Two steps in the right direction

For a long time I've been trying to read more books in English other than those that have programming code or a technical subject. I remember reading quite a few books when I was in School in my junior and senior year back in Bolivia. Colegio San Agustin Por Siempre!! I remember enjoying reading those books, most of them were from Bolivian writers as well as some from Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa . By the time my nephew left after the Xmas holidays I decided to start reading more, I didn't know where to start so I thought that trying to pick up a book that I always wanted to read but never had the chance was a good idea. So I grabed myself a copy of 1984 ( George Orwell) and started reading it and so far I find it quite interesting, if anything reading fiction is waking up my imagination and my passion for the written word. Then a couple days ago I read "Chasing the Rainbow of a Thousand Books" from the WashingtonPost, I have to say that the article inspired me and at the same time brought memories from those years in high school. That same day I went my son to the library to pick up "The Cat in the Hat", Bob the Builder(DVD) and "One hundred years of Solitude" (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) . I now find myself going to bed reading either 1984 or 100 years. Is something that didn't happen for a looooong time but now that I started I don't plan to stop after these two books.

I'm a PLTB...

Today while reading the FullAsaGoog List I found a blog entry from Nick Tong talking about the type of programmer he is, according to the test presented here Doolwind's Programmer Personality Test. I obviously had to take the test and my result says I'm a PLTB kind of programmer.

Your programmer personality type is: PLTB You're a Planner. You may be slow, but you'll usually find the best solution. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing right. You like coding at a Low level. You're from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don't mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm. You work best in a Team. A good group is better than the sum of it's parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers. You are a liBeral programmer. Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

Linux is costing me $25.35 for now

I know it's been quite a long time since I don't write anything. Between preparing for my kids birthday party, cancelling due to snow and then resetting the house for a second birthday party we haven't had much time to sit in front of the computer. That and the fact that I didn't have a monitor for the Linux PC because I returned the monitor to my parents to build the second Edubuntu box. Well I finally got a monitor from Craigslist.com for $25 bucks. So far the whole computer has cost me, well $25 bucks. I got the PC from work when they were getting rid of a few PIII, the keyboard and mouse I got from my own scrap box, where I keep everything computer related, from tiny screws to Hard drives, CDROMS and even a DVD Writer. The initial network connection was, again, borrowed from my parents ;) . It was a Linksys External USB wireless adapter, now that I have returned all that I ran a cable from the main router in the house to the Linux box ( about 15 feet away). The best part of all, the software cost me about 35 cents. I'm just taking into consideration the cost of the CD where I burned the Edubuntu Image. Not bad, really not bad for a system that is great to play and work with. I have decided to reinstall Edubuntu from scratch on the same box, this time I'll pay more attention to all steps and probably write about the whole thing. The first time was a great exploring experience, but this time I'd really like to know what goes on as part of the installation. With some luck I'll be doing the third installation tonight.

Second Edubuntu System is a go.

I went to my parents' over the weekend. I wanted to install Edubuntu in their home PC an old Pentium III, 128MB and 500Mhz. I figured that instead of throwing that one out I would just try to install Edubuntu in it, after all every time my kids go there they want to play with the computer as well. My parents are not computer people by far. If anything they just check the news or the weather on the Internet. I haven't figure out how to take snapshots of the whole installation process yet but I will post them here as soon as I can find out how to do it. Installation was as the first time pretty easy, just select a few options and hit Enter. I hit a road block when trying to go through the step "Build LTSP chroot". The status bar just froze at 50% and nothing happened for a few minutes. Then I got a Screen showing all the steps of the installation and still showing the error message. I decided to try again so I turned off the computer and started the whole thing one more time. Same deal, when getting to the "Build LTSP chroot" step the whole process stopped at 50%. I started researching on the Internet what the LTSP was and how important was to have it on a stand alone PC not connected to a Linux server. Turns out LTSP stands for "Linux Terminal Server Project". Basically is an add-on package to the core Linux system that allows for a thin-client connection. From what I understand this is a way to run a network where the client has the bare minimum equipment and the heavy processing is done at the server. The Wikipedia article has a good explanation on this without going too technical. This website " LTSP, down by the sea: a 20-terminal Linux cybertent for education" provides a great example of the technology. Basically they connected a bunch of old laptops ( first generation Pentiums running at 120mhz) to a server and from there they have a running lab with access to the internet for everybody. In any case, having found what the technology was I decided not to go through that step since the PC was not going to be connected to a server as a "dumb-terminal".I proceeded to select the next step on the list. All applications got installed in little over 15 minutes and then Voila!! a new Edubuntu installation ready to play. So, if you are installing a stand alone Edubuntu system and get an error on the "Build LTSP chroot" step, just select the next step on the list and everything will get installed as usual. I figure that if I at some point need the LTSP package then I can probably install it later. Good stuff.

