Minimalistic computing environment
Lately I have become interested in a more minimalistic approach to
computing. Do more with less, so to speak. Understand the basic
principles of an operating system, network, compilers and so forth.
No longer will I be a slave to overly complicated solutions, provided by
companies that don’t seem to understand the power of simplicity.
One way of computing to rule them all…
I’m annoyed by the concept of the average user, especially the talk
about what the average user needs or want of their computer.
Different parties want to describe not what the average user wants,
but why the average user wants their product or service. Which is in
most situations wrong as the person(s) making the statement is not in
fact describing the average user as they are influenced by the product
they are providing.
Anyway, I believe the average user is like me, that they want one
interface and one way of dealing with their computing tasks. That they
crave consistency and intelligent interfaces.
Which means Emacs for all and everyone!
7th Son, book 1
Currently I’m listening to the audio book 7th Son, available from
http://www.7thsonnovel.com/
Just started listening, but this seems like a very good book.
From what I have gathered from the web page, the author J.C. Hutchins
have released three books in the 7th Son series for free as episodic
downloads on his website.
Seems like this book(s) have created a lot of buzz about his authorship,
a very smart thing to do. Hats off to Mr. Hutchins!
Anyone have another book recommendation for me? Audio or printed?
PS. In these twitter-days I was very glad indeed when I found this
book recommendation in an old-fashion forum.
PSS. Why don’t libraries keep a list of completed free audio books?
PSSS. Does any library do that?
Very impressed with Arch Linux
I’m been running Arch Linux for about six months now, and I constantly
amazed about how easy it is to configure and maintaine, and how simple
consepts make it powerful and flexible.
The package manager, pacman, is quite fast and easy to use. There is
also an alternative or extention to pacman called yaourt, which have
the ability to download and build packages directly from their version
control systems. Just type “yaourt emacs-git” to get the latest
version of the great editor. If you don’t want to have the package
automatically build and installed, there is also the possibility to
download the PKGBUILD file to build and install in manually.
Lately I have been installing Arch on some older machines, which don’t
have the fastest processor or the most RAM. Installing Arch is fairly
quick, and once it’s up and running I clone some git repositories to
get my complete environment setup. An instant computing environment
ready in 10 to 15 minutes depending on the amount of software you
need to install.
As I said, it’s running extremely fast on my computers, which isn’t
the latest and greatest, and everything is easy to maintain and
administer. Head over to http://archlinux.org to read more about it.
Howto NOT update your website..
Two days ago I wanted to clean up the files on this website, and since
I’m hooked on the commandline I wanted to experiment with the
commandline options for rsync. After some time reading the man page
for rsync I found out that the option –exclude-from= and
–delete-excluded would clean up the remote server quite nicely.
Except that all the custom files and some directories that was stored in
the same directory. The –delete-excluded took care of those files,
especially the file containing the settings for the website. I still
look for stuff that might be broken, so please make a comment if you
find something.
The moral of the story is, make sure you know what your doing when you
have the power of the commandline at your fingertips…