(Warning: spoilers.  Go see it if you haven’t yet, then come back and read this.)

I just saw The Day After Tomorrow.  I liked it a lot.  But some things about it bugged me.  First of all, the fact that the whole premise is based on global warming, which is speculative at best and pure bunk science at worst.  And the fact that for the first 1:50 of the movie, they make it look like mankind might not even survive, and then in the last 10 minutes it turns out that the storms/iceage only lasted a few weeks and was no big deal.

There really wasn’t much to the plot, as a matter of fact.  Come to think of it, the whole movie was basically: man is evil and causing a new ice age because of pollution, the ice age will last a long time and probably kill us all, Sam gets stuck in NY along with a girl he likes, his dad promises to come get him, Sam finally kisses the girl, his dad gets there and calls for helicopters, and oh yeah the ice age is over now.  The end.

Most of the CG (computer-generated) stuff was really good, I thought.  Which is a good thing, since it seems to have been a movie designed just to show off its special effects.  But randomly, there were wolves that were CG, and they were terrible.

I really really like Jake Gyllenhaal (aka Donnie Darko), so that helped me like this movie.  I was glad he got the girl.  And I only recently realized that he is a different actor than Tobey Maguire (aka Spiderman).  Speaking of that, Spiderman 2 is coming out soon and I’m hype about that.  The first one was amazing.

One of the previews before TDAT was for the Alexander movie that’s coming out soon.  Of the batch of movies coming out this summer that look pretty much identical (Alexander, Troy, Arthur), I think this is the one I’m most impressed by so far.  Arthur looks cool too, but Troy sorta just looks like a "give me a break" Brad Pitt movie.

You’ll be fine.

Why do Indian people smell?  I’ve had lots of Indian classmates and a few Indian TAs in various labs, and they have all smelled incredibly strongly like sweat.  They don’t look sweaty, but they literally smell like someone who’s done a lot of exercise or manual labor without showering for a few days.  I’m not trying to be funny and I’m not exaggerating at all.  Tonight I was in the supermarket, coming up to the orange juice section, and got about 10 feet away from an Indian couple.  The smell was overpowering.  They took a while in front of the OJ, and when they walked away, I went to get mine.  The smell stayed there even after they walked away.

Every person has a smell that’s pretty unique, and you don’t/can’t really notice your own.  This is not that.  It’s something different that is common to ~all Indians I’ve encountered.  I’ve never noticed black people to have a certain smell, nor Filipinos (my best friend growing up was Filipino), nor any other race/culture I can think of.

Has anyone else experienced this with Indian people they know, or any other race/culture?  Do non-white people perceive a strong and identifying smell on white people?  This has bugged me for a long time, but I’ve never been able to bring it up in any conversations with Indian people.  I’m sure it would be rude, even though it’s completely genuine and serious and not ill-intentioned at all.

I didn’t know that Nick Berg was from my area until I read this article in the local paper.  (Hat tip to mom again for this one.)  It turns out his dad, Michael Berg, is a complete wackjob.

Michael Berg trivialized the horror of his son’s death by politicizing it. ... Berg’s latest excursion into "The Twilight Zone" is a column he’s written for liberal newspapers across the world.  Michael Berg quickly skips over why his son, a Jewish man, was traveling alone in a Muslim country at war.  He never mentions that his son was warned to get out of Iraq by U.S. authorities but refused to leave.
...
"People ask me why I focus on putting the blame for my son’s tragic and atrocious end on the Bush administration.  They ask: ’Don’t you blame the five men who killed him?’  I have answered that I blame them no more or less than the Bush administration."
...
Did anyone blame Bill Clinton when Marines were killed and their bodies dragged through the streets of Somalia?  Not even John "Say Anything" Kerry has stooped to Michael Berg’s level during the recent media hysteria surrounding Nick Berg’s grisly murder.
...
Michael Berg also blames the abuse of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison for his son’s death.  He calls the misguided actions of a few prison guards an atrocity.  To compare taking a snapshot of a naked Iraqi terrorist to "an atrocity" cheapens the very word.  The Holocaust was an atrocity.  The systematic murder, rape and torture of 600,000 Iraqi men, women and children by Saddam Hussein is an atrocity.  The death of 3,000 innocent Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, is an atrocity.

