markjgsmith

What a day yesterday. So much headwind from the world. I decided to back off from merging the latest archives plugin everything page support, because I noticed some strange things on the website. After spending quite a bit of time looking into it, I'm glad I held off, despite massive pressures from the world around me to hurry up. It's difficult to put into words, and I know it sounds bizare, but there are times when the world smells blood, it suddenly knows you are in a precarious position, and situations will materialise around you that make you just want to get whatever you are doing done. That's shen mistakes are easily made, and you find yourself merging before everything is properly tested, and of course big problems often ensue.

But choosing to wait and figure out what's going on properly also has a cost. The entire rest of yesterday I was punished again and again and again, everywherw I went. It made it hugely difficult to get to the core of the issue, but I think I managed to, and made some fixes. I tested it all in staging in the evening, it all looked good. And of course the same exact pattern from the previous night repeated. The world was pushing for me to continue and finish the work, to merge even though I was really tired from standing for many hours. Once again I decided to hold off until the morning, and once again that was followed by an angry world on the warpath.

I've hardly had any sleep last night, motorbike gang stalkers and several strange situations through the night. What a coincidence that there would be a night of sleep depravation. If you walk into the trap, you get punished, if you avoid the trap, you get punished.

Are you going to allow today world? Or are you yet again on the warpath? #

My ankles are massively swollen again. I guess it's all the standing I've been having to do to get the archives fixed. I only have internet when I'm standing up unfortunately. Plus, pins and needles in my legs last night because of the new restricted sleeping situation. Just so horrid. When are you going to give me a break world? #

By the way, forgot to mention, there was another clearly manufactured incident at one of the sandwich shops yesterday morning. They did the old one person that always gets my order right, remembers the garnishes I don't like, taking my order, then the other bloke, who always purposely gets the order wrong and sometimes turns into a total sandwich nazi, actually making the sandwich. It was quite clearly a planned switcharoo, and of course he got my order wrong, and I had to open the sandwich up in front of him and take out the disgusting stuff. Anyway, that was no doubt grounds for the bullying that ensued the entire rest of the day. And guess what, when I left the sandwich shop, crossed the road, and on the otherside there was a street vendor parked right there, seemed very intent on looking at me, as I passed him he said his line that he'd obviously been waiting to utter: "my dog". How uterly vietnanese charming and on brand for this place. #

The Lib Dems pro-EU pro-cannabis ticket

The UK Lib Dems have announced their policies going into the elections. It's a pro-EU pro-cannabis platform, which given the history might be quite a good combination. In all seriousness though, I think having cannabis decriminalised would eventually lead to much lower overall crime. It would just be a normal thing, no reason to get involved with crime. The bigger issue I think is to simultaneously try to tackle the binge culture that is quite common in the UK.

I think most adults would like to have the option to try cannabis every now and then. That's the responsible way to enjoy such a priveledge. The problem is that people often drift into a daily habitual relashionship with such substances. It's the same with alcohol. Both these substances can be fun, and even therapeutic, but when it's too habitual they make you forget how great life is sober. That's something I've really become familiar with the past few years. Being sober is awesome. Waking up early with a clear head is awesome. Feeling healthy is awesome. But it's a subtle feeling in comparison to alcohol or cannabis, so people miss how good it is.

It should be 95% sober, and just occasional stroll into mind altering substances territory. That's how I'd like society to be, where people were responsible enough to balance themselves. The focus wouldn't even be on these substances, they would just be peripheral, the focus would be on living life and contributing to society in a meaningfully way, where you could feel that your talent and efforts really made a difference. #

Linux desktop for developers movement

The main discussion in the Chefs Choice Ubuntu episode Ep#566 on the latest Linux Unplugged podcast, is super interesting, especially given my recent article about what digital collaboration looks like in the VFX industries. Such synchronicity. It was all brought about by the recent announcement over at 37signals that they are moving to Linux as the standard workstation for developers. DHH is somewhat of a major OG internet pioneer, so folks really listen to what he had to say when it comes to developing online businesses.

His thesis is that although Apple does have some nice hardware and software, it's been apparent for some time that their interests are not as well aligned with developer interests as they once were. So he decided to take the plunge and move all his developers to Linux which he feels is more spiritually aligned with his interests. It's somewhat of a bold move in an industry where most, or at least many, developers use Apple hardware and software. The cool thing is he's decided to channel his enthusiasm of the transition into a project, called Omakub, to help rapidly configure Ubuntu into a generalised workstation for software developers. Of course the project is open source and aims to help other small businesses and solo devs make a similar move towards Linux.

The Linux Unplugged guys, who themselves are extremely experienced running and maintaining Linux systems in a variety of contexts, go deep on the whole idea, and it makes for a tremendous episode. It's a subject I'm really interested in, and have been since my time working in VFX, where the default OS for engineers and artists was often Linux, in my case it was Fedora Linux. It was awesome, but it did take quite a bit of customisation to get things looking good and being functionally optimum. I was part of the engineering team that systematized that, but many folks don't have the luxury of an in-house engineering team, hence the need for the project.

Some of the key take aways:

• DHH’s project is a collection of setup scripts that configure Ubuntu Linux to be both aesthetically pleasing to the average developer, but also aims to install and configure many standard tools and software such as databases and text editors
• The scripts add lots of PPA’s so the latest and greatest versions of much used packaged can be installed
• They use a custom version of Gnome
• They opted for simplicity and familiarity, just curl and bash scripts organised in a folder structure, easily customisable, easily understood, just delete what you don't want
• They plan for 37signals to support the project and use it directly in their own work

Some of the additional topics discussed:

• It will be interesting to see how it’s maintained, how it evolves, similar projects have emerged in the past, the difficulty is often long term maintenance as priorities change, as 3rd party projects fall by the wayside and new ones come on the scene
• Mint, cosmic desktop, matte, are all essentially attacking this same problem from different angles
• The aesthetic tweaks are nice, it's suprising how close you can get to a setup that rivals MacOS in terms of looks, but it takes quite a lot of research and decision making, having a baseline like this could really speed up similar transitions to Linux for many
• It doesn’t separate out applications, user data, and the OS very well, ironically MacOS has recently gotten quite good at this
• What are the possibilities of running the scripts on a different base OS than Ubuntu?
• How and why one might want to do a project like this using Nix rather than bash scripts and curl, many portability, customisation and packaging benefits
• Using such a project to create little dev vms that you use in development
• Adding nix as a default tool in the tool chain

It's great to see such a project take flight, especially since it stands a pretty good chance of being around for a while as they are using it in their day to day business activities. Could be an awesome combo with one of those modular Framework laptops. In fact I believe I read somewhere that DHH is equiping many of the 37Signal devs with such devices. This has all the hallmarks of the maker / hacker movement. Really hope this project succeeds, I've seen something similar with my own eyes in VFX, so I know it's possible, and I'm almost certain something similar could be created for developer environments across the wider economy. Digital collaboration on Linux might be the next big thing. #