Brute in a Suit

``You can put a brute in a suit, but he will never be a gentleman---he just looks like a brute, in a suit.''

That's the kind of feeling I get each time I put on my work clothes and head out to the office for yet another day of helping towards building a cool system. I was never a part of the gentry; I was not of the high-born, even if it is actually to be possible to be a part of the modern nobility in a young nation like Singapore. If I had to choose the role in society that I have been bred for, I would go as far as saying being that of a Knight, with some notions of what a high-born ought to do, but being of a more practical temperament and pragmatic attitude towards life.

Not to mention also the general need to have to always ``fight'', and the whole code of behaviour that I somehow manage to keep stowed away at some part of my mind, which makes it neigh impossible for me to attempt truly reprehensible actions even unconsciously.

At work, I had to wonder about how to deploy something on a CentOS system, used as a proxy to RHEL. It felt like a throwback to an earlier period of GNU/Linux system use, almost like the time when I was running Slackware, where I had to basically grab and build most of the packages that I needed. Thankfully, there was still the presence of yum which helped reduce much of the problems of dependencies. However, the CentOS/RHEL universe of packaged binaries is significantly smaller than the multiverse that is Debian/Ubuntu, and having worked with the latter architecture for so long, I have been fat from the ease of using apt-get to get me whatever I want from the multiverse.

So it took me a while to figure out how to get the things that I need for deployment. It really didn't help that I had been running a rather nasty head cold for nearly a week and a half; it was almost impossible to read the mountains of documentation that were necessary for the understanding of what was going on and extract the salient points that helped with the undertaking. I was on the verge of delirium, but still managed to pull enough sanity together to get some things done. That easily cost me around two to three days of good work.

After writing so much here, one question remains. What's the theme of this update? That, I will leave it for now and walk away from the keyboard to get some much needed sleep.