Author: Bobby Rockers

If you build it

I am working on building Linux From Scratch to use as a learning experience for another side project of mine. While reviewing it I ran across this tutorial on setting up LFS. The same site also has Part II and Part III (titled “Beyond Linux from Scratch”) that extends of the original tutorial. Even after all the years I have been developing on Linux; the idea of building an entire OS from source seems pretty amazing.

how(!write){code}

Want to keep your current job forever? Concerned that some out-sourced pimple faced teenager will replace you? Then you simply need to get creative about how you write your code. Having had to maintain other people’s programs… I can attest to the accuracy of this article. In fact, its my guess that most programmers must already be familiar with it, based solely on my evaluation of most program documentation.

…and I have GOT to memorize that Latin phrase.

You don’t have to be a freak

Economics provides some of the most powerful tools for data analysis available to society. Yet historically these tools have been used almost exclusively in the realm of finance and business decision support. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner talks about the work of Steven Levitt, one of the most respected economists alive. Levitt uses economic models and data analysis tools to find answers to some of societies most interesting questions.

I enjoyed this book enough to read through it in one sitting, in one night. And I strongly recommend that anyone with interest in socio-political issues read it. Freakonomics will make you take a second look at what you though was common sense. However, the book does have its notable shortcomings.

First, this book is little more than an extended version of the newspaper article by Stephen Dubner on Levitt’s work. If you are familiar with the article there is little reason to buy the book. Second, the book covers almost nothing about economic method. As such it leaves itself open to more criticism that it generally deserves. Third, Freakonomics is definitely dumbed down to make it readable (and probably profitable) to a wider audience. However, the lack of technicality makes the book an enjoyable weekend read and may even encourage the reader into a greater interest in economics and its usefulness.

OpenSuse is Alive

The OpenSUSE project is really starting to look exciting to me. With the recent release of Beta4 we are just 9 days away from the first release candidates of OpenSUSE 10.

One of the first difficulties of any Linux distribution is package management. Fedora uses Yum (not bad), Kubuntu uses apt (great!), Suse uses Yast (not good.) Yast was fully capable of doing everything the other package managers were but it suffered from two problems. 1) The newest version of Suse never had online packages available; 2) Older versions were really slow and pretty buggy. Steady progress on problem #2 has been going on since the 9.x releases, to the point were Yast is pretty nice to work with. Problem #1 was solved… with the creation of OpenSUSE.

So here are a couple of useful links for getting Yast working with online package repositories. A tutorial on setting up Yast; and the locations of OpenSUSE repositories.

KExtProcess: Part 1

kconfigure, my KDE build management tool, uses KProcess for its handling of automake, qmake, and checkinstall functionality. It does this because fundamentally these tools are command-line driven tools without a library interface for C++ to work with. The problem with KProcess is that, while it is probably the most powerful command-line processing library available, it is still very limited. Evidently I am not the only one with this problem as Martijn Klingens has released his updated KProcess-like tool KExtProcess.

The beauty of KExtProcess is that it not only handles command-line communication processing (i.e. STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR, etc..) but that it is network transparent. It also supports the concept of “profiles” that allow you to string together commands into a single “profile” that is loaded before the process is started. This allows things like: ssh’ing from one machine, to another, to a third before running a command locally on that third machine; or remotely accessing a machine as a one user, and then su’ing to root before beginning your process as root. While KExtProcess is still in its early stages, it will, no doubt, quickly achieve its place alongside KIO and DCOP as one of the powerful *nix desktop technologies in existence.