An Ode to My Mac
I hate computers so fucking much at this moment, you have no idea.
I’m trying to get Asterisk working on one of my Debian boxes with a TDM card. It’s a nightmare. A user interface catastrophe to begin with, there’s next to no useful documentation. They require you download the system and drivers as source, with which you need to recompile the kernel. I fucking hate it.
My Fedora box has developed the annoying habit of slicing the screen into offset bands when certain video files (with no discernible commonalities) are loaded. The only recourse is Ctrl+Alt+Bksp to restart X. Would an Nvidia driver update fix it? Perhaps, but Fedora refuses to enter Runlevel 3 without choking, so I can’t run the shell script that installs it. Oh, and the latest package update for BitTorrent (v4.1 trackerless) borked it. I fucking hate it.
Windows is no better. I just tried to install the JRE 1.5_03 edition on my XP Pro desktop. I double-clicked the installer and followed the prompts: no more, no less. Then I get this monstrosity. Visual C++ assertion failures? What the fuck does that mean? Why should I be expected to care? I fucking hate it.
I hate that I’m expected to know this fucking esoteric crap just to get work done. I hate that I have to massage all these different tempermental software applications that are too dumb to do simple things like recognize there’s an existing version installed and just cleanly update it.
I am just so beyond tired of wasting all this precious time in my finite life trying to wrangle some crap that’s not fit for human consumption. In fact, the only thing that is keeping me from throwing the lot out the window is my new Mac mini.
I purchased it the day Tiger was released, and on the first day I shed blood for it. (I had to pry it open with putty knives to upgrade the RAM, cutting myself in the process.) But after a few hours using the Mac, I forgot about my wounds.
One of the things that I love is how easily you can install software. In Linux, it’s a nightmare of different distributions, kernel versions, source and scripts. On Windows, you’re running installers and choosing options and paths.
On my Mac, it looks like this. That’s a disk image. Visit a Website, click a hyperlink, click “Yes”, and you’re presented with a view like that. To install, just drag the icon over to ‘Applications’. That’s it.
Does that action trigger all sorts of actions/scripts/modifications behind the scenes? I have no idea, and I couldn’t fucking care less. It. Just. Works. And right now, that’s precisely what I need.
End rant.
May 24th, 2005 at 4:02 pm
I hate linux more than you do, but in gentoo all you’d have to do is type “emerge asterisk-1.0” and let it do its thing.
May 24th, 2005 at 4:32 pm
In Debian, you can use apt-get install asterisk and get the same effect, provided you use testing or unstable, as the Debian stable package is light years back.
Installing Asterisk isn’t the big issue — I’ve had a working config for some time, with SIP “softphones”, voicemail, and all. The real problem is the hardware. I’ve got to get an FXO card working so I can use PSTN lines and IP Phones. So technically, it’s not Asterisk that’s pissing me off, it’s zaptel. But the card’s from Digium, makers of Asterisk, and the general beef about their absymal documentation holds.
On an unrelated note, did you know the OS X CLI is not case-sensitive? Halle-fucking-juah!