Ahhh, so in my getting to grips with, I have a few gripes about Linux. Some day I may cultivate these into a well-formed, coherent technical explanation, but just now . . . just now, I’ll share with you a special favorite rant of mine.
New install, right? By default, it wants to check the install media (who cares?) then there’s a screen that says “welcome to <version of Red Hat>” where you get the chance to say “ohhh, wrong CD …” then you move on to disk partitioning, and you have to intentionally select that yes you want to erase all data, and enter a bunch of other parameters … network … firewall, SE-Linux … altogether 10-15 minutes if you know what you are doing. Nothing onerous. Lots of “yes, a firewall, and these other things, these are all a good ideas, I’ll just mostly agree to what you suggest.” (more…)
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“There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.”
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience “About the AOL Announcement”
Unfortunately, I don’t think you could hold them to that statement, legally.
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It would seem that the dinner sushi buffet is back for Walnut Creek, on weeknights, for a limited time only. When it first opened, the dinner sushi buffet was a wonder to behold! Giant servings of raw, delicious fish. It was too good to be true, and indeed when they realized how much money they were losing, they stopped it.
Well, tonight I was thinking “spicy tuna roll” and found the buffet back in action. But it is a far cry from “too good to be true” . . . more like “dude, what do you expect from a sushi buffet? Fool!” Oh well. Maybe Gourmet Sushi will actually re-open soon. The sign says he will open before Christmas, but last I seen, the windows were still covered with newspapers and there was an envelope from the IRS sticking out of the mail slot. If he skips town . . . well, restaurants come and restaurants go, but that guy has this intense aura about him that kind of reminds me of Basil Fawly, except with inscrutable Asian powers. I’m going to miss that guy.
I’m not feeling too good . . . but if I survive the indigestion I get to fly to Chicago tomorrow, and see the fam.
Happy Solstice Holidays to you!
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The January 6, 2006 issue of _The Week_ reports that:
“Atheists are suing the Utah Highway Patrol to remove roadside crosses erected to honor fallen officers. At issue are 14 12-foot-high crosses, each bearing the name of an officer killed in the line of duty. All the fallen officers were Christian, and their families are unanimously opposed to the crosses’ removal.”
(more…)
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You know . . . I have uploaded over 3,000 images to Flickr, and I occasionally like to check out which are most popular.
Of the images that I have taken, the second most popular is this: (more…)
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As far as I know, Tellme doesn’t have a “Tellme Labs” in the manner that Google does, though I did spend some time on my own researching the intracies of LDAP and of PXE bootstrap and OS installation.
So it was nice when I was recently clued in to Tellme Jazz. This creature doesn’t explain itself much, but I find:
- You can collaborate on a shared addressbook. For example, the “Former Tellmes” group, or set one up for you family, peeps, co-workers, and everyone in the group can help add or maintain the data.
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You can record messages, tossing in various “dazzlers” and send them along to individual friends, or groups of friends. (Think “audio Greeting Cards.”)
- Alternatively, you can send text messages . . .
(more…)
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I was tweaking the site navigation–and I welcome any feedback a reader may have–and I had to grab a plugin to allow me to link to next month / previous month / next year / previous year:
Next Archive Date / Previous Archive Date Plugin from scriptygoddess
I appreciate scriptygoddess’ work, as I’m using her paginate plugin as well. Unfortunately, the example on her site is kind of nasty. So, if someone is casting about on Google, here’s the code in my sidebar template:
<?php if (is_year()): ?>
<p><b>By Year</b><br />
<?php previous_archive_date() ?>
...
<?php next_archive_date() ?></p>
<?php elseif (is_month()): ?>
<p><b>Last Month</b><br />
<?php previous_archive_date() ?>
<p><b>Next Month</b><br />
<?php next_archive_date() ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>
Thanks for the code, Jennifer!
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So, Jakob Nielsen is the “cranky old man” of web design, but he’s mostly right. Still, when I saw the title “Weblog Usability” I scoffed . . . weblogs suck! Criticizing “weblog usability” sounds a bit like criticizing children for watching cartoons.
But, like I said, he’s usually right. How does my “weblog” . . . I call it a “web site” with an “online journal” that predates that awful awful word, “blog” but . . . I’m running WordPress, this is a . . . a . . . blog . . . well, how does dannyman.toldme.com stack up to Nielsen’s standards? (more…)
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Well, so we know that Americans put in a lot more time at work than our counterparts in Europe. We get fewer benefits, but higher salaries. Of course, we tend to commute by car, and live in very hot or very cold places, so we spend a lot more cash on energy, or we would, if our government were not structured to keep energy artificially cheap. As a consequence, we convert valuable cropland into large suburban houses, and spend more time driving SUVs around the freeways.
Anyway . . . higher pay or not, I’m jealous of the five weeks of vacation that I’d get if I worked in Europe. On the other hand, Wired reports that American employers have mostly come to accept the fact that Internet access means some amount of employee slack time:
Companies are growing more accepting of the idea that workers will fritter away part of the workday shopping online, according to purveyors of employee internet-monitoring tools. Most employers engage in some sort of monitoring of workplace internet access. But rather than block all shopping sites, employers preoccupied with productivity are more apt to set time limits on access. Today . . . employers commonly permit use of non-work-related sites for around an hour a day.
(more…)
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Aye. So, let us say you want to know what package a file comes from.
On FreeBSD:
0-17:16 djh@web3 ~> find /var/db/pkg -name +CONTENTS | xargs grep -l pdftex
/var/db/pkg/teTeX-1.0.7_1/+CONTENTS
Ugly, eh? Which, I think the portinstall stuff has a pkgwhich command.
Update: On FreeBSD, one may use:
pkg_info -W `which pdftex`
Linux?
[root@novadb0 pdftex-1.30.5]# rpm -qf /usr/bin/pdftex
tetex-2.0.2-22.EL4.4
Schweet!
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I am not a big fan of Starbucks. It’s not merely that I’m anti-trendy, but it just isn’t my idea of a nice coffee shop. (My idea of coffee doesn’t encompass “twenty ounces served in a paper cup with a plastic lid,” unless I’m stopping at a gas station on the Interstate.) But they give benefits to part-time employees, and as far as I have ever heard, the company conducts itself in a decent manner uncharacteristic of many greedy megacorporations. The latest evidence comes from AP / Yahoo: (more…)
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In Sony’s defense, they are renting the walls that they are defacing:
Coming on the heels of widely publicized news that Sony music CDs infected customers’ computers with security-hole-inducing spyware, Sony has hired graffiti artists in major urban areas to spray-paint buildings with simple, totemic images of kids playing with the [PSP].
dannyman says:
Corporations who think they have Street Cred are kind of lame an awkward, like White People who think they can Rap. I’ll grant you, there may be a Corporate analog to Eminem, but it aint Sony.
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