Halffull.org

In the spirit of my previous Exherbo review and guide to fixing an Ubuntu crash, let’s do the same for Fedora!

I was growing a bit tired of the development lag in Crunchbang Linux and needed a new distribution. I want a well-built system that doesn’t take too much administration so I can focus on other things. (As you may know, I have a tendency to set up and administer machines for fun, forgetting to do any “real” work on top of it.)

Fedora sounded good. All free software with fairly frequent updates. RPM hell is avoided with Yum. I particularly appreciate the use of the free Nouveau driver for my Nvidia card, and Kernel Mode Setting for a smoother start and fewer hassles.

When it works, Fedora is slick. They’re a bit ahead of Ubuntu in terms of features, with default SELinux, KMS, and better video drivers. Another thing I appreciate is that one of Fedora’s goals is to stay close to upstream. They don’t want to apply 10 patches to every package, preferring to send patches upstream and get down to zero distribution-specific patches if possible.

It’s quick to boot, particularly with KMS. The battery life is about 10-15% longer than with Crunchbang, even with more daemons running.

Continue Reading »

I’m pretty excited about Go, the new programming language from Google. It’s been my obsession over the last few weeks, and I think if you’re a programmer, you should learn it.

Why did I start? Out of respect for its creators, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. They helped create and popularize Unix, C, UTF-8, Plan 9, and many other things. It may seem like they’ve been under the radar lately in their research wing at Google, but I think they’ve just been building up a foundation of code and ideas.

Why is it exciting? It seems to have solutions for concurrency, compilation speed, and safety, while still looking somewhat familiar. You can run hundreds of thousands of concurrent goroutines. The entire Go library compiles in ~5 seconds. Go code runs almost as fast as C, without even being optimized yet. It’s type-safe without being too verbose.

It’s not as high level as Ruby or Python, but it can be more mentally satisfying in an OCD geek kind of way. It’s C without the pain.

Sure, it took ideas from Alef, Limbo, Newsqueak, and other languages (watch this then this for proof, and for enlightenment) – but how else can you make progress? Go has the momentum those languages never got.

And I, for one, am glad that the legacy of Bell Labs lives on.

Continue Reading »