Crow

So, I've decided it's going to be better for me to just bring my blog back to blogspot.
Long story, I'll explain later.

So if you are used to tablet.druid628.com look for it to start using druid628.blogspot.com.

eDay

So, today is eDay. For those playing along at home, eDay was the date I have been looking forward to for some time. it is the day in which according to Big Red (Verizon) I am eligible for an upgrade. I look around and think I want a new phone NOW, yet I feel as though Big Red once again has me between a rock & a hard place.
Rock:
Android Phone, DroiD2/DroiD2 Global (slide-out keyboard), 3G, Existing Technology,  soon-to-be “the old way”, (ever so-slightly) cheaper.
Me:
I want a phone I can develop on/for, make phone calls (when needed), txt, email (TXRX), I would prefer an Android phone, preference given to ones with slide-out keyboard.  I’m tired of being behind on mobile technology.
Hard Place:
DroiD Bionic, Thunderbolt, iPhone 4 (is this really a pro?), 4G LTE, up-to-date, new technology, mo’ better phones. Expensive.

Here is the quandary, as  I see it, I could go forth with getting a Dark Sapphire DroiD 2 Global and its super-cool 1.2 Ghz Processor, sleek design and awesomely cool slide-out keyboard — or even just the DroiD 2 [non-global].  Riding the 3G wave from here on out for at least another 2 years. I know that the 4G capability is not even to Chattanooga yet but I know it will be.

The flip side, of the few 4G phones seen so far  none have had a physical keyboard which is a big deal to me and I’m not really 100% if it will be worth the wait right now. I mean I could wait 6 months or I could wait 2 years. 6 Months from now 4G could be still really buggy or be super cool while 2 years form now it could be super cool or really bogged down from the sudden mass migration of people like me who are eligible for upgrades now  and either don’t want or know to wait for 4G.

I think that my biggest problem is that today was supposed to be a happy day, “yay no more carrying my black — what do you mean pink? I’m color-blind, they said it was black — Blackberry.” while all I’m doing is worrying over whether to wait blow part of a paycheck on a new phone.

Looking at it right now, I can get a DroiD 2 Global for $200 (with my upgrade discount) I can get a DroiD 2 for $50… I supposed there is something to be said for waiting. Admittedly I’m not a patient person. I might possibly learn something from waiting to upgrade my phone, maybe an uncomfortable part of growing up.   Then again if I had one I could start doing Android development now…  Arghh! the humanity!

This post was a progression, it started as a tweet, grew to a facebook post then grew again into a full-on blog post which will get sent out as a tweet which will update facebook… life goes full circle huh?

The First of the Last

This will be the first of last blog posts here on druid628.blogspot.com...
it will be moving soon a permanent location. This was originally supposed to be temporary in my mind when I started my blog here. That was May of 2005.
That post:

Testing!
Friday, May 6th, 2005
Well I’ve decided that I’m going to try this out and use blogspot for a while as my blog.
We’ll see how it goes.

Well here we go almost five years later and my blog is growing up. I just decided this as I pasted that post into this one that my roll-over date will be the 5 year anniversary of my first blogspot post. So there we go folks, 6 May, 2010 the druid tablet will be moving from blogspot to it's final location. "Make your time."

..We see the uh.. Earth now...

...This transmission is coming to you...

... from Samus.

At the moment, thank God, I have gotten back into my PC in attempt to recover data from a PC I was reloading. I hope that once I finish with these three PC's that I will be able to spend some time investigating my own computer woes. Maybe then I can get my box reloaded with FreeBSD.

So for the moment....

good news.

When it Snows It Pours

Well, let me begin by saying how unhappy I am.

Admission No. 1)
I've had three PC's at my house for varying lengths of time. I have been trying to reload/repair/do something with each of these PC's ever since they came into my possession. I have felt less than zealous to complete these PC's since they are all for family and I wasn't charging for these.

Admission No. 2)
My home office has been a disaster for some time. In recent history there has been a clear path from the door to my wife's desk and one from the door to my desk which then continues on to my closet door.


Yesterday, after church and visiting with family, I sat down in order to make a dent in my tasks of finishing these pc's and maybe cleaning up my office or at least my desk. I sat down and reloaded one of the pc's I already had the data backed up previously. Meanwhile, I am attempting to figure out why I am having trouble installing a new os (FreeBSD preferably but I'd settle with Ubuntu) on my 1.5 TB harddrive in my computer. DING! Reload finished. w00t! Ok now I go to stop what I was doing and hook my harddrive back up and move the old data back to the newly reloaded PC. All is fine. I then exclaim, “Oh Crap!” I realized that I had neglected to hook up the “broke drive” which is a 100gb sata drive I bought off a guy at a flea market. The reason I call it the broke drive is that the rail for the sata data connector to fit snuggly (not snuggie) into is broke so I just have to jimmy-rig it to stay in place. I do that and boot the PC back up. Comes back up. I start to click on “My Computer” (yes I know it's a windows pc – hush!) BLUE Screen-then-REBOOT “CRAP!”

