[music | Leaether Strip - What If (Beats on classic mix)]

The Amarok discussion usually comes as a result of a wider discussion/flamewar about the "little things" that bug the shit out of me a year after dropping SuSE for OSX as my home desktop. I used Linux as my desktop for about 8 years, and before that for more "traditional" server type applications. I've had a Linux desktop since Redhat 4.1, but it didn't replace Windows completely until about 1999. That gives me a different perspective on how a computer Should Just Work. My definition of that is skewed by things like uptime and standards compliance. I have no idea what the Standard Uptime is for a Windows desktop machine. My Windows desktops have always stayed up for months and months, because they do nothing except run Outlook and specialty business software that I couldn't get to work under Wine.

So from that perspective, OSX is not particularly stable. The only time I ever rebooted my linux machines was when either the power went out or I was upgrading SuSE. Aside from that, they Just Worked. I don't count things like upgrading KDE as a reboot, because it was just an X11 restart, ctrl-alt-backspace, new DE starts, no reboot. Leopard is more stable for me than Tiger was, especially in terms of returning from standby on the laptop. However in terms of applications "beachballing" and having to force-quit things, well that kind of thing rarely happened to me in SuSE. I'd probably kill Firefox every couple of weeks because something screws up or its footprint was too huge. I have to force-quit Safari every day or two (no SIMBL or other wackiness anymore until I figure out why this is).

Here's a quick list with some detail about what really bugs me, and what I really like in OSX:

I get asked a lot why I hate iTunes and what's so much better about Amarok. This is about Amarok 1.4.7, since there is no good way to run Amarok 2 yet. When I can get any copy of Amarok 2 to load a track and play it, either via the KDE4 Live CDs or from RangerRick's KDE on OSX native project, I'll give it a spin.

Here's a quick list of beefs with iTunes:

Here are some tools I've written which could be of use to other folks. It's going to be mostly Cisco related, some of which is still being formatted before I upload it, more to come.

CSSManager is a tool to simplify suspending and activating services in a Cisco CSS load balancer. It adds a couple of features like the ability to "lock out" a server and to add comments to a suspended machine to give context for its suspension. More features to come.

CSSPump A tool to display at a click the state of all services on a Cisco CSS 11000 series load balancer. It reads the comments set by the CSSManager above and adds them to the display of active/down/suspended servers.

OpenSWAN to PIX VPN. How to configure FreeS/WAN (Now Openswan) on Linux and a Cisco PIX as endpoints for a 3DES IPSEC VPN.

[music | Bauhaus - Dark Entries (Live)]

This is the first of a few tools I have to release in the coming couple of weeks, mainly involving Cisco's CSS product. The purpose of me writing them is that Cisco's web interface to the CSS is both a terrible user experience and has shown itself to be vulnerable to trivial attacks in the past (in a security sense). I don't want to run the web gui on my CSS's, and most of our admins were terrified of the command line. So I wrote a bunch of tools to help do their jobs, without the possibility of screwing up the load balancers.

[music | Sleater-Kinney]

Today's been fun. Yesterday a site run by one of my friends (wolfeboro.net) was shut down by its ISP because they got a large influx of traffic, and the ISP panicked.

[music | DJ? Acucrack]

Some photos (some good, some bad) of Defcon 14 day one.

[music | nine inch nails - eraser]

Not without some seriously non-typical end user junk, but giving up on installing dependencies myself after seeing control-center2 relying on nautilus, and nautilus relying on control-center2, I installed using YAST and it worked fine. I know I should have forced around the dependencies, but please, someone...

So that got me the control center, from which I could change my GTK2 app fonts to look normal, which worked. Tell me Aunt Tillie is going to do that. I use Linux because it stays out of my way and gives me a ton of tools and display options. I have done this for a long, long time. My mom would be unwilling to do what it takes to achieve the one-true-display. I probably won't touch another thing until these monitors die and I have to (or get to, glass half full) change my res again. But really, if anyone ever tries to make a case for Linux on the average home desktop, make that easier.

Sure, it's easy to change res, but if you are going from 2048x1536 on a CRT all the way down to 1600x1200 on LCD, you can bet that all your font and display settings are fubared. Knowing where to look is only half the problem. If I was an average user I wouldn't know that, as a KDE user, I can change my KDE settings all day and not affect Firefox or GIMP. I wouldn't know that I had to install gnome-control-center2 to fuck with the display settings there to change those apps.

It's not just a multi-DE environment issue, it's a general complexity rant. KDE control center is somewhat easy to use, but it's not as simple as the "control panel" paradigm, and it certainly isn't as straight-forward (for many cases) as the OSX settings applet, with ALL options displayed always by default. None of this expecting your mom to dig down through menus. GNOME has the right idea on that minor point, but unfortunately it's an unusable DE for anyone who is an absolute control freak about how they work. I would contend that it's an unusable DE for anyone else too, but that's just an opinion I guess.

Read my Gnome hate thread to someone at work who may get his ass kicked for suggesting I install the entire DE...

What kind of idiot runs an Alpha version of ANY OS distribution? You're looking at him. Yesterday I decided I'd had enough of being paranoid about my music collection not being backed up, and bought a 120GB drive at Staples ($59). The intent was to move my desktop system over to that and I'd have one copy there and one copy on my fileserver.

I was going to download OpenSuSE 10.0 but for some reason didn't, and decided to use 10.1 Alpha. That was dumb.

I backed up my config from the old disk and moved it over to the fileserver, everything except my X11 config, which is a fairly large mistake in itself, and proceeded with the install.

* Network card - Works/Doesn't work, depending on its whim.

[music | Nine Inch Nails - Fixed (Remixed by Coil)]

I'm going to go buy an Abacus tomorrow. Hopefully I can compile Firefox on it and go about my merry way.

Suffice to say, SuSE 10.0 didn't help things any. About 3 hours into my evening, while I was copying my backup .tars back over from my fileserver, New Install started locking up, specifically, X started restarting. While trying to figure that out, I got a bunch of kernel panics, rebooted, corrupted FS. While running reiserfsck --rebuild-tree, I got another kernel panic. There goes that install.