I have to use Windows machines at work, and the PC speaker beep really annoys me.  I just found out about an easy way to disable it, though, on Windows 2000/XP: run the command "net stop beep".  (Of course, you could just unplug the speaker, but not everyone is able/allowed to just disassemble the machines that they use.)

If American newsmedia is to be believed...

Between the US and North Korea, the US is the unreasonable one.

What subjects actually say doesn’t matter; if you can find a third-hand source that reflects your ideology, use that instead (and if it directly contradicts what the subject actually said, more’s the better).

Coalition forces are targetting journalists in Iraq.

Relatively mild prisoner abuse is far worse than a prisoner being beheaded.

Before kernel 2.4.10, the prevailing wisdom was to make your swap partition twice the size of your RAM.  With newer kernels, equal-to-RAM will do.

So let’s say my system has 256 MB RAM and I’m running 2.6.x.  I should make my swap 256 MB.  The maximum "memory" available is then 512 MB.  If some applications want more, too bad, that’s all there is.  Some process is going to meet the OOM killer.

Now I buy another 256 MB of RAM.  Now I really do have 512 MB of actual memory.  And I hate swap -- it’s slow as crap, and it seems it’s always the stuff I really want to use that ends up there.  So why even use a swap partition at all?  I was doing fine with 512 MB yesterday, and today, now that it’s all RAM and no swap, my 512 is even better.

The most memory-intensive thing I do is my weekly backup; since it caches every file it reads, and it reads every file on my system, my RAM and swap are instantly full.  The kernel doesn’t start killing off procs at that point, so it shouldn’t be any different if my memory is pure RAM and no swap.

From now on, I’m disabling my swap completely and seeing how it goes.  It’s 2004.  It’s about time.

My mom’s been sending me links to Good Morning Silicon Valley, which is a sort of industry-insider tech-blog.  There’s always lots of interesting stuff to be read there, for example Linux nears the tipping point, in which the author seems to be thinking along the same lines that I am about the state of Linux.

I made some screenshots of my desktop a few weeks ago, and forgot to mention them here.  I’ve been using Fvwm instead of Gnome, and it’s been great -- small, fast, and ridiculously configurable.  You can make it look just like Windows, or really cool like in my screenshots : )  And you can switch between configurations anytime.

Then there’s The Ultimate War Sim, which would be funny if it weren’t representative of reality, which is that a troubling amount of people are outrageously fickle and just plain stupid when it comes to this war.

I wrote a script called searchtext (actually I adapted it from my blog search function) to do Google-style searching through text files on your Unix/Linux computer.  Google-style means you can use multiple words and/or phrases, and spaces mean "and," not "or" (naturally).  It recurses directories and shows some of the text surrounding each match.  Chances are there’s already a tool like this for *nix, but I already had this written for my site, so it was trivial to adapt it for local use.

And let’s not forget beautiful baby blue.

Ever since I first put the system into my car over a year ago, I’ve been looking for an LCD just like the one I had, except in blue, to match my car’s panel lights.  I searched and searched and searched for literally a year, and couldn’t find one anywhere that matched the specs I needed (4x40 characters, parallel data bus, blue backlight).  Which made no sense, because everybody was selling that in green, and everybody was selling 4x20s in blue.

Finally about 2 months ago, I sent out a mass email to about 8 LCD manufacturers asking why I couldn’t find one.  Some never replied, some said their equipment wasn’t tooled for that, one said it’d cost $15,000 to develop such an LCD.  Then, crystalfontz replied and said they could make one for me for about $50 (about the same as a green one, which is what I hoped and figured it should be).  They just needed 6 weeks of lead time.  Well after a year, 6 weeks was no problem : )

I’ll have a full photo set soon, with in-car shots, etc.  I’m having trouble getting the photos to come out right, though.  It looks pretty much like you see here, except the blue is deeper, and the white is brighter.  The problem is, if I close the lens further / snap the shutter faster to make the blue appear deeper, then the white gets darker.  If I adjust for brighter white, the blue gets washed out.  I’ve taken almost 100 shots at various combinations and can’t get it to come out quite right yet.  (This photo is about right, though.)

