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GRAFFITI -- December 10, 2007 thru December 16, 2007>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message. |
 
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December 10, 2007
2045 - Good evening.
"Here at the store I actively resist promoting him, because he was a fascist," said Charles Hauther, the science fiction buyer at Skylight Books. "People don't seem to talk about him anymore. I haven't had a conversation about Heinlein in a long time."
There's a bookstore I'll never shop at, and I can only actively resist by recommending that no one I know ever shop there, because of the heathen Hauther. I deeply hope he loses his job over this. This is from an article in the LA Times. That last quote came after this paragraph:
"His rabid fan base is graying," said Annalee Newitz, who writes about science fiction for Wired and Gawker. "To literary readers, the books look cheesy, sexist in a hairy-chest, gold-chain kind of way. His stuff hasn't stood the test of time," because of characters' windy speechifying and their frontier optimism.
Literary readers? Ah, you mean Professors and Professorettes of English who write books for each other? Heinlein wrote books for readers. Literary writers promote the feminist agenda because there's no other way to tenure. Selling Science Fiction writers write what sells. It's a damned shame that advertisers and reviewers (and book buyers, for fuck's sake) are drawn towards the former instead of the latter. Why would a bookseller not want to carry books that sell? Because college removed his metaphorical penis? Maybe he ought to have gone through Half-Cock Jack's troubles, instead. And Annalee, thanks for reminding me why I don't subscribe to Wired: It's loons like you that keep me away.
Heinlein was a man raised in a man's era. To hold his time against him is folly. The article did me one favor - I was able to generate several additions to my list of people to whom I never need pay attention again.
I've still got another column to format. I did it once already, but it changed too much to retain, so I've got to start over. But the bills and the trash and the backups are done, and the CMR Mailbag is formatted and up, so there you go. Happy Monday.
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December 11, 2007
2137 - Good evening. My days are full, but unremarkable (and that's a good thing - remarkable days usually involve a phrase that starts "I just deleted ..." or a page at 0217 letting me know that servers in the data center are down). Each day I come home, and proclaim, "I worked on computers today!" Marcia and I do try to keep up on each other's day, but what I do causes her eyes to roll back into her skull, when I try to describe it. Yeah, tech is lots of rote behavior designed to be repeatable and secure, and knowing what the right thing is to do, when something bad happens. But to the less-geeky, it can be deathly boring, I'm sure.
Current Listening: Dire Straits - Walk of Life.
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December 12, 2007
0814 - Good evening.Sad to see that pterry now faces a battle with early onset Alzheimer's. And on a different topic (culled from Jerry's mail), on the value of checklists, read this. Read it all the way through. Print a copy and give it to your HR person, and ask them to find out if your insurance providers know about it. Wow!
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December 13, 2007
2030 - Good evening. I've got a box of dark chocolate truffles sitting next to me, as yet unopened. It was off the gift cart at work today. Seems yummy ... but there's a Nutrition Facts label on the bloody box. It is to laugh, no? The good news is that if I eat all 16 truffles in one go, I'll get 32% of my daily required allotment of iron. Oh, and a sugar buzz. And 4 grams of dietary fiber. Fiber is good for me, right? Sheesh. Oh, and there's warnings ... something about "other" tree nuts, and peanuts. God wept.
At this moment, I'm upgrading Magickthyse to *Ubuntu 7.10. I may — may — be moving back towards Linux. The Apple GUI is nice, and the hardware is rock solid. But where I care most about things - command line and compatibility with the great variety of free and libre software out there - Linux still wins, I think. So I'm going to move the laptop to one side, and put the big display back in front of me. We'll see what happens. In the short term, I'll need to still use the MacBook Pro for an assortment of tasks, primarily work-related. And my needed Windows instance now runs under Parallels. So, there that is.
