Being Clear About The Work I Want To Do (Part 2)

A month ago, I wrote a post saying I want to be clear about the work I want to do and that I'd follow up every month or so.  It's about that time.

I'm doing something interesting.  I'm learning.  It's open source.  There's, so far, no bureaucracy.
I'm not yet teaching and I'm still a long way off from making any money.

I've started working on the CLFS (Cross Linux From Scratch) project.  I've opened two tickets for changes that should be made to the embedded book and submitted patches.  They're minor things, no one seems to have noticed yet, but I feel very proud of myself.

I'm making progress and it feels really good.

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America. $&#* Yeah!

I've been having conversations with various different people over the past few months about the state of America: our education system, economy, corporations, tax law, and politics.  One trend I'm seeing from the people I have conversations with (and both on TV and online articles) is that people are very pessimistic.

I'm not pessimistic.  I'm very optimistic.

Maybe we don't have the highest ranking education system.  Maybe we're outsourcing a lot of jobs to India and China.  Maybe our political system is fractured and uncooperative.  Maybe all this is true.

But you know what?  Everyone outside North America, even if only slightly, is envious of us.  Maybe they're not envious of all our things, but we have something that's better, worth being envious of.

We have the best sports leagues (NHL, NFL, MLB, NBA, and PGA).  We have THE financial market (Wall St.).  We have the best higher education system (everyone knows Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Yale, heck even my alma mater RPI).  We have the biggest, most high tech companies (Google, Facebook, IBM, Apple, and Intel).

Almost all of these things that we have, that are the best, are spreading world wide.  It's a global economy and in order to grow, it's required.  But they all started here and for the most part are based here, in the USA.

This is the reason so many people still flock to the US.  We're still the land of opportunity, of the free, and where dreams can come true.  It's why we have an illegal immigrant "problem."  So many people want so badly to come here that they're willing to break the law, hide, and do jobs for very little pay with horrid work conditions.

Stop being pessimistic.  It'll only hold you back from greatness, especially in America.

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Gawker Got Hacked... I Dislike Online Accounts

Gawker got hacked over the weekend and had all their users' data stolen, including encrypted passwords.  Awesome.

Gawker at least emailed all the people who had accounts letting them know that this happened, which is nice of them.  I didn't even realize I had a Gawker account, but I do.  I've changed my password there as well as my Google and Amazon passwords.  I don't have any idea what password I used for Gawker but figure I should be cautious since I did use my real Gmail address for the Gawker account.  All my banking stuff uses usernames and passwords I don't use anywhere else so I'm not concerned about those.

I'm thoroughly annoyed by this.  Generally I don't like getting accounts at tons of websites, mostly because I don't want to remember all the logins.  On my work laptop I use Password Safe so I don't have to remember any passwords or usernames, but I shouldn't have to.

OpenID isn't the answer.  I don't have the ability to easily generate throw away email addresses (right now).  Using Gmail's "+" option doesn't work on 90% of the sites I've tried.  So far, just not having accounts is the only answer.  But not having accounts is actually fairly difficult these days.

I'm thoroughly annoyed and I don't know how to fix this.

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My Inspiration

I like playing with computers.  Professionally, that's all I really want to do.

I've been playing with computers since 5th grade.  My family bought an Apple Mac Performa 577 and I couldn't get enough of it.  I bought huge books all about how the software worked, I downloaded all sorts of things from AOL and then the Internet.  I just had to play and learn.

In high school I attended a vocational program for computing.  Most people thought it was odd I'd that I'd attend vocational school as I had good grades and took honors courses and that just wasn't something that people thought went together.  I loved it.  I'm so glad I went to vocational school.  Everybody should go.  Learning the basics of a trade is invaluable further on in life.  And yes, basic IT tasks are basically a trade these days, that's what we learned (A+ certification, installing Windows, putting together computers, basic networking, etc).

I used to be a die-hard Apple fan.  I bought the first G4 Yikes! tower from our local Apple reseller in high school.  I had read about the announcement of this model and just had to have one.  I spent my entire savings from working that summer to get it.  I got the 400 MHz one, before they downgraded the lowest model to 350 MHz.  I felt special.  66 MHz PCI graphics!  Yeah! :)
Apple gave me a free copy of OS9 because I answered a lot of questions on their online support forums.  This was huge for me.  I didn't have much money but I really wanted OS9.  Getting a free copy built a ton of loyalty for me.
I then bought the OSX beta.  It was slow as balls, but that was OK because I was on the cutting edge.

In college I played with a lot of Linux but still had my G4.  I went to opening day at the Crossgates Mall Apple Store in Albany, NY.  I got a free t-shirt and that built even more Apple loyalty.  I couldn't afford buying updates to OSX, so I installed Yellow Dog Linux on the G4 and it became my NFS server for my music collection.

