Sometimes funny, sometimes thoughtful, always a good time
So what’s the deal with LinkedIn?
About three years ago I heard about it, created an account, and had an old friend of mine invite me to be in his “network”. I accepted, and that was pretty much the end of it.
Now, in the past two weeks I’ve received– no kidding– five different invitations from friends all over the country. It’s like all of a sudden everyone has decided that it’s the bomb, and we’re all setting up our networks.
I guess it makes me look more popular, whee!
Today Congress overwhelmingly approved a $460 billion budget for the Department of Defense. That doesn’t include any money for the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, so one can only imagine how much bigger that number will be next month when Congress votes on funding for the wars.
I’m currently reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, which is a fascinating book about today’s rapidly-advancing growth of technology and how it will profoundly affect our society and our lives in the next few decades. He has compelling arguments, and what I find most interesting is the fact that as technology blows past barriers of economics and national boundaries, things like $460 billion for national “defense” will seem quaint and backward. At least that’s my hope… because it’s a shame our country feels it necessary to spend such vast resources on such petty things.
“You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.”
— Albert Einstein
Tonight we had a bit of fun baking… mmm…
It’s gratifying that pouring tens of billions of dollars into Iraq every month is having such positive effects. From an AP article today:
Power supplies in Baghdad have been sporadic all summer and now are down to just a few hours a day, if that. The water supply in the capital has also been severely curtailed by power blackouts and cuts that have affected pumping and filtration stations.
Sewage is seeping above ground in nearly half the provincial capital because pump trucks used to clean septic tanks have been unable to operate due to gasoline shortages. The sewage is causing a health threat to citizens and contaminating crops in the region.
The electricity problems come as leaders are trying to deal with a political crisis that erupted when the country’s largest bloc of Sunni political parties withdrew from the government.
Wow. So Iraqis have no power, no running water, no waste treatment, and their government is collapsing.
But wait! It’s time for our fearless leader to step into the fray with decisive leadership:
Well, stick me in an oil pipeline and blow me up, that’s a shrewd and brilliant move by Bush. I’m sure the Iraqi leadership didn’t think of trying to preserve their government.
I predict a solemn address from Bush to the American people, urging us to “stay the course” and remember that “the surge is working” and how wonderful the Iraqi democracy is turning out to be. He’ll probably throw in a few remarks about “terrists” and how they’re ruining all of his plans.
When, oh when, will those in command see that it’s just not working?
Warning: super geeky entry
For the last five or six years, my operating system has been Jinux– a custom build of Linux that I designed and created from scratch. No, I didn’t write the software, but I did write hundreds of compile scripts, a package management program, initialization software, and everything else you’d need to compile and install a full working Linux desktop or server. It was a marvelous thing. I used it on dozens of servers and a handful of desktops, and basically every hour of every work day was spent using Jinux software I’d built.
Over time, however, the mainstream Linux distributions have been getting nicer, easier to use, and (most importantly) easier to manage. Gone are the days of doing manual updates to software because of security alerts sent to e-mail lists. Now it’s all automated, with nice alerts when you login that tell you it’s time to upgrade such-and-such. Since I’d been spending the past five or six years looking at the web pages and FTP sites for hundreds of programs to see if there were updates, it was very tempting to be lazy and let someone else worry about that for me.
Well, I finally gave in and fired up a copy of Kubuntu to give it a test drive. The installer was very simple, asking just a handful of questions before doing its thing and giving me a nice desktop. The package manager was easy to use (although I had to learn a few new commands) and the updater is awesome, giving me an unobtrusive icon to let me know it’s time to get some new goodies. Here’s a list of today’s updates:
After a few weeks I decided to see if Kubuntu could do what I really need– not only the nice slick KDE desktop I’ve been enjoying for years, but also the heavy-duty server environment necessary to run the hundreds of web sites and thousands of e-mail accounts I manage in my business. It took a few more weeks to configure everything just right, but I managed to get Kubuntu looking and acting just like my traditional Jinux systems. I’m one of those guys who has serious customizations for everything I do: years upon years of shell aliases and desktop preferences and icons and backgrounds and everything else that makes up a computing environment. I didn’t want to lose any of that, and in the end I didn’t need to.
All in all the transition was successful, and I’ve been happily using Kubuntu for about a month. I still run Jinux on my servers– the next big step is converting all of them. It’s no small task to rebuild servers in a production environment without losing any data, dropping a web site or e-mail offline for even a few minutes, and having it all completely transparent to my customers. But I think it can be done, and all that remains is working out the details.
So to the folks over at Ubuntu, here’s a big thanks from a happy customer. It’s sad in a way to bid farewell to my home-grown solution that’s served me so well for all these years, but times change. I can still smile in a smug sort of way knowing that I haven’t used a Windows computer for at least a month now. Who says Linux isn’t ready for the big time?
One of the (many) things I enjoy about Colorado is how it gets nice and cool in the evenings, so even on the hottest of summer days– like those in late July and early August– we can open the windows at night and listen to the cool breeze blowing through the house.
We’ve been putting box fans in the bedroom windows to help the breeze a bit, and after a few years of talking about it, finally decided to spring for a ceiling fan in the master bedroom. It’s got a peaked ceiling, making it a little more difficult, but this week we finally took the plunge. Now we have a nice quiet fan circling above the bed, keeping the bedroom nice and cool and eliminating the noisy ten-year-old box fan.
It’s only a matter of time, I suspect, before the kids ask for their own ceiling fans. Hmm.