the rock garden

Today I am posting from my iBook, using my wireless adapter :) My main computer these days is my 366 Indigo iBook, one of the last of the clamshell models. I am running Mac OS X and now, bzero! I set up bzero on my Fedora PC at work, so I am pleased to have transferred my blog successfully to the iBook and have it working under the OS X Python environment. I actually have IDLE and a full featured Python development environment running now, which is great. OS X has been a real learning curve. It does all of the great things you want from a commercial OS, like great printing support, great gui, hibernating, but doing the usual Unix stuff takes some learning. I still don't feel like it's as natural as Linux or OpenBSD to me, but since I've been using OS X for probably four or five months now, and have reloaded probably four or five times, I am figuring it out. One thing that makes me sad is "apropos", which is not there. Also fortune is missing! I don't have fink reinstalled yet, I am trying to do without. I would like to do a little bzero development for fun, like writing an automatic daily script that puts a fortune somewhere at the top of your blog. I miss the traditional Unix philosophy flavored thoughts you get at login when fortune is running...
Work has been very busy this week, but Friday night and Saturday afternoon I did some socializing with the guys from work, and had a great time. It's quite a change for me to have a social life again, I'm meeting people I actually like and respect for the first time since I left my hometown clique. Refreshing.
I had a short break to work up bzero on the iBook and send out a post, before polishing up and going out for Japanese at a nice place :)
Since bzero is a Python based project, I may get back into using Python for slapping together little scripts to scratch itches again. I have been playing with Perl for several weeks, and darnit, I like it. It seems more like shell scripting to me, it's very natural. But I can see myself writing in a disorganized style, compared to Python's more structured approach. At least that's how they seem to me. Unfortunately working with Perl on the iBook has mostly meant booting into Debian, because I don't have gcc and the XCode tools installed right now. Even without all of my data on the iBook, I still find myself running out of disk space on the 10GB disk with the developer tools installed. Fink takes a little chunk too. Since I seem to be getting pretty dedicated to using this old iBook and OS X, I will probably need to get a bigger one. There is no way to use the great CPAN modules without the developer tools, you need gcc. So it's frustrating trying to use Perl under OS X. Also the documentation is lean. I have thought about solving my storage problems using nfs on one of my PCs, but what do I leave on nfs, and what do I keep locally? Even with a slim amount of my old data stored locally, with OS X, and OpenOffice, and XCode, and fink... Space is about out. And then there's YellowDog Linux. I hacked the yaboot.conf to do a network install on my machine so I can boot and install from OpenFirmware! With no frigging help from IRC or the mailing lists. Apparently I'm the only fool trying to install YellowDog on a computer that can't read burnt cds. I think I will really like YellowDog compared to Debian, because I am becoming a Lazy Linux Guy. Or Old Lazy Linux Guy, or whatever the title is. Fedora is all automatic and stuff, and I am starting to like that. I still find Yum wanting compared to apt-get though. But when YDL 4 is released, I will be installing it. So where am I going to put that? I only have a 1GB Linux partition right now... Sigh.
Time for Japanese!