I’ve decided I’ve been hitting facebook way too often. I think it becomes more interesting when you only view it once every few days. How long before we as a society decide that social networking is just a passing fad.
I’m a certified RHEL 5 Linux engineer (several years ago), but my employer was purchased by a much larger company. and our new direction is all SLES Linux based. I’ve been dealing with SLES for several years now, and I’ve finally decided that my initial assessment was correct, and I definitely prefer RHEL over SLES. RHEL has several winning features. CentOS exists, for one, making free RHEL installations for development and testing quick and easy. RPMFORGE exists, which provides tons of prebuilt non-standard programs quick and easy to install. Without these two open source additions, I think RHEL would rank just barely above SLES in my book. The commercial versions are fine for production systems, where you aren’t making rapid changes on a regular basis, but the open source version rules.
You may have noticed that the frequency of cat stories has dropped drastically here. That’s because I decided to create a separate blog for my cat tales. It’s in the blog menu up top, just click on “cats". Once I figure out how to move all the old stories posted on this blog to that one, I’ll do that.
Mac nerds, I recommend Istat Menus 3, a (not free) system performance monitor that displays its output in the menu bar at the top. The 5 computer family pack is only $24!
I spent Thanksgiving at home, watching football on tv and writing Perl scripts to get md5 checksums on all my media files, so I can verify my backups and eliminate duplicates. Coding is calming on the nerves (when it works 
.
I installed Solaris 11 in a VM, and was surprised to come to the realization that it’s been almost 8 years since I touched a Solaris box, and I’ve apparently replaced everything I knew about that OS with Linux knowledge. I read a little about zfs, and that sounds really cool, but I don’t know if I really need to take a step back 8 years, and re-learn the differences in management of an obscure operating system just to learn about another volume/file management system that I’ll probably never use. Oracle sparc computers are hardly comparable to the market leaders that Sun used to be.
