux and Microsoft together? Oh no!

Who cares. This whole debate for years now of who sucks and whatever is lame, old, stale, and just plain gay. Personally, it's just cool what these OSes can do. Coming from the age of PDP-11s, Atari 800s (my all-time favorite!), et al, today's operating systems are super-kill-dog. I think people should be focusing more on shaping their platforms to do what they want via the applications they run on it. I think XP is a solid OS, and great to develop on. Visual Studio is amazing. Eclipse is amazing. It's all just so...amazing...ahhh...

Anyway, 95% of my XP loads run open source software I've found out there. 7-zip: perfect archiving utility. Notepad++: text editor on 2.5 pounds of steroids. CDBurnerXP Pro: purty good burning program (although I wish there was a rock-solid ISO maker out there; mkisofs works extremely well, except I've had problems ISO-ing DVDs). OpenOffice, Eclipse, etc...And now with VirtualPC being free, I have my OS go through a M0n0wall VPC image. Better than ZoneAlarm by a long shot.

It looks like the bulk of this collaboration is on virtualization, xml document standards, and Exchange compatability. Good (especially for the Exchange stuff). Other vendors have already been developing "commercial" (i.e. $$$ + EULA) software for Linux. If Microsoft and Novell collaborate to make their systems work more transparently together, great. As long as it's free and I can look at that code. And boy would Microsoft earn big points out there for that.

A friend of mine went to a conference in DC a couple weeks back, and many of the attendees he talked to there said that for government work, they steer away from Microsoft simply because the only way they can be sure of their security is open architecture. If this collaboration between Microsoft and Novell is in any way hindered by licensing / closed-source issues, it's a boondoggle and has an exponentally increased chance of either putting a 0-inch dent in the continuation of open source development, or killing Novell's Suse as a Linux OS leader where there's a gazillion distros waiting to be the next top dog. Like FreeBSD. Viva la BSD, beeyatch!

PS: If any of you out there have gotten Xen to run on FreeBSD, comment or something and let me know how you did it!

~simon

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Monday, November 20, 2006

This weekend I was watching Bill Maher's thing on HBO with Dreyfuss on there. Pretty good episode, and Dreyfuss was excellent (although sometimes seeming a little silently arrogant, but he did co-star in Jaws, so...). So today, while watching wonderful install-bars go across my screen at work, I decided to search for the transcripts for the episode and came across another blog going off about Clinton actually being responsible for the war in Iraq.

That's pretty dumb, fella.

Anyway, I couldn't find the transcript, but you can watch it here.

~simon

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Sunday, November 12, 2006

Long time, no post....

Sorry all one readers, but it's been quite hectic. Looks like my house should sell this week and I'll be moving to the East coast by mid-/late-January.

Been busy lately moving my "productivity" over to Linux. I'm not extremely optimistic about this Vista release, but we'll see. I'm attempting to get a solid workstation down for doing C# development on a FreeBSD platform and have been foiled repeatedly in my attempts to get Monodevelop installed on there. Even the BSD# project and building from the Mono Merge port hasn't worked. I'm looking at any non-commercial plug-ins for Eclipse, but haven't seen anything thrilling yet. This, perhaps, may make for a good project, no? A C#/Mono editor written in Java?

Also getting lots of wierd projects at work to take care of, such as having an old Scantron machine with Windows 95 software send it's data to a SQL server. Ugh... I've been working on a solid m0n0wall syslog-client in C# that I'll post when finished. I'm maybe 95% there. I should have classes for sending the logs to MS-SQL, Oracle, DB/2, MySQL, and PostgreSQL databases, too.

Well, back to work and house crap...

~simon

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