super-good!

Well well, more than two years gone by. How did that happen?

The most obvious reason is our little baby girl, born Christmas before last. In the face of that change in our lives anything I’d have thought to post here seemed pretty trivial.

Being a parent is mind-bogglingly great, and I just want to do everything to make my daughter happy. It’s pretty easy to let your life get subsumed by that, so I have to consciously make time to enjoy my hobbies, even if they don’t feel as important to me as they did before little E showed up.

So, to get myself back in the swing of this piddly little hobby blog, a short list of mostly nerd things that I’ve been thinking about:

• Hooray for Google Chrome!

• I think my Aperture Laboratories mug makes my lattes taste better. It must be the science.

• Not to be too much of a fanboy, but Android 2.2 looks awesome and I have much wanting.

• I’ve been reading books with the Kindle app for the iPhone. I have to say that I don’t love it, having gone back and read an honest-to-goodness physical book last week. It just felt so much more real and I enjoyed it immensely.

• Work is good. I’m super glad to have it, first off, and I’m even more glad that I enjoy it as much as I do.

• I’m intrigued by gPXE and am going to play with it when I get to the office tomorrow.

• I’m starting to loathe Facebook, but don’t want to lose the best tie I’ve got to friends who live far away.

And that’s about it for now.

I was pleased to read that Google is contributing to Wine and was especially happy that they’d been doing so by funding Codeweavers. I’ve worked with Jeremy and other Codeweavers folks through Pixar. They’ve done great work for us, and are incredibly nice people too; they deserve all the good exposure and press they can get from this.

I’ve been keeping up with Wine’s git repository ever since I saw how well it can run The Orange Box, and I’ve been really impressed with the strides Wine has been making. After reading that Photoshop CS2 is now well-supported, I tried it out and it’s been just flawless.

The first thing that I did after seeing my Wacom tablet working perfectly in Photoshop was to download a trial version of Painter X. I love Painter and have always wanted to use it under Linux; though I haven’t been doing much drawing lately, when I was, Painter was the only reason that I was keeping an accursed Windows partition on my machine. Wine ran through the installer just fine, but Painter itself failed to launch.

I don’t blame the failure on Wine, though; I blame it on whomever at Corel made the stupid decision to integrate copy protection into Painter. Now, given that a Google search easily turns up cracks for Painter, this useless copy protection is no doubt lamely justified by Corel as “keeping honest people honest.” All it’s doing for me is stopping a trial version of Painter from running. Corel: Really? Are you feeling nostalgic for the 80’s or something? Why not just include a 5 1/4” floppy disk with bad sectors with Painter? (Ah, memories of Renegade and Maverick!)

I’m willing to bet that Painter would run pretty well if this Protexis bullshit weren’t standing in its way, and it’s a pity that such a fantastic program has to be hobbled by such shortsightedness.

The silver lining for me is that, while searching forums populated by legitimate Painter users who can’t run Painter because of problems with Protexis, I found someone who said they’d just use Artrage instead. Having never heard of Artrage, I grabbed the Starter Edition and, lo and behold, it seems to work as well under Wine as Photoshop does. It seems like a great little program that will serve my drawing needs just fine, so I think I’ll send them some money.

(Corel: see how that works? Don’t treat me like a criminal, if your product is good, I’ll pay for it. I was on the verge of paying a healthy chunk of change for Painter X, and I’m really glad I didn’t.)

Before I forget, a few notes about the food we went out for in London:

• Our first night there we had some really fantastic Thai food at Isarn on Upper St. in Islington. The food was excellent and the fruit drinks that they served were super-good. Also amusing were my sister-in-law’s tactics for getting our four-year-old nephew to eat the salt-and-pepper fried squid—she tells him it’s “squid-chicken.” He ate with gusto, and after a few minutes looked up and Andrea and me sagely. “Squid and chicken are the same thing,” he explained with great authority. Alyssa used this technique again on Thanksgiving, when she served Damaso a helping of turkey-chicken.

