RickSpace

So, I’ve gone from a job where I did almost exclusively PHP development with a MySQL backend to a job where I do almost exclusively ASP.NET/VB.NET/C#.NET with a SQL Server backend… and I could not possibly be happier with the transition.
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So, I found two very very sweet functions that have let me basically have polymorphism in php5… granted, I have to code it myself which sucks a bit, but at least the functionality is there.

func_num_args()
and
func_get_args()

may be the best functions every created. Throw func_get_arg() in there if you just need a single value, but you can use these 2(3) functions to have any of your functions accept any number of parameters and do different things based upon those values.

I R Happy Boy

Symfony is a PHP framework that I’ve been evaluating as of late. I’ve looked at Mojavi, Cake, WACT, PHP on Trax in depth, and skimmed over at least 5-6 others from a list I found. Too bad most of them have little more than a neat name… crap. All of it. I know that’s harsh, and I know they’re all trying. But there is NO good reason that on my local machine, a Windows PC none-the-less, and with absolutely no knowledge or experience with either the language or the platform, I was able to install Ruby, Rails, a couple other components and create a decently-functional application in probably 1-2 hours total time. It was that experience that made me want to go out and find a good PHP framework… I just haven’t found one yet…

Until now maybe?
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Today has been a good day for reading and perusing the internetwebthingamajigger.

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Do not ascribe to intelligence what can be attributed to accidental innovation.

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I probably am not really allowed to go into much detail regarding the work I’ve been doing recently, but it is super interesting (well, some of it is)…
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I will start this rant by citing Reuters:

Scientists may have found a gene for fear — a gene that controls production of a protein in the region of the brain linked with fearful responses.

Science News Article | Reuters.com

So, by reading through the article we find that this discovery CERTAINLY has positive aspects and may lead to many wonderful treatments for serious ailments. What is causing MY amygdala (see article for reference) to go crazy is that this is lauded as a completely positive discovery. We are a society, nay a WORLD, driven by the few feelings and emotions we still allow ourselves to have, and are in the process of trying to eliminate those pesky ones that are still around.

Fifty years ago if your mom and dad died in a trainwreck and you were raised by nuns, only to end up rebelling and starting up a pornographic video production firm at age 22; later to be come wealthy but clutched by the vices of alcohol and drugs… You cried about it. You sobbed. You dealt with it and you moved on. Maybe you found Jesus and became a Christian and started anew. Maybe you sold your business, poured yourself into a more positive venture and lived a fulfilling life. Or maybe you killed yourself; tough crap. Now, if mom and dad swerve on the road and accidentally kill a possum (MAYBE HE’S PLAYING DEAD, YOU DON’T KNOW!!!), the child is instantly put on anti-anxiety pills, anti-depression pills and just for good measure, another experimental drug guaranteed to chemically lobotomize the child so he won’t act out. The parents take no responsibility to merely teach the kid about death, explain to him/her that sometimes things happen but you’ve gotta keep going, and treat this as a chance to help the child grow up.

Fifty years ago, people had mood swings. Now people have bipolar disorder.

Fifty years ago, kids were happy, playful, hyper and sometimes couldn’t pay attention in school because they wanted to be playing! Now they have ADD/HD and need to be medicated.

And now, since we can already slow thoughts, calm nerves, relieve anxiety, dull pain and remove ambition with pills… all we lacked was a God-like fearlessness. Is this a good thing? I mean, aside from killing YET ANOTHER natural human emotion, is there nothing else wrong with this?

The article states that mice naturally are afraid of open spaces and tended to stay near walls and under things when they can. You want to know why? THAT’S CALLED SURVIVAL. A mouse under a cabinet cannot be stepped upon. A mouse up against a wall may not be seen. The doped up mice wander out into the middle of the room without fear of anything. What things are we as humans afraid of? Falling off tall objects (like buildings), being hit by cars while crossing the street, very hot or very sharp objects in close proximity to our skin, etc. If I were not afraid of falling off of a building, I probably would be more inclined to walk dangerously close to the edge of the building, and even try to see what it feels like to walk on the air surrounding the building.

If we continue to embrace the “make it go away” culture that has come into existence and eventual proliferation, empowered by pharmaceutical research and distribution companies but openly embraced by the common people, we will soon be able to feel nothing. Maybe I’m too old-fashioned and ‘burly’ (I quote that because no one who knows me would call me burly) but I think some pain, some fear, some anxiety, and some of just about every feeling is OK; in fact I would argue that it is necessary in order for us to become the people we are. This nation of prescription-induced Zombies is not for me.

Forbes magazine features a cover-story about how blogs are evil and people who participate in the discussions on blogs are an evil lynch-mob… I won’t go into detail, rather I’ll just link to their article… which gets more people reading their information which I’m sure is in part the goal of this whole thing. In brief, I tend to agree with this Warner Crocker post.

