I’ve been running OpenSolaris Nevada on my file server for a while now. While ZFS makes administration of filesystems beautiful, I’ve been disappointed with the zpool functionality.

In addition, administering the rest of Solaris is a maze of twisty passages, all alike. Things like Perl’s CPAN, which is supposed to have a high level of “JustWorks”, fails hard in Solaris (which includes both 5.6 and 5.8). Things like libtorrent/rtorrent and FLAC with Ogg support, which compile just fine on Mac, Linux, Cygwin, and OpenBSD, fail it hard under Solaris. I’ve been frustrated with all the little quirks of the system that just don’t seem to appear under other platforms. I’m underwhelmed by the SunPRO compiler set, and the system just feels *slow* to use, as compared to Linux on the same hardware.

So, using my handy-dandy external backup drive, I backed everything up, and installed the brand-new Ubuntu 8.04 on it, and while it’s back to mdraid and lvm, the rest of the sanity more than makes up for it.

Categories: Geeky Peawee
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Last week, my poor Tempo decided that it no longer wished to be for this world. As this leaves me carless, I went and got myself a new car.

What type of car, you ask?

A 2001 Audi A6 Quattro. And I love it.

It’s smooth, comfortable, and a great highway cruiser. That last part tends to be useful for me, as if I’m not driving 2 miles, I’m driving 200, and I enjoy how comfortable this thing makes long car trips.

Also, it’s badass.

Categories: Life of Peawee
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Apple’s walled garden works well for most people. I, unfortunately, am not most people.

This is my story.

As I’ve already discussed previously, iTunes has a certain amount of suck involved.

So, I’ve discovered Play, which sucks less in some ways, and sucks more in others. As so far, the more suckage hasn’t been so much of a concern for me yet, and after checking out the source code, it don’t look too hard to create some patches against. One of my “post-graduation to-dos”.

My CD collection sits as FLACs on my server drive, and Play handles it quite nicely, updating its sqlite database of music every time it starts up. To rip, I use sbooth.org’s Max, which includes the very excellent cdparanoia ripper and pretty good support for tagging, album art, and all the formats I’ve grown to love, such as FLAC.

Currently, there are a couple of weak links. Play doesn’t export playlists to plain text files (otherwise known as .m3u), and the built-in “Convert with Max” option only lets you select 10 tracks at a time. How am I supposed to convert 200-250 FLAC files into Ogg or MP3 to put on a portable player to bring around? Solution: the music library database is simply a sqlite database, which means I can hook up a Perl script to it and extract playlists like that, and run it through conv. For use with my iPod, I can simply make a small library in iTunes, and simply import into iTunes to copy to the little machine. No biggie. If I felt like it, I could most likely write an AppleScript to automate it for me.

CD burning? Same as with the iPod; just use iTunes to make it easy.

So far, I really haven’t missed it. Huzzah!

Categories: Geeky Peawee
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