Well when I boot it back up the computer is doing the good-ol' “Splash-screen - REBOOT” game which I hate oh-so-much! I disable reboot and it tells me, “Unmountable Boot Volume” well after 10 – 15 minutes of swearing. I grab the newly found 40GB drive that I had plans for, load it up crap now it cant find my network card. Oh wait, I have a slipstream that has my driver on it.

I'm going to pull a Kanye West on myself and interrupt myself. All this is after spending hours yesterday attempting to load BSD or Ubuntu onto my 1.5 TB drive, running MemTest 4 against the RAM and a myriad of other tests. None of which had the best video of all time.

Ok, so while I'm letting the slipstream disc run I went to put my daughter down for the night since my wife had been keeping an eye on her during all this. I get her to sleep and put her down. Then I go back into my office and it's rebooting, “cool it's ready!” XP splash screen... REBOOT!

Requiring all the energy in my body I restrain myself from shouting and picking my computer up to throw it through my window. After a bit of cool down I sit back down and start back to work on it.
Unfortunately, with no resolve.

I could have shortened this by saying, “ARGH!!!” but then you wouldn't really know what was going on would you?

Hopefully I'll get SOMETHING resolved soon.

Crazy Mac OS fun tonight...

So this evening I sat down to play on my MacBook Pro -- one which is among the many apple laptops which has issues with sleep/wake. I have tried multiple different solutions and the only one which seems to be the best fit is to let the machine hibernate when closing the lid and wake on power press.

I recently have been attempting to rectify this problem with out much luck. So back to where I started, I sat down this evening and lifted the lid on the laptop... black screen. I press a button, black screen. I press the power button, black screen. Frustrated but not bewildered, I press and hold the power button to power off the laptop. Then power it back on, everything appears normal,
Login Screen, i type my username, then my password, my password again, and my password again. I then am prompted with my password "hint" I try one more time and see that my Mac Book Pro is telling me, that I'm an idiot but it will let me login with a new password but I will not have access to my keychain, however should I relearn my old password I can have my keychain all I want...

WTF?

So I punch in a temporary password, nothing just the login box shaking at me.

WTF?

So I click cancel and login as root. I attempt to change the password and am cursed at in a foreign language (the language of error codes). So after a few minutes of poking around, I learn my home directory... is empty. NOOOOO!!!!!! I then spend several hours attempting to troubleshoot, debug and hack my Mac. Finally I am glad to report, I was able to get into my account with all my stuff in place. I plan to do a write up and add it to my Apple/Mac section of my site (which is seriously starved for content).

Anyway, I'm going to go to bed now.

Happy New Year!

Groooooooovy!

As most of you know that I do not use my blog as a platform to hock new technology, however on occasion I stumble across something which catches my attention. As my wife would tell you that the only requirements for something to capture my attention is it needs to be either shiny, blue or both. Well today I am going to hopefully hold your attention hostage long enough to share this somewhat new and shiny technology with you.

Ok, so here we go.

I made a discovery yesterday, while at work I was researching the proper way to use something with the Symfony framework. While on another blog the blogger wrote something to the effect of "...this is why I miss Grails." Immediately my mind thinks, 'what is grails... GOOGLE!' I ask the I Ching of the Internet -- who I might add I firmly believe is attempting to take over the world, but that is another story for another time -- of what is 'Grails.' To which it provides me a link directly to http://grails.org. Elatedly the landing page reads, "the search is over." A fact I might add, I was proud to know because I had not planned on doing that much research at that given time.

I went on to discover that Grails was an open source [yay!] high productivity making use of the Groovy programming language. Sweet! Wait, what is Groovy? Crap more to research. I go on to learn that Groovy -- which has been around since 2003 although Groovy 1.0 was not release until 2007 -- is a dynamic alternative for Java. Wait, what? In short it is based on Java, for Java and is a bit more relaxed than Java. Now the interesting thing is according to most documentation I have read Groovy will accept any .java file renamed to a .groovy file and will work just fine. However, expectedly, the reverse is not true. High Java (or Java proper) will not necessarily accept a .groovy file that has been renamed to a .java file. The reason for this being that groovy has several features which High Java scoffs at.

In my recent and brief experimentations with language of Groovy, I have become a fan. With a little more Groovy development time under my belt, I hope to see it in my arsenal of languages soon. I will update you as my experience increases and I gain levels in Groovy.

Groovy can be found: http://groovy.codehaus.org
Grails can be found: http://grails.org

.::. DruiD .::.

DruiD628.com & Symfony

DruiD628 . com will soon feature a new expansion of the site built on Symfony (http://www.symfony-project.org/ ) for those who remember the Clan of the 628 app I had written previously and unfortunately lost due to the um... lack of backups by my old hosting company -- another story for another time.

This will be a rebirth of that app. However since air travel is not a big thing for me anymore the "DruiD tracking" feature will not be as prominate. It will have some of the same features as previously, I will have more to post soon as more details come available.