So, the reason blogs are evil? People can say bad things about others… these things can be completely unsubstantiated. Could this not happen in the pre-blog world? Yes, it could, and did. I agree that some people misuse the tools at their disposal, but in the ever-popular pro-gun argument, it is not the tool that is evil or kills; it is the ill-guided user of the tool that does damage. I wish there were a way to make an honest call to bloggers, asking them to at least think and maybe even do a small amount of research before you swallow everything you hear hook-line-and-sinker. Does that mean I agree with Forbes? In a way I do… I don’t agree with their handling of the issue or the sensational way they chose to cover it, but I do wish more people would act credibly in the blog world. That does not, however, mean that I think they should be forced to by their providers, which is what Forbes is calling for.

So, in essence, I disagree with Forbes’ main point about needing people like Google to prosecute or at least turn over the names of people who post things that are in disagreement with corporate America. I also think Forbes messed up some of the facts when it said that Google makes a concerted effort to go out and shut down ’splogs’ because they skew page-rank. If you look at any discussions on predictive market analysis gathered from blogs, forums, etc, you will find many complain that Google ignores those ’splogs’ because of the ad-hits that they generate. I think probably there is truth in both sides of this, as in most cases.

I guess in general, I’m disappointed that Forbes actually published an article that condemns the freedoms of speech and press that are provided by the constitution, and upon which Forbes’ main business (magazine production/sales) is based. I don’t think their coverage was 100% incorrect or evil, but I think it was not really a ‘proper’ way to cover it. I am sure there will be many blogs out there calling for blood on this one, but not me. I have another question though…

How does this sort of article affect business based upon blogs, forums, etc and the content generated on them? Infoseek was noted in the article, but there are other companies such as BuzzMetrics and Umbria and I wonder if this is seen as a good or bad occurrence for them. If you take the ‘there is no bad publicity’ approach, then any time that blogs in general spend in the spotlight is good. However, do stories such as these decrease the market’s trust of blogs and perhaps their interest in viewing the trends? Or maybe these sorts of stories heighten the awareness that people ARE out there talking about your products, and maybe you need to tap into that? Interesting times and interesting thoughts make for tired mornings and distracted work.

Okay, so I thought everything was going great with Red Hat 9, and indeed, for what it did, it was great. But I wanted to use the ndiswrapper package in order to use my Linksys Wireless USB 11 stick. Well, as it turns out, RH9 was using the 2.4.somethinglessthanIneeded kernel. Basically, I was going to have to update the kernel; this is not something I like doing, but not something I’m entirely unfamiliar with. But basically, I didn’t want to nuke the whole install just because my NIC wasn’t working, but I wanted to get it working… so I updated to Fedora Core 3 which took just about as long as a from-scratch install. But anyway, once that was done, I now had a new enough kernel, my XWindows running in full screen, and it boots to prompt (runlevel 3) instead of booting graphically, so I’m happy… sorta.

So I get the Win32 drivers for my NIC, and the ndiswrapper, and after much toiling and trouble with it (mostly my own fault for not reading things completely) I get the NIC installed, using the ndiswrapper, and Linux sees it and there are no real problems… except for the prevaling problem that I STILL cannot get DHCP. So, this gets me thinking because now I’ve had like 4 linux installs with two different network cards not getting DHCP to work. So I check my Windows machines and find that if I reboot with DHCP enabled, they don’t get leases either. GRRRR! You are KIDDING me! So I unplug/restart my router and my dsl modem (just to be thorough) and sure enough when it comes back up, my Windows machine instantly grabs DHCP, I change the wireless NIC on my now FC3 box to use DHCP and oila, I have IP address and internet connectivity. I take the laptop upstairs trimphantly (the battery doesn’t work, so I shut it down, unplug it, take it upstairs, plug it in, boot it up, wlan0 comes up with an ip address, I ping google.com, of course it comes back just fine and I excitedly issue the ’startx’ command. XWindows comes up, gaim autoloads because I told it to, and I get my contact lists and such. Now, I try to open a web-browser to start … browsing the web, of course. Firefox takes forever to even open up (I mean, I get an entry down in the taskbar, but no visual in the screen area… finally it comes up, but can’t get to the webpage… I run a terminal, which sits in the taskbar forever and never actually shows up… Any program I try to run, nothing will open or execute correctly, my gAim shows me as online but I cannot ACTUALLY message anyone, even my wife sitting in the chair next to me… I try to log out of xWindows but it’s not letting me, so I CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE my way out, which shows all kinds of crashing errors, I get to the prompt, try to ping google.com again, and this time, it can’t get there… wtf happened? I tried this 3 times in a row before deciding not to give it any more thought and instead to just sulk about the house the rest of the night feeling defeated.

I WILL get this working, and I don’t want to re-install some other variant of Linux at this point because I think I’m very close… any thoughts on what would cause an ndiswrapper’d wireless NIC to work before entering X but slowly degrade to the point of no longer working?

So I have a Dell Inspiron 4150 laptop that I bought for my semester in Germany back in 2002-2003. I have, I believe, put Linux on this laptop several times, but I always end up removing it because of various frustrations. I have, since the Zend/PHP conference, become a little more convinced that I WILL make it work… I don’t need some crap Alienware pre-fabbed laptop, I can do this on my own. Now, of note are that the pcmcia slots are bent beyond any hope of use by a gravity-induced, floor-terminated trip started by careless placement of the laptop on a table. Also, in a similar accident, the USB port became … ‘wobbly’ I like to call it. So, by this, I intend to let you know that my interface options are somewhat limited.

