So I got into work tonight and noticed something right off. My login screen was different. Behind me, Brett called out a congratulations. The box was different, the prompt was different, and I was not happy. I tried to login but was denied. So I went to Brett and asked him what he’d done to my computer. At this he looked rather confused. I went back and rebooted the thing and sure enough, GRUB had nothing but Ubuntu. I was not happy at all, and getting vocal about it. About this time Craig poked his head around and also said, congratulations. I pointed out the splash screen and again noted that I was not happy. Arg! Slash screen, how useless is that?

About this time Tim came over to congratulate me. At this point I was finally cluing into the fact that they didn’t mean the computer. After all, Tim at least knows that I hate Ubuntu and love having root access on my Fedora box. Turns out I got a promotion at work, but seeing as how I couldn’t get to my email, I had no idea. So the sad thing is, I have increased in rank and yet, lost privileges. Apparently the Fedora box was acting up earlier today, and when my desk-mate complained to the admins, they brought in one of the test Ubuntu boxes. I not only lack root access, nothing works. Pidgin has a tendency to crash, I can’t customize my themes and desktop, and I even had trouble logging out. I had to open a terminal and run pkill to get rid of myself.

Still, I’m very happy about the promotion. It’s one step closer to doing what I really want to do, which is be an admin. And at long last I no longer need to go to an L2 to get a DNS change done.

I’ve never been much of a programmer, but I do decent enough writing and debugging PHP and Java, and I’ve recently fallen in love with Python. PHP has a huge fan base, so Googling for any problem usually has good results. Java has Java Doc, which makes it pretty darn easy to look up anything you need to do. Python was so easy to get started with that I wrote several of my Operating Systems assignments after only 4 chapters of reading, with 40 lines of code, versus my classmates who were averaging 250 lines of code.

And then there’s Ruby on Rails. I’ve been loath to try it. It seems over-hyped and largely used by people who can’t get their paths correct, much less properly use an MVC environment. But I’ve heard from several people how easy it was to use, and after trying out Cake PHP, I have been looking for a decent MVC environment. Initial assessment: Rails bites. Or is bytes? I’ve been messing with several online web tutorials. So far none of them are encouraging. I’ve seen several that help you create your first Hello World app, but don’t explain anything about it. My favorite, billed as the quickest possible way to get from install to Hello World:

alias rails_hello_world='rails hello && cd hello && ./script/generate controller welcome hello && echo "Hello World" > app/views/welcome/hello.html.erb && ./script/server -d && firefox 0.0.0.0:3000/welcome/hello'

And no explanation. Yeah, that’s useful. I’ve managed to get Rails running on my server, nice little Congrats screen and everything. Here’s the sad thing, when I look at Rails and the basic commands to get stuff set up, they make a lot of sense. But I’m really frustrated with the things that don’t make sense. For example, one aspect of the above code,

./script/generate controller welcome hello

When I initially ran a command along the lines of the above, I received a nice output that made a lot of sense considering the MVC framework. But I initally ran it with just one variable. And the tutorial I was going through at the time then provided a few lines of code and said, vioala, Hello World. Only that didn’t work. I’m pretty sure I need some view stuff first. So I went back to another tutorial which invoked multiple variables, like the above command, but with no explanation. I’m having a real hard time getting an idea of what is supposed to work, and why. Admittedly my frustration tolerance is a little low right now. And bad docs and tutorials does not make a bad language or environment. Sadest part is, I’m no good a documentation myself. So even if I do manage to get this all figured out, I don’t know that I’ll be able to do much better.

So anyone know of a good tutorial, preferably set in a Unix environment?

I have had aspirations to actually write more on this blog. I have a few lines of what was supposed to be a post on my trip to Hawaii, and I had planned on a nice, long stint about the Provo Freedom festival. But I have aspirations to do a lot of things that never seem to get done. I have a partialy built table-top aeroponics unit out in a lego bucket in the living room; my scorpions finally have proper dirt, but are still awaiting cool plants, etc. But this blogging thing, I’m not quite sure what to do about it. My orginal plan was to make it one part journal and one part rough-draft documentation for the many projects I aspire to complete.

The problem with using it as a journal is that I’m a very private person and there are things I don’t want the whole world to see. Really, there are things I just don’t want certain people to see. But keeping a journal is important to me. Last year President Eyring gave a talk on keeping a journal. Whenever prophets and general authorities give talks in conference I do try to apply what they are saying to my life, no matter what, but Elder Eyring’s talk was one of those that hits you in the heart and gives you that extra twinge of guilt/resolve. Guilt that you haven’t been doing whatever they are talking about, and resolve to do better. This is especially notable because it hit me at a point in conference when my attention span was waning a bit. As I said, this was last year, and a few entries in a blog that has not been properly backed up does not a journal make. Especially since I’m not even blogging about things that I don’t mind everyone seeing.

As for the projects, as usual, I’m just a slacker. I’m not sure how other people do it. It seems like my friends and co-workers have seen all the latest movies, faithfully watch more TV shows than I new existed, keep up with facebook and online gaming (they also know more games than I ever knew existed), run families, read books, and still manage to keep learning about all the complexities of the computer world. How are you doing that?! Me, I have trouble convincing my body not to sleep ten hours a day, eating regularly, keeping my room in the clean-if-cluttered category, watering my plants and feeding my critters. I usually get to work no more than five minutes late and barely manage to make my quotas. That’s about what it comes down to right now for me. I want to do so much more but I’m struggling with just the basics. Reading is just about gone right now in my life, except for the reading I do to prepare for my sunday lessons; I watch too much TV but it from the conversations around me, it at least seems like I watch almost nothing compared to some; I gave up most computer games years ago; I don’t think I facebook very much (feed the virtual dog, send plants, play a few brain games) and I don’t have nearly enough time for the people in my life or the projects I want to be doing.

I’m almost out of the blogging time I’ve alotted myself tonight, so in my next post I hope to list some of the things I am working on, and maybe set some reasonable timelines for working on them. Maybe, just maybe, I can start managing my aspirations so that I can complete a few.