bryanmills.net

So as computer geeks go I’ve bought very few computers in my life.  In fact I’ve only bought one new computer.  And this purchase just took place, a brand-new Powerbook G4 12″.  All the other computers I’ve had over the years were either employers or old used machines I picked up on ebay.  Needless to say I’m very excited.

The reason I went with a powerbook is that it was one of the cheapest 12″ laptops I could buy (yep, you heard me right the mac was cheapest).  In addition to the price factor I also knew from various postings on the web that ubuntu would install cleanly on this machine.  I just got the machine this weekend and decided to run with OSX for a bit and see if I could actually make it my daily driver operating system.  So far my only complaints iinvolve mounting NFS shares using the finder.  I seem to have much better luck mounting them using the command line.

I suspect though by next weekend ubuntu will be installed on the machine.  Hopfully that doesn’t take all weekend.

I’ve had a few emails from people asking why I don’t have my resume online anymore. Simply stated I’m not looking for anymore work right now. I’m trying to finish up school and make decisions about my long term future which doesn’t include working for any of the host of companies that recruiters call me about. In a year or so I’ll post it again but not until after I know exactly the direction that I want to go in. I appreciate people looking me up but I’m just not in the market right now.

So after almost 3 years of taking classes parttime I’m now on the final descent towards my Masters. I’ve got to finish up classes this semester and more importantly write my thesis this summer then if all the stars line up I’ll have my Masters. This was very important to me because I felt that it filled some gaps in my education.

So whats next? My current plan is to continue my education by pursuing a PhD. I’m struggling with this decision but have already made plans to attend fulltime next fall. I figured the worst that could happen is I get there and hate it, then drop out, unable to find a job, get kicked out of my house … wait why am I doing this again?

As you can tell its still an on going struggle in my head. It boils down to what is best for my future versus what is best for my short term goals. I’m not sure I’m making the right decision, but I do know this will be the only time in my life such an opportunity will be available so I damn well better do it while I can.

So around 1999 I started working with Oracle and back in those days I was just doing Coldfusion development and using Oracle as a backend. I did this using the typical stack of software, Windows NT, IIS, oracle client, and Coldfusion. Well I soon moved on to the Java world and did a bunch of integration type applications that always talked back to our Oracle database. We actually had to purchase a commercial Oracle driver (not from Oracle) for Java to effectively talk to Oracle. This was a real pain-in-the-[explicit -word]. Since then I decided that databases should be opensource and most people using oracle were much better off with PostGres or even MySQL in some cases.

This week I was forced back into the world of Oracle. So here I am trying to get Python to talk to Oracle. Again just as a client, I was shocked at how painful it was to setup. I’ll admit this might be ignorance on my part, but I’m used to postgres or MySQL just fire up a library and your off in what ever modern language you can imagine.

First off I was told to install the Oracle Client. Seems easy right. Well, you have to hack around Oracle’s installer program if you are running on anything other than there blessed OS’s (Redhat ES and SUSE). God forbid your on Ubuntu or Fedora (see FC3 instructions).

So I decided to look for alternatives. Luckily Oracle knew they would piss people off and offered an Oracle Instant Client. This is just a package with the shared objects and some jar files for my fellow Java friends. It took some time just to find this solution since I wasn’t familiar with Oracle and would have never searched for ‘Instant Client’.

Finally, I was able to download a python module called cx_oracle from a company called Computronix. This package seems to be the best for talking to Oracle (if someone knows otherwise let me know). I was finally able to connect to oracle via Python (assuming those Oracle shared objects are in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH).

My next complaint… Oracle still requires the tnsnames.ora file. It seems odd that I can’t just say connect to this database on this host using this user and password. Maybe I’ve just been used to a simple life of connection strings but this just seems like old Oracle legacy in need of death.

Another complaint. So to download this ‘instant client’ you have to register with Oracle. So I go to the registration page and fill out a bunch of fields. Then I submit my form, pretty typical, except they had this long list of “Spam me with ????”, checkboxes of which I wanted no part of. So I didn’t select any. Then the next page tells me that I didn’t select a subscription and I needed to. I then click the “go back and fix it” link, thinking ok I subscribe to some spam just to get this package. It lost all my information, not only that but if I tried to go back using the browser they have initial javascript that clears out all my previously selected values. After filling the form out again I see why I got the first error message they have a check box titled ‘Please unsubscribe me’, but wait I wasn’t subscribed, ohh well I’ll check that one and it worked. Not only that but I got an email saying I had been un-subscribed from something I had never subscribed to in the first place…

Enough ranting for now! Hopefully this will be helpful to some other lost developers.

The Custom Linux Market is starting to heating up. Back in October of 2003 when Cobind had its first prototype of its DiY tools I knew this was going to be big. So maybe its not the easiest thing to sell. Your target market is a bunch of Linux hackers that would rather be buried in Emacs than use some application that abstracts all the bits-and-bytes of creating a distro. But I think it would be an ultimate application to be able to quickly and easily create new Linux distros and easily provide support for all of them. Cobind has failed to get the funding we needed to continue but luckily I’ve been able to continue this journey into a Custom Linux Building at Timesys.

The market is clearly there we have Progeny selling like mad and Specifix ramping up each of them targeting the Custom Linux Market. At TimeSys we have been focusing on the embedded market which I think is the right move, its a niche market that really needs customized Linux. The reason for this rant is to mainly say Timesys has more funding now and therefore I will get to see my vision of a source-to-distro Custom Linux Builder. How exciting!