If you’ve been here before, you’ll notice that the first rendition of the new look for this place has been introduced. It is based upon the intention WordPress theme but more work is needed before it looks as tidy as I’d like it. That’ll take a little while and improvements will come gradually but I hope that the new design is pleasing even at this point in time. At the very least, it looks natty to my eyes though there are little bits and pieces that I have ended up leaving behind for now. Even so, it gives me a modern menu at the top of every page so I’m far from disappointed. In any case, I don’t mind doing some extra tinkering.
Archive for June, 2010
Pondering a change in appearance
This little outpost on the web has had the same site design for around two years now and I am beginning to wonder about making a change to it in the spirit of keeping things feeling fresh. Experimentation is in progress on the offline copy of what you see here but that could reveal roadblocks yet. So far, things are looking hopeful and you shouldn’t be too surprised if it all looks different some day.
ERROR 22-322: Syntax error, expecting one of the following: a name, *.
This is one of the classic SAS errors that you can get from PROC SQL and it can be thrown by a number of things. Missing out a comma in a list of variables on a SELECT statement is one situation that will do it, as will having an extraneous one. As I discovered recently, an ill-defined SAS function nesting like LEFT(TRIM(PERIOD,BEST.)) will have the same effect; notice the missing PUT function in the example. The latter surprised me because I might have expected something more descriptive for this as would be the case in data step code. In the event, it took some looking before the problem hit me because it’s amazing how blind you can become to things that are staring you in the face. Familiarity really can make you pay less attention.
A look at Slackware 13.0
Some curiosity has come upon me and I have been giving a few Linux distros a spin in fVirtualBox virtual machines. One was Slackware and I recall a fellow university student using it in the mid/late 1990′s. Since then, my exploration took me into Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake and eventually to Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. All of that bypassed Slackware so it was to give the thing a look.
While the current version is 13.1, it was 13.0 that I had to hand so I had a go with that. In many ways, the installation was a flashback to the 1990′s and I can see it looking intimidating to many computer users with its now old-fashioned installation GUI. If you can see through that though, the reality is that it isn’t too hard to install.
After all, the DVD was bootable. However, it did leave you at a command prompt and I can see that throwing many. The next step is to use cfdisk to create partitions (at least two are needed, swap and normal). Once that is done, it is time to issue the command setup and things look more graphical again. I picked the item for setting the locale of the keyboard and everything followed from there but there is a help option too for those who need it. If you have installed Linux before, you’ll recognise a lot of what you see. It’ll finish off the set up of disk partitions for you and supports ext4 too; it’s best not to let antique impressions fool you. For most of the time, I stuck with defaults and left it to perform a full installation with KDE as the desktop environment. If there is any real criticism, it is the absence of an overall progress bar to see where it is with package installation.
Once the installation was complete, it was time to restart the virtual machine and I found myself left at the command prompt. Only the root user was set up during installation so I needed to add a normal user too. Issuing startx was enough to get me into KDE (along with included alternatives like XCFE, there is a community build using GNOME too) for that but I wanted to have that loading automatically. To fix that, you need to edit /etc/inittab to change the default run level from 3 to 4 (hint: look for a line with id:3:initdefault: in it near the top of the file and change that; the file is well commented so you can find your way around it easily without having to look for specific esoteric test strings).
After all this, I ended up with a usable Slackware 130.0 installation. Login screens have a pleasing dark theme by default while the desktop is very blue. There may be no OpenOffice but KOffice is there in its place and Seamonkey is an unusual inclusion along with Firefox. It looks as if it’ll take a little more time to get to know Slackware but it looks good so far; I may even go about getting 13.1 to see how things might have changed and report my impressions accordingly. Some will complain about the rough edges that I describe here but comments about using Slackware to learn about Linux persist. Maybe, Linux distributions are like camera film; some are right for you and some aren’t. Personally, I wouldn’t thrust Slackware upon a new Linux user if they have to install it themselves but it’s not at all bad for that.
If all else fails…
Two problems have come my way that were resolved by removing configuration files and going again. Both affected Linux installations that I have. The Ubuntu installation on my main PC is working well but I ran into trouble starting up NetBeans 6.8. No GUI would ever appear but taking away the .netbeans folder from my home area allowed a fresh start with the IDE starting up as it should. To date, not all of the various projects that I have are restored but that can be done as I go along. Plugins for PHP development needing reinstatement but that was another easy thing to achieve; just go to Tools>Plugins on the menus and work with the dialogue box that appears to download and install the needful.
The inspiration for taking the configuration folder from the home area came from needing to address a misadventure with a Debian VM. Perhaps foolishly, I went using gconf-editor on there and messed up the appearance of the terminal window with whatever change I made. Getting rid of the .gconf folder restored order with its recreation by the system. Next time, remembering what changes have been made and reversing them might be the best course of action…