Edubuntu is great !!

I need to create a slideshow or a demo on how I did the installation, I've seen a couple examples on the web. I figure they are using something like VMware inside a previously installed OS where Camtasia can be run and grab the screenshots. I cannot see how else they would be able to grab the screenshots from the installation process. Something I like about this whole thing is that I'm learning new stuff and it's fun. I listen to Batanga all the time, however under Linux there is no Windows Media Player. There are some other options out there but I need to learn a couple more things to make things actually work. The thing is for now I cannot listen to music on the Edubuntu box but I see that as a challenge, I'll be posting information about some of the roadblocks I find with Linux. Some of the things I take for granted under Window$ are not as easy to setup ( for the moment) in Linux. I want to play poker also but the pokerroom.com website requires Java, guess what, for some reason that is not working either. I think that my first step in this whole trip is to actually start reading the documentation ;) . https://help.ubuntu.com/6.10/pdf/ubuntu/C/desktopguide.pdf main site: https://help.ubuntu.com/

Let's start the fun.

I had the idea of starting a blog long time ago. I actually started using my old grtfercho.blogspot.com site as a Internet Bookmark place. Kinda like del.icio.us before del.icio.us existed. I had 210 bookmarks on my old site that I cleaned and moved to my account in http://del.icio.us/grtfercho. My second take on blogging was @ cfblog.com/grtfercho, this eventually will become my official ColdFusion only blog, for now I don't have anything but the name. Too many things to do, a lot of things to organize. So what am I going to blog about? I have too many projects that I'd like to talk about and probably get some feedback. In the past I created my own wiki to organize my ideas and have all information in one place. It didn't work because there was no accountability. I was the only one with access to the wiki, therefore if anything was incorrect I wouldn't know about it because I put it there in the first place. Creating a blog and leaving the doors open for anybody to see makes me accountable of what I write, even if only a handful of people come to these pages I have to write thinking that from now on there's an audience. Blogging also makes me write, simple as that. Since English is not my native language I think that blogging will sharp my language and communication skills. Thank god for spell checker...!! The projects..... I have the domain programmingforkids.org reserved, I started looking for information related to teaching programming to kids and I really couldn't find a central repository. I decided to start my own. The website will help me understand and discover more about computer languages that I either forgot or haven't used in the past. It also gives me the chance to share and receive feedback. I think it will be a great experience. I also have the website LLAJTA.COM that I administer. A lot of things happening there, I'd probably blog more about the site on the site itself and not here. Only because the site is in Spanish and I plan to keep this blog (grtfercho.blogspot.com) in English. I may however write a couple things here related to the challenges found @ www.LLAJTA.com and to programming. What made me start blogging all of a sudden? I think the first step in all this was when I decided to teach programming to my nephew, he's 10 years old (Mar-2007). When I started looking for information about programming for kids I realized that at some point my kids were going to be in that same position and that I needed to start working on something so by the time they reach the appropriate age I can have a nice collection of data in one place. My son Ian is 3 years old now, he started playing with the computer when he was 2 , eventually after a few months he knew how to turn on the monitor (we never turn off the computer), select the bookmarks option from the menu and go to SesameStreet.com to play with Elmo. Now I decided to build a new computer for him. This time I didn't want to deal with Microsoft and Windows. I also wanted to start experimenting with Linux once again. I've done in the past and never successfully, there was always something else that pulled me away from Linux :( . I started looking around to see what distribution was the most acceptable for me and for him to start learning. I'm a Linux noooooobie (for now). After looking at some of them, Suse, Red Hat, Fedora, etc. I landed on Ubuntu and from there to Edubuntu. Needless to say I didn't look any further. Edubuntu is the perfect distribution to satisfy my kid's curiosity with computers and a good starting point for me to retake that lost and forgotten affair I have with Linux. It's been almost two weeks since the computer is up and running. I already found a few problems, no, not with the system, is just me. Since I don't know much about Linux I'm not familiar with the system and with the way to install and run things. I'll be posting my experiences about Edubuntu in this blog as well. cool enough for a first post. I have a lot of things to work on.