I like Mint for the interface, but they all have CLIs.

Arch Linux is good beginner distro.

Ubuntu recently switched to a new interface that bugs a lot of people. The hatred is probably not on the level of Windows 8, but it's up there. When I tried it last, working with multiple desktops was a nightmare.

I use Linux Mint, a fork of Ubuntu. I'm pretty happy with v13 LTS, haven't tried the later ones. The difference between the various versions is the UIs, all of which are barely different. xfce and KDE are old window managers that a lot of people still like. MATE is a fork of Gnome 2 for people who hate Gnome 3. Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome 3 for people who hate Gnome 3. I use MATE right now but it hardly matters.

+1 for mint

Do you prefer MATE or cinnamon?

I wrote the pathfinding system for Neverwinter Nights 2... lots of people complained about it... lol.

I think this is now my favorite thing I've ever read in a doc:

On a more serious note, I'm dying to know the circumstances behind this behavior:

I've only tried cinnamon.

I prefer KDE, and use Kubuntu mostly. To call KDE "an old window manager some people still like" is not really fitting imo. It's a full desktop system similar to Gnome, and quite popular.

some pics: http://www.kubuntu.org/feature-tour

but yeah anything will work for learning linux, and probably you should try a few alternatives anyhow.

You're completely right; I meant "old" relative to MATE/Cinnamon/Unity (the defaults for Ubuntu and Mint). Actually I think 100% of people I've seen recommending Ubuntu have plugged specifically Kubuntu, so that might be the "default" installation whether Canonical likes it or not.

EDIT: For MATE vs. Cinnamon, I tried both on my machine and couldn't get the Cinnamon installation to work, though I later found out that might have been a bad torrent I forgot to checksum. I wouldn't be surprised if Cinnamon turns out to work better in the long run because Mint still pulls stuff from Ubuntu, and Unity and Cinnamon are both based on Gnome 3.

No I always plug Xubuntu

After RH goes to the white board...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wASCH_gPnDw

Since your looking at that silly bot, you'll probably see a few of the mistakes or questionable syntax things easier. I didn't see this video before I had started, or it may be one of those things that don't really hit you until you've already made those decisions..

HW question for you guys. I need help figuring out an algorithm to draw a grid of roads. essentially the beginning of the road is a car maker, then a road, then a light, then a road, then an end. To instantiate everything you basically have to go in reverse order and do:
End(road2)
road2(End)
light(road2)
road1(light)
CarMaker(road1)

simple enough, but I have to take as input how many rows and how many columns and design this layout based on that. It seems in my head like it shouldnt be that hard but everything ive written up fails royally. Any thoughts as a good way to approach this? Hopefully Im not explaining this poorly but Im on the end of a coding bender.

I don't fully understand the problem. Does that chain have to be on the grid exactly once? Can it be smaller than 5x5? Do we have exactly one piece of each or do we have more than one road1 and road2 pieces?

the user would set the amount of rows and the amount of columns. You can consider a road segment a road, and the whole chain of a column or row an avenue.

[IMG]http://s10.************/6jm0plzh5/Screen_shot_2013_06_05_at_1_40_17_AM.png[/IMG]

etc

Where cm is a carmaker, x is a light, E is the end of the road. Each dash is a "road" and the whole chain from cm to E is an avenue.

I suppose laying them out isnt terrible, but laying them out and attaching them all to each other correctly is proving to be a mind numbing task


A better explanation:

[IMG]http://s12.************/ji0zudpwd/Screen_shot_2013_06_05_at_1_42_25_AM.png[/IMG]


CarAcceptor being an interface implemented by Road, Light and CarMaker. I think this makes one entire avenue? Not sure at this point, seeing stars. Should probably sleep blahhh

And uh...

Need a bit of advice about the start up world:

Payday has not arrived yet. I've already worked for 3 weeks. I was told that payday would be x day (~10 days ago), but apparently the pay schedule was incorrect, so I was to get paid on the 1st, which couldn't have happened because the 1st lands on a Saturday. Boss is now on vacation.

I am working for a single-founder start up company and I am the sole employee. I gather that I am being paid by another company that is backing this company, so I get the confusion about the pay schedule.

