Feeling My Age

Every day I look in the mirror. Thanks to a combination of time, a high-stress job, and said teenage daughter; there's a little less black on top of my head and a little less brown in my beard. And no matter how many times I change the lights above the bathroom mirror, there's a little more gray there every day. The lines around my mouth and eyes are a little more pronounced. There's a little more of my grandfather in the mirror when I look, too. Not my dad; instead of turning his hair gray, apparently us kids just made him tear it out. But every time I look it's the same story.
I look old.
Tomorrow afternoon, my daughter will (hopefully) play in her first junior high basketball game. She's an 8th grader; 13 years old this year. In 9 months, she'll be a high school Freshman.
I feel old.
I regret that I'm not going to be able to make it to all of her ball games. Between my working nights and my wife working a few towns over (which requires taking our one vehicle), it's a bit tricky to get me to any of the out of town matches. But every home game, I'll be there in the stands. I will say that it helps that she's on the JV team, which means she'll play at 4:00 most days instead of "maybe around 6, depending on if the early games run late, or finish early."
I don't know if she'll get to play. I don't even know if she's any good; at a small school like ours, every warm body that tries out for the team gets on -- playing time is a different story, but everybody makes the team. But I don't care. I will be there, in the stands; every chance I get.
And I will try not to be *that* dad. You know the one I mean. The dad who, even at a Junior High Junior Varsity game is riding the refs and the coach like he's at an NBA game. The dad who jockeys for more playing time for his kid, regardless of how good the kid actually is. The dad who "encourages" by doing the coach's job for them; who berates his kid for every missed shot and errant pass instead of asking "Did Coach tell you what you need to do to get better?" and "You gonna do it?" then leaving it at that.
My daughter could practice her jump shot from now until she graduates, and she still probably won't be the next Jackie Stiles (the former WNBA All-Star who played basketball in our league when I was in high school). And as far as I'm concerned, that's fine. She doesn't need to be. As long as she's having fun, keeping her grades up, and doing the best she can every time she steps on the court, there will be a proud old man sitting up in the stands.

Making a Change

It took working with 11.04 to finally make me jump off the Ubuntu bandwagon and onto Fedora.

I don't have much bad to say about Ubuntu, don't get me wrong. They are innovative in all of the right ways: personal cloud storage that's accessible through Windows; pushing the limits of UI design; keeping timely software updates coming.

There were, however, two hurdles for me. The first I can't complain too vigorously about: WiFi. Due to differences in the wireless chipsets, 802.11 has always been a bit of a boogeyman for Linux. In my case, it was a regression with the Atheros 5000-series kernel driver... my wireless stopped working outside of 15 feet from the router, sometimes less.

The other, and quite frankly the dealbreaker for me, was a performance hit. I have an older laptop, a TravelMate 2420 that I've maxed the memory on. I don't know if it was the Unity desktop or the CouchDB backend they used for their UbuntuOne cloud service, but as soon as I installed 11.04, I began experiencing periodic stalling, CPU spikes and network traffic (which is why I point to the UbuntuOne).

As for the much debated Unity desktop; I was pretty indifferent to it. For the most part, it did its job. My biggest problem with it is probably its biggest feature. I'm not the biggest fan of "quick-launch bars" in general, and by default Unity puts a great big one down the side of the screen unless you have a window maximized. I've said before, this is a great idea for touchscreen interfaces where menu navigation could be a little tricky, but for my preferred method of keyboard and mouse, it feels redundant. It works, but I wasn't a fan.

I chose Fedora because of Gnome 3. The Gnome 3 desktop is similar to Unity in quite a few ways; not surprising, since Unity is built on many of the same libraries. I chose Fedora over OpenSUSE (the other major distro offering the Gnome 3 as a default) because of familiarity: one of my first Intro to Linux books dealt with Red Hat Linux; so I at was a little familiar with the RPM system. When you boil it down, the difference between the majority of Linux distributions is how software is delivered, and what software is easily available. Most up-to-date Linux distros share the same kernel.

Wait, you say. Hold up. Didn't you say that a kernel bug was screwing with your WiFi? If everybody is using the same kernel, wouldn't the bug be present on all of them?

Yes, I did. And yes, it was; which was why I said I couldn't complain about it too much. The biggest difference was where I was trying to install it. When I tried to install Ubuntu, I was at home; where I had wireless access and -- because the Debian/Ubuntu installer has wireless support built-in -- I was going to use it during setup. Except 11.04 shipped with a kernel version that had the bug. Which meant the install failed where I was until I fished out an ethernet cable. When I installed Fedora, I didn't have access to a wireless network, so I didn't notice it right off. And I was able to update to a kernel release that worked with my wireless -- before I got home and back to my network. Serendipitous, yes; but it is one of those things that is offputting.

And when I say that they share the same kernel, I'm generalizing a bit. Not every distro is going to release every point release (i.e. one distro might not release 2.8.24.36, choosing to wait and test 2.8.24.37 instead, or simply patching and releasing a custom 2.8.24.36_custom): it's the end of July and there have been nearly a dozen since April: they will be doing some testing before releasing it into the wild.

But, I've made my choice, at least until... October. Both Fedora and Ubuntu are on a 6-month (April/October) release schedule. And really, outside of disk space, there's nothing stopping me from installing both (after a thorough backup, of course). This laptop is a testing rig, for all intents and purposes. Besides, this is Linux. It's not about brand loyalty, it's not about being afraid to change. It's about figuring out what works best for you and improving the experience for everybody.

Now, since I've grabbed a copy of NetBeans; I think I'll try and teach myself some JAVA.

Gnome 3 Wallpaper Switcher

Every once in a while, I don't feel like looking at the same thing over and over again. Call it a geek version of wanderlust; but I like to have my desktop wallpaper change frequently. And I like it better when I don't have to choose, but a new background pops at random.

And with Gnome 2, the default window manager for a good number of Linux distributions, that wasn't hard to do. There were daemons (small background programs) that you could install, or you could create XML files that told GNOME's settings manage exactly which background you wanted for exactly how long.

Gnome 3 featured a major rewrite of the underlying controls. And while this created a great number of improvements -- visibly and performance-wise -- a few features were removed. As of 3.0.2, one of those was the ability to set those wallpaper slideshows as a background.

My google-fu is strong, though; and I soon found that it wasn't the ability to use the slideshow files that had been removed, it was the ability to select the file. The underlying mechanics were the same, as was the syntax of the XML file. It was simply a matter of "You can't get there from here." You could, however, get there from the command line; and that's where my python-fu came into play. Hopefully, Google Docs doesn't mess with my code too much here....