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So many things, so little time - and computery things!
I've been spending a lot of my day either working or exercising/preparing for the big mathematics test that's going to happen soon, and I do indeed know now that there's a difference between understanding the logic of something (whether it's a particular kind of programming or calculation) and being able to just do it without having to expend lots of work trying to recall how to do it.
"First you see the pattern, then you manage to make use of the pattern, then you use it enough times that you can reliably pull it off, and then you integrate it into your greater map". Or something like that.
And what have I spent my spare time on? Mostly wrangling with Linux. I decided to try to upgrade Debian to testing from stable, and in the process, I found out a few things. Most of these things then required me to restore Debian from a backup :p
I found out:
- The binary nvidia drivers don't like 3.x + my patchset (grsecurity for the most part). "Don't like" to the point where X's invocation of them causes a reliable crash.
- GNOME devs think smartphones are really neat. So neat they want to have a smartphone interface on your computer. Well, I suppose they're not so different from the MS developers in that respect :)
- btrfs is *slow* if you're ever thinking of upgrading with apt, or using something else with lots of fsyncs in it. The marginal speedup (perhaps, possibly, maybe) you'd get on an SSD by using btrfs rather than something more conventional like ext4 is really not worth it when you have to wait a day for what would otherwise take an hour. (I eventually gave up and reformatted the partition as ext4, then copied the contents from backup)
I'm getting less interested in bleeding edge as I go, it seems :) And I should really sleep now, because I can feel the tiredness making my posts strange. That, and I should rest so I'm well prepared for tomorrow.
"First you see the pattern, then you manage to make use of the pattern, then you use it enough times that you can reliably pull it off, and then you integrate it into your greater map". Or something like that.
And what have I spent my spare time on? Mostly wrangling with Linux. I decided to try to upgrade Debian to testing from stable, and in the process, I found out a few things. Most of these things then required me to restore Debian from a backup :p
I found out:
- The binary nvidia drivers don't like 3.x + my patchset (grsecurity for the most part). "Don't like" to the point where X's invocation of them causes a reliable crash.
- GNOME devs think smartphones are really neat. So neat they want to have a smartphone interface on your computer. Well, I suppose they're not so different from the MS developers in that respect :)
- btrfs is *slow* if you're ever thinking of upgrading with apt, or using something else with lots of fsyncs in it. The marginal speedup (perhaps, possibly, maybe) you'd get on an SSD by using btrfs rather than something more conventional like ext4 is really not worth it when you have to wait a day for what would otherwise take an hour. (I eventually gave up and reformatted the partition as ext4, then copied the contents from backup)
I'm getting less interested in bleeding edge as I go, it seems :) And I should really sleep now, because I can feel the tiredness making my posts strange. That, and I should rest so I'm well prepared for tomorrow.