RickSpace

So, I’m not gonna lie… I read some of what most of my friends would consider ridiculous blogs… most of my ridiculous blogs are either far-right leaning political blogs that I tend to agree with for the most part, or they’re far-left (when politics are discussed) leaning vegan/vegetarian blogs that I tend to agree with on all things diet.

So, imagine my surprise when an RSS feed came across with the following title:

Superbugs are the new Martians

Not gonna lie… Instantly, images are flashing through my mind of Starship Troopers style super bugs ripping people apart, etc.

So… not so much. It’s about antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that seem to be resulting from the overuse of antibiotics in beef (and other animal) farming. So, it’s all back to a vegan worldview, but MAN I was hoping for some huge friggin’ bugs.

This site is AMAZING. 

In some ways I’m sorta cautious because I can’t see how some of it is legal.  In other ways, this is an amazing service and if it IS legal, then… I mean, they’re not trying to hide it at all.  Anyway, search for any book you want… find it, download it in .pdf, .doc, or even in .mp3 (read to you by a slightly-British-sounding female… it’s actually not THAT bad).

Wow wow wow wow.  This is amazing.

Try as they might, American General was never able to discover how to become useful by ’surfing the internet’. I guess I should clarify further…. this was a comment left on this site, but caught by my spam filters:

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Okay, this is not where I list my favorite apps.. this is where I am looking for YOUR favorites.

I just did an install of Debian Sarge 2.6kernel with Gnome as the desktop.  I prefer KDE but I am an idiot, and for the moment, Gnome is what is there… I’ll install KDE later if I find I can’t get around with Gnome…or I’ll do Fluxbox.  I’m told Gnome is nice… we’ll see.

Anyway, I want a list of your favorite (doesn’t have to be 5) apps that don’t come with the standard distro… or maybe they are included but not installed by default, or maybe deeply buried that I may not know about.  I do development, office work, etc… I also toy with networking and such… just to give you an idea what I’m into.  Don’t say The GIMP or OpenOffice, obviously I know about those… I’m looking for the lesser-known diamonds in the rough.

I don’t know much about Habari… I use Wordpress… like most other blogging softwares, I’ll take a look at it eventually I’m sure… but I’m sick sick sick sick of people being original and different…. just like EVERYONE else.

Habari is the Swahili word for News. Ubuntu is a word from an African language and no one is REALLY certain of the meaning. Joomla is an English-ization of the Swahili word (Jumla) for ‘all together’. Why? Why? Seriously… do we REALLY need more products named in African? I get it… I do, really.

I mean, it was clever the first time, it was non-annoying the second time, but now it seems like when you create a new trendy “WE NEED THE WEB TO EMBRACE THIS!!!1″ product, you basically brainstorm a list of 500 words that COULD have something to do with it, then search African languages until you find a word/language combination that creates the coolest sounding word, then you do about five minutes of research into the meaning of it, and make a marketing campaign showing how conscious you are of the global community blah blah blah. No, you’re an apologetic self-hating software developer who thinks everyone will think of you as worldly if you name your product a word you’ve likely never used in conversation and didn’t know existed until afore-mentioned name search process.

::EDIT:: All of that aside, it sounds like they have some talented people working on Habari… the name is the only thing I expect I will be disappointed with ::EDIT::

I am not OVERLY shocked about this, but at the same time, I do find it interesting that SharpDevelop actually creates a smaller compiled binary than VS.NET does from the same code.

I decided to compile a Win32 app I had written a while back for my company in SharpDevelop just to see if:

1. SharpDevelop could import from a VS.NET .sln file correctly.
2. SharpDevelop would compile the (admittedly quite simple) code without problem.
3. SharpDevelop would create a similar sized binary with similar execution time.

For #1, it was seamless, painless and very easy.  Navigate to the project to import and boom, I’m done.  Once again, #2 was simply and quickly tested with incredibly pleasing results.  I clicked the run button and it popped up… no problems.  And finally, on #3 I was nicely surprised. 

• Compiled with VS.NET, .exe file size: 36k.
• Compiled with #Develop, .exe file size: 28k

That is a 23% reduction in executable file size.  Granted, this was a small application with no images or other large binary objects, but my guess is, similar results could be seen in larger applications. Can you imagine that 3mb executable file dropping to 2.333mb, etc?  It may not seem like a whopping huge difference with harddrives being as extensive as they are nowadays, but it harkens to cleaner bit code being created and I’m thrilled to see this result personally.

So, my freetime project that I’ve decided to take on is:

Setting up a start-to-finish ALL Linux ALL OpenSource .NET development station.  This will include several things.

1. A Case/UML tool for modeling mono-based .NET projects.
2. MonoDevelop - a customization of SharpDevelop for compiling bit code to run on Mono rather than the .NET framework… mind you Mono is a mimic of the .NET framework supported and primarily developed by Novell.
3. A Linux ’server’ (it will be a decent laptop) serving out webpages on Apache with mod_mono installed so it can serve up ASP.NET pages.
4. The only part I’ve not yet figured out is the database.  It may run against a SQL Server 2k instance on a windows machine of mine, or it may run against a locally-hosted MySQL installation.  I haven’t found an open source SQLSERVER.NET engine, so I’ll probably use MySQL and maybe give me a reason to check out sqlyog or whatever it is.

So, first step will actually be getting a laptop, installed with Linux, set for hosting of webpages with Apache, recompiled with mod_mono support and a mysql installation with whatever tools I choose for that.  This should be fun.

Suggestions on Linux distro?  I’ve considered Ubuntu because I’ve used and enjoyed Debian before and have messed a LITTLE with kubuntu.  Other than that, I’m not really sure what I’ll do.  USB/Wireless support are of some importance but I guess I could run wired most of the time if need be.

Thoughts?

So I’m going to be trying a couple different new tools out.  This is being posted from one of them.  I’m not overly-impressed YET, but I’m hoping to find this more full-featured than what I see so far.

I also started using del.icio.us a little more now… I’ve not been using it but when I opened up my old account I found a couple old articles that I really am glad I found again…. So, I’m going to start bookmarking into that more frequently, and hopefully from there, populating some stuff on RP.net.

Oh, and also I’ve been working on developing a different theme/different frontpage for RP.net, so we’ll see if/when that ever comes in… just decided that I really wanted to use one that I developed rather than one I borrowed from somewhere else.

Expect an explosion of posts/links probably today, and maybe in the next days but then for it to die off and me to once again completely forsake this blog sadly.

Okay, most importantly, I am not this guy:

Scientology Rick

Not that anyone who knows me would mistake that, but just wanted to clear that up, since he shows up on a Google search for Rick Petersen along with a host of other non-significant results… but there’s MORE!

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So, you want to learn how to program in the .NET languages of VB.NET and C#? Or maybe you already know how to program in those languages but you don’t have the scrill to go out and buy the newest version of Visual Studio.NET because you’re in college, or you are for some other reason financially strained (I know this situation all too well). Well, fear not friendly-friend; Just over the last little bit today, I’ve evaluated a couple pieces of software that should make life more enjoyable (affordable) and have one on the burner that I will evaluate which could bring this whole thing together.

First off, despite the title and the first paragraph, as far as I can tell you WILL need to have a Windows Operating system on a machine, and be running Microsoft’s .NET Framework Version 2.0 or greater (I think that’s the greatest atm).

Now that we’re past that, let’s look at a couple tools that may be old news to many, but perhaps you aren’t aware of them.
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