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December 14, 2007
1859 - Good evening. That re-fettling didn't go quite as smoothly as I'd hoped, but still, here I am. I've got VMware Server running a Solaris 10 install, two IRC channels running in screen on different systems, XMMS playing Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor (Stokowski and the Chech Philharmonic, strings, no organ), and a continuing hands-down winner for all my web-editing needs - Bluefish, in version 1.0.7. What wasn't smooth was, following the upgrade, there was neither hide nor hair to be seen of the RAID where my home lives. Urk. I login, there's no there, there. So I pulled down a fresh copy of the Ubuntu 7.10 Alternate Installer (many more options than the Live CD GUI installer version, but pickier about it's friends), and started a fresh install. I blew away /, /usr, and /var partitions, reassembled my RAID5 array and mounted the partition there-contained as /home. It was well past 2100 when I started that, and the machine was nearly a fully functional Death Star by the time I stopped for the evening, shortly after 2300.
That Solaris install is going to take a while, I think I'll go relax for a while ... There, I think I've revised the upload script properly. We'll see momentarily. Ciao!
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December 15, 2007
1753 - Good evening. I got out among the sweaty herds today, and completed my holiday shopping (unless I decide to get something else for Marcia that she didn't suggest!) When I got home, I proclaimed that I had tried and tried, but "couldn't find 7-Eleven gift cards anywhere, so she'd just have to wait until next year." Can you tell what sort of seasonal (read: frosty) reaction I got to that? Grin.
Elsewhere, I finally got Vmware Server 1.0.4 running, and a Solaris VMTN "appliance" installed and working. That should provide the practice platform I need for working through the materials leading up to a Sun admin certification one of these days. Wow, did I ever have some fun getting that to a happy state! Lots of reinstalls, various versions of VMware Server, etc. Oh. Part of the story is missing, that might be causing your confusion. After last night's Solaris install, I allowed, nay, asked it to pull and install updates. Ahem. That was a mistake, as the system was unbootable afterwards. So I tried a variety of recovery techniques, including bumping up to VMware Server 2 Beta. Nope. So I blew away the VM and found this VMTN link. Hmmm. That didn't run under VMware Server 2 Beta. But uninstalling that and reverting to standard VMware Server took some doing, including finding stuff left behind and deleting files and directories manually. The Beta's uninstaller wasn't very ... complete. All is good now, though.
Time for pizza! Ciao!
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December 16, 2007
1428 - Good afternoon. On the geek side of the ledger, much of what I was looking for is now setup here on Magickthyse (the desktop/server system, an AMD 64 X2 box). While there's organizational stuff to do getting the documents folders merged, I'll probably just end up checking all of it into Subversion, then checking it back out on both systems, a good way to keep things in some semblance of order while running multiple systems.
Most of what I'm finding on my return to Linux as a primary home OS is that the way X works matches how I work better than OS X did. A variety of things just work on OS X (as they do on Windows), that need more configuration and setup here ... but once setup, things are both more stable and secure. Firefox is certainly more stable for me under Linux than either OS X or Windows. Cut and Paste between windows/applications is most intuitive for me under X. That is, it worked fine for X apps under OS X, too, but didn't translate across easily to the Aqua native applications. XMMS is, for me, a much more capable music player than iTunes. iPhoto is pretty good, but I can get close enough with Linux-based applications ... and Gimp wins hands-down for my editing needs.
I even got all the fancy visual F/X from Compiz working. Silly, but fun, it causes (mostly) no harm, and certainly this machine with it's nVidia card isn't even breathing hard keeping up with the requirements. Turns out that Compiz interferes a little bit with the VMware Server console app. I could get into full screen mode, but not out again ... short of shutting down the VM. That's a tiny downside, since I really don't plan to be doing much from the console anyway.
The fighting continues in the Cradle of Civilization. Funny how things have gone downhill in that area once religion got involved, eh? Yeah, "ours", too. Crusades aren't tea parties. Meanwhile, our young men and occasionally women are continuing to make sacrifices on our behalf. There's no good time to die in combat, but it must especially suck for the families of the fallen, at Christmas time. My condolences to the families and units of our fallen servicemen this week.
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
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