all that glitters..??

"Never buy low serial numbers." Easy advice to give, but hard to follow. Witness the modern-day genius of pre-marketing: every time a neat new hi-tech gadget gets announced, a virtual army of unsuspecting consumers turns out to pay for the privilege of becoming beta-testers. Egging them on are "reviewers" (possibly hired shills), who write glowing reviews of the as-yet unmanufactured product in question. Occasionally, we are treated to videos of consumers camping out overnight in front of an electronics store for the privilege of being first in line to purchase a shiny new experimental gizmo that the manufacturer needs to get rid of before a greatly-improved version 2.0 is launched a few months later... http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20111205#feature

I could haven't have written it any better than Robert Storey, as above.

i found an old .iso in my archives. wondering why i had it in the first place, i started exploring it... i am most impressed by WattOS R4. i couldn't believe how fast it boots, how efficient it's footprint is, and still functional. i have it installed now and think i am going to keep it.

i am using wattos4 as a browser appliance - extremely nimble and fast. who would have believed it from an ubuntu base! so, i plonked for it's latest iteration WattOS R6, and found it to be slightly worse than wattosr4.

i have reviewed antix before, but i can't recollect. i will have a look and update this post here.

leaner code is cleaner code is more efficient code

leaner code is cleaner code is more efficient code. a program with 100 lines of code is better than a program with 10,000 lines of code. less prone to bugs and (un)intentional security holes, easier to decode/maintain, cheaper to run... etc.

of course, comments are not code and documentation is to be encouraged. but documentation should be maintained separate from code; not maintained within the code. any documentation change should not result in code change requests.

i'm gradually migrating to the console, which is where it all started! :-) i strongly prefer working from the console, mainly because console apps are leaner and not dependant on unnecessary services like mouse or window manager. i fire up x, only only when i need to use gui apps. i work on the console within tmux (previously screen), which allows me to keep my environment when i transfer between console and x.

i am on a constant quest for more efficient apps. soon as i find one, i change over. efficiency means smaller code, focussed approach. for example, i changed over from screen to tmux a while back, and from ratpoison to dwm more recently.

my toolkit

i am on a constant quest for more efficient apps. soon as i find one, i change over. efficiency means smaller code, focussed approach. leaner code is cleaner code is more efficient code.

linux roadmap

just read a comment by Tomáš Pospíšek in a blog. I have been thinking about this recently and couldn't have put it much better. So I quote verbatim:

I can see that additional daemons running idle in the background (“background”, for “the casual” user and D-Bus seem lately to be indicative of “without any no documentation at all”) are even further cluttering up the system. I can also see, that it will add a few layers of communications, and hard to see protocols. Unfortunately I fail to see, what good such a daemon is good for at all.

$ ps auxw|wc
186 2242 18356

Very far from KISS. And since KISS is also a aesthetic system quality, having 186 processes running on a plain desktop system with only 11 user visible applications is quite ugly.

I’d argue that one of the main dangers of Linux is that it is acquiring all the bad properties that Windows had in the past: nothing is documented, nothing is transparent, everything is binary or in some undocumented protocol that can’t be dumped into a text editor, nothing is meant to be touched by the user directly, but only through some GUI thing( which connects to a message bus, which connects to a daemon, which changes some registry, which triggers some helper, that … etc.)

how-to manual mod

http://android.modaco.com/topic/318375-how-to-manual-mod/page__view__findpost__p__1412211
how-to mod any firmware or mod on your phone step-by-step

I have learnt a lot from this forum and a few others. I think I should document where I am and how I have modified my firmware, if it helps others. I suppose this is the ethos of open source - learn from others, build on it, and pass it back.

my philosphy

as i experience more in life and (hopefully) become wiser by experience, i find that i am leaning towards a particular stance, which seems to be getting stronger with time. i have arrived at this independently, but i also realise that others have trodden this path before (and long before and much more than) me. i find my philosophy epitomised by

this blog

my *nix adventure: venture to give something back… knowledge shared!

Primary purpose is probably to serve me as a reference to what I have been doing and my reasoning behind it, to aid my memory a few years later, or when disaster strikes and I need to do it all over again.

Secondary purpose is for others to help themselves. This is probably the ethos of the Open Source community. Use the knowledge freely made available by others, build on it, and give it back freely to everyone without reservations.

This blog is a tribute to the Open Source community, and all the individuals behind it! To give something back, I will endeavour to explain what I have learned, and assist with all reasonable queries. Of course, this also depends on whether I know the answer... I will respond to queries or comments, with updates within the post, or in a new post.

PS: I am not a regular poster, and there might not be frequent updates...