If you’re hiking alone in the woods, and you come upon a bear (or the bear comes upon you...), and the bear starts coming after you, what do you do?

- Stand still and hope he doesn’t hurt you
- Pick up the biggest rocks that you can throw accurately,
  and throw them at his head
- Shoot him in the face repeatedly with your BB gun
- Run away and hope you can outrun him
- Some combination of the above
- Something else entirely

I’m curious to hear what anyone thinks would maximize the chances of survival in this situation.  Note that the constraints are fixed as I’ve explained them above; you are alone, you have just a BB gun, and whatever else you might find in the woods (rocks, etc).

I accidentally wore my Wegmans shirt to Giant today.

Also, I have a Wegmans shirt.

Because why not.

Five years ago, the Linux operating system was really a pain to use.  It looked and felt "ugly" and inconsistent, but more importantly, it was often very difficult and time-consuming to install new software.  While you might be willing to put up with an ugly interface, you’re probably less/not willing to use a system that requires you to spend an entire weekend whenever you want to install anything.

The heart of the problem is dependencies.  Almost every program you install will depend on other programs/libraries being installed first, because your new program needs to use those libraries.  So you try to install your new program, and the first thing it does is check whether your system has the dependencies it needs.  If not, it says "couldn’t find xyz" and the installation stops; you then need to find and download and install xyz.  Any given program might have 3 or 4 or 10 or 20 dependencies, and each of those has its own dependencies which your system may or may not already have.

To make matters worse, a dependency is usually for a certain version of a program.  You might have version 1.2 of package foobar installed, but your new package requires foobar version 1.4.  So you install the new version of foobar.  But then it turns out that some other program you’ve got, which also depends on foobar, doesn’t work properly with version 1.4.  Now you need to upgrade that other package to (hopefully) make it work again, and possibly upgrade some of its dependencies too.

This turns into a frustrating nightmare very quickly, and it was not the exception, it was the rule.  And the chances of hitting some error while installing your program are much greater when you’re installing 5 or 10 different packages.  Plus, installing any given package requires at least 5 steps (download, uncompress/unzip, then running the commands configure, make, and make install), so installing more than a couple packages is a pain even if you don’t run into any errors.

RedHat Linux attempted to make things easier with their RPM package management system.  This allowed you to use a single command (rpm packagename.rpm) to replace the last 4 steps of an installation, once you’d downloaded the RPM file.  But there aren’t always RPMs available for the package you want to install, and in any case it doesn’t address the issue of dependencies at all.

Debian Linux attempted to address all 5 steps with their APT package management system.  With a single command (something like apt-get install packagename) the system would locate, download, unpack, compile, and install the program.  Even more importantly, it would also determine which dependencies your program has, and it would download and install them first.  If you’ve spent any amount of time administering a Linux system, you understand that this idea is nothing short of miraculous.

I spent a month last year using Debian, but found the APT system to be less than ideal.  (In fairness, I should say that given more time I might have been able to better understand and properly use the system, possibly eliminating my reservations about it.)  It’s not exactly as simple as apt-get install whatever.  The system actually has 3 different versions at any given time: stable, testing, and unstable.  The packages in "stable" are outdated, sometimes by a year.  Testing packages are newer, but usually at least a month or two old.  Unstable packages can be up-to-date but also very likely have bugs that prevent them from installing or running.

All that is confusing and annoying, but if you could mix packages from the different versions, it’d be ok.  But you can’t do that cleanly, i.e. if you try you’re likely to break your whole system.  If you want to upgrade from stable to testing or unstable, you have to do it all at once, which could take hours or days.  And eventually unstable becomes testing, and testing becomes stable, so you will have to go through this on a regular (albeit infrequent) basis.  Basically, a Debian system is either stable, testing, or unstable, and it can only use packages if they’re available within the proper version.  And as I said, stable is usually very outdated.

Aside from those conceptual problems, I frequently ran into practical problems just trying to use the APT system at all.  In the process of installing packages, there would be compilation errors, or configuration problems, or other problems typical of the manual configure-make-makeinstall process.  The concept is great, but if it doesn’t work, it’s no better than the manual method.

