February 2015 – TestBlog

I’m going to jump

Joy! Mandatory online training courses!

Of course I put it off until the last day.

And now I suffer.

Mr. Popularity

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2015/02/19/the-devil-has-been-in-twice-as-many-movies-as-jesus-and-how-that-has-changed-our-theology/
An interesting discussion on the origins of our shared concept of the devil. And by interesting I mean how little of it is shaped by the historical tome as compared to popular culture.

Geek Code

I remember spending an afternoon studiously plonking out my GC [1]. I may have even included it in an email signature at the time. Man….blast from the past.

Brought to you by a light discussion at work of creating a unique identifier for every developer based on their positions in the various geek religious wars (vi or emacs, *nix or windows, Firefox or IE or Chrome or Opera or what-have-you, tabs or spaces, etc). Assign each facet a set of prime numbers. Add the primes and you get a unique integer. It shouldn’t take more than, what, 32 different facets?

[1] http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html

The drudgery

Not sure how many times I’ve been through the steps in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuhMQIpCP1A. Most irritating to me is the way in which the bug in GRUB that doesn’t kill a boot process but throws a bunch of misleading errors was skipped over. Went down a bit rabbit hole on that when it turns out my biggest issue has to do with the X/Nouveau video driver. It has only the slightest degree of support for the GeForce 750 TI video card I installed. So the boot would appear to puke up front but allow you to continue only to puke for real after logging that it was adding swap space. What was really happening though, is that the filesystem was successfully mounted and it was switching to graphical mode. Only it couldn’t because of the suck.

Thankfully the NVIDIA driver installs correctly and disables nouveau for me at the same time. The only problem there was getting to a terminal while xserv wasn’t running so that it could perform the install. So, after many attempts, tonight I will finally, successfully, build out my new server with a permanent installation. While doing laundry. Because I’m hyper-threaded like my CPU.

Install Ubuntu Server so as to set up a RAID5 device with partitions for swap, /, and /home
Reboot into repair mode
Mount the root RAID partition
Drop into a shell
Set the GRUB quick boot option to false in the grub config
wget/run the NVIDIA driver
Reboot into server mode
apt-get install ubuntu-desktop cinnamon (because Unity is still the suck)
and then restore /home from backup (again) and install all of the software that makes the machine go (again)
Set up my Windows 7 VM for seamless mode and install all my Windows-only apps like Evernote, VisualStudio 2013, etc.

All-in-all, though, the new workstation is a beast. I don’t think I’ve seen CPU usage over 60%, RAM usage above 40%, and the CPU temp higher than 80°F. I haven’t done any serious benchmarking but I’ve put it under some load multitasking installs, compilation, and running VMs. It should be a great testbed for evaluating Vagrant, Docker, Jenkins, and Gradle.

Linq fail

My favoritest thing about Linq is that no one around here writes it natively. It always ends up in the code base via Resharper translating a block foreach and if/else statements. It looks awesome and is totally terse. Unfortunately, whenever you need to refactor that Linq statement the first thing you end up doing is rewriting it as a block of foreach and if/else statements.

So, basically, it’s less than worthless as a paradigm. Unless you’re trying to impress people doing the code review…