Author Archives: John Havlik

Happy Summer Solstice

Posted by in General

Yep, the current season for the northern hemisphere is now summer. It would not be summer with out the sun, our local star.

And speaking of stars, the star Eta Carinae made its way on to the front page of Digg twice today. Eta Carinae resides at about 7500 light years away from Earth. Back in the 1840s the light from a supernova like explosion on Eta Carinae reached Earth. Now with composite pictures from NASA excitement over this star is increasing. According to Phil Plait, from Bad Astronomy, Eta Carinae should produce a gamma ray burst in its supernova event. A steady diet of these high-energy rays will kill all living inhabitants of Earth. Don’t panic, according to Phil the most likely directions for the gamma rays to be emitted during the event are not aimed directly at us.

-John Havlik

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Busy Weeks

Posted by in Announcements

The past two weeks have, to say the least, interesting. By next month, development on WP Trainer will begin. At that time, a quick update with more enhancements to Berry will occur. This includes fixing up the code section of this blog, and updating Moo.WP (mainly as it is a dependency for WP Trainer). Due to demand, watch out for a full-fledged Aptana installation on Gentoo Linux guide, with pictures. Along with the guide the SVG sources to the Aptana logo in the Tango color scheme will be released as the developers still have not made a SVG (or transparent PNG for that matter) logo readily available.

-John Havlik

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Vista Performance

Posted by in General

The Vista beta 2 displayed the potential of Microsoft’s new operating system, too bad that the included performance issues became worse. Last week I was called into a client’s office to try to figure out why a custom written command-line application took twice as long to complete in Vista. By no means is this an apples to apples comparison but the results are surprising.

This particular application written in Fortran an compiled in Windows XP took about 2 hours to complete it’s calculations on a Pentium 4 1.6Ghz machine running XP. The same application, running the same model, on a Pentium D 2.8Ghz machine took over 4 hours to complete when running Vista. Without even knowing that I have primarily used Linux as my main OS for the last month, they inquired on the benefits of migrating to Linux as they own the source code the the majority of the tools they use. Since none of their tools venture out of the command line world, porting them to Linux could be as simple as a recompile.

Last Saturday someone inquired on my impressions of Vista and Linux. Again there was no reason for the person to suspect that I run Linux, but they inquired anyways. These people are not the technical type, they know how to use their computers to aid them in their work and that’s about it. The simple fact that these people are frustrated with Vista and more importantly know Linux exists surprises me. While others have in the past proclaimed the respective year of proclamation the year of Linux, to date no substantial mass migration to Linux has occurred. I will not grant a single entity the privilege of the icon for a year. However, the next three years will be interesting, especially if Microsoft manages to piss off any major game studio (e.g. Electronic Arts).

-John Havlik

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Gentoo and an Aptana Howto

Posted by in Guides

Well yesterday, both Gentoo 2007.0 and Aptana milestone 8 were released. Thanks to some bugs in a previous release I was able to test milestone 8 on Gentoo last week; that was before ATI’s drivers went kamikaze.

Overall I am impressed with milestone 8, it features more advanced support of PHP, including variable highlighting. With Gentoo to install Aptana just make a folder in /usr/lib called aptana, then extract the archive to that point. After that make a file in /usr/bin called aptana, open it in your favorite editor (nano) and add the following:

#!/bin/sh
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox
exec /usr/lib/aptana/Aptana

Save the file and do a chmod 755 on it so that it becomes executable. Now try typing in the command aptana& into your terminal. If all goes right you should see the aptana splash screen. If you get a bug, look at the log file it directs you to. Should you see something like org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: No more handles [Unknown Mozilla path (MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME not set)] then your mozilla path is not correct. If the executable fails in general, you need to make sure you have the JRE 1.5 or newer. To get this just run emerge -p sun-jre-bin (you don’t have to use Sun’s JRE but that is what I use) if you like what you see then rerun the command without the -p. Once portage finishes doing its stuff, try executing Aptana again. It should work then, if not search the Aptana forums.

-John Havlik

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Vista, Ha! No, Thanks.

Posted by in General

Currently Windows only serves one purpose that Linux cannot. Think about it for a while. The only thing Windows does better is gaming. For the past 5 days, I lived without Windows.

There was a method to the ‘madness’, though something crapped out on me (ATI’s display driver) that just set me back a week. Luckily, I now work off of a 20GiB USB hard drive for anything important (work), which is good for when a system goes bonkers. In the process I realized two things:

  1. I really need a wide screen monitor.
  2. Having a laptop or some other powerful computer combined with my current setup would be nice.

Honestly, the realization of needing a wide screen monitor came earlier, but with the multiple desktops Gnome and KDE have, switching between them was fine, but it would be nice to fit Aptana and Firefox side-by-side for the benefit of testing. I’m just waiting for the ones that can fit 1080p HD video plus the taskbars to drop in price—one step down in resolution saves 300 USD. As for having an additional powerful computer (ideally a much more powerful one) so that I can have two separate computers, one that only runs Gentoo for work and daily use. Leaving the other open for playing games, and probably running distcc to aid in compiling for the other.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

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