trystan.org

As I’m no longer a student, the carbonsilicon blog was rarely receiving updates. I decided to roll the content of that blog into this personal blog and let the carbonsilicon domain expire. Most of the carbonsilicon content can be found under the Cognitive Science category of this blog.

Macintosh computers and OS X have a reputation for usability, Linux does not, and Windows tends to sit somewhere in between in most people eyes. I run all three operating systems. The Ubuntu flavor of Linux being my primary workstation OS and Mac/OS X being my mobile solution. I run Windows XP and Vista on a VM on both Linux and OS X. Today, I was rather shocked when I plugged in my new Kodak camera into my Macbook and it was not auto-detected but it was on Ubuntu Linux! Then I removed the SD card and put it in a jump drive, still no action on OS X but Ubuntu auto-mounted it again and gave me a view of the file system.

What is the world coming to? Could it be that the open source community is actually surpassing Apple in terms of usability? Well, probably not quite yet in terms of the bigger picture but I remember when Linux was too imature to be a viable system for mainstream computing without a dual boot with some other OS. Certainly, that has not been the case for a couple years now. At this point, it is evident that strides are being made in the “it just works” department as well; an area where Linux was weak historically. Onward to glory!

Interestingly, both kinds can make you loopy. The wine we drink and the wine we use to play Windows games on Linux. I recently got a couple older games to work that required a little tweaking. First, Rise of Nations was failing to install upon entry of the CD key. This was remedied by copying mfc42.dll to wine’s windows\system32 directory. I’m guessing there’s probably some legal issue regarding redistributing this dll with wine. Secondly, Heroes 3 was failing to play under my default wine settings. Under the Graphics tab in wine config, I enabled the virtual desktop and then it worked fine. Appearently v1 of Heroes 3 requires a 800×600 video mode which I do not have configured under X.

Beyond the simple matter that it facilitates far too much beer consumption, I’ve come to the realization that I’ve been bound to golden handcuffs for the past 8 years; well at least gold plated. Working as a developer is financially rewarding but also spirit crushing. After all, profit and capital are king. Creativity is usually considered more of a liability than a virtue. If your goal is to make money and be efficient it is indeed sensible to minimize surprises. However, this is not the environment for me. Consistency and suppressed creativity leads to boredom, boredom causes frustration, frustration leads to stress and chronic stress causes brain atrophy! I would have stopped killing my brain cells long ago if it weren’t for my own insecurities and the propoganda machine telling me, “you need a large income to be safe and held in high esteem by others” and “you won’t be happy unless you have a big cozy house.”

For the last few years I’ve worked around the problem by taking a boring development project and turning it into something I was interested in. However, you can only get away with this for so long. Words like “loose canon” tend to get around after management discovers that you’ve written the application in a little known language using techniques unknown to anyone else in the organization. Although it may translate to near term job security, they’ll always remain paranoid of what you may do next if given any rope. I fully admit that this is terrible practice for a commercial application development environment but it’s the only way I can motivate myself to do that kind of work anymore.

It should have never gone that far…but those damn golden handcuffs. I may also be able to plea temporary insanity due to the loss of grey matter due to chronic frustration. Anyway, as previously alluded to in this blog, I’ve decided that I’m sure I want to return to school at this point and pursue a research career. I just need ‘way’ more variety of things to explore. Learning a new programming framework every now and then it nowhere near enough to keep me going. I’m just a bit bummed it took me so long to arrive at this conclusion. For the very near term, I’ll subdue my frustrations by trying to get neural critters to run around mazes in Lisp.

Where’s all the old Blog entries? Well, I finally ditched my old web host for a new one. At any rate, I will probably not migrate the few blog entries I had on the old site to this new server. Hopefully, this new host, A2 hosting, will work out better for me.

The main reason I left dwhs was their appearent ignorance, or apathy, toward simple security problems. When I complained about their levels of security they simply denied security issues rather then working to resolve them. For example, they regularly sent renewal e-mails that contained the site admin password in html. In addition, their site contained an unsecured redirect that had the admin password in plain-text on the url query string (not https). This would explain how I was hijacked twice, but months went by and they didn’t seem to pay attention to these issues.  The hijacking got me temporarily blacklisted by Google, it was a mess. In addition, I had e-mails begin to mysteriously bounce which was the last draw. I didn’t even bother to contact them about it; I just left. Dwhs is flakey and overpriced. Here, I have a bit less bandwidth but more developer options, more apps, and it’s half the price.