Year: 2007

08/04/2007

It’s gratifying that pouring tens of billions of dollars into Iraq every month is having such positive effects. From an AP article today:

Iraq’s power grid is on the brink of collapse because of insurgent sabotage, rising demand, fuel shortages and provinces that are unplugging local power stations from the national grid, officials said Saturday. Electricity Ministry spokesman Aziz al-Shimari said power generation nationally is only meeting half the demand, and there had been four nationwide blackouts over the past two days.

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:

President Bush called Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Vice President Adel Abdel-Mahdi to urge them to try to preserve political unity in the country.

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?

08/04/2007

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?

08/04/2007

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.

07/27/2007

It’s funny how our trampoline becomes Party Central all the time. Here’s Kyra (on top of the playset) and her four neighborhood friends all playing something in the backyard.

The $200 or whatever we spent at Sam’s Club ten years ago has definitely paid off… that thing is so awesome.

07/27/2007

I read an article by some guy named Chris Hedges, where he discusses how war in general, and Iraq in particular, can turn a soldier from a killer into a murderer. Of particular note:

The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing– the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm– to murder– the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing.

He goes on with this blunt assessment of the side of the war we see:

The American killing project is not described in these terms to a distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract terms of glory, honor, and heroism, in the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a virtue. The campaign to rid the world of terror is expressed with this rhetoric, as if once all terrorists are destroyed evil itself will vanish.

Very true. And very scary.

07/20/2007

From the Associated Press:

Airline passengers will be able to bring many types of cigarette lighters on board again starting next month after authorities found that a ban on the devices did little to make flying safer, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said Friday.

The agency also announced that it was changing its policy on breast milk, and will allow mothers with or without children to carry more than three ounces onto planes.

Progress. It may not be much, but at least the boneheads running airport security are waking up to the fact that most of their idiotic rules aren’t actually doing anything more than annoying millions of passengers.

Maybe by this time next year we’ll be rid of the dumbest restriction of all, the 3-1-1 Rule!

07/19/2007

Ultimate is such an awesome game because even when you lose, you have a great time. Or at least I do.

We played a double-header tonight in Boulder, and we were up against one of the top teams in the league. They’ve been crushing all of their opponents, and although we lost we held the score pretty tight the whole game. Then we played one of the weaker teams, who came on strong in the first half and managed to eke out a victory because we weren’t able to recover in time (eventually losing by one).

Yet despite that, both games were a ton of fun. I knew many of the players on the teams, and we were constantly joking and heckling each other during the game (“He’s got nothing!” or “What was that throw?”), and mingling on the sidelines talking about this play and that throw.

All in all, it was a nice summer evening enjoying time with friends and getting some exercise. It doesn’t get much better.

07/16/2007

Dr. Jon Miller, director of the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, has spent decades compiling statistics about scientific knowledge amongst the general population of America. The results are… underwhelming.

  • American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small).
  • Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity.
  • Only about ten percent know what radiation is.
  • One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth.

    • Like, wow.