freemode.net

Long strange week    [ Rants ]

What a long strange week it's been...

Been busy at work and at home.   War's going, it's very odd to listen to the daily War in Iraq updates on WAMU in the morning and evenings.   Having this level of press coverage with embedded reporters, daily news conferences and almost hourly PR battles between the Pentagon, CENTCOM, the White House and Tony Blair on one side and the UN, Iraq, Jacques Chirac and the global anti-war protesters on the other makes for something more resembling a dark satire than a war.   Will the Dixie Chicks apologize?   What's the latest civilian casualties from Iraq?   Do the Academy Awards winners care any more about Donald Rumsfeld's opinion on their movies than he cares about their opinions on the war?   Are we "bogged down", "running out of steam", or even better, "in a quagmire" after less than 10 days of warfare?

You get sick of listening to this self-feeding news cycle of rumor and leaks and conferences and allegations and plain old horse shit flying over the airwaves and RF bands after a while.   I mean, here I am, former Socialist and child of the Brave New World of the Nineties, siding more with the guys giving briefings from Camp Doha.   They seem far more connected with reality than anyone else.

Vernal equinox    [ Rants ]

It's the vernal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, and time to take the Christmas lights down and invade Iraq.   Good time of year for cleaning up the house and sending cruise missiles + F-117A stealth fighter-bombers to attack "targets of opportunity" in Middle Eastern dictatorships.

Weather report: rainy in Washington DC, expected to clear up by this weekend.   Very snowy around Colorado and Wyoming.   Residents around Basra in southern Iraq should expect intermittent artillery bombardment with a high probability of mobile infantry and armor rolling into the area.

apt-get and PHP4    [ Software ]

Debian's a great Linux distro, and has a wonderful package management system, but every now and then something breaks in a completely unexpected way.

I had run the usual 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade' a few days back, and saw a whole bunch o' packages come up.   I ran through the 20 or so that could be installed that way, and then did a 'apt-get dist-upgrade' to resolve the dependencies for the remaining 70 or so.   It wanted to uninstall PHP4, so after pausing for a full 3/4 of a second, I went ahead with the removal, figuring that it was a uninstall-dosomethingelse-reinstall setup.

novus ordo seclorum    [ Rants ]

Between the warbloggers and the news coverage and the President himself, this seems like an odd way to go to war.

The eves of conflict aren't usually calm happy places, but this is decidedly different.   Is this what our society will be like from now on?   A constant state of emergency and fear, international crises turned into armed conflict, and privacy exchanged for a small dose of security against waves of paranoia?   An economy too weakened by fear to recover, and citizens told not to stand tall, not to make our nation the shining example of freedom and equality and democracy that it can be, but instead to merely buy our way out of our problems.

What if this is the way society will be?

ESR vs SCO    [ Software ]

Eric S Raymond has fired off another salvo in the ongoing SCO vs IBM lawsuit - what a beautiful shining example of corporate stupidity on SCO's part.   There's a story on Slashdot with more info, plus SCO now has a SCOsource "division" whose raisin'detreh (pardon my French) seems to be suing other, more successful companies.   Way to go, SCO - turn a failed business model of selling proprietary x86 Unix into a public spectacle for the whole industry to watch your company thrash and burn as it dies.

networks and poetry    [ Humor ]

perhaps it's in a SONET
or Middle Earth's TOKEN RING wars
maybe floating in the ETHERnet
beyond the FDDI nearest stars
forgotten like a DECnet
card in VMS
or NetBEUI for the emperor
and emperess

The original HP    [ Rants ]

Not Hewlett-Packard, but Howard Phillips Lovecraft.   If you've been around the 'net or gaming or alternative subculture for any length of time, you've probably seen lots of references to his fiction.   I had read some excerpts and short stories of his a long time ago, but hadn't read that much of his work until I was at home over the past two days and stumbled across a great collection of his writing in HTML and PDF format.

Some of them are rather short, less coherent and read like he was writing on deadline (Nyarlathotep), but others (The Music of Erich Zann, The Call of Cthulhu) are simply wonderful in eerieness, foreboding and varying degrees of subtle and not-so-subtle horror.   A mountain walked or stumbled, and all that.

And all of this from the comfort of my laptop with an 802.11b wireless card - this is what the Internet is all about, being able to find information and great works and enjoy them from anywhere, on any device.   "hp invent", indeed.

Lotes    [ Rants ]

I've been working from home today, thanks to a rather unpleasant stomach virus.   But thanks to the Linksys WAP11 in the basement + a WPC11 adapter, I can sit in bed and check my email, edit documents and send 'em back and forth to work.

So now that I'm spending some amount of time using Lotus Notes, I'm getting familiar with its ups and downs.   It's far better than MS Outlook + Exchange for doing forms, databases and implementing business processes, but the email bits almost seem like an afterthought. It's like AIX : imagine that IBM had written a great workflow product, and then decided to add mail functionality to it around version 3, but had gotten the requirements translated from Hungarian to Mandarin to English.

HP Visualize C200    [ Software ]

Just got an HP Visualize C200 workstation from eBay - arrived via FedEx yesterday, and our neighbor was nice enough to let the delivery guy drop it in their front hallway rather than let it sit outside.   The box is nice!   You open up the CDROM/floppy/disk/front-panel enclosure, and the narrow 50-pin SCSI + fast/wide 68-pin SCSI + floppy + power + front-panel cables all run into a single mini-backplane at the back of the enclosure, which has something like an oversized SCA connector to plug into the system backplane.

It's got 512MB memory, two Seagate ST34572WS disks (although the OS only sees one of 'em from an 'ioscan'), an HP video card with a VGA adapater, and a PA-RISC 8200 200Mhz processor with 512KB instruction/1024KB data cache.   More specs are available from openpa.net.