Enter Gentoo.  Gentoo Linux is based on the same idea as Debian -- a package management system that resolves dependencies intelligently.  In Gentoo, this system is called Portage, and you use the emerge command to access it.  With the command emerge packagename the system locates, downloads, unpacks, compiles, and installs your package, and it also installs any required dependencies.  The difference (in my experience) is that Gentoo does this a lot better than Debian does.  In Gentoo, there aren’t separate package trees for "stable" or "unstable" (etc) versions; there’s just one package repository.  When new packages (or new versions of packages) are introduced, they are "masked" meaning they’re undergoing testing.  It’s a similar idea to Debian, but it’s implemented much more simply.  To install a masked package, you don’t have to convert your whole system to a "testing" distribution; instead, you just set a special variable when running the emerge command: ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge packagename will install your masked package.

I said that I often ran into errors using Debian’s APT system.  In contrast, Portage has "just worked" for me consistently.  I’ve probably installed 200 packages including dependencies, and have only had problems with 4 of them.  And they weren’t difficult, frustrating problems that took forever to solve -- manually installing the packages solved the problems, so that probably means whoever created the Portage version of the package just messed something up.

With the advent of such intelligent package management systems as Gentoo’s, I think the last significant problem with Linux on the desktop has been solved.  The two other main problems were that the graphical interfaces available for Linux were ugly and hard to use, and that there weren’t as many/as good programs available for Linux compared to Windows.

The GUI problem has been largly solved in the past year or two; a modern Gnome or KDE Linux desktop is just as nice-looking and easy to use as a Windows desktop (and can be configured to look exactly like Windows, if you’re really addicted).  The lack-of-programs problem is solved depending on what you need, with a few exceptions.  For web browsing, email, instant messaging, office apps (word processing, spreadsheets, etc), watching movies, listening to music, image editing, and every other mainstream usage, there are (usually multiple) Linux programs that are as good as or better than their Windows counterparts.  I do all that on my system, plus watch tv with my tv-tuner card, and record music with a free multitrack harddisk recorder program (ardour).  There’s literally nothing I want to do that I can’t do in Linux, and that’s saying something since I’m a geek and use my computer for everything.  The few apps that I hear people really complain about being missing are the Intuit apps (Quicken, TurboTax), and those you can run in Linux with Crossover Office (which I think costs $50).

Back to the topic at hand, systems like Portage solve the final important problem with Linux -- the fact that installing programs used to be a nightmare.  It’s even arguable that this is now easier on Linux than on Windows, since with a single command, your programs are downloaded and installed for you.  The initial installation of the operating system is still somewhat difficult, but the average user never does an OS install anyway; the OS comes pre-installed, or they have a friend/shop do it, because the average user would have trouble even with a Windows OS install.

Switching from defense to offense, what are the strengths of Linux?

♠ price.  The OS and all applications are free.  (Well, there are programs that you can pay for, but I’ve never needed a program that wasn’t free.)

♠ security.  Since programs need special priveledges to modify/delete system files, viruses and social engineering rarely cause damage on Linux systems.  Since most programs are open-source and are actively developed by multiple people, security bugs are fixed very quickly.

♠ community.  Again, most programs are open-source and actively developed, and have mailing lists that you can read and ask questions on.  If you need help or want to request a feature, mailing lists are your best friend.

♠ remote access.  With simple secure tools (ssh and scp) that are standard on virtually every Linux distribution, you can log in to your system from anywhere, run commands, transfer files, do anything you’d normally do if you were sitting in front of it.  With vnc and x11vnc, you can even use your GUI (mouse, etc) remotely, similar to the Remote Desktop feature in Windows XP (except that it’s been around for about 10 years on Linux).

♠ backup and system transfer/copy.  With a single simple command (rsync -a --delete / /mnt/backup) you can make an exact copy of your system to another disk (or partition or directory).  Do it regularly and keep it as a backup, or do it to move your system to a bigger disk, or just to clone a system.

There are lots of others, but those are some of the standouts.

In conclusion... I don’t actually have a conclusion, but this post got to be really big, so I feel like a conclusion is in order.  I conclude that if you know a geek who can help you get past the initial installation, you should run Linux instead of Windows.  The end.