I then went on to built computers and install Linux on them.  One winter when I came home for the holidays I literally had 8 computers packed in mom's minivan.  It was awesome.  I built Gentoo Linux from stage 1 on a 200 MHz Pentium system.  It took days.  It was so much fun.  I ran Return to Castle Wolfenstein demo servers off my laptop and built my first ever computer from scratch just so I could play the demo on Linux.    It was an amazing learning experience.  I learned that the motherboard I got had a newer chip set that didn't have support built into the Red Hat 7.2 provided kernel for the IDE controller, so it got stuck having the processor clock everything in and out in PIO mode.  The hard disk performance was atrocious.  So I learned to build kernels.

Fast forward about a decade.  Now I work at a big Fortune 500 company writing .NET software, playing with RFIDs and smart cards, and soon I'll be diving into some Verilog.  I'm basically an engineer who does DRM for physical things, but I can't really go into the details.  It's interesting, but I want to get back to playing with computers and especially Linux.  Up to the beginning of 2010, I was designing and building an embedded XML-RPC server in C++ for a PowerPC board and the desktop Java app to control automated board testing.  That was a cool job for the technical things, but the business side of things seemed to be turning for the worse and I jumped to the division I'm in now.

These days, I want to play with embedded Linux.  It's cool.  It runs a whole ton of stuff.  It's inexpensive and there seems to be a real dearth of quality people out there who know what they're doing with it and are willing to share that knowledge for a reasonable price.  I want to become one of the people who knows what they're doing and then teach other people those same skills.  Along with my continued interest in many things related to computing and Linux, this is my inspiration for writing a book about embedded Linux and for wanting to help with the Cross Linux From Scratch project.

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Absolute FreeBSD and Building A Server With FreeBSD 7

Two books on my bookshelf, that I read over a year ago, are Absolute FreeBSD: The Complete Guide to FreeBSD, 2nd Edition by Michael Lucas and Building a Server with FreeBSD 7 by Bryan Hong.  I bought them at about the same time and read them together.  I was wanting to use FreeBSD on my desktop machine and I was setting up a virtual private server (VPS) on RootBSD to serve web pages, mail, and be an network time protocol server.  These two books, although both published by No Starch Press and about the same operating system, are very different in both content and style.

Absolute FreeBSD is a thick tome covering everything about FreeBSD that an aspiring computer savvy person would want to know.  Basically, you could read Absolute FreeBSD, never read the official FreeBSD Handbook, and learn very similar information all while building a computer system that can serve web pages, DNS, mail, and many users.  Michael Lucas is a great technical writer.  He keeps things light when describing situations but then provides just enough technical details about how things are supposed to work, interspersed with step by step instruction, to assist you with setting up your own server.  It's one of the best written books about computing that I've ever read.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and putting the information to practical use.  It's an awesome book and I learned not only how to set up a FreeBSD server, but also, why certain things work the way they do (especially DNS which is rather difficult to explain).  This book will be a lasting reference book on my bookshelf that I will refer to in the future, even when doing non-FreeBSD things (like DNS), to help refresh my memory.

Contrast this with Building a Server with FreeBSD 7, which is purely a step by step (literally) manual on installing and configuring often used software packages on a FreeBSD 7 system.  There's very little, if any, explanation on: why you should set up configuration files in the specified ways, why certain commands are issued the way they are, and how to do anything beyond the basics of installing and getting said software running.  I'm sad that I spent money buying this book, I could have gotten just as much out of it by borrowing it from a friend or library.  I only used it once and now some of it is already outdated because the software packages described are either out of date or because FreeBSD has moved on (already being at version 8.1).

The way these two books contrast each other is astounding.  Usually, the No Starch Press books I've read are mostly written similarly to Lucas's style.

One thing I definitely got out of these two books is that I want to be a writer like Michael Lucas.

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QEMU Booting CLFS PPC Issues

I'm building version 1.1.0 of the Cross Linux From Scratch (CLFS) PowerPC system.  I don't actually have any PowerPC hardware so I'm using QEMU.  I have built QEMU 0.13.0 from source because Debian Lenny only comes with version 0.9.1 and it's a bit old.

When booting my CLFS system in QEMU, this is my command line:

andrew@bigbox:~$ qemu-system-ppc -nographic \
-hda cross-lfs-ppc/disk.img -kernel \
cross-lfs-ppc/clfs-fs/boot/clfskernel-2.6.24.7 -M g3beige

The switches used are:
-nographic -> QEMU should output to my terminal rather than VNC
-hda -> This is the file to use as disk /dev/hda
-kernel -> The kernel to use
-M g3beige -> QEMU should emulate a beige G3 PowerMac

When I was building my CLFS system, I didn't follow the directions for Yaboot because I was under the impression that I could simply hand QEMU the kernel and root file system and it would be happy.  When creating my disk image, I didn't create any partitions, everything's simply in hda.  One of these two spots are probably the root of my problem.  I'm going to try building Yaboot first and if that doesn't fix it, I'll work on creating the partitions correctly within my disk image file.

When booting, QEMU goes through its normal bios output but after finding a display and building the device tree, it hangs with:

Calling quiesce ...
returning from prom_init

After a few minutes, it will reboot and end up at the same place.  The verbosity is not much help for debugging and Google doesn't seem to be my friend with this issue.

I'll be sure to either comment on this post as to my resolution or I'll write another post detailing the fix.

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