Mon 15 Dec 2003
Its been a while since I updated the site. Dang … time sure does fly when your busy.. Lots of music stuff happening, lots of customers clamoring for website updates, a few new larger customers .. life has been good .. I can almost feel a bit of an economic upswing.. hopefully it is the real deal.
Lets see .. a few weeks ago, I totally borked my FreeBSD box … I did a “buildworld/installworld” — basically this is equivilent to upgrading your Windows 2000 to Windows XP or your Mac OS X 10.1 to 10.2 … but whats pretty nifty about the FreeBSD method is the fact that it can do it in such a way that everything is compiled and determine before hand (while the system is still online and totally functional) and then just for a matter of minutes (less than 5) does it do the actual copy over of the new system and reboot to load the new settings and all of that..
Needless to say, when your running a server or in situations where uptime is a must .. being able to update the system with as little down time as possible is a very good thing.
In anycase, I did it slightly wrong (didn’t read the instructions quite right) and since it is updating a lot of the core system files and didn’t complete, I ended up with a system that simply didn’t boot. DOH! However, as with any screwup, it provided me with opportunity to learn all about how to make it better. 
Unlike other operating systems where if your lucky you would be able to simply install over the borked installed, cross your fingers and hope everything is fine (though generally a hard disk reformat and clean install is the norm) — FreeBSD offers up a bootable fix-it CD (second CD of the install CDs) and let me pick up where I screwed up … it hummed away just fine. Fantastic.
Given the fact that this is my first FreeBSD box and it is acting as a two printer print server, file server, web server, mail server, dns server, desktop machine (dual monitors, kvm, cd-rw, cd, sound, dual network, keyboard, mice, yada yada..) plus is able to keep up with the way I work (there are times when I have my email client open, 30-40 websites open (via two or three browsers), open office word processing documents, calc spreadsheets, 1200+ song play lists running, instant messenger client (aol im, yahoo im, jabber), ftp client, gimp image editor, scribus desktop publishing app, programming editors, logged in via SSH to 3-4 other servers, lots of terminal windows open, etc..) and just continues to hum away (month or two at a time without reboot) is simply awesome.
Granted, there are some things that I don’t particularly care for with the *nix desktop .. cut/copy/paste is not completely standardized across applications.. while most will do the text thing just fine .. other things such as images, document conversions, etc is poor at best .. Also along the same lines, for some reason some apps will not see all of my fonts .. they will either try and use their own fonts and/or a subset of the installed fonts. Granted, some of these apps are simply older and do not conform to current standards, but every once in a while I’ll run across something that I just sit back and think “this is lame”..
However, the failings of the *nix desktop pale in comparison to the number of insanely great, time saving tools. Simple things like “always on top” for any window, window shading, vector based icons/interface, tabbed web browsing, no virus/virus scanners churning away behind the scenes, no spyware, huge & easily accessible application collection (via the ports system), stability/stability and more stability, general responsiveness of the interface, customization options, lots of shortcut keys (and completely configurable — ie ALT + RIGHT CLICK to resize any window on the desktop..), great printer subsystem (many consider it the best on any OS), PDF integration in the interface (make anything a PDF.. either export or print to PDF functions available), strict separation of user & admin privileges (98% of the time I run as an underprivleged user so anything I do can’t screw up the entire system)
Needless to say, it now has been about 5 months since I switched over to FreeBSD as my primary desktop. To an extent, it feels akward when working on a Windows machine. Its funny in a way .. When using a Windows machine, I tend to hit interface funtionaility walls and think to myself “how did I EVER work without this feature??” — things like tabbed browsing, pop-up ad blocker, always-on-top windows, window shading, virtual desktops, etc.. Sure I suppose many of those features I could buy for $20-$50 a pop to get similar functionaility, but the question ends up being “why”?
Perhaps the one big surprise that I had was Microsoft Office vs OpenOffice.org … I have been using OpenOffice.org almost exclusively for the past 2-3 months.. I use it for opening MS Office documents (haven’t run across one yet that doesn’t open in OOo) as well as creating documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.
The one thing that truly sets OOo far and away from MS Office is its stylist panel. The stylist panel, the only default floating panel when you initially run OOo acts similar to style sheets in web design and desktop publishing lingo. Essentially instead of manually formatting .. you simply setup styles .. ie — a standard text style, standard text bold style, page header, section header, sub header, blocked text, etc… Then simply select the style you want when you are laying out the document and your set … later if you need to change a header or body text .. simply modify the style and everything will auto format accordingly.
So what else can you do with styles? Well one thing that is “insanely cool” is using those styles to aid in the creation of the table of contents, alphabetical index and other document organization tools. I remember writing papers in Office where I would have to manually maintain and update a table of contents. In OOo, since everything is a style, simply pull up the table of contents tool and say “create here” and bam .. a table of contents .. fully functional, auto updating and correct. Total creation time? First time use was under 30 seconds.
How about an index? Slightly more difficult but still VERY cool .. go to where you want the index in your document, select “Insert -> Tables & Indexes” — click on “Alphabetical Index” then tell it what words you want indexed .. you can cross reference specific keywords and much more. After that is complete, it creates it and your done. It will allow multicolumn layouts, grouping of various terms and other nifty features to help manage the look and usability of the index.
Of course, there are lots of other similar tools for things like foot notes, illustration indexes, bibliography, user defined, envelopes, and much more.
Granted, I am sure that these features are built into Microsoft Word .. somewhere. Infact when writing this, I checked in Word 2000 to see about creating Table of Contents and Indexes .. however, quite frankly, I didn’t quite understand what they are talking about. Seems like since there isn’t built in styles, you have to go in and mark everything and then it will read those markings and create the indexes.. blech.. I dunno .. seems like a less than elegant solution to me.
For OOo to have these great tools, rock solid stability (atleast from my use), multiplatform (*nix, mac, windows and more..) and to top it off, completely utterly FREE … man … I dunno, seems like very few people should still be stuck on MS Office. Sure there are those individuals who are using MS Office’s VB scripting and so forth and it would take time to convert those to OOo’s python scripting .. but for the vast majority of users .. the transition should be relatively painless.
Guess thats all for tonight. Quite a long entry I have made.. hehe.. till later.