Long time, no post...REDUX

So, much has happened.

Uncle Sammy here is gonna be a dad. Although I'm very excited (partially since I thought I'd sterilized myself back when I was a bad bad kitty doing bad bad things), that was a pretty big jolt. The ultrasound or whatever it was was WAY f-ed up, holmes...The little one in there was just kicking back until suddenly it's choppers went ga ga ga, then swung an arm up. I just about crapped myself and fainted.

So since February I've:

1. Moved from Portland, Oregon to Ambridge, Pennsylvania
2. Got a contract, then full-time developer job
3. Got a place in Pittsburgh
4. Got pregnant
5. Got married (shotgun-style)
   

Anyway, this was always meant to be yet another tech-centric blog, but if anybody does actually read this and want to know any more about 1 - 5 above, do a comment and I'll counter-comment, etc. Now, moving along to tech crap:

First of all, I'm salty with Linux right now. I just got a $300 eMachines T5230 and an nVidia 8500 (plus a 22-in widescreen Acer monitor). Very tasty sweet deal. But, I wanted to fully exploit the 64-bit Athlon in there, as well as utilize the hardware virtualization. Thus, I wanted KVM. Now, my awesome apartment / rowhouse I'm renting said they had a networked house. That was semi-false: the contrators or whoever wired the house with cat-5, but just for the phones. So I just went and bought meself a Linksys wifi router and Ralink USB wifi thumbdrive.

Tried Ubuntu. Couldn't install nVidia binaries, nor did the repository ones work. Tried CentOS 5. Fucked up my hard drive partitions. Mandriva, ok this one worked...initially.

Mandriva was the easiest of the three to install. The only initial problem was the xorg.conf file needed to be changed slightly to get KDE up and running. I went in and got rid of any DRI references and changed the device from "nv" to "vesa". Then I could start X. I could not get nVidia's drivers installed properly on there, but went instead into HardDrake, selected the (currently undetected) video card, and used to config tool to select Vendor->nVidia 8300 - 8800. Then it worked like a champ.

The Ralink was pretty damn easy once I decided to ditch WPA as the setup and go to WEP, as wpa-supplicant sucks right now. I downloaded the drivers from Ralink's site and copied rt73.bin into the /lib/firmware directory. ifconfig showed rausb0 online already, so I iwconfig'ed the essid and key to open (or restricted worked, as well). I then went into Control Center->(something)->wifi something and got the prompt for the WEP key. I entered that shiz nit in and BAM! Gots me some internet.

Then came the problem of getting KVM set up. I had already changed my repositories through the Source Media Manager (or whatever it's called), and then did a search for KVM. Nothing. I instead installed GCC 3.4 and changed the symbolic link /usr/bin/gcc to point to 3.4 instead of 4. I downloaded KVM and tried to build. Nope.

At any rate, I'm going to try a last-ditch effort using Fedora. I'd really like to get a BSD virtualization workhorse up, but I'll wait until they get the KVM ported.

To any Linux users who may come across this: please, any suggestions to make my eMachine a virtualization monster would be very, very welcome. One caveat: no vmware. I think it's a great product, but seem to notice way better performance with both Virtual PC and VirtualBox. VirtualBox seemed too unstable last time I used it, but perhaps it's come a long way. Xen I have no idea about.

On the programming front, I've been itching to try F#, particularly with some managed DirectX action, but I don't currently have a project in mind for it. I've also come across Cw (C-Omega) and am a bit curious about this extension. This also seems REAL cool.

So, this entry got rid of the nagging itch to post. I'm hoping to post more frequently again, now that my vacation's over. Bye bye, now.

Long time no post...

Sorry, all 1 readers. I've had much going on the last two+ months. Just a few of the wonderful things:

• sold house & moved in with mother (total house population = mom, joey, 3 pugs, 2 german shepards, me, and LOTS of booze to get through all this...)


• just finished migrating Windows / SQL Server 2005 / .NET multi-tier app I had finished at the end of October to a LAMP solution (fun fun fun...)


• ulcers...

Revelations I'd like to share from all this:
I am a Linux convert now. This does NOT mean I am one of those losers who goes around calling Microsoft M$ and all that. I still love my XP + VS2005 for development, but this works wonderfully within VMWare on my linux install. I'd been using CentOS for the project at work, and had it all set up on my Toshiba Satellite P25-520 (b'yatch) working gravy, until I just downloaded and immediately installed PCLinuxOS 2007. OMFG, so so cool.

Eclipse is fantastic, and I'm going to start doing MUCH more development in Java because of it. Eclipse does NOT beat Visual Studio 2005 for me yet, BUT before I am flamed like a mother for this statement, I figure here's why: I haven't been doing development in Java, but C#. That's, I think, 'nuff said. Eclipse was fine for the PHP work, and I love the Web Services designer in there. So, although I am still a huge fan of VS, I readily and humbly admit that I simply do not have enough (any, actually) Java / Eclipse action under my belt yet. VS2005 + MSDN Library, though = very powerful.

Wandering into this LAMP project was also difficult wondering which of the 800-godzillion distros to pick from. We had a contract class run at one of our campuses a while ago where the guy used CentOS, but I first tried FreeBSD. After my head became flat as a pancake from beating it on my desk so much and getting sick of hacking configure files just to make shit build on there, I slapped in CentOS and BOOM! Two hours later had a solid LAMPer with PHP Soap service ready to go (b'yatch). Yum = my friend.

Now it's PCLOS. The CentOS was just a bit too much of a loser to get perfectly set up on my laptop, and I just wanted that Toshiba to become my daily "appliance" for email, word processing, et al, with the VMWare for any specific crap I needed to do. So I try out the PCLOS and BOOM! I really liked how it's packaged as a LiveCD so you can try it out first. I highly recommend this distro.

[to be continued...i'm hungry and tired, so i'll edit this later]

A CentOS MySQL server, a .NET app, and me.

by Simon Duvall.

Hey all,

Ripping my hair out the past day trying to migrate an MS-SQL server app to a MySQL server. There's a front-end Windows Forms app in C#.NET 2.0 that reads data in from a Scantron machine and sends the data to a MS-SQL server, and several ASP.NET 2.0 forms that both submit data to the same database and display reports from it. Love this project...

Anyway, the MySQL server is on a CentOS 4 box. I kept getting this wonderful exception when I moved to Connector/.NET (from the MySQL site):

A request to send or receive data was disallowed because the socket is not connected and (when sending on a datagram socket using a sendto call) no address was supplied.

I, of course, over-thought the problem and overlooked the simple fact that the CentOS box had it's iptables firewall blocking the default 3306 port.

So, for any of you also going through this debacle, check your iptables: iptables -L

Cheers,

~simon