Thursday, March 02, 2006

Of Penguins & Snakes

I have once again started 'playing' with Linux, and you would expect of me, (If you know me), I have been exploring it to the fullest extent able. I have burned no less than 28 distros to CD/DVD & also tried several of the BSD flavors as well.

So, at the moment my laptop has, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Fedora & the dreaded M$ Windblow$ XP installed. I hope to eventually pick one distro that meets my needs and start moving friends, family and clients to it, without the fear of being unable to support them hanging over me.

Ubuntu is so far the most promising, but the latest version does not play well with the touch pad on my laptop. Of course none of my users, has a laptop so this is of little consequence to them.

I also decided, it was high time to learn to program again, as the dusty old memories of basic on an Apple 2e were of little use in accomplishing anything I want done these days. So after a bit of research, I have discovered the joy that is Python.

What a wonderful language, easy to write, easy to read and yet amazingly powerful. I have learned the basics, the minimal basic mind you, in about a week. That has been enough to truly start a hunger in me to 'learn it all', (yes, I know this is not possible), that I my write or modify programs that others will find as useful as I do. That said, here is a quick and very standard example of Python, the universal first program written by an student in any language:

#hello world
print 'hello world'

The line starting with # is a comment, then next line is the entire program needed to have Python print hello world to the screen. Even my grandma would be able to read that.

Well enough for now. TTFN!!

Life Never Stops

Well... Until death anyway.

So, again time has passed at an alarming rate and my intentions of writing here, on a regular basis, have gone the way of the Dodo.

Yet, here I am now.

And why? Well... I don't really know, but let's take advantage of it while we can.

My nephew, is doing pretty well, and does not appear to have the heart defect, most often the cause of early death, found in many with DiGeorges Syndrome. Praise the Lord!!

Life is still hectic, VMK is still a time consumer, blogs still do not write themselves and I am likely still the only one reading this anyway.

If you get a chance, visit this site:

http://www.northamericanpatriot.com/provictory/

Sums it up pretty well to me!!!

I have other news to report, but I will do it in other posts, perhaps as soon as I finish this one.

Only time will tell.