Killer Koala and FreeBSD

So, today is release day for Karmic... no Killer... yeah Killer Koala.
As some of you know, I am an BSD crack-ho, however I use ubuntu at work. Using linux at work is fine by me it's still part of the Open Source, free, free-of-Macroshaft world. Yay! So far a couple of the guys here have updated to ubuntu 10.9 (a.k.a. Karmic -- I mean Killer Koala) I however will be waiting at least until tomorrow to perform my upgrade.

On the other hand, I am waiting with bated breath for FreeBSD 8 to move from -CURRENT to -RELEASE. I will likely be making that switch as soon as possible.

So as for the really really random-ness in the post I did want to take a moment to clear up some misconceptions. As many of my amigos know I abandoned that linux-specific world a number of years ago and jumped headlong into the BSD world. My reason for that was the lack of unity in the linux world, so many people have the, "oh i can do this better, I'll just make adjustments or rewrite this, repackage it as something else."
Come on!
I was a loyal fedora wearing red-hat maniac but starting with Red Hat release 7 i started to notice more and more I liked less and began to explore other options. I made a beeline for the BSDs and have not regretted it yet. I am a little frustrated with the lack of BSD support for Flash by Adobe (skrew you adobe!) but there are alternatives out there which get the job done. So for those who say "if you're such a loyal BSD guy why are you using ubuntu" I'm still in the open source, free, free-of-Microsoft side of the fence, and ubuntu isn't that bad -- although it too has splintered into all the *buntu versions.
It gets the job done.

Anyway we shall see how the upgrades go...
I'll let you know...

Important Info Regarding Emailing me

Beginning on the Ides of March (15 March, 2008) I will no longer be reading any emails sent to my primary email address druid628 {shift-2} comcast {.} net, unless they have been digitally signed or -- more-- preferably encrypted. I have been planning on doing this for sometime and have finally been... pressed... to making it a reality. I will be taking steps between now and the Ides of March to be migrating my mailing list subscriptions over to a different account that will be used specifically for that purpose.

For those who are not technical, this might be a bit of a hassle *initially* and for the inconvenience I am very sorry. It will require installing some software on your PC to make this encryption and digital signature possible. I will be setting up an area of my website dedicated to this information and including instructions for installing the software and configuring for both ThunderBird and Outlook Express.

For those of you who *are* more technical in nature and just felt your heart stop at the horror of having to buy PGP just to email me, fear not! My instructions will be for using Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG; GPG), guess what, it's free. I have used it for, almost a year now and it works well, unfortunately for the non-techie people, it is all CLI and no GUI (layman terms that means it's DOS like not a nice window).

Again I apologize for any inconvenience that this might cause, this is something I feel that I need to do and will become much more common for many more users. I will update again with a new posting when I post the pages with more information, tutorials and scripts.
For those who may already use PGP or GPG, my keys are already available (see below for keys) and I would appreciate you becoming an early adopter of this policy.

Thank you.

To Hades With It All!

Alright, I've had it.
I've done all that I can do.
I hate computers.
I am tired of working on them.
I'm tired of putting up with their stercus tauri.

I decided to put my mind on some other topic, so after being introduced to a firewall application that I could run on one of my old linux boxes, I thought 'hey that would be a fun project to get my mind off of all this.'
this being the problems I'm having with my primary desktop computer)
So i took out the old box that's just been sitting in a corner with a half-arse load of FreeBSD on it, popped in X-files DVDs and I dug out this great old blue box that I bought for $5, a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away, that was retail version of RedHat 5.2. I plug the machine in, make sure it POSTs. So, I put the disc in the cd-rom tray and hit reboot. I start the install, Stack trace!?! hmm, ok let me check something. I take the disc out do some checks on the BIOS settings, all looks good. I open the try and put the disc back in. After closing the try and hitting reboot, my computer stuck it's tongue out at me. The Cd tray shot back out. So i hit the button, it closed and opened again. I'm thinking ok, i have fat fingers maybe i'm double tapping the button so i real quickly punch the button. Closed. OPEN! OMG!! WTF!?

So after a few minutes of fighting with the cd rom, and it not working. As I am an only child, I did what I do best. I threw a temper-tantrum. Denting cases, bending chassis, and as a side note: i don't like that the plural form of chassis is chassis.
All-the-while doing a few other destructive things to the computers around me.
SO, this brings me to my point.

I have:
5 non-working white-box PCs
1 maybe-working Compaq PC
1 working PowerMac 7600 which I recently upgraded to MacOS 8.1
1 working Rosewill 19" Flat panel monitor
1 working 17" Mac CRT (Big-butt behemoth)
1 working 17" Dell CRT
1 sort-of working 17" Philips CRT (it pin-cushions every now and then)
1 working Sun 1U Netra X1 server
I think I may have a couple Toshiba Satellite Laptops (1 working; 1 not)

Anyone need some parts. Sold As Is.