I studied both. When I first started I wanted to be a programmer. As time went on I realized pure programming isn't for me. I lose my motivation on large projects and stop wanting to build them.
I like solving interesting problems and prefer to leave the grunt programming to someone else. This is why I work more in IT now than in programming. I have a lot more variety day to day. I still get to help solve/program interesting problems but it's not my life.
Some of the things I get to do: - Oracle DB Administration - Planning Linux migrations/installations - Windows Server Admin/Migrations - High availability clusters - Java/VB/PHP programming - Scripting - Routing/Networking
I'm no longer stuck going from one big project to another day after day. I can switch my concentration from area to area as I get bored or as projects dictate.
You're young. You need time to see what fits for you. Try both.
I have never had a problem with HP getting me spare parts. Call them, explain the situation and have a qualified, understandable tech on the phone with me. Last week we had a drive fail in a client's SAN...
Call HP, talk to guy and within 5min the drive was being sent out. Arrived the next morning even though they said a couple days.
If I was doing mission critical stuff I would have no problems going with HP.
That said if down time is not an option a supply of spare parts is probably a good idea.
I installed Slackware 10.2 on my new out of the box laptop yesterday. X and the network card worked with only the smallest effort. A startx and modprobe later was golden.
All wireless utilities were included to make using the Wireless NIC easy enough. Getting the Wireless NIC working wasn't the easiest thing but that's not Slackware's fault. The Wireless NIC isn't well suported in Linux to begin with and required me to download the latest drivers from the NIC's Source Forge project site.
Once I did that it just worked.
All in all I've been pretty happy with how Slack 10.2 and this laptop work together.
My drive to work is quite short (10mins) but like you I can't stand mainstream radio. I like CBC Radio2 during the week days. It has nice soothing anouncers and classical music.
On a longer drive I break out the MP3 player. With a few GB of my favorite tunes I like doing the longer (1 hour+ drives).
A couple of other ideas: Stuart Mclean from CBC is very funny and well worth listening to.
If you can find old radio plays: Jack Benny, Phil Harris and Alice Faye, The Shadow, Life of Riley and many more, you'll never be bored again. Ebay has lots of them for sale.
Knowing that the whole computer thing could be mastered with a few simple concepts (point,click,drag) really helped me get interested.
From there I branched out to DOS, and eventually Linux.
The ease of use of the Mac combined with a (then) newfound love of programming got me started. Being able to write a program to print my name on the screen was pretty cool.:)
I'm using Slackware9.1 and installed it from source. Just make sure you have the needed Nomad filesystem libraries installed on your system. I don't remember having to do anything too unusual to make it run.
If you're really stuck contact me via support at the above website and I'll do what I can.
While we're on the subject, cam someone suggest a way to transmit/receive GPS locations to remote site? Think vehicle tracking or something similar.
As I'm driving around, I want to collect GPS points of my location and transmit them in some way back to my home/office where I store them in a database.
Any creative ideas on how this can be best accomplished?
I use Linux to avoid spending obscene amounts of money to keep up to date with the latest software.
With Linux I get great software at a minimal cost. Most of the time I don't need to upgrade it just to have access the the latest features in some other program.
Products I develop under Linux can be sold to customers without forcing them to have the latest proprietary apps. They're more likely to use my latest software if I can provide a complete and working solution.
From the website: Linux Video Surveillance AKA eLViS provides a user interface for watching motion frames captured by the motion program as JPEG files. eLViS lets you view up to four motion threads and has a simple configuration panel to setup the motion.conf file and eLViS configurations.
eLViS is intended to be used as a low cost security monitoring system. For that reason we have chosen Linux for the high reliability and flexible licensing of software.
We recommend that you use eLViS on a standalone Linux system that is dedicated to this task.
http://www.silicontao.com/software/lvs/doc/infor ma tion.html
I've worked for companies with ADSL, Cable, T1, and E10 lines. At home I still use 56k dialup, on occasion (house sitting and such) I still use 28.8 dialup.
For basic email, forum reading and non porn related web surfing even 28.8 speeds are manageable. It's not fun but it's doable.
My home system is a P4 2.8Ghz system connected to the new via 56k dialup. It works for me and I have no need for high speed.
One of the problems I've always struggled with trying to overcome is how to make yourself unique in a market where there are so many others just like you.
Why should a company or person hire me when there are a dozen other people just as qualified and able to do the work. In some ways the market is way over saturated.
