My semi-regular trip to the dark side

Windows, Windows, Windows...I do love me some Windows!   In 1994, after recently upgrading to Windows for Workgroups 3.11, I had a revelation.  These were the early days of the Internet.  There was no web, you used Gopher instead.  There were no forums, we used Usenet and we LIKED IT!  Broadband?  Hell, dial-up networking?  What are these?  You wanted to get on the Internet, you used something like Telix* and communicated with the world via a command line.  It was a wild time.

Where was I?  Oh, yes...anyway, one night I needed to download some massive 1 or 2 megabyte files over my 19k modem from school, but I also wanted to play this new game I'd just bought called Warcraft (no "World of", just Warcraft).  What was I to do?  I thought about risking running both Telix and Warcraft under WfW and hope for the best.  After all, this new WinG platform Microsoft was touting was supposed to make everything work smooth, right?

So, I went for it.  I got thoroughly immersed in the game for a while and lost track of time.  Not thinking, I Alt-Tabbed over to Telix to see how things were going and immediately thought "Oh, crap! There goes everything I was doing!"  You see, back in those days, Windows had a bit of a reputation.  If you tried to run more than one thing at a time, it would crash!  You certainly didn't try multi-tasking a DOS app with anything, and certainly not with a game!  "You're a fool!" the crowds would shout!

But, to my surprise, the downloads were still progressing.  I was still online with Telix!  "Wow"  I thought.  "That's weird."  But, I just KNEW my game would be hosed.  So, I Alt-Tabbed back to see the carnage....and my little peons that I had told just prior to switching to go gather some trees were just heading out to begin a-choppin'.  The game hadn't frozen...it had paused!  This made no sense...

That's when the revelation hit me: this was a fresh install of Windows for Workgroups 3.11.  That means it was at least a pretty good approximation of what Microsoft intended your experience to be and it worked...as long as I hadn't screwed around with it.  The revelation was disheartening: PEBKAC.  Like most people, I blamed Microsoft for all of my woes, but the reality is an operating system is only as stable as its admin.

Having taken the "It's Windows, what do you expect" hammer out of my toolbox, I started to really get an appreciation for Microsoft's products.  Now, I know when something's broke it can be fixed.  A person doesn't have to live with blue screens.   They are not, as one commenter once said "Microsoft's way of telling you you need to reboot".  They're error messages that contain valuable information about what's wrong!

I attest my success in the IT field to the way I approach things.  For example, I follow Microsoft's best practices as closely as possible because that's what they tested!  They know THAT configuration works and this one doesn't.  You can't support a half billion dollar/year revenue generating environment on an unstable and unreliable platform...and that's why we run ours on Windows!  But, I'm not here to evangelize Microsoft products to you or try to convince you that if you have negative impressions of them the fault is yours alone (even though that's true :) ).  No, I'm here today to tell you about my current interest episode which includes Ubuntu Linux.

"LINUX?  You think I'm going to listen to some WINDOWS guy badmouth my beloved OS?"

Nope.  You see, I mentioned earlier that my install of WfW was a fresh one.  Why do you think it was fresh?  Because I had been giving this new OS called "Linux" a trial run on my machine.   I'd been reading about it for a while on the Intertubes about how light and fast and easy on resources it was.  As I was a Computer Science major at the University of Rochester, I wanted to be one of the cool kids using Unix so I set out trying to find it.  I actually headed to the UR computing center one day with a box of 4-5 floppy disks to see if someone could put it on there for me.   Hey, I was told it was small and light, and since DOS + Windows amounted to 6-7 disks, Linux must be MUCH less, right?

After poking around, I managed to find a copy of the only distribution in town: Slackware.   It wasn't even Slackware 1.0 since the Linux kernel itself was still only around version 0.98, but I downloaded all 15 disks (15!!), wiped my computer and installed it.  And, it didn't work...Well, let me clarify.  The OS worked, but the X-Windows system that provided a GUI on top of it didn't work all that well.  I had a crappy Trident video card that could only do 640x400 (that's not a typo.  It wasn't 480, it was 400) in 16 colors and X didn't know how to do that well.  There also weren't very many X-based programs out there for it.  Basically, you could multitask some console windows, have a nifty clock window, and a pair of eyes that followed your mouse around.  Very unimpressive.  Click the link for X-Windows.  The Wikipedia article has a picture of about the best you could hope for back then at the top.  Ugly, right?

