The Summer Begins

I am attending my friends' graduations tomorrow. Weird, to think that they are either continuing to ignore real life by going to graduate school, or actually accepting that it's time for real life.

I hate calling it that. Real life. I guess my real problem is that what we call real life is not a path to personal satisfaction. We are merely moving on to the next step that the capitalist system tells us to. I got lucky, this summer I'm hopefully going to be working with a very cool company doing some very cool things. But a lot of people are settling for the jobs they found.

Settling.

Due to life kicking my ass into gear, I've had a mini personal review. In how I treat others, to how I treat myself. I settled this past semester. I was getting school work done, and having some fun, but I wasn't thinking about what is best. Best for me, for my friends, for my community. It sounds lofty. It is lofty I guess.

I am tired of the way people in college tend to approach the life they want to have after college. It's some pipe dream. As if now is not the present. Somehow they are screwed into a life they wont like. I guess part of that can be that they need money to do what they want. But should that really stop you? If you die 100,000 dollars in debt or in the bank, will either make you happier?

I didn't mean to talk about that. Good luck to everyone.

My real point is that I am staying here in Blacksburg for the summer. I have a few things I think I still need to make the summer more bearable.

• Road bike
• New desktop computer
• Big widescreen LCD for the new computer
• Man purse ( that doesn't suck )
• People that visit me
• Driver's license ( no, I don't have one )

That's all I have for right now, I'll probably make a wishlist.txt file on my laptop to keep track of things I should save up for. Like a TV.

Congratulations to everyone who is graduating. Especially to the people I know and love.

Mass Murder at VT

I'm alive.

But 22 aren't.

You can check cnn, whatever. I can't quite fathom that 22 people are dead on my campus. It's gonna be a while before I'm ok.

Please pray for those who have been killed, and their families. I miss and love you all.

Back at School

So I've had a week of classes back at school and it has been an enjoyable experience overall. I like all of my teachers, and I got into classes I wanted to. I also still have perfect attendance and a perfect grade in all classes. Easy to say so early on in the semester, but I like to celebrate success at every possible stop I get. College is an experience that is hard to comprehend while you are there. I like to think that I have a good perspective on what I am going through, but it's hard to say without looking back on this experience in 20 years. It's not like high school where people get a lot of fanfare for completing successfully. Graduating seniors throw parties, sure, but there are a countless number of friends I have met and missed in the last 3 years that I will never see again. High School graduation sucked when you thought that you would have no chance to ever meet up with these kids again. I've seen most of the people I cared about after high school. College is totally different. People leave, move to France, get married, and leave no trace behind. Facebook obviously gives us a way to stay in touch in that superficial internet way, but it's not gonna let you hang out again.

Enough emo-tastic-ness for now.

What I'd really like to talk about are some alternative pieces of software I currently use, and have changed the way I use linux.

First I would like to talk about fdm. It is a replacement for fetchmail and procmail that doesn't suck. Plus using the new 0.8 release, you can have some pretty cool general mailbox rules. Case: You add yourself to a new mailing list. With fetchmail and procmail you'd have to add new rules ( even though phrakture has a hack to do it, it's ugly ). With fdm you can just use a matching rule and use the matched text as the folder to put the mail into. Dynamically created mailboxes! Did I mention that fdm has sane syntax? Yea, I didn't think I'd find something like this either.

Next up is Mutt-NG. I could talk for hours about it, but check out my config over at http://hg.codemac.net for it, and you'll eventually grasp the power.

Weechat is a very extensible chat client. It has a beautiful plugin structure, and has sane defaults. You don't have to configure it to the end of time just to get something usable. Nick colors, nick lists, etc.. are built in. The way irc should be.

Speaking of weechat, I use Bitlbee for aim, jabber, msn, etc. It is an irc server you run locally, connect to with your irc client, and sign on aim through your irc client. It is very similar to jabber gateways.
This has taken me from 3 chat clients ( one for jabber, one for aim, one for irc ) and brought them together into one client that's text based.

Why would I want text based? Because of GNU screen. Screen is a terminal emulator. Think of it as a terminal with tabs. The coolest part is you can "detach". Detaching is a way of placing the entire screen session into a background process. You can even log out of the machine and the screen session will persist. Think of this in terms of the permanent away messages most of us keep up on AIM these days. I can sign onto AIM with bitlbee, detach and logout of my machine all while staying logged into AIM + irc + etc. Ahh the power of screen. No more signing out of irc just to restart X.

One more app in my refusal to by stuck in X is MusicPD or "mpd". It's a background daemon that plays music. Thus you can log out, log in, start X, stop X, and your playlist will stay going. Another common use is to have a headless server sitting in the living room plugged into your stereo, and then clients can connect remotely to change what is playing. The clients available are many and varied. My favorites are ncmpc and Sonata. Go set it up and be happy.

Now for my favorite revision control system.... MERCURIAL! Sorry, I really like it It's a distributed rcs that rocks my world. I've tried using darcs and bazaar, but neither were fast enough for personal use, and not enough features like Mq and bisect like mercurial has. Try mercurial, you wont be disappointed.

