Coffee|Code : Dan Scott - Personal

Long overdue pictures of Arik

dan@coffeecode.net (Dan Scott) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 21:46:20 -0400

On the comfy handmade quilt that cousin Janet made for him

With the ever-hamming big sister

The ability to eat solid food is not necessarily a prerequisite for entry to university

Risque! Look for a similar pose from him in a centerfold in about 20 years.

The MEC double bike trailer / stroller (2009 edition) is a hit with the kids (and us)

Sitting up with Grandma at eight months

A jovial jumper, he is

Activity centres are also a great source of entertainment

Here's looking at you, kid (from the Hicks reunion)

Linux on the desktop, ten years later

dan@coffeecode.net (Dan Scott) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:33:18 -0400

It's a running joke at the Linux Weekly News at the start of each year to predict that "this will be the year of Linux on the desktop". In our household, it's been Linux on the desktop for over ten years now.

A week or so ago, I received an email from the Linux Counter asking me to update the status of my account. I was a bit surprised to see that I had registered an account stating that I had a machine running Linux back in May 1999 - more than ten years ago! Then yesterday, while pawing through a box of miscellaneous computer crap (doesn't every geek have a few boxes of those?), I came across the receipt from CheapBytes for two CDs: Red Hat Linux 5.2, and Linux Mandrake 5.3 (Venus) dated February 23, 1999. It was a direct result of having run into Linux in 1998 at IBM when I was testing a port of DB2 to this previously relatively obscure (to me) operating system. Having cut my UNIX teeth earlier that year on AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, and SCO OpenServer, I was surprised at how capable it was on our relatively cheap testing hardware, and something in my brain clicked and sent me over the edge to learn more, more, more about this Linux thing. Shortly thereafter, I was submitting an order to CheapBytes from my work address.

I distinctly remember trying to get Red Hat 5.2 running on my IBM Aptiva at home, with no success, but the slightly more bleeding-edge Linux Mandrake handled my hardware without too much pain and actually produced a working XWindows interface. Glorious! I even managed to get Lilo to support dual-booting of Windows and Linux, so that I could geek out and then later Lynn could reboot and get some real work done. Or, I could play some serious games. Let's not get our priorities too screwed up. Somehow I managed not to fry our computer, despite rapidly entering the land of custom-compiled kernels and experimenting with different packages and RPMs from different distributions.

I ran Linux at work, as well, dealing with horrible things like Token Ring drivers in the early days (lots of custom kernels compiled there). I wrote manuals in gvim and built a documentation management system on a LADP (Linux, Apache, DB2, and PHP/Perl) platform. Figuring out solutions built on Linux often opened up much faster, cleaner ways of getting work done, and I never had a complaint about my productivity. A few days ago, I was listening to a Hacker Public Radio podcast in which many of the round table contributors mentioned that they couldn't run Linux or BSD at work because their machines were locked down, and I thought "How sad!"; these are clearly smart people and they should be able to select their own tools to get their jobs done. Imagine the fun that would follow if you hired a crew to renovate your house and then required them to use the set of tools that you had purchased at a discount store!

By 2001, whatever the current version of Linux Mandrake was was just running all the time on our home machine (I was a silver member of the Mandrake Club, oh yeah!). I wasn't playing many games anymore, although I did buy and play the Linux versions of Heroes of Might and Magic III and Soldier of Fortune and Alpha Centauri. I was even deeper into geekdom, doing some editing and writing for The Linux Documentation Project and minor hacking on projects like Wine (necessary for running Lotus Notes for work at IBM, you see) and PHP here and there. And when I wasn't monopolizing the machine, Lynn got tired of waiting for the system to reboot and she just jumped into Linux (using either Gnome or KDE, and cursing me only slightly when I switched the default desktop or upgraded and things moved around). So, we've been a primarily Linux-based family since 2001 I guess.

