I can see my house from here!

Where's the car?

I am reading and working with anything Gnu/Linux related that comes my way - in an attempt to gain some understanding and experience. I'm starting to see the picture at some of the detailed levels, but they are not consistent between their parts. Only general rules for each silo of exploration. I figure that I need a better road-map to studying so that I reach the "broad understandings" that one gets from an applied education.

In attempting to determine what to study first I surveyed jobs on Dice using the term "Linux Admin". From those I pulled the requirements and counted how may times a particular skill came up, and how many a particular area was either directly asked for or was implied as important by asking for a skill that applied to that area. What I ended up with surprised me as I got both a priority of subject area and a priority of subject depth in which to pursue.

		Area	Particulars (As of April 6th 2013)
		Everyone	CLI, Apache (install and maintenance, not code)
		OS	Red Hat & CEntOS, Widows, Scientific, Gentoo
		DB	MySQL, PostGRE, Oracle, MS SQL
		Scripting	Bash/sh, Python, Perl, Ruby
		Network	Firewalls, Routers, SNMP, Load Balancing, Mail, FTP
		Tools	Puppet, Nagios, NGing, Varnish, Git/GitHub, Svn
		Big Stuff	VMWare Sphere, AWS, SAN/NAS, LDAP/AD Exchange
		Themes	Configuration Management Monitor & Backup Version Control Security
		Certs	RHEL, Cisco
		Misc	Sed, Awk, Grep, Vim/Vi

It was then easy to align this with the project I was currently involved with. That helped me direct my study while directing my work efforts which made a real win-win for me finally. Don't see a lot of those anymore. Only downside is the legacy system I am on uses Zabbix which is NEVER asked for in the tools area. People who use it love it, and on paper it seems to do more. Guess we shall see.

REFS:

Dice

Closing thought(s):

I think if one knows any two of each area, you would be sitting rather pretty.

What is this place?

Can you believe I made a deck of flash cards to study command line functions?
Can you believe I read articles from 1999 about commands and they were still accurate?
Can you believe that anyone would do StarWars in ASCII??

  I was really impressed with the Ubuntu 12.04 I installed on my laptop. It was a much more grown-up GUI than I was used to. The community was very helpful in strange DELL wireless problems and volume switches and everything was running in a couple of hours. I did this months ago not really even knowing what a Linux distribution was. I easily found some great programs and had everything anyone needed  for daily operations. Plus it ran a lot faster. I used the laptop by switching drives so that I could go to XP, Vista, Ubuntu at will for several months. Then, eventually I stopped putting in the Windows drives and left it at Ubuntu.

 At work we have some deployed RedHat 5 systems, but we test and develop in Centos 5. My gut says they are different but the geeks call it the same - yet fear unplanned updates. Jury is still out.

 I did some training in Fedora running in a VM on Ubuntu.

 I installed Centos 6 on my home laptop to replace Ubuntu (entire rant here withheld).

 Between all these systems, there is nothing that seems the same at first glance. I remember (90's) when Windows decided that it's vendors had to follow a spec for applications so that there was a consistent look and feel to all programs. Sure that started as printer drivers (if you haven't heard of printers they are electronic devices that kill trees - go as your Father) and then progressed into the Tsarist regime we have today; but that consistency was important.I liked hitting the same key in all programs. It really cut the learning curve and made all of us more productive. These days, even Windows isn't following those rules very well so maybe that is now a moot point (another rant that could have been). That familiarity is missing in these non-windows systems. I think it will yet play a role.

 Being NOT on a MAc, and NOT on a Windows machine is very very freeing feeling. I totally am getting my geek on these days. There is a great satisfaction getting something done now. Of course, it is a bit harder. But I really know what I just did. I had to research what my choices meant. I had to decide that what I was doing was best for my goals. I was learning throughout the whole experience.
  I've built a couple of dozen systems from scratch now; On laptops, PC's, VMWare, VMBox and HyperV platforms. They are the same, yet they are different. There is subtlety and finesse and domain knowledge and discovery and mystery. But nothing catastrophic . Nothing unusual. Nothing insurmountable. 

 Where am I? I'm at the point where I have learned that you will get out of a Gnu/Linux system what you put into it. Its pretty linear that way. In Windows you get what you pay for.

REFS:

Ubuntu
Centos
blinkinglights.nl
   or if you are windows without telnet just watch Josh's recording here!
 Cygwin This is the best tool ever! 

Closing thought(s):

 I've learned so much and know so little, and I now know I know so little now that I know now what I need to learn now to know how to now the know how.  Now you gno.No?

The universe is against me (or for me)

Got roped into working on a Linux deployment at work. Dug deep into Redhat, Centos and Ubuntu in the last two months. Gnu/Linux (outside of apple) has actually come some lengths since I looked at it five years ago.

Dropped my apple iPhone, bought a Google with 4.1 and dove straight into the abyss. Again.

I was getting bored with Windows anyways ...

Closing thought(s):

Could be worse. Could be out of a job.

Quit quitting quitter

OK, I'll try it again (lawsuit won, jobs in demand), plus one of those crazed deviants from the edges of society has pointed out that there is MonoDev. Is this goodbye to the 3rd World of objective c?  What will I complain about when it works?

REFS:

Mono Dev

Closing thought(s):

Is it to late?

Don't remind me

I see it here just off my desk and I cringe. I hate your slim figure, you remind me of futility and waste.

REFS:

Everyone else is thinking it aren't they?

Closing thought(s):

Reoccurring theme ...

Still meh on the Mac

But I got this cool game on the iPhone!

Looked into the Windows 7 phone now that their new version is up and running. Guess what? It looks just like Mac. Developer tracks and distribution follow the same motif ($100 bucks and a cloud store). One has to hand it to Apple for the innovation as they got that in spades.

Here's the deal though: I can run the wPhone out of Visual Studio. I can write in c#, write games using XNA.I don't have to feel like I'm in a Conan the Barbarian spin-off when I code because I'm bashing cron. Wait, that sounds kinda fun.

Yet, when I conceptualize an application I think in terms of iPhone not wPhone. I own an iPhone, not a wPhone. My iPhone is free (company paid) whereas a wPhone would cost me an AT&T bundle. My company doesn't seem to want wPhones 'cause they already made that major deal for hundreds of iPhones. An iPhone is still pretty utilitarian for an Outlook-and-occasional-phone-call guy.

REFS:

Microsoft's App Hub - Home site.
Apple's iOS Dev Center site.

Closing thought(s):

... and I just got that cool game that only runs on the iPhone.

Still there?

Gathering gloom

I looked at the mac just laying there the other day. It brought back all those horrid things I learned so far; the marketing hype and later withdrawal; the tribal knowledge learning curve; the intuitively obvious that was only available to non-windows users.

I even fired it back up and started giving it another go. That lasted about five minutes. I don't even like the screen-saver I made for it. I get a sickening sad feeling in my gut sitting with it there so I put it back on the shelf.

Closing thought(s):

My iPhone just told me that the applciation I made and downloaded from the iMac is about to expire. Just reminds me of the $100 I'll never see again.