1,000 Hits

Yep. This blog got its thousandth hit sometime this afternoon. I never thought that would happen in a little under six weeks. Looks like I picked correctly when I chose to go with WordPress!

Interesting News Articles

I was cruising the web, when I thought I would post some more interesting news articles that touch upon some of the issues that have been discussed on this blog. Nothing like getting a new perspective on matters, eh? (No, I’m not Canadian, but I am Norwegian on both sides of my family, and grew up in a little town that was about a hundred clicks south of the Canadian border in the Upper Midwest.)

First is an article from the St. Paul Pioneer Press that elucidates the illusion of a battle raging between Science and Faith. Some people who are regular readers of this blog know that I hold fundamentalists in disdain. That being said, I think I must emphasise that it is only fundies that I hold in disdain. The rest of Christendom seems to get the fact that science does not challenge God, but magnifies Him, whether if it is Evolution, Mathematics, Physics, or Anthropology.

June’s article on Gas Prices is a great starting point for researching the huge difficulties in economics, politics, and sociology when it comes to understanding the dependence the world has developed on the petrochemical industry. It is an indisputable fact that some companies have been negligent in their responsibility to safe-guard the pollution that inevitably develops from refining oil, as well as the negative impacts our exhaust has on the environment and weather patterns. However, the best remedy to this, as I stated in her comments section, is to support those companies that are doing something about it! The Stirling Heat Engine, while and old technology, is promising for the future in new and inventive ways to pave our way to energy independence. There is an interesting article in Discover Magazine about the new industry that is growing out of the frustration a lot of people are experiencing in regards to high energy prices. They had another one on a company combining Stirling Engines and Solar power to become the biggest producer of alternative energy in the nation, but for some reason I can’t find the article right now. I will post it when I remember the title of the article.

The latest rage in the literature is discussing Genomics and its application to cure disease. However, Proteomics is the way to go! Just look at this list of people to watch out for in the biological sciences from Discover. Also, look at this introduction to the field, courtesy of Wired.

In anticipation of Nick‘s article on Creationism and Evolution, I thought a little history about the Intelligent Design movement would be in order. Also, another great overview ofCreationism’s Legal Woes from a different perspective.

In Linux news, check out the new Gnome 2.16 Desktop Environment! While I use KDE, Gnome is the DE that most people that are fairly new to Linux see, as it seems that Ubuntu is the most widespread of all Linux OSes out there. Also, it seems that Gnome is the force behind the new XGL and Compiz 3D Desktop Interface, an interface that puts Windows Vista to shame. It does more than Vista, on hardware that even XP would have problems running on! Click on the Desktop Interface link to drool! 🙂

Speaking of Microsoft, it seems that their Live Search is now out of Beta Testing. While I normally do not like MS or their products (I used to work for them before I went into the Army), I will grant you that fair competition is a great thing. Maybe Google will find a way out of the morass that their Google Ad Sense program has become. Personally, I used the Live Search a few months ago, and was not impressed.

That should be enough until tonight. As usual, comments are a blogger’s best friends, so type away! 🙂

The Martyr Mentality

Or, in other words, the Politics of Victimization. This is especially relevant in the United States right now because we, as a culture, love the under-dog. Most people will root for the ill-favored team (How else do you explain Twins’ fans?), the new-comer to the market, the David against the Goliath. From this, we also sympathize with victims. We expect justice to be done. From this sympathization with the victim, though, certain movements in the country have been playing off of this empathy for good and for ill.

Best example would be GNU/Linux against Microsoft. Most of us who read the Tech Trade Press like to see someone take on Microsoft’s juggernaut. The reason why we like it? Well, it might have something to do with the fact of all the illegal and questionable purchases, trade agreements, and coercion that went on in the early to mid 90’s. Companies were stifled, patents were bought and then used as weapons, lawsuits were brought against innovation that threatened the current monopoly, and so on. Now, there is a new kid in the market space that seems to be able to compete with MS in the server market, and now other companies (generally those who were burned and victimized by MS in the 80’s and 90’s) are hopping on board the Linux train!

Our sympathies in a situation like this are generally justifiable, if you view the Tech Industry as a spectator sport. (And come on, who hasn’t viewed one market or another as a sport at some point in their life?) The problem is when the politics of victimization are used to engender feelings of empathy for the majority that has no problems. Businesses are now starting to use this in their PR campaigns, but they are not the progenitors of this tactic. No, for that, we have to look at the Neo-Conservative Christians who propagated this particular methodology.