Clearly not everyone is going to like the same thing I use. But what's significant to this is that for everything I listed here, there is an alternative. None of these are standard, and none need to. This is what keeps me using linux over Mac OS X. I just like programming and customizing to much to be forced into one way of operating. Also I am extremely keyboard centric. I hate using my mouse. You basically can't get a good workflow on Windows or Mac OS X. Especially on Windows. At least in Mac OS X most of the apps I listed here you can port over using Terminal.app, but Windows? Forget it.

The moral of our story? Open standards, open source, open choice

Unneeded

Unneeded Apology

Several things have been unneeded recently around Virginia Tech. The first I would like to point out is an uneeded apology from the killer's sister. Her family is not at fault in this tragedy. I know they must be going through some crazy stuff. The statement by Sun-Kyung Cho, sister of Seung-Hui Cho, on behalf of herself and her family:

On behalf of our family, we are so deeply sorry for the devastation my brother has caused. No words can express our sadness that 32 innocent people lost their lives this week in such a terrible, senseless tragedy. We are heartbroken.

We grieve alongside the families, the Virginia Tech community, our State of Virginia, and the rest of the nation. And, the world.

Every day since April 16, my father, mother and I pray for students Ross Abdallah Alameddine, Brian Roy Bluhm, Ryan Christopher Clark, Austin Michelle Cloyd, Matthew Gregory Gwaltney, Caitlin Millar Hammaren, Jeremy Michael Herbstritt, Rachael Elizabeth Hill, Emily Jane Hilscher, Jarrett Lee Lane, Matthew Joseph La Porte, Henry J. Lee, Partahi Mamora Halomoan Lumbantoruan, Lauren Ashley McCain, Daniel Patrick O'Neil, J. Ortiz-Ortiz, Minal Hiralal Panchal, Daniel Alejandro Perez, Erin Nicole Peterson, Michael Steven Pohle, Jr., Julia Kathleen Pryde, Mary Karen Read, Reema Joseph Samaha, Waleed Mohamed Shaalan, Leslie Geraldine Sherman, Maxine Shelly Turner, Nicole White, Instructor Christopher James Bishop, and Professors Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, Kevin P. Granata, Liviu Librescu and G.V. Loganathan.

We pray for their families and loved ones who are experiencing so much excruciating grief. And we pray for those who were injured and for those whose lives are changed forever because of what they witnessed and experienced.

Each of these people had so much love, talent and gifts to offer, and their lives were cut short by a horrible and senseless act.

We are humbled by this darkness. We feel hopeless, helpless and lost. This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn't know this person.

We have always been a close, peaceful and loving family. My brother was quiet and reserved, yet struggled to fit in. We never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence.

He has made the world weep. We are living a nightmare.

There is much justified anger and disbelief at what my brother did, and a lot of questions are left unanswered. Our family will continue to cooperate fully and do whatever we can to help authorities understand why these senseless acts happened. We have many unanswered questions as well.

Our family is so very sorry for my brother's unspeakable actions. It is a terrible tragedy for all of us.

Nicely said, but it's unneccessary for you to say all that. I think we all know that your family meant no harm on Virginia Tech, and I also think that it would be considerably ridiculous for someone to think otherwise. This also reminds me that some people are afraid of retaliation against south koreans? I think that would only come from people who were not at Virginia Tech.

Unneeded Attention

... from the media that is. The media has been hounding students on campus. I was called by a local newspaper for comment about the tragedy the night it happened. If you've seen a picture of a girl kneeling down to pray, that was my friend's piano teacher. She decided it would be a good time to pray, and when she opened her eyes, she was surrounded by photographers. When students went into the convocation ceremony, they were harrassed by reporters for comments.

It has been more than absurd, and most students will agree with me when I say that the majority of the media are representing themselves as heartless human beings.

Needed Love

One thing that was needed, that I recieved plenty of, was love. Thank you to everyone who has sent me messages through facebook and myspace. Thank you to everyone who sent me a text message. Thank you to everyone who sent me an instant message. Thank you to everyone for your phone calls. Thank you everyone for your hugs.

Thank you everyone ( besides the media ).

3 Keywords in C++

My teacher today in CS had some funny comments in class. This is a data structures class in C++. We have a project due in a week and a half, and everyone was asking questions about what we are allowed to use or do on the project. Some things came up like multiple inheritance, and other generalized features of the language. He said that he would allow all uses of the STL, any features of the language, except for 3 things.

1. goto -- If you are using goto in C++, you're doing something wrong. Straight up. Don't use goto in your C++. It's just wrong. I will beat you if you use goto in your C++ project.
2. rtti -- RunTime Type Information is what this stands for. You should be using dynamic_cast<> or any of the other cast's instead. C++ has plenty of solutions for anything about run time type information that you shouldn't have to use rtti
3. void* -- If I was talking about C, then you'd think I'm insane. But this is C++. You have all these cool ways of handling pointers, that you should design your program to not use void*.

I think these suggestions should be true for any project. Just thought I'd share.