Let me know if you happen to need one of... well, of whatever this is.  I’ll forward you the message.  The best part is the name of the image file: magicpower.gif

I was using Knoppix 3.3 with smb client to copy an image file (3.4 GB) from a W2k server to my new notebook hard drive (the old one died).  I keep encountering problems.  Copying to fat32, I get an out of space error before the file is finished copying.  Copying to ext3 file system, it just keeps going until it fills the whole volume (20 GB).  Any ideas?

I’ve been thinking of creating a deviantArt account for a while now, simply because it would give my photos more exposure.  But I have some reservations.  First, the site is friggin’ overrun by SUPER STUPID SMILEYS -- I mean seriously infested with them, top to bottom, it’s disgusting.  Second, the whole "deviant" theme is just gay... "hehehe, we’re deviants, look at us, we’re so cool" gag gag gag.  Third, the way to get people to notice your stuff is to post comments on other people’s stuff, so 99% of all the photos posted are filled with completely generic comments saying just "great shot! :););o)" and "love the colors!!1!11!!!" etc.

There’s nothing I like better than getting out of the shower and finding my potted ivy plant upside-down on the carpet under the windowsill, dirt everywhere, and the ~16-foot-long branch that’s been growing for over 5 years broken right off.

Does anyone remember a time when things were free on the internet?  Everywhere I go I can’t find anything free.  If it is free it doesn’t last long.  Man Spinner used to be free radio and it was good.  Then Netscape took over.  Now I can play it for 10 minutes a day and then it tells me to sign up to this evil service.  I’m sure we all know this one.  Next thing you know, the evil ones will take away their messenger service or make a real simple version we can use for 5 minutes a month as a tease and then say we can upgrade to one that we can use for 15 minutes a week for $50 a month or GO PLATINUM for $150 a month and be able to use it for unlimited time PLUS you get a free set of SUPER STUPID SMILEYS from superstupidsmileys-r-us.com but you have to sign up for a 3 month "trial" membership with them for just $5 but you must stay with the company for 3 years or you will be billed $10 a month for every month you had the service.

Um......where was I.  Oh I’m bitter because the internet isn’t free anymore.  Anthony, where are the ads man?

DOUBLE DEUCE

Does anyone know where dead pc monitors go?

CJ just caught and ate a fly.  What a fantastic cat.

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and proclaiming - WOW--What A Ride!

sdfgsdfg

If you’ve followed the "Sept 11 Subcommittee Hearings" or whatever they’re called, then you know what a joke they are.  It’s a (frankly rather blatant) attempt by the left to gain political points with voters and has nothing whatever to do with "learning the truth."  In a seemingly unrelated post, SDB sums it thus:

Ever since 9/11, the powerless Left in the US, and "allies" in Europe, have been trying to set themselves up to be able to say I Told You So, but the catastrophes they predicted have universally failed to manifest. It’s been a frustrating time for them.

Has the administration made mistakes? Of course it has. Has it confessed to doing so? Yes, but not the way the Left wants it to. The Bush administration acknowledges its errors through actions, not words. When it recognizes that it’s done something wrong, it tries to fix it. For example, the first administrator sent to Iraq to supervise the rebuilding process was a dismal failure, and after six weeks he was politely kicked upstairs and Bremer was sent to take over.

But that’s not what the Left wants. What they want is a public mea culpa, a humble abasement, delivered in somber tones with eyes downcast, after which the administration would voluntarily submit itself for flogging. That’s because they want the administration to acknowledge as mistakes some major decisions which the administration clearly still thinks was right.

This isn’t about "honesty" or "openness" or "accountability" or any such drivel; it’s about serious disagreements regarding major political policies, and the Left has utterly failed to prevail on those issues on the political level. So they are trying to gain through the backdoor what they cannot win legitimately.

Sorry for the lack of posting this week.  I’ve been busy.  Blah blah blah.

If anyone knows where I can get a "hacked bios" for my Tyan Trinity 450 that allows me to assign IRQs per PCI slot, and/or has a "Disable IRQ sharing" option, I’d love to hear about it.  I currently have 8 devices sharing just 3 IRQs, while 2 other IRQs are completely free.  Retarded.

Talk to you later.

Happy Easter Anthony (et al).