But, I used it for a while anyway.  I struggled, I fought and eventually...I reinstalled Windows.  There was no benefit whatsoever to me running this OS at the time.  In fact, thanks to my crappy video card it was much crashier than Windows!  But, I remained interested in it.  I followed development over the years.  When the kernel hit 1.0, I purchased a new machine to be my primary and installed it on the old (after upgrading that video card, of course).  Each year since I'd give the latest and greatest a test run here and there.  Sometimes they'd last days, sometimes months.  Sometimes it never made it past being installed in a virtual machine.

For a good long time, I even used Linux From Scratch as my primary OS.  In fact, I spoke at VPNCon in Toronto and Linux World Expo in Boston about using Linux From Scratch to provide my company at the time with a free VPN solution that worked wonders!  Many an article (halfway down, ignore the horrible picture) was written about the one trick this pony pulled off there.

But, while LFS was fun, it was a pain in the ass.  Each upgrade required careful tweaking and tuning to make sure I didn't break a hundred other things.  Some things never worked right, and others just never happened at all.  I became a believer in package management systems.  Redhat's yum made me happy for a while, but it was eventually trying out Debian (pronounced DEB-ian, not DE-bian.  It's named after the original author, Ian and his girlfriend, Deb.  Betcha didn't know that!) that gave me an inkling that this "year of the Linux desktop" I'd been hearing about for a decade or so might come to pass.

A few years back a new distribution that was based on Debian called Ubuntu hit the scene and really made a splash.   Ubuntu was designed to combine the ease of upgrading/installing/maintaining from a Debian system with the usability of a Redhat desktop.  They've got some good directives and history behind them, not to mention a huge fan base.  The most recent iterations, 10.04 and as of last Sunday 10.10, have been widely acclaimed as "Windows-killers".  My wife's actually been using a Xubuntu desktop for a couple of years now, and aside with some weirdness with her trackpad I can't replicate, I've gotten no complaints from her.

And, the point of all this?  About three weeks ago, I wiped my little laptop that was running Windows 7 (I really do love me some Windows 7, though!) and put the beta of Xubuntu 10.10 on.  I ran it for about two weeks during which time I installed the Netbook Remix desktop, the Ubuntu desktop, Lubuntu desktop and Edubuntu desktop on top of it....and seriously borked the install.   But, that's ok.  I was really putting it through its paces to see which install I wanted to use as a base.  I had partitioned my drive up with a 10G OS partition and the remainder setup as home, so when I finally decided to just go with the plain vanilla Ubuntu it was a 20 minute reinstall.

I did have some issues with my wireless for a while there, but I was able to work those out and have gotten down to the business of serious fiddling.  Yeah, Ubuntu's got a reputation in the community as "the Windows of Linux" because it's easy to use.  The gods forbid!  But, this is my primary machine.  This is what I use to do...whatever it is I do.  It needs to work!  Playing is fine.  Fiddling is fine, but at the end of the day when I need to do something it better be able to do with it!  And, that's really the point: I have an OS that I can use AND play with.  It's still Linux under there, and once you see what I've done to it under the hood, you'll see that.

So, the articles I have on tap detail the things I've done as well as possible plans for the future.  Could be fun!

* Seriously?  You're still SELLING Telix?  For $79.99?  You DO know DOS is kinda over, right?  Don't get me wrong, I LOVED Telix!  It was one of the most popular pieces of shareware ever and with good reason: it worked and worked well.  It was one of the few I remember actually paying for!  But...do you really still have people paying for it?

What's with the name?

"Oh, look! A chicken!"?  What the heck is THAT supposed to mean?  Those who know me know I have ADHD.  As I was only diagnosed a few years back, I've come to realize that I had been trying to make my essentially flawed brain fit models that are more suited to the general populace than me.  For example, the vast majority of the population learns very well using the standard educational model of  regurgiteachin': "teach, repeat, regurgitate".

