Steve lists his 10 reasons to never get a job. The running joke here in Guelph, at least among our group of friends, is that you’re not truly Guelph until you don’t have a job.

First, something to listen to while you’re reading. While I’m not sure I completely agree with all Steve’s points some are pretty classic:

“Getting a job is like enrolling in a human domestication program. You learn how to be a good pet.”

“Does putting yourself in a position where someone else can turn off all your income just by saying two words (”You’re fired”) sound like a safe and secure situation to you? Does having only one income stream honestly sound more secure than having 10?”

“When you run into an idiot in the entrepreneurial world, you can turn around and head the other way. When you run into an idiot in the corporate world, you have to turn around and say, “Sorry, boss.””

“When you want to increase your income, do you have to sit up and beg your master for more money? Does it feel good to be thrown some extra Scooby Snacks now and then?”

“As part of their obedience training, employees must be taught how to dress, talk, move, and so on. We can’t very well have employees thinking for themselves, now can we? That would ruin everything.”

Sorry, didn’t mean to post that many, just read the thing.

I picked up me new machine last Friday and subsequently spent the weekend tinkering. Most of the tinkering was spent trying to get my monitors configured correctly and I wasted a ton of time there. With some sound advice, which I’ll post at some point, I’ve finally solved that particular issue tonight.

So I’m now running up on Fedora Core 6 using dual monitors with a spanning desktop. I still need to develop in .NET so I’m using VMWare for my virtualized windows development environment which is just damn cool. A fully networked virtual environment.

There are a few pleasant surprises since I was last in linux:

• Installs and updates have gotten a lot more painless with yum.
• Digital camera support. I plugged my camera into a usb drive and quickly imported my photos into f–spot. While I’m sure there are similar apps out there in the windows-land(picassa?), I personally have never had a slick way of categorizing, storing, and archiving my digital pics. This plus editing, versioning, and exporting to common apps like flickr and gallery.
• Peripheral support for printers, flash drives etc is a no brainer now. These types of issues were always a pain in the past. I don’t think I’ve typed “mount” yet.

What is still painful? Pretty much the only thing was xorg.conf which I expected. Ultimately this is just about experience and it helps to know some people who have that experience. The installation process was straightforward, however, figuring out exactly how to properly setup my RAID-1 array took some trials. To date I haven’t tested that by unplugging drives but will when I have some time.

It’s only been a few days but I’m pretty confident that I’m leaving the microsoft OS world behind me for now. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll come grovelling back in no time.

Is it just me or is this just another modified shell emulator? It sure looks a lot like a *nix screen if you exit your windows manager, or ctrl-alt-F1, and fire up vi or your favourite text editor. There are certainly no distractions in that environment.

Interesting looking project and great to see new software that’s not so GUI intensive.

Link courtesy of Chris.

Jaimie past this my way, another great 2.0 project. Careful, read before you play.

So I think these pictures will be my answer next time someone asks me how I like working in a home office. When I get drop ins to my office, they tend to be short, cute, and quite creative. That’s vastly different than the last corporate office I was holed up in.

As I fire up my C# debugger in windows it occurs to me “Is there a decent debugger for .NET code in MONO?”

Apparently there is. Having been a fan of debugging java code in jdb instead of a GUI, I like the looks of this. In fact, after a quick glance over the commands I would say that this debugger is based on jdb as the command set looks similar.

Now if you’ve never used a command line I’m sure you’re mumbling the standard caveman comments about using the command line for debugging. All I can say is there’s a learning curve, it feels clumsy at first but it quickly surpasses any GUI debugger in terms of performance, speed of use, etc as you become proficient with it.

Can you get up and running much faster in a GUI debugger? Yes, no question. Can you say the same after three months? My experience is no but I’m a caveman.

In case it hasn’t become clear, I’m on the virtualization bandwagon. At least when it comes to my desktop. In terms of server based stuff, no clue.

Back in my mks days, we used removable harddrive chassis to mimick virtualization. So my desktop had a removable drive as it’s primary drive. Depending on what was happening I’d have three or four physical drives in my office. My two core environments were a Red Hat drive and a Windows 2000 drive. There’d be a few extras depending on the projects at the time. Anytime I wanted a new environment, get a clean drive, plug it in and install the OS.

Looking back at it now this was just a virtualization hack. It was a lot better than dual boots which were clumsy. This setup was a complete pain if you didn’t have network file storage available as you could only have one drive active at a time. Obviously you’d also be stuck booting and rebooting your machine all day long.

Time to move on……

My father sent me this picture. A kilometer long water bridge? Umm…I’m no expert but I think that’s cool. More details here.

In case anyone’s paying attention, here’s where I’m at in my attempt to be a computer geek.

I’ve ordered up a new desktop after having been running laptop only for over two years. Quickly, it’s details are:

• 2 GB fast RAM.
• 2 x 320 GB drives.
• Intel board and processor.
• nVidia video card with dual heads.

All parts are fancy pants parts, ie respected brands, so it’s not cheap but it’s still a great deal, especially compared to a laptop.

I’m now planning to start with fedora 6 and try Xen and VMWare to virtualize a windows desktop for development purposes. I’m going to start with xen as it’s built into the kernal and uses paravirtualization. Certainly, I’ll use xen for any linux based virtualization but I don’t see doing much of that. Hopefully windows will work nicely as well, if not I’ll move to vmware.

Other stuff, I want to setup a software based RAID-1 array. My plan, at this point, is to use this desktop as my workstation when at my desk. As well, it will be used for some file serving purposes on our home network. When I need to be remote, including within my house, I will do one of the following:

• ssh into the desktop.
• remote desktop into my virtualized windows machine on the desktop.
• bring a copy of my virtualized windows machine with me for use on my laptop.

I intend to quickly move my laptop to fedora as well. As well, I’m going to give Mono a serious look for windows development in fedora. In terms of databases, I may just run a small virtualized windows machine on my network for sql only. Or I’ll just use MySQL, code primarily in fedora, and do all my final testing in windows.

So basically, still a lot of crap to test.

Some entrepreneur advice from a non-entrepreneur.

We all get excited about cool tools or ideas for cool tools. You don’t want to be so emotionally attached to an idea that you make excuses for it and blind yourself to reality. On the other hand, you need to be emotionally attached enough to see it through. It’s a tricky balance.

My take? I’ll take a clear problem and an unknown, or challenging, solution any day over a cool solution in need of a real problem. The worst situation is when you dream up a cool product and then start searching around for a problem to solve with it just because you think it’s cool.

Solve real problems. Don’t create products or businesses and then search for problems to solve with them. Find the problems real humans are experiencing, get excited about them, then solve them. Get excited about the real problems missing sound solutions instead of solutions missing real problems.

It’s a far more sustainable business model as well as it allows you to outgrow the solution you find today. As opposed to desperately clinging to that cool whatchamajig you dreamed up years ago while your market’s long gone.

Okay, how many different ways can I say that…..Oh, and having said all this, I’ve never done either so I wouldn’t listen to me.