Making Glade run on Precise Puppy

Being a Crazy Old Programmer, there are times when Crazy Old Programmer Thoughts create little fires in far-flung reaches of my brain.  About a year ago I started collecting night sky images with the thought I would write a C# program to watch for odd things up in the heavens.

Specifically I wanted to look for meteorite trails and bolides.  It was not a success but not a failure.  The proof-of-concept was to make one second exposures and save 24 hours of these images.  Exposure time on day sky images would be adjusted accordingly.  That would yield about 86400 files for each 24 hour period.

Windows choked horribly.  Copying that many files from one directory to another required more than an hour of the computer's time.  Processing the images were slow, likely due to the file system and that C# doesn't compile to the hardware, rather to an intermediate CLI.

Anyway, I started looking and thought I would experiment with minimal Linux distributions.  First one up is Precise Puppy.  Install on my little HP mini was fairly painless and overall the OS is extremely responsive for such minimal hardware.

Next step is getting the DEVX package installed and running. 

Slow it Down, Son!

I have been trying to tell programmers to 'just slow it down and think a bit' for years.

Whether you’re knitting or programming, working faster will only slow you down. Or at least that’s what Jeffrey Ventrella argues. In “The Case for Slow Programming“, the tech author makes the claim that software developers need to slow down if they want quicker results.

Nice article.  Take a look at it here.

Difficult Holidays - Yet Another Lesson on Enjoying the Simple Things in Life

Some lessons in simplicity come as gently as a Sparrow's feather landing on your arm.  Others are more difficult to accept.

We divorced back in 2007.  She liked the complex life, full of intrigue and lies and deceit and conspiracy.   It's not that she was happy with this, she never seemed happy, wanting things to be increasingly more complex.  She would spend days analyzing events and gossip to arrive at conclusions that seemed outrageous to a simple fellow like myself.

Aside from an occasional text, we had no communications, likely for the better as we were certainly not compatible.  She may have begun learning the pleasure that comes with simplicity a little too late.

A few days before Christmas she passed in her sleep, after a day of making cookies with a neighbor.

So, please take some time to enjoy the simplicity in your life.  So often our lives become twisted and complex.  That is not where peace thrives.  Find that peace and enjoy it.