1000 Albums, "Green" cycles, Linux commands you cannot live without

Sounds

NPR's All Songs Considered recently interviewed author Tom Moon, who wrote the book "1,000 Records To Hear Before You Die". He went through tons of recordings (obviously), and came up with a list of the most important to the history of music and culture in the world. These may not have significant appeal to you personally, but objectively, these albums all have something unique and important about them.

For example, the Hot 5s and Hot 7s. These were the first recordings that featured African Americans on wax in the US. Louis Armstrong was fantastic at this time in his life as well. Another example is Grease. This is something that is not important to me, but I understand why it's there.

It made me finally remember why I studied music in college. It also made me realize why I haven't liked music in four years as much as I had prior to four years ago.

Opinions

The world will always heal itself...with or without us. Earth doesn't need us to survive and continue existing. I think the strongest argument for taking care of what you have isn't what's in the Bible about being a good steward, which my mother always reminds me of. She has translated this into "be a good steward of the stuff you have." I now realize that it was written to mean everything. Not just "stuff", but everything you could possibly affect during your short life. I don't think the answer is to minimize everything in your life, but it is to be conscience of what your purchases, actions, thoughts, dreams and work actually do for other people, for the Earth, for the future, etc.

There is a Native American proverb which goes "We don’t inherit the land. from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children". Ironically, I feel this is how we should be thinking about our lives.

For example, rather than say: "We have 50 years of oil left if we continue to use it the way we do today, stop using oil" say: "Our dependence on oil does damage to our environment, but it does things for us which are conveniences which we aren't used to living with out: heat without a fireplace, quick and rampant transportation options, overproduction of corn and soy, electronic "toys", etc. How can I affect change to use something other than oil (which would be better on the environment and could actually make entropy work in reverse...with biodynamic and sustainability practices) to continue using what I currently use and have, or how can I replace or cut these things out of my life so as not to leave my footprints on this Earth?"

So, the questions and answers are very involved. I'm still on the path to finding answers to some of the questions I have about how to replace or remove things from my life...and more questions pop out. It's a constant struggle, and I think if we're conscience of it moving forward, unlike we have been in the past, we'll have a better chance of not killing ourselves in the short term.

And, like I said, Earth will heal. Carbon will be eaten up by trees which can grow on land previously covered by ice. The oceans can eat carbon, too. Plants and mushrooms will take over and the very strong animals will survive in the meantime. Even if we eliminate ourselves and other large mammals, fish, birds, and insects...plants, water, air, bacteria, and virus' will live on.

Programming

If you're going to use linux, you need to learn a few commands. The good ones are 'grep' and 'find'. Once you figure those out, learn 'sed' and 'awk'. 'screen' is another great command that lets you have "tabbed" shells in one session.

I've been working with configure, automake, and Makefiles for the last couple weeks. I've been trying to learn each of these tools inside and out at the same time, so it's been a challenging couple weeks. I know that I'll be better prepared for development on any OS in the future because of this experience.

I won't give you any specific examples, but I will recommend that to learn these tools, find a package that has a lot of dependencies (say MythTV or Xine). Create an NFS partition in your home directory which models the directory that you would put on another chipset. You should have a cross compile toolchain. We're using CodeSourcery G++. Set up a Makefile which will help you build quicker and easier once you have all of the kinks worked out. We're using a Makefile.common file to declare variables that are used in more than one line. Examples of this are the chipset we are cross compiling to, and directories that we want to point our linker to to find cross compiled libraries.

The Makefile itself should have sections for each step. For example, if you're building libxml2, have xml2_configure, xml2_make and xml2_install sections. You can make section called xml2, which calls those out in order:
xml2: xml2_configure xml2_make xml2_install
The other way to make things easier is to use an environment variable defined in your Makefile or Makefile.common which sets the path to all configure and make scripts for various packages.

Now, when you run into a problem, use the tools described above to help debug files. Remember, configure will create files (they're listed in the output of the script) which are used to help the general Makefile build your libraries. The Makefile will compile and link all libraries, and install will create executables and move them to the proper directories.

When you're all done, you won't have anything working on the host system because it's compiled for a different chipset. So try running it on that chipset to see if the compilers worked like you wanted them to. If you build the Makefile properly, you should be able to zip this directory up and move it to another build system and remove all of the work required to cross compile MythTV or Xine.