This laptop has an onboard NIC, so network should not be a problem, an ATI RADEON 7500C 32mb card (rather generic/common) so that should not be a problem, a sound card that I’ve had working in Linux before so we’re good there, and overall just some mid-old age hardware that all should work with Linux… so I’m super-geeked and convinced that this is SOOOO gonna happen (This is Sunday night btw).

First try - Fedora Core 3 :: The OS goes on, though the loading process is somewhat lengthy, but it DOES go on, and by the end, I have a working system (other than the NIC) that boots straight into XWindows… I don’t want it to go straight into XWindows. Also, the system feels VERY slow and cumbersome. I go through the XWindow tools for network management and eventually I get the network card working correctly by assiging it a static IP address, and telling it what nameservers to use. Not the ‘preferred’ method of function, but it’ll do… for a minute. It eats at me for a whole night.

Next try - Debian Sarge :: So, I get on Debian’s site and download the floppy-disk install images, write them to disk using winrwwrt, boot up and see an error message.. after several attempts, I realize that the floppy is close to going bad and because of the low-level reading nature required of the ‘boot’ floppy, this will not do. So, I swap the root and boot floppies, rewrite the image and now all is good in the hood. I boot up and I see the ever-so-friendly and very familiar Debian installer. I go through the installer a bit, and eventually get to the point that it’s supposed to hit the Debian mirrors and pull stuff down… I realize I’ve not got DHCP working again, so I reboot, go into the expert install, set the IP address, set the DNS, now I get access to the mirrors and it pulls down the base Debian system, installs it, and reboots. At reboot I now re-enter the Debian installer, again without DHCP address, and this time however, I cannot find ANYWHERE to manually set the network configuration. Because of that, I save the settings and end up with a VERY basic Debian install. I search the internet and hack around in the files until I find the places to manually set up my network card (/etc/network/interfaces or something like that) and where to set the dns server info (in /etc again somewhere). I do so, and now I can ping google… yay! So, I apt-get install x-window-system and BOOM… it works like I remember Debian working… it’s friggin gorgeous… By the way, I haven’t mentioned that when booting into the terminal like I just did, any of the Linux distros always utilize only like the center 40% of my LCD, so I have this tiny box in the middle of my screen with the info on it, but I can see that X is installing. I test the X install afterwards, and it’s working… awesome. Now I apt-get install kde and like 20 minutes later, KDE is downloaded and installed. This is beautiful. I log into X and there’s KDE… however, it’s still only using the small center of my screen… very annoying. So I reboot… Same thing. I figure well, at least DHCP is working now I’m sure, so I use XWindows to reconfigure the NIC for DHCP, do a dhclient, and nothing… reboot… nothing. Furious, I turn the machine off; I give up.

Next Try - Red Hat 9 :: Okay, I love RH9, some systems are just CLASSIC. The system goes on quickly, I choose to hand pick every single thing that is installed and I do so, I ask it to boot into text mode instead of graphical, everything installs, it uses the full screen… so now everything is just absolutely awesome… DHCP still doesn’t work. As a note, at ONE point in time, DHCP DID work because I used this laptop in lotsa different DHCP-only environments. I’m still not sure what’s going on but I’ve decided to do two things.

I’ve decide first of all that I’m going to stick with RH9, I’m going to get the Windows driver for my USB-wireless (hope my USB works happily for a bit) network stick, and get the NDISwrapper and go that route. Hopefully my USB-stick will be able to pull DHCP plus I’ll be able to play wirelessly so I can work from upstairs where my family stays.

Secondly, I am going to dual-boot my computer at work. This may seem unrelated, but I want to try one of the heavier installations (Fedora Core 4 is burning as we speak) and this computer has all the nice new stuff. I have a 3.2ghz, 1gb RAM, 100GB HD, svideo out to a nice monitor, etc… I have not really had a chance to use Linux on a really buff machine ever… I always dedicate yesterday’s trash to Linux. Well, if I can get OpenOffice (um, yea), Firefox/Thunderbird (well duh), Gaim (ya think?), Zend Studio Pro (it works) and Meeting Maker (the only possible challenge) to run on FC4, I will most likely attempt, in a month or two, to format this Windows machine, and go full-out FC4.

I don’t hate Windows honestly, but all the software I use on any regular basis can and does run on Linux, plus I’ve been wanting to learn the ins and outs more for a long time, and I think jumping off the deep-end may be the only way to achieve the competency I want. Plus, I see RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) and perhaps RHCT (RHC Technician) in the future for me possibly and if so, I want to get prepared. Finally, our department is moving towards Linux and the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) stack for development, and I think it would be of great use for me to be more familiar.

So anyway, that’s the update for now… hopefully tonight I’ll get RH9 with the USB wireless going on DHCP, and then maybe tomorrow or sometime later this week I’ll finish burning FC4, and dual-boot my work system and see how that goes.