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]

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