An onion computer is a work laptop that you’ve had for years and can’t bear to replace yet :-). Just looking at it makes you want to cry, like an onion.
Every large or small company has its IT priest or person responsible for technology. Normally the guy works until the next generation comes along and flees from innovation like the devil from holy water… nothing should ever change. The same guys who condemned your company to use Windows 2000 because XP is no good, Vista is heresy!
I wanted to play on the Mac and ended up downloading the Windows 7 RC from Microsoft. The question was whether you could install it with BootCamp, I found out that you could here.
The most important things to do before starting are:
The Mac OS X discs are needed for the driver installation. Backup is always good and Time Machine helps. The BootCamp instructions have about 20 pages, but you can print 4 pages per sheet and save some trees.
Installing open source packages on Windows wasn’t easy. With Bitnami, the work gets a lot closer to Linux. Django, Ruby, Trac, everything is easy to install.
I had to change the name of the user who made commits in the SVN repository after migrating from one machine to another. In this case, the repository was created for local use with local users and then integrated for departmental use.
To swap user names:
Make a dump of the repository (for backup purposes) using svnadmin
svnadmin dump REPO_PATH > dump1
Using svndumptool.py:
svndumptool.py transform-revprop svn:author
OLD_NAME NEW_NAME dump1 dump2
This video is very interesting and quick to watch. Concepts such as modularization and coupling are explained in a practical and intuitive manner.
I learned how to program reading computer manuals made in Brazil :-). It was the reserve market. First language: BASIC… but nothing visual or even Quick Basic. I used a TK85 and learned Sinclair Basic. In high school, I decided to enroll in an informatics technical school. There, I was introduced to other languages: Pascal, C, Cobol, Clipper, Modula. Object-Oriented Programming was still something distant, Borland C++ 1.0 and Turbo Pascal 6… good times. The trend at the time was structured programming, but the video below summarizes everything:
The year of 2008 passed very quickly for me and 2009 is already at the door.
Life passes more slowly in small cities, at least for me, but not too slowly either. Since the Belgian TV is really bad and my (by IP) TV is even worse, I decided to rent some DVDs and remember interesting things from Brazil.
Firstly, renting DVDs in Brazil is easy. You go to the rental store and get 20 :-) With some magic calculation, they give you something like 5 days to see the movies. Here it’s simpler. Picking up 10 DVDs or 20, you have to return them on the next day! And there’s more, the rental store only opens from 1 pm to 8 pm… if you return after 5 pm, you pay a €5 fine !!! It’s all very magical :-) This explains why our record is of 3 DVDs per weekend (of course, it doesn’t open on Sundays, it’s for Monday). Alias, nothing opens on Sundays here: pharmacies, supermarkets… forget about it! Only restaurants and cinema and look out!
I was very impressed with Ubuntu 8.04, I couldn’t let 8.10 pass without testing it. The 8.04 I had tested on a virtual machine, Microsoft’s Virtual PC, worked well after passing some parameters to the kernel initialization. Two weeks ago I also had another pleasant surprise using Linux when Bluetooth in Java worked without problems, or better, with fewer problems than in Windows. This sums up how motivated I was to install the new Ubuntu.
The Mozilla Labs is experimenting with a new Firefox extension called Ubiquity (http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/). This extension allows you to open a command window in the browser and perform very interesting mash-ups.
The test version, see the video, brings features such as quickly searching Wikipedia, searching addresses on Google Maps and others. The best part is that users can define new commands, see the tutorial (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_Author_Tutorial).
If you want to insert maps into your Gmail, translate passages from web pages, search for books on Amazon without leaving the current page, Ubiquity may have been made for you.
Time passes and even computers get old. My Windows is nothing to talk about…
After I started using the Mac, the PC was handed over to other users in the house. The party began with cheerful underwater themes, 3D fish, and weird things like that.
Unfortunately, a computer doesn’t get better with time… and it got ugly even to turn on. I’m taking advantage of sacrificing my installation and starting another from scratch. But that’s not so simple.
All change takes work, switching computers is not easy. To avoid leaving it cheap, I decided to test a Mac this time, an iMac.
It has been three days since the exchange and I am still recovering. The keyboard shortcuts are bothering me, but some are already helping with daily tasks. Here’s a bit of history:
To get my revenge from Windows, I installed Ubuntu 8.04 with Wubi… that installs Ubuntu on the NTFS partition. The funniest thing was to read Ubuntu below Microsoft Windows in the same boot utility of Microsoft, priceless. But the bug doesn’t like my PC, or my PC doesn’t like any operating system. The printer stopped working on Windows after I installed the video camera… I can’t reinstall it even with a prayer. The scanner went along, cursed integrated driver. Unfortunately, I have many registered programs in Windows, better leave them as they are and install the printer on another computer. The way is to believe in Wubi and continue with the installation.