Compilation at last Several random thoughts

• I wanted to write a very long rant about what I've been doing at work, but found it is not easy to do so, without going into specifics that I'd rather not have published on the Internet, so I'll just have to say we made a bold move that forced a great change, and that now there is a great challenge ahead for me/us and that I'm very happy about it.
  I have the opportunity of playing the role of architect - implementor - maker of policy - dirty coder - etc. And it is just great.


• It look like vacation time makes bloggers very busy, and entries have been rather poor lately. However I have to comment on svigle's life threatening experience: It is weird, when I started driving I thought the worst thing that could happen to me in a car was that I crashed it and got into trouble (as in, trouble paying the reparation). It wasn't until a few years later when a friend of mine died on a car crash, thanks to large doses of alcohol on the driver of a large SUV who crashed the car he rode in, that I realized that driving, and cars can actually kill people, and can actually make one who is behing the wheel, a murderer. That is one of those things that have to happen close to you, for you to realize.


• It would look much cooler on geek meetings if one said "Debian" when answering the perennial what's your distro question. It is more hackish, to say it some way. However I like my machine to be configurable only when I want to configure it. I want for the tools I use to be configurable. I like to configure my apache, or my version of mysql server, but I do not want to configure the X server. I know I use X, but I don't care about the number of Hz the screen runs on. The nice newbie like installation interface made those choices for me, and made them right. There's nothing worst than having to spend a whole week figuring out what makes X crash, because of installing it by hand (or from a bleeding edge testing branch). For me, Mandrake has done the job perfectly, I configured my system carefully where I wanted it carefully configured, but didn't configure it where I wasn't interested. I think that's the beauty of Linux and all it's wide spectrum of choices. You can decide what you want to control and what you want to leave as is.