In 2004 or thereabouts we switched to Gentoo to try and avoid the upgrade "who moved my cheese?" hassles. The desktop layout stayed more stable, but the pain of having to recover after major configuration changes or blocking dependencies got tiresome and in 2007 we switched to Ubuntu and have been pretty happy with that ever since. Lynn had to jump back to Windows every once in a while when she started writing her thesis (curse those MS Office 2007 .docx files and layout changes between OpenOffice.org and MS Office) but otherwise, for us, Linux on the desktop has been part of our reality in some capacity for over ten years now - and almost a full-time reality for 8 years.

If you want to give it a shot, I would recommend Ubuntu as a good starting point for a general introduction to Linux. If you're one of my friends working in the film or audio industry (hello Ian!), Ubuntu Studio is a version of Ubuntu specialized for your needs.

Rewards of northern living

dan@coffeecode.net (Dan Scott) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 23:39:45 -0400

When we moved to Sudbury, one of the draws was the wealth of trails available to us for hiking, biking, and cross country skiing. Between work and school and the arrival of Arik and Amber, however, it's somewhat rare for us to take advantage of those trails that are literally at our back door. This summer we got in a few good hikes, and picked some blueberries, but I had brought my mountain bike ride out for only one brief off-road spin. Well, until last week...

One fine sunny day, I headed out for what I thought was going to be another quick ride. Then I took a turn that I hadn't before, and started on a (for me) epic ride around Laurentian Lake. My neighbour / friend Markus had told me about this trail, but I didn't think I had the stamina or skills to pull it off. Our terrain is an incredible mix of glacier-hewn exposed granite, deep woods singletrack, and lakeside rides. This ride put all of those elements together; the following picture captures a rest break I took at the top of a rock outcropping about one-third of the way into the ride; it overlooks Lake Laurentian, a star-shaped lake about one kilometre behind our house:

After the intense rock climbing & descents (yes, at points I threw the bike over my shoulder and clambered up and down), the ride settled into a marshy trail, then smoothed into classic singletrack through a pine forest that provided welcome shade for this pale torso on an intensely sunny day for early September. After dipping close to the lake several times, a waterfront trail emerged and I managed to capture this rather spectacular shot from the other side of Lake Laurentian:

At this point, I was getting pretty fatigued (I had skipped lunch before the ride and had no food or drink with me - yeah, duh, it was going to be a short ride, remember?), so the Lake Laurentian Nature Chalet was a welcome sign that civilization (and crisp, cold, clean drinking water) wasn't that far off:

My bike looks pretty good resting up against the chalet's waterfront railing, doesn't it?

One more long climb brought me to the lookout:

Such beauty does come at a cost, unfortunately, at least for those who don't ride often enough. Luckily, I was able to pay the price in scrapes and bruises this time around! Following is a picture of my lightly scraped knee; my elbow took more damage (but I'll leave that to your imagination).

From the outlook, it was only another twenty minutes or so of familiar trails to get back home. All told, a great ride, and one that I hope to repeat--albeit with appropriate provisions, or a bottle of water at least--before the summer is out. Also, if you come to visit, you would be well-advised to bring your mountain bike. I'll be happy to show you around a few of our backyard trails!

(My apologies for the (lack of) picture quality; as was previously noted, I hadn't been planning on a long ride so I ended up putting my cell phone to work)

Arik and Amber update

dan@coffeecode.net (Dan Scott) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 08:38:01 -0500

Arik is just over eight weeks old now (and over fifteen pounds!), so I'm long overdue to post some photo updates of the family. The following photo was taken when Arik was about six weeks old. He loves the sling; so does his Mommy, and and so does his Daddy (who has an extra-large version to fit his extra-large frame). Amber prefers us to use the Austin Powers-style baby carrier, though.

Three most important people

Janet sent us this fabulous soft, warm quilt for Arik that will undoubtedly accompany him for years to come. In this picture, he's lying on the floor in our living room soaking up a bit of the sunshine on a warm February day in Sudbury (it happens, honestly!):

A study in contrasts (quilt courtesy Janet)

Spook loves Arik (and the quilt, and sunshine) too

Amber loves Arik. Loves holding him, loves singing to him, loves being sung songs featuring both of them that Daddy makes up on the spot... only sometimes is that a detriment when Arik is sleeping and she wants to wake him up

Big sister doesn't look _that_ big next to Arik

Amber also loves the camera. (For the dentists out there, she is on a weaning program for her pacifier, don't worry)

Mugging

Arik apparently likes the camera too.

