Angelo DiNardi

I’ve finally made it to Mountain View, CA. I’ve moved in and all. I’ve forgotten how much “fun” it is to move into a new place — so many random things need purchased.

Tomorrow is the first day of my internship at Google. Should prove to be a great experience. I’m sure I’ll have some things to share.

California has been really incredible. I’m really loving the weather and the “feel” out here. It is so much different than Rochester or Pittsburgh and a welcome change. Shella and I spent yesterday in San Francisco exploring the Fisherman’s Wharf area (Flickr Photos).

I have a feeling that these three months just aren’t going to be enough. At least this will help determine if I want to move out here once I graduate. I can’t wait.

The past few months have been quite a ride for me. The path I’m heading down now is nothing like what I even imagined it would be a few months ago. Come Friday my time at BlueTie, Inc will end after 1 year, 7 months and 28 days of generally enjoyable employment.

I’m heading to Google in Mountain View, California for three months on an internship with the Docs team. I’m a pretty hardcore AJAX and Web2.0 developer from my time at BlueTie and my own projects. Going to Google is like making a pilgrimage to the holiest of web app places. I’m quite excited.

And then what happens? Back to school. School has been on the back-burner for too long now. I’ve concentrated on too many other things. I’m still pretty much on track to graduate reasonably on time — so that’s not the issue. The issue is I just want to be done. I really like my Software Engineering courses — but I like actually working so much more. I’ve found trying to do them both at the same time to be a futile effort. I can hopefully be able to wrap up school in about a year and a half or so and then head wherever my heart and career may take me. I’m hoping that isn’t Rochester.

Of course, what’s to say that doesn’t get interrupted again? I always have a number of things going on in the background. One of which might just change my direction again. It’s fun to have options.

I recently began using the auxiliary audio port on my car. I’ve had some interesting discoveries.

First, interference. The whole thing worked perfectly until I plugged in a car charger to the iPod. Over the speakers I was getting a ton of electronic noise from the iPod. Using the Click Wheel, having the backlight turn on and off all changed the noise. At my house we had similar issues with interference on our home theatre due to a ground loop. Ground loop explanation thanks to wikipedia:

… Low current wiring is particularly susceptible to ground loops. If two pieces of audio equipment are plugged into different power outlets, there will often be a difference in their respective ground potentials. If a signal is passed from one to the other via an audio connection with the ground wire intact, this potential difference causes a spurious current to flow through the cables, eg: creating an audible buzz at the AC mains base frequency (50 or 60 Hz) and the harmonics thereof (120 Hz, 240 Hz, and so on), called mains hum. …

The iPod is connecting to the charger which connects to a “cigarette lighter” type power port. That power socket and and the stereo have different ground potentials and thus cause the interference. To fix this I purchased a ground loop isolator. I found one at Circuit City for relatively little. Using 1/8″ stereo connector to RCA adapters to connect the iPod to the Ground Loop Isolator and then into the AUX port. Clear sound.

Enjoy.

Starting Sunday I’ll be in California for the AJAX World Conference. Expect to see some posts related to the conference.

I’ve been a Linux user for years ( on and off since 2000, 100% switch since Jan 2004 ) and I’ve used Gentoo for most of that time. I’ve run Gentoo on my desktop, laptop, servers; everything really. I’d spend days getting a system installed and usable, hours and hours making wireless networking slightly work on my laptop, and more time than I’d like to think updating systems. That all used to make sense.

Back in the day when really to keep on the bleeding edge of Linux software Gentoo was really the only option. If you wanted it in the package manager, that is. Obviously you could install things by hand with others — but Gentoo had it all in portage. But now when even “user friendly” disro’s like Ubuntu include things like Beryl — what does Gentoo really have.

I installed Ubuntu on my laptop finally — replacing Gentoo. When I booted it up for the first time I was able to use NetworkManager in the notifications tray to connect to an access point immediately. It “just worked”. Amazing. I didn’t have to do anything. Same thing with audio and video. It worked right out of the install. I really like that. I also like being able to update 60 packages on a system in all of about a minute.

With such ease of use and simplicity of maintenance where do distributions like Gentoo or Slackware stand? Hard to imagine many people continuing to use them or more, people starting with them. The days of hard to use Operating Systems is over — Linux is finally catching up. Is it too late to stop many of the Linux users from switching to Apple’s Mac? With the power of UNIX and the “it just works” mindset — why not? I’ve got a friend’s G4 Mac Desktop in my room which he lets me use. I’ve started to use it more than all my other systems, even though it is older than them all. Reason? It still performs well, “just works” better, and the user experience is nicer. I’m looking forward to the not too distant future where I can buy myself a brand new Mac.

It’ll be interesting in the next few years to see how much more Apple’s market share will grow. It’ll be especially interesting to see where more of the converts are coming from — Windows or other OSs.

I’ve lost track of the number of Wordpress installs I have on this server. Regardless, here’s another.