If we look at the statistics for the US we find that almost 80% of the population identifies as Christian. This is much more than a simple plurality. This is much more than a majority. This is a super-majority. Yet, we find that some Christian movements are characterizing themselves as being persecuted, denied their rights, unable to function, and enduring general social martyrdom. Why would they do this when it is obvious that they have majority opinion behind them? For one reason and one reason alone: We like the under-dogs! We want to be sure that victims are protected! Because we like the under-dogs, of course we’ll listen to them, and even help them out!

As we can see, this is fallacious, as it is their ideology, their ethics, their morality that drives this country at the moment. By setting themselves up to where an outsider thinks that they are being attacked accomplishes their goal by expanding their mind-share of the news memes at the moment, and pushes forward their propaganda on whatever issue they are contending with right now. This does not mean that all Christians are doing this. Far be it from that! While most Christians, and, indeed, their denominations, are content to live their life quietly according to their beliefs, it is the few, the extreme right wing, that is ruining the collective reputation of Mainline Christianity as a whole. Of course, here I’m referencing to the self proclaimed “Word Faith” movement that I escaped from, not to mention certain Pentecostal sects, as well as a few fundamentalist Baptists.

In the end, what is lost is the freedoms and liberties that this country was built on. There always existed a small but vocal minority within the bounds of this country that wanted to install a theocracy, and stifle any dissent to their views, in the hopes of creating a “New Jerusalem“. Let’s work to instill the original values of the Founding Fathers instead- Equal Rights Afforded to Everyone.

Helios Battling Illness

This is not a good day. I was over at Digg.com, when I found a new story concerning Helios. Helios is one of the bloggers that were out on the net that inspired me to get past my fear of HTML and write my own blog. His blog is also what inspired me to choose WordPress, because of WordPress’ Open Source heritage. He has been an inspiration to the Linux community, and if you read his blog on a consistent basis, he’s absolutely hilarious! I especially like the reminiscence of his when he had an anti-Linux acquaintance of his browse to a known web site that would infect the computer with all sorts of virii and spy-ware, all because said person thought that anti-virus software was a conspiracy. (This acquaintance of his owned stock in Microsoft, which might have lent to his incredible myopic view of the Linux world.)

His effort in the Texas area, Lobby 4 Linux, was an inspiration to other LUG groups across the nation. Not to mention that his posts about the pro’s and con’s of the Linux world, his easy to read nature, and his in-depth knowledge of the OS itself always made for informative reading. I would highly recommend that people browse over to his blog while it is still up and read some of the back posts. Also, if you are able to do so, think about donating to help his family out. With the state of our current medical insurance system, I’m pretty sure that what he’s going through right now is just the tip of the iceberg compared to what most people have to go through.

Our best thoughts are with you, Ken!

And Then There Was One?

If you search Google, especially the news portion of the site, you will notice one thing that seems to be repeating itself over and over: Ubuntu is Linux. Of course, the false corollary of that is also repeating itself as well: Linux is Ubuntu. Are people, or, more importantly, news editors, really that stupid? Does no one ever do research anymore? Is this the fall out that we are experiencing from the failure of the American Public Education System?

Of course, when you look at this phenomenon, you will realize that this has been going on for several years in the press. Back in the mid to late 90’s, if you read any of the trade press on computers, you would have been forgiven for assuming that Linux was Red Hat. With the push into the server market, though, it seems that Red Hat has lost a little bit of its mindshare in equating their name with Linux. Then, around 2001 or 2002, Suse started to become synonymous with Linux. Novell pushed the Suse brand after buying the group out, and the desktop experience, at that time, was one of the better environments to work in, at least as Linux desktop solutions in the corporate world went back then. Of course, on the heels of Suse came the marketing of Linspire and Xandros. (I won’t even go into them, since if I wanted a Windows desktop, I would use XP.) Now we have Ubuntu.

Please do not misunderstand this. Personally, as I’ve stated before, I use Mepis 6.0, which is built upon the core packages of Ubuntu (which is built upon the core packages of Debian). However, I’m beginning to be a little irked by all the fanatical support that Ubuntu is garnering. Ubuntu did not create apt-get, that is the tool that differentiated Debian from the Red Hat systems. This powerful utility seems to be the main reason why people are singing the praise for Ubuntu. It is also the reason why people are suggesting that Ubuntu should be considered a newbie friendly distribution for those who are brand spanking new to Linux. Sometimes I can agree with that, depending on the circumstance, but most of the time I can’t.

