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I've been using Ubuntu for a few years now and quite like it. And when I saw they had released 10.04 I was excited to upgrade. The last two releases I did an upgrade-in-place with their upgrade tool and I didn't run into any major problems. So I did the same thing for this release. But that's where this story begins.
First I noticed that I was getting warnings and errors related to my X.org config. This was very alarming since I've never seen that before and I don't run any thing unusual in my x.org config. I tried a few different things to address it but could never really solve the problem. Then I noticed that rhythmbox was always crashing on me. Like all the time. Oh and my startup applications would never start up as they were supposed to. And compiz wouldn't work due to complaints about in correct driver even though I did install the correct one.
So after complaining about it for a week to my coworkers they suggested that I back up all my important stuff and then do a fresh install. Complety wipe it and install from scratch with 10.04. So I bought an external hard drive (500G) and did that. The fresh install was soooo easy and quick. I then carefully restored data back to my home folder. If you are doing this be careful not to copy back .gnome2 or .gvfs or anything .g* or at least be very cautious in doing so. Those could break things on an upgrade like this.
Conclusion- the fresh install worked beatifully. Ubuntu 10.04 works great and i'm not seeing any of the problems I had earlier. In fact it also fixed a completely separate issue I was having with my wireless card. So I'm definately still an Ubuntu fan.
- My SageTV setup, and why I chose to go with SageTV versus MythTV, or TiVo or others.
- Controltier. This is an automation framework for deploying and managing software. It is a bit complex but can be very powerful. I use this at work.
- My presentation at Postgresql Conference East, entitled "Postgres Administration for Sysadmins". This presentation covers basics of configuration and running Postgres and monitoring your database.
- An updated how-to for Virtual Box- setting up several servers and getting them to talk to each other.
- How-to on getting CUPC (cisco's chat/video thingy app) working in Virtual box vm.
- Snippets of some of my screenplays (works in progress).
The benefits of vanilla CGI vs FastCGI for Perl apps
What people value in a web development process/toolkit is significantly weighted by the process and tools that web developer a) first learned, and b) is most confortable using. Meaning that a developer whose first experience programming web applications was with Catalyst and has since found Mojo more comfortable and uses it regularly, will have a different set of "values" (or criteria by which other things are compared) than a developer who started web development with straight CGI.pm and is now a Jifty user. (this bias should extend itself to any and all programmers, but I find it more appearant in web developers where there is more contention about which toolkit is better than another).
Whew. OK, after all that, I have to say that I agree with Mark and feel that "vanilla CGI" is a great way to get things rolling as a developer without having (usually) to change a thing to a web server. Just write your code and go. I also feel that if people expect things to run slow in CGI and not in mod_perl or FastCGI because that is their biased environment of choice, then they will program accordingly. Meaning that they will write code that is slower, heavier, etc. because "oh, mod_perl will take care of it and it will be fast enough," or something similar.
I've never actualy heard anyone say that, but I hear things close to it from other developers (Java web developers mostly) who feel like everything is perfectly normal when you have to rely on huge complex tools and frameworks and middleware and dedicated containers and separation of tiers and abstracted everything and this and that and the kitchen sink too just to develop web applications. This "normal bloat" I'll call it, is where that bias I mentioned earlier really comes out. If people can't even see that their tools and process is overly complex, burdensome, and has a moderate to high degree of dependencies for normal development and opperation, than how can you persuade them that it is perfectly fine to live without that? How can you make them see that that is not "normal" for many, many other web developers?
Living without FastCGI??? Shudder. You're still using perl for web development?!?!?!? How can you live without Hibernate for data access (or replace with your favorite language specific tool here)?!?! Running perl CGI without mod_perl??? Are you stupid??
Yes, stupid like a fox. Err... I mean, doh.
Sleep is an interesting thing. For some people it is an absolute necessity for basic functioning from day to day. For others it is just a nice-to-have optional sort of thing. However, when you go for long periods of little-to-no sleep, anyone will feel the effects.
I'm trying my best to keep my lack of sleep from affecting my day to day behavior and general happiness, but it's hard. One of the main things that helps is good food and a good shower.
So I finally was able to get the domain spencerchristensen.com. It was taken for a while by someone else, but when I check just a couple of weeks ago, it was available. So I am setting up my personal site.
I have had a personal site for years at http://www.mecworks.com/~spencer , but this has fallen dormant for a long time. I hope to get back into maintaining a personal site with this one. I still don't have a lot of free time to give to this, but hopefully I can at least give more that what I have been doing.