Slackware's simple package and configuration setup made this fairly painless.
What I did was modify the initrd ram disk to change the custom setup files. I created my own which partitioned the drive, formatted, and started installing packages.
I modified a couple packages to use defaults the way I liked them, reburned the CD and voila. Perfectly installed systems every time.
Slackware uses shell scripts exclusively so it's quite easy to figure out what happens when.
Moderating articles is a great idea, however I think we should also be able to vote from the submissions queue itself.
We look at the queue of messages and vote/moderate ones that are interesting. Anything receiving enough votes automatically shows up.
This way you'd improve the quality of the articles that show up as well as rate the articles that did show up. Theoretically posting articles of interest to the most people. Rob and friends could still add articles they thought were interesting in order to keep things fresh etc.
I learned to program in high school 88-93 when no one knew what the net was or that it even existed. Added to that I we couldn't afford a computer at home. As a result I only had a limited a mount of time in front of the computer to program ususally restricted to computer class and lunch.
In order to make the best use of my time and figure out whatever problem I was working on I'd spend a lot of time with pen and paper writing out my code. I started wrting out the whole program but as I got better I'd skip the simple parts and only write out the complex bits.
Whenever I ran accross a problem I didn't understand I'd read books/program/talk to people until I figured it out. I didn't have the luxury of the net to post a question to with an easy answer.
I believe strongly to this day that it made me a better programmer. The more time kids spend away from compters the better off they'll be. The answers to all life's problems are not at the end of an internet connection.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words someone watched The Last Starfighter. Not exactly a new concept.
I was able to keep them on the line talking about random stuff, and not anywhere near a computer until some manager yelled at the poor phone dweeb.
Awesome. :)
I made a BartPE recovery disk with DriveImageXML for the imaging component it worked great.
I made sure the install image fit onto a DVD.
I studied both. When I first started I wanted to be a programmer. As time went on I realized pure programming isn't for me. I lose my motivation on large projects and stop wanting to build them.
I like solving interesting problems and prefer to leave the grunt programming to someone else. This is why I work more in IT now than in programming. I have a lot more variety day to day. I still get to help solve/program interesting problems but it's not my life.
Some of the things I get to do:
- Oracle DB Administration
- Planning Linux migrations/installations
- Windows Server Admin/Migrations
- High availability clusters
- Java/VB/PHP programming
- Scripting
- Routing/Networking
I'm no longer stuck going from one big project to another day after day. I can switch my concentration from area to area as I get bored or as projects dictate.
You're young. You need time to see what fits for you. Try both.
I have never had a problem with HP getting me spare parts. Call them, explain the situation and have a qualified, understandable tech on the phone with me. Last week we had a drive fail in a client's SAN...
Call HP, talk to guy and within 5min the drive was being sent out. Arrived the next morning even though they said a couple days.
If I was doing mission critical stuff I would have no problems going with HP.
That said if down time is not an option a supply of spare parts is probably a good idea.
I installed Slackware 10.2 on my new out of the box laptop yesterday. X and the network card worked with only the smallest effort. A startx and modprobe later was golden.
All wireless utilities were included to make using the Wireless NIC easy enough. Getting the Wireless NIC working wasn't the easiest thing but that's not Slackware's fault. The Wireless NIC isn't well suported in Linux to begin with and required me to download the latest drivers from the NIC's Source Forge project site.
Once I did that it just worked.
All in all I've been pretty happy with how Slack 10.2 and this laptop work together.
The FSF has a program called Diction. It's not perfect but it's better than nothing right now.
http://www.gnu.org/software/diction/diction.html
My drive to work is quite short (10mins) but like you I can't stand mainstream radio. I like CBC Radio2 during the week days. It has nice soothing anouncers and classical music.
On a longer drive I break out the MP3 player. With a few GB of my favorite tunes I like doing the longer (1 hour+ drives).
A couple of other ideas: Stuart Mclean from CBC is very funny and well worth listening to.
If you can find old radio plays: Jack Benny, Phil Harris and Alice Faye, The Shadow, Life of Riley and many more, you'll never be bored again. Ebay has lots of them for sale.
A Macintosh Plus :) Seriously.
:)
Knowing that the whole computer thing could be mastered with a few simple concepts (point,click,drag) really helped me get interested.
From there I branched out to DOS, and eventually Linux.
The ease of use of the Mac combined with a (then) newfound love of programming got me started. Being able to write a program to print my name on the screen was pretty cool.
No trick.