For instance, there are a myriad of ways in which Ubuntu fails the newbie. If you are trying to get someone who has always known Windows all of her life to use Linux, then I would suggest that you install either Xandros (yes, I know I stated I don’t like the distro, but I will still give credit where it is due) or PCLinuxOS. I would still tilt towards the PCLinuxOS distro, though, as it seems to have everything set up for the home user right out of the box (or image). It has Firefox and Thunderbird set up as a default, plus all the media codecs and file sharing utilities an open source person could want. Not to mention that source packages are still there in case if you need to compile something from source, not that a newbie would want to be doing something like that when they are first starting out on Linux.

Be that as it may, this leads me to refute a piece of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that has been floating around on the internet for quite some time- Linux is not fractured like Unix. Microserfs like to say that when you install one version of Linux, it is incompatible with all the other versions, and then they begin to use this “methodology” to show how small each distro’s market share is in comparison to Microsoft’s share, especially in the server realm. This is simply not true. There is a reason why most F/OSS advocates relate to the term “flavor” instead. Just as there are flavors of Windows (95, 98, 2000, XP, and so on), they can still essentially run the same software. The same is true for Linux. The same software that I’m running on Mepis right now is the same software that I ran on Suse 10.0. Sure, there are some “compatibility” issues in where certain libraries are kept on the file system, but the same is true in the Windows environment. Nothing that a good symlink, or a conversion utility such as Alien, can’t cure.

Now that the Portland Project and other similar initiatives are gaining traction, basically all the distros will turn into is how many and what type of software packages will be automatically installed. General purpose? Ubuntu. Corporate development and business specific? Suse. Multimedia? Well, can’t think of one right off the tip of my hat, but may I suggest Symphony? With the installation of each, you will find that the only thing that will make it stand out from the rest is how it will curtail to your specific needs right after installation. Not to mention that you are not locked into the preconfigured system, as most packages are just a click away with Synaptic and SMART.

So please! If you are advocating the adoption of Linux, actually look at what the user wants, rather than just throwing Ubuntu at them. Most of the time, especially for home use, it’s a good fit, but their are other options that may adhere to what the user wants to do a lot better!

Brand new to the Blogosphere

Here’s the thing: If you haven’t noticed, and I’m sure you have, this site is a little plain right now. When I originally thought I would put this blog up, I had envisioned writing it with applications and a text editor on the home computer, and then uploading the pages to whatever site I would have to host the blog. Obviously, as I’m using the web-based version of WordPress, this scenario did not happen. While my HTML and JavaScript skills are rudimentary at best, there are a lot of examples of code out there on the web to “emulate”, so to speak, on a personal site. As such, I’m still learning the on-line version of WordPress. Give me some time and I’ll have this site looking the way a proper Blog should, complete with nifty art and links to whatever video is currently occupying my time. (I actually think that embedded video in the page is tacky and reminiscent of the annoying pop-up Flash based advertising that annoys the hell out of me, so I will strive to avoid that.)

Speaking about using WordPress, I’m finding the documentation to be a little obtuse in its presentation of the features and layout of the tool. If anyone knows of a mailing list, CVS repository, and anything else that the good folks behind WordPress use for editing, submitting, and revising the docs, please let me know. I’ve already highlighted several sections that I would have rewrote almost entirely, as there are assumptions inherent in the presentation that leaves the blogging newbie (such as myself) completely in the dark. Before you start chastising me for my newbie-ness, remember that I use Linux for my OS about 98% of the time, utilize KDevelop for my C/C++ coding projects, and am usually immersed in technical specifications because of my hobby of tweaking everything in KDE and the Kernel. As such, I guess it would only take me a few hours of consistently going through the documentation and piecing it together, as I’m used to doing that already for all of the other docs that I go through, but I’m beginning to get a little peeved at the state of documentation in the Open Source community. I believe that if you are a proponent of F/OSS software, such as I am, but don’t know jack about coding, then get involved in other ways. Become active on the community boards to help out others with their software questions, write documentation (if you are blogging, and your blog is even half-way successful, then you obviously like to write, so put it to use!), or use your blog to put up HOWTOs of cool or useful things that you have done with whatever piece of OSS software that you enjoy. Contribute somehow! The people coding the projects can’t be expected to do everything! Most of them are doing that in their spare time!