Mugging, part two

Updated: 2009-03-01 Thumbnails were all linked to the same image... fixed!

Seven things

dan@coffeecode.net (Dan Scott) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:56:35 -0500

I was tagged by Lukas for the "7 things" meme, and meant to do something about it, but I've been kind of preoccupied with the new baby and the sprinting toddler and work. Anyway, it seems like a heck of a lot more reasonable than the evil Facebook's "25 things" meme, so I'm going to take a few minutes to try to play along.

I was an early riser until I was around 15 or 16 years old and discovered the surrealists. At that point, I began experimenting with sleep deprivation as a means of stimulating my prose and poetry. This is also when I began drinking coffee. After about a month, I was no longer capable of being an early riser--and the fruit of writing experiments was, uh, not too impressive.
Rather than going directly to university after high school, I elected to take what is now termed a gap year. No trips to Europe for me, though; the goal was to refine my bass-playing and music-reading skills and head to a post-secondary music program. I recorded a few prog-rock tracks in a studio with a fantastic couple of guys (hey Pete and Mike!), but ultimately didn't put enough effort into my bass to carry out the plan. Let me assure you that a year of working night shifts at a convenience store in the entertainment district of a small city is not a waste of time; I can't count the number of experiences that I'm thankful for having had during that time.
Although I roast and grind my own coffee, I'm not a coffee snob. In fact, I possess almost no sense of smell and I suspect that my sense of taste is limited in comparison to most people, and I'm quite happy to drink diner coffee. I cannot stand the taste of Starbucks coffee, however.
The first time I was able to run a full kilometre without walking was when I was eighteen. Since then I've run a couple of 5K races and and a sprint duathlon.
I'm pretty sure I was destined to become a systems librarian. When I was 10, I used to hang out at the local college's computer room until the students would log me onto a completely restricted Gandalf mainframe account so I could pretend to be Matthew Broderick in WarGames. My first real job, when I was 14, was as a "computer page" at the Barrie Public Library Children's Annex. It was my responsibility to oversee the use of the bank of Commodore 64s that the library made available to children, luring them in with games but requiring them to complete their allotment of educational software first. Oh the power.
I occasionally wrote reviews for random CDs that came into the campus newspaper office. Nobody else wanted to review this orange CD called Tragic Kingdom by some West-coast band, so I took it on. I gave it a savage review; I wasn't impressed with faux-ska and couldn't stand the lead singer's voice. Six months later No Doubt's "SpiderWebs" was in high rotation on every radio station in North America (look, folks, that song is repetitive enough without being played twice an hour!). I'm sure that my negative review still gnaws at Gwen Stefani today as she weeps bitterly in her platinum mansion.
In grade one, my report card read Dan is too critical of his classmates. In my defence, if they weren't so stupid--come on, sound it out buddy--I wouldn't have been critical. Okay, not much of a defence.
I am not a very demanding friend. I (almost) never call, (almost) never write, and (almost) never visit. Okay, scratch that: I'm a crappy friend. Most of my close friends found out that we were expecting a second child only through Lynn's Facebook account. I called one couple shortly after Arik was born and his quasi-namesake (one of the Eric's in our life who bring honour to the noble name) asked me after a few minutes: "So, uhh... did we know that you were expecting a baby?". No, no you didn't, and that's not your fault. Man I suck.
I'm really good at arithmetic.

Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.

Share seven facts about yourself in the post — some random, some weird.
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

Wow, that was fun. Lemme see, I'm going to break the rules and just tag two people: Helmut, because he's one of the only other people who worked on the ibm_db2 PHP driver out of passion rather than as a job assignment. And Gabriel because I like his style.