Why Debian?

I was installing Bugzilla on CentOS today and it reaffirmed my preference for the Debian distribution. Debian has an official Bugzilla package. CentOS does not. If there are unofficial ones, I haven't found them yet. Bugzilla is a well known application so it is not unreasonable to expect there to be an official package, and yet there is not. Perhaps one reason is a lack of resources. It takes man-hours to package an application and that effort might be needed elsewhere on more critical packages.

And that is where Debian is different. There is a Bugzilla package in Debian because someone volunteered to do it. Perhaps the person needs it for some project, or his business depends on it, or maybe she just likes the application. Whatever the reason, the Debian developers maintain the packages on their own time. The result is there are almost 24,000 (I don't have an exact count for lenny) official packages in Debian. This is a phenomenal resource. When I need an application or library for a project there is a excellent chance I can just install it with aptitude, and get on with solving the problem.

Debian would have to change radically for me to switch to another distribution. There is no chance of that happening soon.

Skype

It seems that most of my family has been bitten by Skype. I'm chatting frequently with my brother in Australia. My sister Jean just signed up. Apparently, my other sister Pat and John have been yakking for a while already. The only person left out is Marie, my third sister who lives in England. I don't believe that she would try to install Skype by herself. She has a friend who used to help her with computer stuff, and I'm hoping she is still around. I sent a email to started the ball rolling, let's see what happens.

Canada Is Pierogi

Sorry, I just couldn't resist. I heard someone say it on the radio and thought it was funny. That's prorogued for those who haven't heard, and it means that parliament is suspended. Canada is without a government for 2 months. Gee, I hope we don't have a major crisis like maybe, oh I don't know, a looming recession. Well, I think its just a conspiracy so the politicians can get a longer Christmas holiday. I mean, really, who would believe the Liberal, NDP, and Bloc could agree on anything? Don't believe anything they say. Its lies, all lies, I tell you. Where's my tinfoil hat?

Pierogi anyone? Hmm, tasty...

When Programming Was Fun

I'm a self-taught programmer. My first program was written on a TI-59 calculator. I hand assembled 6502 machine code on a SYM-1 single board computer before I wrote anything in a high level language. I never thought about the process much. I had an idea, thought for a while, and started coding. If the idea and thinking were good, the code would work, otherwise you started over. Designing software and coding were intricately connected and I never even considered separating the two.

When I started programming professionally, not much changed. I worked with people who had similar experience to mine. Except for the addition of a customer who set the broad requirements, the process we used was still the same. The programmer's always designed the software. It worked. We delivered working systems to customers and the programmer's had fun.

Then I started working with people who had more formal training in programming. Suddenly, design and coding were expected to be separate activities. My mind never really accepted that this was possible to solve a software problem by just talking and thinking about it. Programming became much harder and much less fun than it was before.

Lately I've been thinking about if it is possible to regain that old feeling of fun. Certainly, when I program for myself, it is fun. But is it possible to get the feeling back on paying projects?

New Prospect

I built several Linux servers for a small web hosting company over the past year, and that has now led to a new prospect. Its a small job, just to setup Bugzilla on a CentOS server, but it should be interesting. It could lead to some sysadmin work too.

I'm doing a lot of sysadmin work lately and I find it is not really an area that interests me too much. But I need to diversify the business while I reevaluate the application development side.

Relaxing Day

After the hectic pace of last week it was good to slow down a little. I did some planning for another Linux server installation but did not push myself to actually get started. I also looked at my own network plans which have been stalled for some time now. My main server is a little overloaded with too many functions. It runs Postfix, Apache, BIND (for internal use only), several lesser services, and the firewall. In addition, the server started life as my desktop system and has never been reinstalled so it has accumulated some cruft over the years. It has been running the same Debian sid install for exactly 10 years, dutifully updated on a daily basis.

I'd really like to split up the server functions. For one thing, it will give a chance to configure things better from the start. For another, it will remove the eggs from the same basket. For example, I need a master DNS server for my own domains but I would prefer to have the DNS on a separate system in case BIND is comprised. I'm not sure how far to go with separating the services since more hardware requires more space, makes more noise, and of course uses more electricity. Since I will likely be using old PIIs and PIIIs, they do not have the performance to run virtual servers. Why use such old systems? Because I can get them for free.

Man's Got To Know His Limitations

There was no way I was going to get the TomsGiftList project into a usable state any time soon. I decided to try and setup GiftWeb again and guess what? It worked! The reason for it breaking 18 months ago seems to have disappeared. I did not even have to change the include path for the ADODB library which I had the last time I tried GiftWeb.

I still don't like GiftWeb even though it saved the day. It is an old PHP application. When I tried the "recommended" PHP configuration for production use, GiftWeb crashed. This worries me a little. I hope that I have not exposed my server to an exploit. GiftWeb was the first and only PHP application that I ever played with, and the experience made me like Python even more. Of course at that time (2003) the Python web frameworks were a little less mature than they are now, so CGI was really the only option for writing Python web applications. No thanks.

I'm glad I was able to get the wish list back online. Nevertheless, it is only three weeks to Christmas so I don't how much help it will be to everyone.

(It was a toss up between Clint Eastwood and Kenny Rogers. :)