Steven Reimer

Programming as the Magic of Legend ( http://jroller.com/page/obie )

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be. ... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn’t work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program."

I came into work thinking, today would be a good day to do the package updating that I have been prompted to do for a while. So I let the update wizard do it’s thing and at the end rebooted as needed.

While Fedora (6) was booting I noticed that eth0 failed to get an IP. No worries, we have dhcp hiccups at work alot. Finishing booting. Tried to get an IP manually - no go. Called over the IT guy. His laptop worked fine. My onboard Broadcom gig NIC isn’t even lighting up.

Figuring that the driver broker during the update I threw in PCI NIC. Still nothing. No internet connection means no online searching for solutions. So I thought, why don’t I try upgrading to Fedora 7. Having never done a smooth upgrade from one Fedora version to the next before I had my doubts. 1 hour later... my doubts are confirmed.

Next I tried a clean install of Fedora 7. 1 hour later - still no network.

Finally admitting defeat, I dug up the Fedora Core 6 install DVD and went back to un-updated Fedora Core 6 and now everything is working. Except Eclipse - the most important utility at work.

What have we learned kids?
Be wary of automatic updates. Proceed with extreme caution and have a contingency plan.

After all of that, I still prefer Linux to Windows.

I used to think that this would be a hard age to turn, but the more I think about it the more I am ok with it. Why not simply embrace the inevitable? It’s a path I’m going to have to walk one way or another? However, if I claim to be in some sort of early-mid-life crisis maybe I could get away with getting the V-max I’ve always wanted.

I have been trying to figure out the cause of my fatigue. Maybe lack of sleep? (usually 7 hours) Maybe poor eating habits - but I normally eat pretty well. Maybe a brain-draining, eternal project at work? But most likely the main cause is that it’s between 2 and 3 pm on a Friday.

It’s on Friday’s like these that I look forward to doing nothing on the weekend. Except that in the summer it seems that all of our weekends through August get booked up by the end of May. I’ll try and get some down time to relax Saturday and Sunday regardless.