¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

So, after declaring I’m not into any Linux Desktop studies anymore, I now consider myself into the (*nix) Server world.

You might remember I started a “server challenge” in this blog months ago. Well, forget about that; it’s useless. The typical concern of a future-system-administrator-myself should not be focused in a typical “how to install apache everywhere: arch, debian, centos, opensuse, ubuntu”, but instead in a typical “which web server is best for each kind of situation?”.

I began studying the amazing – I will repeat –, A-MA-ZING, docker engine. I’m also reading a book by Jono Bacon which teaches a little My SQL and PHP. I’m more interested in a general basis of how these tools work: currently I do not intend to master any specific programming language or server tool (except, of course, Javascript – this one should be mastered by everyone).

Oh, I should also mention I’m using my custom and dear Gentoo to try these tools out. I will always be an Arch guy, but my Arch environment is too noisy right now, distracting me way too much. The advantage of using Gentoo is that I don’t understand 100% how portage/emerge works. I’m pretty comfortable with it right now, I know how to install packages, personalize my USE flags, query packages, etc, but I do not know how they work under the hood.

I’m also using a simple Firefox (24, Extended Support Release) and do not intend to install Chrome here, neither be logged into facebook or google. Another “advantage” of using Gentoo over Arch is that I do not care too much about bleeding edge updates. Gentoo is still rolling release, which is awesome, but it is slightly more stable than Arch.

I also should mention that I finally moved my main terminal emulator to urxvt (my previous one was sakura) – this is Arch Community’s fault.

While I expose myself to these new tools – and World! –, I’m also refining and trying to discover what is my best way of learning (and, when possible, sharing). This “challenge” thing is excluded from my list: it is amazing to share, but I myself do not learn that much. I find that writing casual blog posts (like this one) is a good way to settle down and share some conclusions and (general) experience. But I’m also searching for a better way of managing and organizing information (my college course has ‘information’ in its name, so this is my job!).

For references, I’m using my open-bookmarks repo in a relatively active manner. I do not include everything there: this would be cumbersome! But this was a good idea, I feel more comfortable writing down my references there – it is much better than scattering .txt and .org files everywhere through my filesystem.

But I’m still searching for a good manner to take notes. Gists are awesome to collect snippets of code, but what about notebooks? I tried desktop (and on-line! Remember ‘Perrotta Wiki’) wikis before, but they weren’t created for personal use. Well, if I find a better way to create (disposable) notes in an integrated manner, I’ll share it here.

What’s next? I expect to create a repository in my Github which will contain Dockerfiles. And let’s see what I’ll find about PHP+My SQL. I should probably find another free git hosting solution to host my “mini projects”, because I do not want to put temporary stuff into my Github.

Thank you for reading.