While I generally did very well in school, it was very difficult for me as that's not how I learn.   Finding that out was a great revelation for me, but it did leave one huge question: how DO I learn best?  Figuring that out has been a personal quest for the last few years, and I have made some recent advances in my discoveries.

Like most people, I've found I do learn best when I'm immersed in a topic.  This is the generally recommended way, for example, to learn a foreign language (not that I need to do that, I'm an American, dammit!  We speak English and we do it poorly!).  Learn the grammar and syntax, but also engage the cultural side: eat the native foods of that region, read their local news, their books.  Learn their songs and art.  This is great for those who are able to maintain focus on a topic for long periods of time, but what about the rest of us?

I won't mince words: I'm a technology expert.  My primary expertise lies in the area of enterprise infrastructure.  You want a major environment setup that generates hundreds of millions in revenue and needs 25/8 availability to do it?  I'm your guy.  While I primarily deal with the Windows Server world, I'm also quite competent with Linux and other Unix variants as well.  I have a wide breadth of knowledge, and the way I've come to it is because of the ADHD.  For a few months, I might be a on a Linux "kick" and will devote a ton of time and effort into delving further into that platform.  Soon after, I might be full tilt in love with Citrix platforms or the new version of Windows that just came out.  It's tough to say where my brain'll take me next and I've arbitrarily followed it over the years.  Recently, though, I've decided to come up with a more formalized method of maximizing on this "negative" I live with.

The "A-HA!" moment came a couple of years ago when I was doing some remodeling work in our bathroom (I can do carpentry, plumbing and electrical work all due to the fact that I had a brief interest in learning how to do it at one point :) ) I had gotten everything back together and the sink re-mounted when I realized I hadn't tightened one of the screws for the shelf above the sink.  The screw wasn't critical, it's a glass shelf and this was just a tension screw that kept it from flopping around.  Where it was placed made the likelihood of that happening minimal, but I still wanted to do a thorough job.  Unfortunately, I also didn't want to re-remove the sink to get at the screw.  So, I compromised with myself.  I taped a note to myself on the bottom of the sink that said "Don't forget to tighten that screw on the shelf!  Love, you!"  Yes, I always tell myself I love me in my notes to myself.

About a year later, the sink was clogged and I had to take it off the wall to get to the pipes to snake it (it's a VERY small bathroom) and I noticed the note which I'd actually forgotten about.  So, I tightened the screw.   My wife had thought the note was a bit silly, but had to admit it had been a good idea once she saw how well it worked.

The drawback to my previous "interest episodes"  was that it might have taken me months or even years to get back into a particular topic.  As such, I would spend a lot of time during the next one reacquainting myself with the basics.  After percolating for a while in my head, that note under the sink lead to the idea of leaving myself notes when I'm interested in a topic.  Basically, everything I learn, I document.  When I do get back to a topic, I can quickly review to where I left off and just build on that.  At the moment, I'm calling this informal framework "Breadcrumbs".   Like leaving breadcrumbs to find your way back out of the dark forest, my goal is to start using the tools that are available for managing information and using that to create notes I can leave for myself to then build on to greater sums of knowledge.

I've tried this with a couple of topics and initial results look good.  The big problem I did run into is how best to organize this knowledge?  I have pages of notes that don't make a whole lot of sense at times to Current Me.  I'm sure Past Me knew exactly what he was talking about, but I just see some weird ramblings.  Since I'm in the process of migrating this blog, and I'm currently in a writing "episode", I figured what better way to provide myself clear, easy to follow notes than by providing clear, easy to follow notes to the whole world?  There's a line of thinking that says "if you can't explain it to someone else, you don't understand it yourself".  Another saying I'm fond of is "teaching others is the best way to learn".

So, going forward, I'll be writing a lot of technical articles on whatever topic I'm stuck on at the moment (current topic: Ubuntu Linux).  I hope that someone out there might get some use out of some of this.  But, if not, at least I know *I* will!

Future Me, I hope you appreciate this!

Oh, yes...the title of the blog.