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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.

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!

Proof right here.

That is all.

One of my more favored software development blogs is Beautiful Code. The concept is that code that is properly elegant is going to be readable, functional, and most of all, working correctly. There’s a lot of focusing on unit testing, proper OO design techniques, and how to squeeze an elegant solution out of the nastiest conditions.

Well, I believe I have a Nasty Condition.

I hack on FORTRAN and Fortran at work, after getting out of the IT support gig. What’s the difference between the capitalizations? Easy. FORTRAN references the language pre-1990 (1950’s through to 1990), and Fortran is the more modern Fortran 90/95/2003 standards.

Fortran 90/95/2003 isn’t that bad to work on, actually. For its primary purpose (running numerical computations on hideously expensive computers), it works really well, and makes me a happy hacker.

FORTRAN helps to create ugly code. Complex looping and branching statements are much more difficult than in other languages, and many FORTRAN coders cut their teeth on it when the language was still implemented via punchcards, and “eloquent” coding meant as few cards (aka lines of code) as possible. Goto statements scare me. Gotos with literally 5-6 arguments terrify me. Did I mention that there’s limitations on line length imposed upon the language from punchcards?

The code in specific I’m working on is worse. Those working on it use no version control, so it’s full of commented-out things every which way, and it definitely dates from the punchcard era, as it lacks things like blank lines in between logical blocks of code statements. It has terrible, nonsensical indenting, and it relies heavily on subroutines acting in highly non-documented ways on literally hundreds of different, poorly named and undocumented, global variables.

Oh, and there’s a function that simply wraps ACOS(), the cosine function in FORTRAN. This is what it does:

FUNCTION ARCOS(X)
ARCOS = ACOS(X)
RETURN
END


Lovely, yes? Waste of a function to have to keep track of, yes? I’ve seen it in three different versions of the model, and it troubles me the same.

I also saw references to MS-FORTRAN 4.0 for MS-DOS in the comments. Joy of Joys. In addition, it will only compile with Intel Fortran. Portland Group’s compilers break a little bit on it, but gfortran, g95, g77, f2c, and sunf77 compilers all fail with pretty pyrotechnic displays with it.

Hopefully this stuff won’t drive me completely batty before I can understand what it does “under the hood” enough to re-write what I need out of it in something better.