Month: July 2005

are all the “hacks” books this good?

I got Wireless Hacks out of the library the other day and it’s about so much more than wireless: it really serves as a good primer on networking, security hardening, with a leavening of the internet gift culture.

Lots of OS X goodness as well.

Thanks to this book, I am running a squid proxy and working on sending all my packets through an encrypted tunnel: he makes it all look easy.
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what she said

rahrahfeminista2 – :

Why does the cell phone network think usage patterns for its products should fit into people’s broadband patterns any differently than standard cable or dsl, where basestations are quite common. I even wonder if the ubiquity of broadband in places like SF is helped by having various levels of access available at different “prices” — you can war drive for free but your reliability will suck, you can share with roommates but it might make having servers running tricky, or you can have your own connection/IP and have complete control. And this “price differentiation” emerges without intervention from the phone/cable companies. Why do cell phone companies [telcos] think they should be any different?

The Verizon guy sez “Giving things away for free doesn’t work anymore. It never did.” Well, locking people into a service or making it more trouble than its worth never has either.

Now playing: To Hell With Poverty! by Gang of Four from the album “Another Day, Another Dollar”
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annoyances and workarounds

An annoyance that seems to haunt all package management systems: FreeBSD has been much less painful to use than RPM, but it still has issues.

This seems to crop up for some users:


[/opt/ports] # portupgrade -a
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:322:in `deorigin': cannot convert nil into String (PkgDB::DBError)
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:915:in `tsort_build'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:914:in `each'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:914:in `tsort_build'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:906:in `each'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:906:in `tsort_build'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:928:in `sort_build'
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:932:in `sort_build!'
from /usr/local/sbin/portupgrade:674:in `main'
from /usr/local/sbin/portupgrade:207:in `initialize'
from /usr/local/sbin/portupgrade:207:in `new'
from /usr/local/sbin/portupgrade:207:in `main'
from /usr/local/sbin/portupgrade:1869

and the stock answer seems to be to remove the pkgdb.db file and rebuild it with a less buggy hashing method (bdb1-tree, dbm_hash — anything but the default Berkeley DB).

But what if you try all the options and get the same result?
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from bad to worse

and it isn’t so long ago that I marveled at the US becoming cheap(er) offshore labor for European manufacturers (when Mercedes built its M-class plant in Alabama).

I tain’t unedumacated!:

Workers in the U.S. South Too Uneducated to Build Cars? Automobile manufacturer Toyota announced that it would build a new car factory in Woodstock, Ontario, even though several US states offered greater subsidies and tax breaks to the company. The reason?

[M]uch of that extra money would have been eaten away by higher training costs than are necessary for the Woodstock project… Nissan and Honda have encountered difficulties getting new plants up to full production in recent years in Mississippi and Alabama due to an untrained – and often illiterate – workforce. In Alabama, trainers had to use ‘pictorials’ to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech plant equipment.

(Also a contributing factor — Canada’s national health service, which apparently drives down the overall cost of each individual worker.)

To be fair to the US South, the problem may be more apparent there because of the region’s zealousness in competing for automobile factories. But the point remains — Toyota is saying US workers are so poorly educated that it’s not worth the effort to train them. Whom to blame? And how many more factory (and other) jobs will have to be lost to better-educated workforces in other countries before this pings on the national radar?

Where else do Japanese (or other) manufacturers build car plants and how do they fare with their local workers?

And how many workers at, say an Alabama Mercedes plant, are in a position to, or have the desire to, buy one?
Now playing: Can’t Get You Out Of My Head (KEXP Version) by The Flaming Lips from the album “Yoshimi Wins: Live Radio Sessions”
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tagging

Ruk is organizing his blog posts:

My Own Private Taxonomy:

The danger, of course, is that my taxonomy will lose value once it becomes a tree with hundreds of branches. But, for the time being, I have a lot more granularity at my fingertips, which is, I think, a Good Thing.

I’m filing this under “Taxonomy,” a sub-category of “Weblogs.”

For me his blog post title sums it up: all taxonomies are private or personal. For example, he tags a post about David Letterman as “davidletterman” under the parent category of “television.” How does that benefit anyone else? For me, these schemes are only useful if people other than the person who devised them can use them. Do I look for stuff on my site by category, the closest thing I have to a taxonomy? No, I use Google.

My largest category contains more than 1000 posts, the smallest but 6: how useful is that? Could I have organized it better? Probably. But isn’t that like writing the index before you write the book?
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rediscovering Beethoven

Listening to this new series of symphonies via the BBC has been quite enjoyable, as I would have expected.

But whether it’s the brief introductions by the presenters — generally some historical context about the premiere — or the lack of a physical component to this presentation, I find myself marveling at the very idea of going to hear a premiere of one of these.

How often today would we be able to go to a performance without having heard a single note beforehand? Today, we have recordings, televised performances, reviews and articles, all designed to enhance or explain the piece. But 200 years ago — even 100 years ago, for many — there was no way to know what was coming. You bought your ticket and took your chance.

By referring to the lack of a physical component, I mean no CD case or record sleeve, no liner notes, no cover art. Just the music. Unlike Beethoven’s contemporaries, I can rewind and reply to my heart’s content but I still approach the experience with no preconceived ideas about the interpretation.
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