And, now that I’m done explaining/ranting, if you happen to stumble across this blog, leave a comment to let me know how to get involved with the documentation! 🙂

“The promise of freedom requires the courage of thought.” -Clay Springer

Procrastination and Confusion

Well now, I finally did it. Of course, to get this little blog of mine up and running took a little bit of experimentation, two crashed OS’s, some studying on the pro’s and con’s of Apache 1.3 vs. Apache 2.0, and a lot of yelling at the computer and whichever of my friends that happened to be closest. Not to mention the poor folks that man the call center for Comcast. (Which, in my not so humble opinion, Comcast should fund better in the arena of education and training rather than pouring their capital into marketing and lobbying on the Hill.) Why all of this ruckus over posting a simple little blog? In a word- Confusion.

It all started with my installation of Mepis 6.0. I had been a Suse user for years, and loved the OS, but when I upgraded to 10.1, the proverbial fecal material hit the high frequency oscillating target. First the burns for the OS images went poorly. For some reason, CD’s 1,4,5 and the Add-On CD went well, but for some reason K3B refused to burn the images for CD’s 2 and 3. At first, I thought this was an issue with the CD-Burner that I was using at the time. However, after consulting with the person who got me started on Suse Linux 9.1, it seemed that there was a problem with K3B itself. (For those of you who do not use Linux or Open Source Software, K3B is a burning utility like Nero, except most of the time it has more features and is definetly more user friendly than the burning utilities in the MS world.) This was confirmed after I switched out the CD-Burner for another, and the same issue was happening. I finally got the CD’s burned, don’t ask me how, and then went for the install. I backed up my data, did the install, and I was in! That’s when the problems started.

You see, I didn’t read the documents or the forums on Suse before I went ahead with the install. All I did for “research” was to read the glowing reviews that were posted all over the web when it was released. However, these reviews just went into how easy the installation was, how great the User Interface was, and then explained a little bit about the utility that made Suse famous: YaST. (Yet Another Set-Up Tool.) If I would have read the forums that were dedicated to Suse and OpenSuse, I would have found out that there were a lot of bugs, glitches, and down right ill-thought out design in this version of Suse. Yast wouldn’t work properly, YOU (the Yast On-Line Updater) was broken, and several hardware configurations were mis-configured. However, it did get installed, and I did get to experiment with the 3-D Desktop. The disappointing thing about the 3-D desktop was that it was not simple to implement or configure, which was yet another thing that all the glowing reviews forgot to tell their readership about. You had to install components from the CD’s, modify config files, and generally jump through hoops to get it operating in the KDE envirnonment. (I prefer KDE because it was the first Desktop Environment that I experienced on Linux. I’ve never ran Gnome, and played around with FluxBox, IceWM, and XFCE, but always felt more comfortable in KDE.) But Wait! If you read the press releases and the reviews, you would assume that getting the 3-D desktop was simple! Well, it wasn’t; at least on the KDE side of things.

At this point, my friend was tired of fighting with Suse. He tried to migrate to 10.1 from 9.3, and all of his environmental settings and hardware configurations were completely messed up. The problem with his experience, though, was that he was installing it on his laptop (a Sony Vaio) which was his production environment for work. (He works as a Web Developer for a big health care insurance company that relies on its internal web applications for day to day business critical needs.) He could not go about and muck around with the configuration of Suse. He needed his laptop, and he needed it NOW! So, one Saturday afternoon, he gives me a call and tells me to start some research on other OS’s.

That Saturday, I downloaded four different “flavors” of Linux. Out came the CD’s, and onto them I applied Kubuntu 6.06 “Dapper Drake”, Mepis 6.0, PCLinuxOS, and the latest from Knoppix. I tried them all before installing. I knew more than enough about the Debian architectural underpinnings of the Ubuntu flavors, had heard nothing but good things about PCLinuxOS, and had used Knoppix regularly when diagnosing my own computer when I goofed up or when removing spyware from other’s computers. He, however, decided to go with the DVD ISO of Kubuntu. Like I stated before, I like KDE. So does he, which is the reason for all these distributions being KDE-centric. Needless to say, he liked the apt-get utility in the Debian sphere of influence. So did I, after dealing with “dependency hell” for two years on the Suse platform. (Even the SMART Package Manager, Guru’s repo, and other repositories couldn’t save you from that in the RPM universe.) Onto his laptop went Kubuntu! I was more hesitant, though, as I was used to Yast. Yast is a great utility for configuring all kinds of things in the Linux world without having to drop down to the command line to edit a text file. Think of it as a more secure version of Microsoft’s Control Panel in Windows. However, the problem with Yast is that it relies on a whole host of scripts for it to boot and run, which makes it powerful, but very slow. In the past year, I was already doing the majority of the installations of RPM’s and configurations of Networking and Graphics on the command line anyway, because it was just faster to do it that way than to wait for Yast to boot up. Once my friend pointed that out to me, I finally decided on Mepis 6.0.

