Going back to Fedora Core

My recent Fedora Core 9 can be said successful. I still like Gentoo so much. But, in the work place, running gentoo may risk me to stay longer in the office. My choice of alternative is "Fedora Core 9".
I began this with Ubuntu 7.04 which was the left over from the previous. And switched to Kubuntu 8.04 with KDE4 three or four months later. Disappointed so much and tried Fedora Core 9. Thought about Open Suse, but FC was the next.

I tried Fedora Core just once about two years ago for a couple months. I guess it was FC6 or FC7. I switched to Gentoo when RedHat 9 became Fedora Core. So basically, I left RedHat world long time. I don't even remember how it was.

In short, Fedora Core changed a lot from where I stopped using. The biggest advantage of FC9 is very considerate default. Different from Ubuntu policy (literally enabling everything regardless of system resource for ease of use), FC focused more on lower level stability such as kernel API compatibility across the versions. Hibernate works very nice. Good for laptop. So, in kernel level, Fedora Core opens flexibility more, and it is stable more.
But don't get wrong with X11 crashes. That's not due to unstable kernel. That's because the gap between distro's open end and user failure to provide suitable driver. I believe this has been and will be the endless fight for Linux kernel and X11 driver.

KDE4: Gentoo, Kubuntu, and Fedora Core 9

I am okay with KDE4. There are still some quarks in KDE4, but generally I like how it is now. I can't explain detail of KDE4 in each distribution. In short, I dropped Kubuntu for KDE4. I agree that Ubuntu linux is doing a great work, but with KDE4, they need to catch up.

With Gentoo, things are smooth. Sure!! I pay huge compile time for this. In my work place, things are moving in fast phase. So, having gentoo isn't quite suitable. I chose Kubuntu when I had a chance to refresh my work desktop. Kubuntu KDE4 was pretty disappointing. One of most annoying example is that I couldn't move widgets in panel. Right click did not even offer "Move" option which I remembered it was there on Gentoo. So, I had to find another time to refresh my desktop. My desktop didn't find time to kick out Kubuntu, yet. I could flush and rebuild my laptop during the last weekend with Fedora Core 9. Still some issues, but much better than Kubuntu.

When I get a chance, I will compare rpm vs. deb. In short, deb is more convinent, but rpm is more flexible. dpkg(deb package) mainly uses package based dependancy and extends out to file based integrity check if it needs to. RPM, on the other hand, takes file based, but yum wraps these into package level and group level ( collection of packages ).

to filter .svn view

find is a great tool. But, find treats all files and all directories equally including .svn dirs. Suppose we need to see the directory structure of a certain directory and issue this command:

$ find . -type d

If the current directory is under svn version control, find will show many .svn directories, too. Well, since find is a great tool, it will have some filtering functions, too. 'man find' and we can come up with this to filter out .svn.

$ find . -name .svn -prune -o -print

Hmmm.. We select non-.svn by inverting the result. But, we don't know it is a file or directory. Unix has another great tool called egrep.

$ find . -type d | egrep -iv ".svn"

We used invert matching not in find, but in egrep. Inspecting a directory will be much easier with these two tools. For svn specific, we can use 'ls' command on svn.

$ svn ls -R

But, ls isn't good for distinguish file or diectory.

Python and DB2

We have a DB2 backend and I started to test it with PyDB2. Here is a tutorial link. In short, nothing is surprising. It uses standard python DBAPI interface with some good utility in DB2.db2util package.
Initially, I thought this client package would give different usage because DB2 client is different than postgres, mysql, or Oracle. However, PyDB2 is written well by supporting standard API.

Shell, Brace expansion

I found that I research this whenever I think of this function.
If I have to select file a,b,c only in /tmp, brace expansion is the answer. /tmp may have bunch of other files. Also repeating /tmp/a, /tmp/b, /tmp/c is annoying.

$ ls /tmp/{a,b,c}

Brace expansion is not used often, but when it is needed, it is super useful. I have to leave this note hoping that I have a place to lookup at least.

KDE 4

I am a little late to install KDE 4 since it was out in the last year. One of my biggest woe was 'what if it is not fully compatible to KDE 3?' It didn't happen, yet. I enabled OpenGL. After I lost interests about compiz-fusion, it's been a long time to work with visual effects.
KDE4 looked nice. At first, I was confused from reorganized menu. But once used to it, it was useful. I liked tab with recent items. KDE4 has zoom feature. I am not sure if it is from OpenGL because it responds pretty fast.
Migration is generally successful. Now, I have to find a time for my work desktop.

Another 2:00am wakeup

This happens quite often, these days. I used to sleep through the night. Usually I enjoy doing things in early morning, like 5:00am. 2 isn't good time to wake up. This happens especially I get to sleep with some thoughts. Last night, I was thinking about 'How to generalize test directories'. I collected good number of test cases. My solution is providing default callback handlers, and specific handlers will override if specified. Loading/Unloading/Reloading modules at runtime isn't fun, but better than introspect.
If someone asks 'why is introspect bad?', I don't want to say it is bad. It isn't suitable for callback handler. The code is half open, and the rest half will be provided at runtime. Thanks to duck typing, traceback will byte me way later. With introspect, class name doesn't need to be fixed. I need to grab class name on the fly. But, other than this benefit, whole chain of responsibility comes after that. It is very difficult problem to figure out "Is this the callback handler for event A or B, or is it really a call back handler??" C++ compiler will be useful in this case ;)
If constraining class name by fixing it, I know what I am binding. Much simpler and yeah.. I am lazy.