LifeHacker posted a link to a nice little ‘Learning the Command Line‘ article. I get asked a lot to explain my obsession with the command line and why I’d want to seemingly live in the past.

While the sheer power you have is the biggest reason, the next biggest reason is it’s ubiquitousness. I could be using that word completely wrong so I’ll explain. A real example, say I need to search through a large codebase on a project. I’m looking for any mention the word “CreateConnection” in any c# file. As well, I don’t care about any file that has the word “Test” in it’s title as those are unit tests. As well, I only want a list of files. I don’t want specific references in the file, just a list of filenames as I’ll then open up those files and edit by hand. I type one line, and yes I can do type this without referencing 18 books:

find . -name *.cs | xargs grep -l CreateConnection | grep -v “Test”

Let’s not even get started on what else I can easily add to this to write the list to a file, ftp it to a network location, run this as an hourly job to update a network location, and on and on.

So does Visual Studio, or some other gui, allow me to do that? I would guess it would but I don’t care about that. Here’s why. Tomorrow when I’m working on html files while building a website, or xml documents, or txt files, or any non-binary file, I can do the same thing. I’m not bound to finding a new editor or gui that’s implemented this. As well, I can login to almost any server on the net through ssh and do the same thing. That’s powerful.

The same applies to my obsession with vi. Everything I take the time to learn in vi, I know have available to me for any non-binary file on any *nix based machine. Again, in my humble opinion, powerful.

Now I don’t plan on getting my wife or dad in a terminal session but if you use a computer for anything beyond checking email and browsing the interweb then do yourself a favour and try the command line. You will be useless at first but didn’t your parent’s tell you, if it was easy everyone would be doing it.

Meetings make you dumber. I hate to day I told you so, but I kinda sorta maybe did.

An old post of Steve’s about related to OS X users jumping to Ubuntu. Steve pretty much sums up why I have no current plans to become a mac user…

“The reason that Mark and Cory are moving to Ubuntu is that they are uncomfortable with Apple’s use of closed-source, proprietary formats. Cory in particular seems to have a real problem with corporate invasiveness, closed formats, and DRM.

The Mac has never pretended to be anything other than closed and proprietary. Lots of people like to say that the Mac would be the dominant platform today if they had only licensed the Mac OS. Lots and lots of people really wish they could knock together a box of parts and run OS X. This isn’t even touching on the fact that Apple software isn’t open source. The Apple box is, more or less, a closed loop. You’re in or you’re out.”

Ok I really didn’t mean to just swipe Steve’s entire post but he does such a great job summing it up…

“Finally, people switching away from OS X is a good thing, more or less. Sure, Mac users Apple to gain as much market share as possible but ultimately, people switching away is an indication that the OS competition isn’t just between Apple and Microsoft. If Vista kicks ass and Mac users start bleeding over to Ubuntu or another flavour of Linux, you better believe that OS X will become better than it is. It may even become a more open system if the Apple marketing wonks figure that that’s the best way to keep users.

Please relax folks. The canaries aren’t dead on the bottom of the cage, they’ve just flown the coop.”

I’ve added a new category titled ‘Linux‘. I moved a few previous posts, not all though.

Damn, why didn’t I think of that?

This is another example of something I’ve personally ‘hacked’ almost everyday and of course it never occurred to me you could design a product out of it.

“Stainless steel can colander great for draining small cans such as tuna”

Link from cool tools.

If you’re curious what ubuntu is really about and where it came from, a great place to find information is Mark Shuttleworth’s writing…

“With Ubuntu, our vision is to make the very best of free software freely available, globally. To the extent we make short-term compromises, for drivers or firmware along the way, we see those as bugs, and ones that will be closed over time.” [link]

“In the 1990s, Shuttleworth participated as a developer of Debian, a computer operating system. In 2004 he returned to the Linux world by funding the development of Ubuntu, a user-friendly distribution of Linux, through his company Canonical Ltd. In 2005 he founded the Ubuntu Foundation and made an initial investment of 10 million dollars. In the Ubuntu project, Shuttleworth is often referred to with the tongue-in-cheek title Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life, or SABDFL. In September 2005, he purchased a 65% stake of ImpiLinux.” [link]

Now that’s some interesting office space. Some videos.

Now that I have some experience with Ubuntu, I find myself looking for excuses to keep running fedora on my desktop. When you have the likes of Eric Raymond jumping to your OS you have to like your prospects. I have no idea how legitimate this ‘Goodbye Fedora letter’ is but if it is then it’s very interesting.

My only hesitations with moving my desktop to ubuntu are dual monitor and raid-1 support. I’m sure they’re both doable but I’d have to feel cozy about that first.

Jaimie sent me this link to ubuntu on tap. I don’t even know if ‘internet cafes’ still exist but if they do then someone’s got to install a row of taps with various distros being served up.

I’ve been in meetings the past two days and so far my experience of running ubuntu on my laptop is that people are certainly curious about it. System76 sells hardware exclusively powered by ubuntu, including some nice looking minis.

Do I recommend that people switch to a linux distro? No. I’d suggest that everyone explore some of the stuff that’s available and if you’re new to linux then ubuntu is the one to try.

There’s a lingering perception that linux is painful. During our meetings someone was explaining their wife’s experience with her new apple notebook and the fact that she plugged in her camera and her pictures were automatically imported etc. The next comment was something along the line of “you should see how painful it is in linux, mounting drives and crap”. Ahhh, that’s just not true anymore.

Later during the meeting I plugged Jaimie’s memory card into my laptop and instantly had a popup stating something like ‘there appears to be a pictures on this memory card, import?’

If you haven’t tried linux on the desktop in a while then just give it a try, things have improved. Is it better than windows, apple, etc? No, they’re all unique and there’s reasons to use each.

My offer….If you live near me then I’ll happily burn you a ubuntu live cd to give it a try. Or even simpler, download and burn one yourself. Or get free cd’s shipped to you.