I am a picky customer. And I have at least one vendor to bitch about once some of the dust settles, but I have to say, Abovenet has always been great. They are honest, they have good sales support, their data centers are nice enough . . . and any time I file a ticket to take care of network trouble or something like a server reboot, they have always taken care of business. Their networking people in particular do an excellent job of offering to help, to the point of offering to take a look at my BGP configs to offer pointers.
This is a test post from the bus via my Sidekick II. They recently updated the software on this device and things are nice. Timestamps in my AIM logs and the web browser is now noticeably faster, and prettier. There’s support for JavaScript, at least enough that the Flickrbar appears on my web site, which loads up with full color backgrounds and pleasing-to-me fonts.
Nice job, T-Mobile and Danger! Now, if only I could have per-account e-mail ringtones, so I could check my normal e-mail on the device without the loud “system pager” ring that is my default for email sent to my mobile . . .
Yayoi has heard me quote this bit from The Simpsons a dozen times now, but:
“Welcome to Japan, where the local time is tomorrow.”
Today I noticed that my blog timestamps were now one hour off, because WordPress does not support the abomination that is Daylight Saving Time. So I went in and said “stick with Universal Time,” which I think should be the standard time zone for everything anyway. Standard Time zones are an inaccurate fiction, invented as a convenience to schedule trains. Daylight Saving is a silly kludge built on that fiction. When I’m elected dictator, we’ll all use Universal Time for coordinating schedules, and everyone’s time-keeping device will also accomodate local solar time, so you can coordinate pre-industrial activites like eating lunch around noon, or heading home from work some time before sunset.
I am a crackpot who is fifty years ahead of his time, so don’t mind me.
This is an easy problem, but Googling the answer didn’t immediately return a great solution.
I want to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux via serial console. How to set that up? Red Hat says how. Hook up a keyboard / monitor, and at the boot prompt, enter:
For many yers I have used FreeBSD nearly exclusively. In the BSD tradition, root is pretty well protected — root can not log in from remote unless you put some effort into hooking that up, and local users can only run su if they are members of the wheel group. Because of the nifty sudo tool and my own disinterest in memorizing any more passwords than necessary, I have tended to remain unconcerned with the root password, setting it and storing the thing somewhere, which is a pain, or setting it to something dumb, or just not setting it, depending on the security needs of a given system.
I recently learned a painful lesson from Fedora: not all unices are as protective of the root user. Sure, I knew that in Linux any local user can run su, but OpenSSH isn’t going to allow people to log in as root, right? Wrong!(more…)
“Right now Asian fans really like the Japanese products and culture. They want the package in Japanese, manual in Japanese, they want everything to be in Japanese, or Japanese style. Japan is cool and popular in China, and right now it seems like they don’t want anything else.”
Takeshi Kimura SNK Playmore Game Devloper Magazine, November 2005
“Ramatou Issoufou is lucky to be alive,” said Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. I recently witnessed the 37-year-old Nigerian woman and her baby son survive a treacherous childbirth, after Issoufou nearly slipped into a coma from eclampsia, a complication of pregnancy that kills 50,000 women a year in the developing world. The maternity hospital where the birth took place was filthy, bug-ridden, and poorly equipped, and her husband had to pay $42 for an emergency surgical kit supplied by the U.N. Population Fund. Thanks to that effort, “two more lives” were saved. But last month, President Bush cut off U.S. contributions to the fund, due to pressure from Christian conservatives. They don’t like the U.N. agency because it promotes contraception. They also object to the fact that the Population Fund operates in China, which has an appalling policy of forced sterilizations and abortions. But the Population Fund has been pressuring China to end the coercion, and besides, “the solution isn’t to let African women die.”
Every year, more than 500,000 women die worldwide during pregnancy and childbirth. Through both contraception and medical supplies, the Population Fund is making a dent in that appalling statistic, but each day, hundreds of women perish because it can’t do more. “Call me naive, but I think if Mr. Bush came here and saw women dying as a consequence of his confused policy, he would relent.” Surely, letting women die isn’t what America stands for.
Nicholas Kristof The New York Times The Week, November 4, 2005
The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fold, that’s all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain’t changed
Remember how Iraq used to be run by a brutal tyrant who did nasty things to minority elements? Until American troops came in and liberated the place, and ran the jails, except after awhile the American troops got crazy again? (more…)
I’m new to Linux, but I’m trying out Fedora Core 4 on my work laptop. It’s pretty slick once you change the desktop environment to KDE. But I want to be able to play mp3s, and there’s nothing in the default system that can handle this, and yum doesn’t know where to find good stuff like mplayer or mpg123. (Yeah, I’m a command-line type of guy . . .)
So, I go shopping for “repositories” that extend the Fedora Core base repository . . . and the short answer is that if you do this:(more…)
[The Unbearable Lightness of Being] has that sexy whiff of the Eastern Bloc to it (very effective on anyone who hasn’t been immunized by an actual relationship with an Eastern European), it’s full of young people having complex, turgid sex with one another, and since the first sentence of the book mentions ‘Nietzsche’, it is ipso facto philosophical.
I mean, he even goes to the trouble of worrying about the right translation for you, his gentle reader: (more…)
Chicago is New York City taken in moderation.
or
New York is Chicago taken to excess.
The midwest is a place that identifies with moderation. Midwesterners are proud of their great metropolis. Chicago is quite the wonder! But then, they will admit to being uneasy about that big big city.
New York sees itself on the level of London, Paris, or Tokyo. New York is the cultural axis around which a great nation revolves.
Chicago sees itself rising from the plains. Chicago is the great version of Milwaukee, or Detroit. Chicago gave birth to the skyscraper and the Loop has a certain antiquarian flair, with the screeching L line at the center.
Chicago spreads out on the plain . . . tall buildings in the center, and miles upon miles upon miles of neighborhoods and factories, which give way to suburbs and corporate headquarters, which give way to the farms and small midwestern towns that are every year sucked into the growing conurbation. (more…)
I have not had a consistent supply of Television since I left home for college . . . ten years ago. And lately I have been thinking that while it was a lonely time, 1996-2002 or so was also something of a “Golden Age” for me, at least in terms of learning stuff, because I ran only FreeBSD on my computers and could only play very few games. (That’s a seperate reflection for another time, and may just be reactionary nostalgia.)
Anyway, I’ve been thinking lately that watching good shows, especially without commercials, is nice stuff. TiVo is bigger than just a “smart VCR” . . . before TiVo I used to worry about whether I could catch a show at a certain time . . . after TiVo, I couldn’t care less when a show aired, if I wanted to watch it, it would be there, a few days later, and when I wanted to unwind, I could fire up the show. (more…)
