unix: April 2006 archives


On Moving Data, Losing Data, a Short Essay on Why Finder Sucks, Deleting Data, and Gaming, Mostly as an Excuse to Use This Ridiculously Long Title

[ rakaur on Wed Apr 26 at 02:27 AM // category: apple, games, software, technology, unix ]

And so it is done. Mostly.

I gave Gentoo a big “fuck you, Gentoo Linux, you suck.” I now have Windows XP on daedalus, and it is now my gaming machine. And I am happy. This was not easy, though.

You see, being my main machine until now, daedalus had the biggest hard drive I had laying around, which is 200GiB, to store all my stuff like video and music. This was on a 160GiB partition under ReiserFS. This was bad. I had to transfer everything off my 200GiB hard drive onto various places on my network (including my mom’s computer proteus, my server cyndane, my laptop praxis, and my iPod ePod). Along the way, my entire collection of Red vs Blue and The Elegant Universe Nova series seems to have up and disappeared. I transferred it back to daedalus under Windows, it was there, and now it’s just gone like it never existed. And I am sad. I think it’s because Finder crashed a few times while relocating stuff.

And—let me digress for a moment—that’s another thing. Why does the Finder suck so bad? So far my experience has gone something like this:

So why does the Finder suck such a multitude of cocks? It sucks just as bad as Explorer, and in just about the same ways. It randomly crashes and disappears and relaunches ten seconds later. It randomly refuses to do things because “the file is in use” until you log out and back in (restarting it is not enough). It randomly refuses to do things over the network that it was doing yesterday just fine. Even if I turn on the “Prevent .DS_Store creation over network” option it STILL shits .DS_Store files in every single directory you view, and as a result my entire media partition on daedalus is infested with these. I’d expect this if I was using 10.0, but this is 10.4.6. Yeah that’s great add stupid and spectacularly useless shit like Dashboard, but completely ignore how much Finder blows.

Anyway, as I was saying.

One of the good things about having to relocate 100+ GiB of data is that it kind of sets your priorities on what you need and what you’ll never ever look at ever again ever. I wound up deleting more than half the stuff I was going to save.

So now, daedalus has XP on it, and I am playing games, and I am happy. My original plan was to install X on cyndane, and I might yet, but not until the need arises. Until then, I’ll be playing some games.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.26 @ 02:27 AM

Not So Dreamy, Apparently

[ rakaur on Sat Apr 22 at 12:01 AM // category: apple, software, technology, unix ]

Well, that sucked.

DreamHost uses NFS mounts for their mailing system. Because NFS is widely known for being so mind-blowingly slow that it’s nearly useless for anything other than people that get two emails a century it made moving my mail extremely hard.

This was a colossal pain in the ass. At least I can now remove mail from cyndane, which will remove about 80% of the running load and installed packages.

One down, two to go.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.22 @ 12:01 AM

Dreamy Mail

[ rakaur on Thu Apr 20 at 01:45 PM // category: apple, software, technology, unix ]

So, I’m trying to move my nice and new pretty mail system over to my new host, DreamHost. This makes me think two things:

I’ve been scping my mailbox for over an hour now, and I don’t believe it’s even close to being done. My main goal in all of this is, of course, to get all my stuff off cyndane, and thus off my residential cable. What I’d ultimately like to do, is get all this off cyndane (www, mail, XMPP, etc.) and put X on it so that I can put Windows on daedalus, and be able to KVM between Windows and Unix. As a bonus, I’ll still have my laptop, which doubles as desktop/Unix.

This would make me happy.

I’m almost certainly going to keep FreeBSD 6 on cyndane, though I’ve thought about Linux (only because it’s more desktop-y). I definitely wouldn’t use Gentoo, because I’ve certainly learned that Gentoo’s only purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others. I’d probably go with Debian if anything. However, almost certainly going to stay with FreeBSD 6.

Sounds like a plan.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.20 @ 01:45 PM

For What it's Worth

[ rakaur on Sun Apr 02 at 08:46 PM // category: apple, hardware, software, technology, unix ]

So, since receiving my MacBook Pro, I’ve touched my Linux desktop about twice. And, in that time frame, two packages stopped working, direct hardware acceleration stopped working, BMPx randomly jumps around in mp3s, Azureus crashes, and forget IM.

So, for what it’s worth, I wish I had the money to just fuck it and buy an iMac. Maybe I should see if anyone wants to buy daedalus for $900. That’s about $300 less than what I paid for it. I’m thinking of saying to hell with Linux and just wipping it and putting XP on it for games, and have my laptop for everything else.

You know how many things I’ve had to fix on OS X because they just stopped working and weren’t a result of my prodding?

Zero.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.02 @ 08:46 PM

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