Happy Birthday, Codefix

Today is sort of a birthday for Codefix: I first registered the codefix.net domain on August 22, 2003-- eight days after the Great North American Blackout; however, wondering how people lived without electricity and meeting my Brooklyn neighbors weren't the only things going on back then. Work as a Linux consultant was just starting to become steady, but incorporation was more than a year away and I was still moonlighting as a photographer.Later that year, Red Hat made waves by announcing that they would discontinue support for their (free as in beer) non-enterprise Linux distributions. Fortunately Open Source projects are particularly well suited for stepping in when another has dropped the torch; in this case, there were even a couple new contenders: Fedora and Gentoo. Fedora was Red Hat's consolation prize to the Open Source community and early versions were not impressive; Gentoo, on the other hand, seemed like a genuine revolution in the Linux world.

The Ultimate Backpack

A funny thing happened in Chicago, I was there for YAPC:NA and avoided having to check luggage at the airport by cramming everything I would need into a garden variety nylon backpack. On the last day of the conference, I noticed that my backpack had torn at the seam near it's laptop compartment. Noting the irony of circumstance (Perl is known as "the duct tape of the Internet"), I went off in search of some duct tape to keep my newly ventilated bag together. Naturally the duct tape worked, my makeshift repair even survived an airport search, but I still needed a new bag. (NB: Individually wrapped Lactaid pills can set off metal detectors).

Vim, lately?

As I write this, Vim 7 is making waves as the next great thing in Open Source software; although it's not yet available in most package management systems. Fortunately, Vim is easy to compile from source. I used the following to compile the source on my Ubuntu laptop:

sudo apt-get build-dep vim-gtk
sudo aptitude install xlibs-dev
svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vim/vim7
cd vim7
./configure --enable-gui --enable-perlinterp
--with-compiledby='Codefix Consulting <garrison@codefix.net>'
make && sudo make install