• A few nights later we had dinner at J Sheekey before seeing a play. I had a pan-fried filet of sole and was very pleased, and I didn’t do too bad of a job getting the bones out despite having had a few glasses of wine. Truly, this is an accomplishment of which I can be very proud, and one that must be awe-inspiring to anyone who might be reading this.

• Tea, particularly the tea we had at Liberty, was always wonderful. Why don’t we do this in the States?

• We had dinner at the Wapping Project, to which I won’t link because their website is fairly incomprehensible and irritatingly resizes your web browser. The food was good, but the atmosphere was really fun. Giant green generators all over the place, and a huge tree out front filled with yellow umbrellas; also, the small stand of trees surrounding a phone booth in the back room.

I’ve changed hosting again. I don’t have any specific complaints about Steelpixel, though it seems that the IP of my machine here at work was blacklisted from reaching my hosted server. Also, not having direct control of the machine was fairly annoying, so I’m now using a virtual host through Slicehost.

I like how Slicehost lets you pick your favorite distro and it images it for you in a few minutes. Slick!

We’ve been in London since last Saturday, staying with Alyssa and Santi in their amazing loft. It’s been fun shopping and having afternoon tea, walking around in the drizzle and hearing a new accent or language on every corner.

My sleep schedule is totally off—I’ve been waking up at three or four, feeling completely awake for an hour, and then conking out again until noon (and would sleep longer if Andrea didn’t come wake me). Oh, how I suffer!

We’re heading off to the V&A in a little while, and then it’ll be dinner and a play.

Some pictures of food I saw on sale in Minnesota on our recent trip:

I didn’t partake.

Goodbye, SCO.

This was a pleasant surprise on a lazy vacation morning. I’ll raise a glass to their failure at 5:00 gin-and-tonic time.

A few more spots opened up in the Amazon EC2 beta program yesterday and I grabbed one of them. I spent a couple of hours playing with it while the other nerds still around at work were literally crying out with excitement over their new iPhones (which are indeed amazing).

I went through the tutorials and then, with a helpful blog post and script I put together a Fedora 7 machine image. One slight change I made to Carson’s script was to point the yum configuration to a loopback-mounted F7 DVD ISO. This was especially easy because Red Hat set up the DVD as a prepared yum repository, so there was no need to copy the DVD’s files and run createrepo on them.

Building the image this way was really fast, and uploading the resulting bundle was fast too (thanks to the speed of Pixar’s network connection in the off hours).

I have to say that I was genuinely excited when I first saw that EC2 had booted my image and assigned it an address. The root prompt that I logged into was no different than any others I’d seen, but knowing what was behind it set my nerd thoughts racing.

At first it seemed to me that this would be the perfect way to host my wee blog and source repositories. SteelPixel is fine so far, but for some reason it’s taken a dislike to my desktop machine at work, dropping all of its packets. All of my other machines work without trouble. That tiny annoyance was spurring my hopes that EC2 would become the cheap, nimble host of my nerdly dreams—and then I did the math. Running one EC2 instance for a month would wind up costing more than $70. Poop!

EC2 still has tons of potential, though, and I’m looking forward to poking at it more. All of these cheap new technologies (from Amazon and elsewhere, especially ZFS from Sun) are making it an exciting time to be a big nerd.

We’ve had a new floor put in our bedrooms, which means that we had to move all the stuff from half of our house into the other half. Our fireplace nook became essentially the only habitable part of the house, and that was taken up entirely by the bed.

But it’s been worth it. Before:

and after:

My formerly trusty server gave up the ghost a couple of weeks ago, and my friends and I figured it was time to move on to hosted service.

So the old server’s on its way to the ACCRC, and I’ve relocated to Steelpixel. So far things are looking good over here, though I do have to get used to not being able to do whatever I want to the server. I am a control freak.