Hand Coding

Some people just don’t make sense to me, Linux-wise.

Well, I have a new hard drive on order, so I now should soon have the space available for a Linux install. At this point, two items remain: I need to decide on a distro, and I need to get the courage to install it <g>.

Here’s a message that I sent to netscape.public.mozilla.general:

I’m currently a Win2k user, and I download and install a new nightly trunk build [of Mozilla] at least once every day.

And, I’ve been giving some thought to switching to Linux. The two distros with a ports-like system (Debian and Gentoo) appeal to me most, as they appear to make program installation (especially dependencies) much easier.

However, do either of those distros offer a means of downloading the current Mozilla nightly through their respective “ports systems”? Or, would I have to just download a build and install it manually? And, if it is the case that I would have to download one of the files from ftp.mozilla.org anyway, would I be better off just going with another distro instead?

So, yes, I’m basing my distro-choice on which offers the easiest installation of the Mozilla nightlies — am I a fan, or what? ;)

So far, I’ve received two responses:

I’ve been using mozilla with debian. Whilst there are .debs available, I prefer to use nightlies and as such grab them manually off of ftp.mozilla.org and since I like giving talkback reports, I greb the sea archive. By default mozilla installs in /usr/local/mozilla and nowhere else (ie it wont put anything other then where you tell it, with /usr/local/mozilla being the default destination).

I've never had any hassles and my system remains nice and tidy so don’t let the manual install turn you off using Debian as, in the end, it's not really a hassle. You'll always grab from the same location, untar into the same location (or install if you go for the sea) and run from the same location.

Hmmm… hope that's not as confusing as it looks. :)

--
Hogarth

And, this one:

Debian has the “mozilla-snapshot” package which is generally only a couple of days behind the current build. I just keep my own tree and rebuild mozilla every morning via a cron job. It is faster for me than downloading a new nightly would be and it works pretty well.

--
Travis Crump

Well, that’s some food for thought. I don’t understand prcisely what they’re saying ;), but it does make some sense.

I’ve also run across this handy table comparing the software versions that come with the major Linux distributions. Looking over it, Gentoo appears to have very current versions, and Debian isn’t as far behind as I thought it might be ;). (In due fairness, the table may only be comparing debian-stable, for all I know)

So, I’m looking for additonal reviews for both Debian and Gentoo. I found this review on Gentoo 1.2 but some parts distrub me, such as this:

Emerge this, emerge that, and do a bunch of stuff by hand that you're used to being able to gloss over with handy dandy tools; for example, Gentoo makes us configure X by hand.

Err, what?? As a user used to clicky-this and clicky-that, I don’t want to be configuring anything by hand, if I can help it.

Then, there’s this Gentoo review, of which one of its first sentences is “I note first off that this distribution is not for the faint of heart &hellip”. Err, faint of heart? That would be me :-/.

Perhaps related to my post yesterday about European vacations, I just read a post from Albanach in the comments of a Slashdot story on work hours that goes over Europe’s working time directive (previously unknown to me).

Indeed, in Europe if they had you working 15 hour days, you could go home at 11am on the Thursday and not return to work until the Monday.

Why? Because the European Union protected its workers by introducing the working time directive which emans the maximum hours you can be contracted to work is 48 per week — you can work longer if you wish and agree, but no employer can force you too, and if you decide not to there's not a thing they can do.

Damn! Remind me why I’m living in this country, again? ;)

I’m looking for access to an SMTP server. This would be just to send a couple e-mails a day; and, I’m not asking for an open relay, as I could provide an ip address from where I would be accessing the server. If you have an SMTP server that I could use for this, please let me know :).

A new study from the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington, DC-based think-tank that advocates for alternatives to prison, has found that after two decades of harsh criminal justice policies, there are more black men in jail or prison than in college. At the end of 2000, 791,600 black men were behind bars and 603,032 were enrolled in colleges or universities. By contrast, in 1980 — before the prison boom — black men in college outnumbered black men behind bars by a ratio of more than 3 to 1, the study found. […]

Whoah. I know that many black men are in prison, but I had no idea that it was to this extent.

I haven’t brought my CD player in to work yet (when you have to leave for work at 7:30am, mornings always seem to be a rush), so I was jonesing for some music this afternoon.

Figuring that I wouldn’t mind hearing some non-mainstream, a quick Google search turned up Digitally Imported, which has all kinds of techno — trance, hard trance, hard house, eurodance, and so on. I listened to eurodance for a while, and I’m listening to hard house at the moment — but they’re both very good.

If it weren’t for the poor audio quality of streaming MP3s (compared with Redbook CD audio), I would be half-tempted to leave my CD changer at home and just try streaming Internet radio for a while ;).

PS If you have any techno or melodic death metal streaming-radio stations to recommend, please post them in the comments :).

On NPR’s radio show “Marketplace” yesterday, there was an interesting bit on European vacations. I can't seem to find the segment in that show’s text archive, but I’ve confirmed that it’s in the RealAudio version (at about the 10-minute mark).

I agree with almost all that the author of piece has to say. Americans are being stifled by such short vacations, and Euopeans probably are well-rested after theirs. However, contrary to what the author suggests, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a 4-6 week vacation should become law.

As a contractor, I now have a timecard. Yes, the clock-in/clock-out punchcard type.

From The Register, it looks like telecom company Marconi isn’t doing very well. Though their stock price reached $17.70 in 2000, it’s now fallen to $.03. I did web development work for FORE Systems (now a part of Marconi) during the summer of ’99, and I hope they can pull out of this slump.

Once a cash-rich operation, Marconi ended with 4.3bn pounds ($6.6bn) in debt following an acquisition spree when it paid $4.5bn in cash for ATM-switch maker Fore Systems Inc and $2.1bn for Reltec, a manufacturer of last-mile access products. At the time, the company bragged that the deals would move it up into the same league as Cisco, Nortel and Lucent. […]

From a thread on MetaFilter, songs in commercials are becoming a phenomenon all their own — Cadillac is even becoming popular with some younger buyers due to their use of a Zepplin song in an ad.

There’re also websites that help people figure out the artists that performed songs heard in commercials. At first, I was happy to discover SongTitle.info as there’s one song from a GMC Yukon commercial that I’m still trying to track down (the commercial featured the hulking beasts driving in choreographed circles, synchronized-swimming style).

SongTitle has an entry for “Our Day Will Come” by Ruby & The Romantics (with a link to a sound sample) for the Yukon. But, after listening, I ruled that one out. I don’t hold it against SongTitle, but I suppose they just don’t have the details for that particular commercial.

Even Volkswagen has a CD of collected songs from its commercials. Some of the more obvious ones — such as Mr. Roboto — are on there, but I may just get it to discover some new techno artists (good techo is just so hard to find these days).