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I didn't completely escape the clutches of Microsoft when I found my new job. This new place does some development for windows CE, it turns out. I've been struggling through some build issues with some code for the last couple days, and my early impression of developing for windows are not good. I'll admit possibly a little bias, but I'm really trying to keep an open mind. Really. First of all, the command-line tools are severely lacking in Windows. My mentor here is showing me all kinds of command-line tricks to get stuff done, which I really appreciate, but cmd.exe is awful, copy-n-paste is weird, you can't resize the window by dragging the edge. Useful commands like which, grep, find, just don't exist. Agony. I know about cygwin, but I've never been able to integrate that well with the rest of windoze, and especially not with Visual Studio. My second complaint is online help. MSDN appears to be quite voluminous, and somewhat helpful actually, ...

Wow, I sure thought this was a longshot when I went searching for an obscure problem I was having. Strangely enough, someone else using putty and Xming to run X11 applications from a Jaunty machine also got the error message: PuTTY X11 proxy: wrong authentication protocol attemptedError: Can't open display: localhost:10.0 And their fix worked for me too. Thanks, timkoop on the Ubuntu Forums!

Pretty much just like the upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10 , minus the xorg problem. The /etc/apache2/sites-available/default didn't even change this time, but I still had to kick apache to get it to serve my virtual host. Not sure what's going on there. One thing I noticed that I forgot to write down about the last upgrade, that is still weird with Jaunty, is the network manager applet has a red X on it, as if I'm not connected to a network, even though networking is configured how I like and working just fine. I'll have to google that one someday.

I'm a little behind on my version of Ubuntu at home. Last night I finally upgraded to 8.10. Very smooth compared to past experiences. Video didn't work at first. I just deleted my xorg.conf entirely and then X started up just fine. My apache virtual host was not being served. Everything caused the default junk in /var/www to be served up. Here's what I believe the relevant diff off /etc/apache2/sites-available/default was: bryan@brzo:/etc/apache2/sites-available$ diff -urNp default.dpkg-old default.dpkg-new --- default.dpkg-old 2007-10-31 21:38:12.000000000 -0700 +++ default.dpkg-new 2008-09-19 06:41:53.000000000 -0700 @@ -1,5 +1,4 @@ -NameVirtualHost * -<VirtualHost *> +<VirtualHost *:80> Restoring NameVirtualHost * and <VirtualHost *> statments seemed to fix the problem. I have not taken the time to understand why, and if anyone wants to comment and enlighten me I'll greatly appreciate it. Look for another post soon on how the u...

You may have noticed that the blurb about me has changed slightly. My career status has been in flux over the last few months, but has now settled. Back in January the project I was working on at HP was canceled. My rather large R&D lab was told that we no longer had work to do. Our only job was to find another job. The upper managers would try to find spots for us on other projects within HP, but we were basically told to not hold our breath. So I didn't. I updated my resume and went to work. I interviewed with an interesting company located about an hour away from my home, up the Columbia Gorge , named Insitu . They were (and still are) busy interviewing and hiring many people and it took a while to hear back from them. In the meantime I was offered another position at HP. Not having anything else firm, I accepted. I quickly learned that it was a .NET/C# windoze programming position. No more playing with hardware, no more bit twiddling register manipulations, no ...