Paul’s Journal

Unfortunately I have grown a reputation as skilled with computers in the freshman dorms.

The problem is too many students fear their own computers. It seems like a massive paradox, that technology something that is supposed to allow amazing advances in education, with the youth in the forefront of this revolution, yet at the same time many of these young people cannot maintain their own systems.

I see the problems everyday, computers that won’t boot, run slowly, or are infected with the new virus of the week.

The technology seems so simple to me, looking at it from the inside, but too many of my peers do not have the same viewpoint. They think that computers are so complex and they fear that they are so unskilled that they will break their computer with the slightest misstep. In a sense, those who live in fear of technology are justly fearful, if they use the wrong command, all their precious data could be destroyed. The problem needs to be solved at both ends, the computers must become more user friendly in all aspects, but the users cannot fear technology, instead they must be willing to learn.

Good Luck with that ever happening.

Leaches are parasites that suck off their victims blood, taking what is not theirs. In todays world, many people embody the same tactic of leaching off their so called friends. A person in my hall, while he is the nice guy stereotype is a perfect example of a modern leach. If you order Pizza, he will wander into your room and ask for a piece. If you are trying to study in your room, he will drop by with a lame joke. If you are trying to write Its not that I hate people in general, its that this one person constantly takes, without giving. Real friends know when to share, when to join a conversation, and when to leave a person alone. Leaches don’t have any of these traits, they don’t share, they don’t gracefully join in a conversation and most of all they do not know when they are not wanted. It is difficult for me to tell these leaches to go away, it isn’t in my nature to be mean to anyone. My only solution has been to keep open, and hope that the leach can learn, and become a true friend in the future.

1) Zealots — They consider debian the only solution.

2) Lack of enterprise support — FAI (fully automated install) is debians attempt at what RedHat’s Kickstart kicks ass at. An easy way to image/build many machines very quickly. Besides this debian-stable’s software is comonly too stale, while debian-unstable, well, is completely unstable. Debian-testing, might be the best, but there is no way to pick a date and keep only the critical things you need. Sure Redhat can be a PITA but at least it supports it’s distros fully.

3) Support — (lack there of) — The people i talked to on IRC consider anyone that has any problems as a “newb” and that they obviously must be an idiot.

4) apt-get is cool — (damn, this was a why debian sucks list, but its not all suckage.)

5) Packages are modified — Debian has a habbit of taking packages like Apache HTTPD and completely changing its defaults, and adding their own patches, while this may seem good at first, it makes pinning down problems and mis-configration more difficult.



Well. Thats good enough for now.

How lame. I go into CCIT to work for an hour.. and there are not enough computers for me to use one.

Google, the god of searching always continues to amaze me. While doing my daily troll over slashdot I found that google is also a calculator! Try it out.

100 days in seconds

53*100



Today I also was making a Poll System for Carroll I did it in OOP PHP. I was amazed at how much faster I was able to code it now that I have recently being doing much more C++. PHP seemed like such a breaze.




In other news, I submited a Patch to APR for apr_reslist


Otherwise, I have just been hanging around in the dorm. Hurrah.

How is this all starting…

I normaly don’t like Blogs.

The deal was last week i was renewing this domain(corelands.com) which I use for nothing except email. It was originaly for a new web based game, but development on that was dropped almost 1 year ago. I thought I should put somthing up here. My first idea was to put all my open source software here, which may still happen. That seemed like it might be enough.

However, for my English 102 class, we have to make some rather lame writing journals. My second thought was i would get practice writing by using this as a blog, and if even 1 out of ten entries could be used for the writting journal it would be time well spent.

So here i am.. with my own blog. go figure.