With that decision, I’ve been very happy! The computer was already set up with everything that would have taken me another two hours to configure on Suse right out of the box. (Or ISO, as is this case.) The only thing I had to do was to activate the Audio and Video Codecs! (Those are the files on your computer that tell your computer how to display all those wonderful movie and song files.) Once that was done, the whole environment was perfect! All my programming files were there, and the only thing extra that I had to do was to install the source code for the kernel from one of the repositories. (I like to compile a lot of the programs from source to make sure the config files catch all the variables in my particular environment. Not to mention that I think most of the time, when you compile from source, the program just works faster. Of course, that’s probably just perception…)

So, what does this have to do with putting up a silly little blog? A whole lot. The reason for it is that I was amazed at how simply every thing worked in Mepis, and thought I would try my hand at other things that I was too scared to do before. Of course, here I’m referencing to actually putting up a web site. I had never considered this before, even though I know the basics of HTML and Javascript. The thing is, though, I knew enough of web coding to get through someone else’s code, and maybe put in a modification here and there, but not enough to actually write something from scratch and have it look nice and readable when someone else would browse to it. This procrastination ended with the installation of Mepis on the computer, though. From the forums at MepisLovers.com I heard about this great little utility to help people with posting their own Blogs called “WordPress”. Hurray! This sounded exactly what I was looking for!

Then the confusion set in. I installed WordPress from Synaptic. And then I looked for it. And looked for it, and then I looked for it some more. I couldn’t find it! Their were no executables, and the only thing I found from the installation log in Synaptic were a bunch of PHP and HTML files scattered all over the place. Then it hit me: WordPress was not an application in the ordinary sense. It was a web based program to generate an HTML and PHP page! Hence the reason why Apache, MySQL, and PHP had to be running on my machine at the same time for it to do what I wanted it to do. This was quite a shock to me, as everything (yet again) that I read had led me to believe that it was an application; kind of like a pared down version of Frontpage or Dreamweaver, but meant just for blogs. So, in the process of trying to get the software up on the computer, somehow I had inadvertently installed two instances of Apache. One was version 1.3, the other was version 2.0. This was in addition to the MySQL and PHP servers that were currently running on the machine.

Now, the fun happens! In the middle of trying to set this up, I had somehow disabled my firewalls. Knowing myself, I had probably become a little too click happy with some of the dialog boxes that had popped up on my screen. (Yet another “blond” moment in my life, I guess.) So, now I had two unsecured web servers running, a database that was not properly setup, and more than likely an unsecured PHP server running. This made the system come to a grinding halt, to say the least! Not knowing very much about web development, and having felt that my system was compromised, I just reinstalled Mepis. (This time, installation and configuration of everything only took about 20 minutes). I was up and running again! And still intent on making a weblog.

Which leads me to my confrontation with the”good” folks who run my Broadband service. I called them in an effort to see if they had the specifications so I could run WordPress on my personal web page site, which is what I’m paying all the monthly fees for after all, right? I mean, no one actually gets 6 megabits per second transfer rates through their cable modems in reality, right? Of course I’m right. The most that a person can hope to attain is about 500 kBPS from most servers because of the bottlenecks in the net architecture right now. (If the DSL providers would market this, they would get a lot more people switching. I don’t know why they don’t.) I call them, thinking I will talk to competent people who know a lot about web pages. I don’t know why I was surprised when I found out that they were completely clueless about why I wanted to do what I wanted to do. They didn’t even know what type of servers they were running on their network! What they wanted me to do was pay an additional US $50 per month for them to host my personal blog!

That’s when I decided to just run with the WordPress hosting site. It does everything I wanted it to do, without the hassle of setting up Apache, MySQL, and PHP on top of my current Linux distro. While I love Linux, I’m not much of a server guy. (Unfortunately, the only thing I know about servers is what I know to get a linux Printer and File server up and running securely, and Microsoft SQL Server 7.0.) Eventually I see myself hosting this weblog on its own domain, with customised HTML coding, but for now the web-based version suits me just fine. It’s not like I expect a lot of people to be reading my meandering, abstract thoughts in the first place. (Unless if I post one of my Linux tutorials and it gets promoted on Digg.com, that is.)

I think that should be enough for an initial first post. My god, but did I ramble! 🙂