The reason for the current delay is that the backing company is changing banks or something like that and the checks have not arrived in the mail. They did offer to do direct deposit, but I refuse to do direct deposits. Not sure if the reasoning is relevant here, but I had my identity stolen in a major way about 5 years ago and still deal with it to date. I also don't want to hear that the money was sent and blah blah blah.

I'm kind of confused about this. I would have thought that they could hand over a wad of cash and talked to their accountant. I'm not sure what the story is about paper checks coming in the mail either since this isn't really my sphere of expertise.

I'm trying to figure out if all of the above is standard procedure in the start up world or if this indicates danger ahead. Today is Wednesday, and it is now 10+ days since the initial check was originally supposed to appear and now 5 days since the amended payday. I feel like I should have been paid before vacation?

Yes, everything is brand-spanking new and yes I do know the name of the company the check is coming from. I'm thinking that I should give it to Friday, but even if I do, I'm not sure what to make of this current situation.

You should have received the name of the company doing HR or the person doing HR. Talk to that person or company. If you don't have those call your boss on vacation and find out what is going on. This is a situation you can call the owner of the company about on vacation.

I've been stung from a company not paying before, don't leave it till Friday. I agree with Kerowo that if you can't get an answer from anyone else in the company phone your boss on holiday to ask where it is. He needs to understand that you need to be paid on time, and you don't want to ever give the impression that you don't mind not being paid on time. You work to get paid

They offered to do a direct deposit so I don't think they plan to stiff you unless this is one gigantic scheme to hire people in hopes to steal their identity.

I would also call your boss too and I wouldn't feel weird about it. You've been working there for almost a month and haven't gotten paid yet. That's a big deal.

He is well aware of the situation and he did respond to the email I sent the other day. I'm not worried about them stealing my identity: I am excessively cautious now days. I just state that this is the reason I don't do direct deposits because I figure someone would ask why I didn't do it. The other issue is they can say they sent the money and then blame it on my bank for not clearing it or some other crap like that. I've personally dealt with a ton of questionable people here in LA.

I feel like the story has some truth to it, but I'm concerned about the future situation.

I didn't get my first paycheck from the company that I work for now when I was supposed to. It's happened to me at other companies in the past too. They've all been small with 0 - 30 employees with almost no turnover.

They all made it right in the end but it's a pretty brutal thing to go through when you're broke.

I wouldn't worry about it too much unless they start to ignore you or give you ridiculous excuses.

So, I'm not sure if this is something I'll need more context to understand or what. it still looks weird. It's funny, before I even watched the video, I guessed at the implementation of vectors vs. lists and guessed that conj would be O(1) in both cases, and I was right, but still. He mentioned abstractions, and maybe what's going on is there's some other stuff that works a lot more cleanly because of this behavior, but until I actually see that other stuff it seems like a gigantic wat to have a built-in function that prepends to one built-in data structure and appends to another. We'll see if it makes more sense next week I guess.

I'm not sure what happens when you add items to an array, list, [???] in Java. By "abstractions," I think he means both abstractions over Java stuff and over the usual Lisp stuff. Since I don't know Java, I can't say what list or vector would represent in Java. I can speak, in part, for Lisp:

cons --> conj
car --> first
cdr --> rest
() --> seq
'() --> list / vector

Would probably find the Clojure version more readable:

Here is how you sum a list in Scheme:

Actually, Common Lisp does that above better, similar to Clojure, I think.

Not sure how I feel about not using cons, car, cdr. I sort of like them, since it doesn't abstract the idea that Lisp is really little more than a huge register machine, but I guess from a practical perspective, first and rest is less scary and no one is really pushing pointers now days. Regardless, I still think there are some advantages to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAR_and_CDR

Oh, I'm entirely used to cons/car/cdr. I'm just eyebrow-raising about the apparently inconsistent behavior of Clojure's conj, which appears to be "Whatever makes this fastest if you're using this as a stack" (I don't know for sure what the structures are underneath for sure since I don't know Java, but it sounds like vectors are dynamic arrays and lists are linked lists). Currently I think of it as "push".