I'm using Slackware9.1 and installed it from source. Just make sure you have the needed Nomad filesystem libraries installed on your system. I don't remember having to do anything too unusual to make it run.
If you're really stuck contact me via support at the above website and I'll do what I can.
Yes I know it's not the same product. :)
I do want to report that my Nomad Zen Xtra Jukebox works great with Linux if you use the the gnomad2 program.
Gnomad might work just as well with this product.
While we're on the subject, cam someone suggest a way to transmit/receive GPS locations to remote site? Think vehicle tracking or something similar.
As I'm driving around, I want to collect GPS points of my location and transmit them in some way back to my home/office where I store them in a database.
Any creative ideas on how this can be best accomplished?
Well it was banned for awhile. :)
Read it. It's a classic. If you're a Micheal Moore fan you'd like it even more.
They come packaged together and can stream live video over the net quite easily.
I use Linux to avoid spending obscene amounts of money to keep up to date with the latest software.
With Linux I get great software at a minimal cost. Most of the time I don't need to upgrade it just to have access the the latest features in some other program.
Products I develop under Linux can be sold to customers without forcing them to have the latest proprietary apps. They're more likely to use my latest software if I can provide a complete and working solution.
I help out a local bookkeeper as needed. For that I get my taxes done and usually a good dinner each time I'm over.
:)
Works well for me.
From the website:
r ma tion.html
Linux Video Surveillance AKA eLViS provides a user interface for watching motion frames captured by the motion program as JPEG files. eLViS lets you view up to four motion threads and has a simple configuration panel to setup the motion.conf file and eLViS configurations.
eLViS is intended to be used as a low cost security monitoring system. For that reason we have chosen Linux for the high reliability and flexible licensing of software.
We recommend that you use eLViS on a standalone Linux system that is dedicated to this task.
http://www.silicontao.com/software/lvs/doc/info
I've worked for companies with ADSL, Cable, T1, and E10 lines. At home I still use 56k dialup, on occasion (house sitting and such) I still use 28.8 dialup.
For basic email, forum reading and non porn related web surfing even 28.8 speeds are manageable. It's not fun but it's doable.
My home system is a P4 2.8Ghz system connected to the new via 56k dialup. It works for me and I have no need for high speed.
Any big downloads are done at work which is rare.
One of the problems I've always struggled with trying to overcome is how to make yourself unique in a market where there are so many others just like you.
Why should a company or person hire me when there are a dozen other people just as qualified and able to do the work. In some ways the market is way over saturated.
Slackware's simple package and configuration setup made this fairly painless.
What I did was modify the initrd ram disk to change the custom setup files. I created my own which partitioned the drive, formatted, and started installing packages.
I modified a couple packages to use defaults the way I liked them, reburned the CD and voila. Perfectly installed systems every time.
Slackware uses shell scripts exclusively so it's quite easy to figure out what happens when.
Moderating articles is a great idea, however I think we should also be able to vote from the submissions queue itself.
We look at the queue of messages and vote/moderate ones that are interesting. Anything receiving enough votes automatically shows up.
This way you'd improve the quality of the articles that show up as well as rate the articles that did show up. Theoretically posting articles of interest to the most people. Rob and friends could still add articles they thought were interesting in order to keep things fresh etc.
Just a small variation on an otherwise good idea.
Personally the Bastard Operator From Hell makes the top of my list.
The Cathederal and The Bazzar by Eric S Raymond would be a close second.
I learned to program in high school 88-93 when no one knew what the net was or that it even existed. Added to that I we couldn't afford a computer at home. As a result I only had a limited a mount of time in front of the computer to program ususally restricted to computer class and lunch.
In order to make the best use of my time and figure out whatever problem I was working on I'd spend a lot of time with pen and paper writing out my code. I started wrting out the whole program but as I got better I'd skip the simple parts and only write out the complex bits.
Whenever I ran accross a problem I didn't understand I'd read books/program/talk to people until I figured it out. I didn't have the luxury of the net to post a question to with an easy answer.
I believe strongly to this day that it made me a better programmer. The more time kids spend away from compters the better off they'll be. The answers to all life's problems are not at the end of an internet connection.
I was just reading on lwn.net about SlackPack, it provides basic package management with Slackware.
Take a look at:
http://freshmeat.net/releases/60961
We use wireless here. It's an amazing technology and as with anything new still has a few growing pains.
:)
We're doing things with it that would blow your mind. I'd give details but my boss would probably hurt me.