Confessions of a Linux newbie.... part 001

Today I learned of the power of the showmount -e command.... which helped me figure out that I had the permissions given to a visually similar, but wrong IP address range.

I have now managed to share a folder, and access it, using NFS across two Ubuntu boxen. 8)

How cold warriors screwed up science for the rest of us.

I watched this story while I was doing some server maintenance today at work. (Yes... working on a Sunday... ugh).. and it brings a few points to mind:

• Giving both sides to a story isn't fair and balanced if one side is a tiny vocal minority
• Tiny vocal minorities can be created by corporations with a relatively modest investment of resources, and can net a large disruption of Democracy in the process. I'd recommend reading the works of John Robb to see what that implies for the future.
• The science behind global warming has been known for quite a long time... longer than even I imaged it to be.
• There are parts of government which actually work quite well. Let's not throw it out, but encourage the good parts, and weed out the bad.
• Slippery slope arguments are bad for one's logical thought processes, because they over-ride the possibility of progress through dialog with one of fear.

Global warming is real, and we need to address it.

VRMish download manager... 2nd mention

I'm thinking that there needs to be some sort of agent that can sit in the cloud, or on your system, to handle things you download, and allow you to socially network info about them, like delicio.us for files instead of bookmarks.

So now I'm not the only one with an idea.... Dave Winer has it too... some way to manage all of the downloads, via a 3rd party.

He's only worried about local stuff.... I want to distribute the list, etc... but I think there is some common ground.

The Terminatrix

At last, an explanation of why Obama got the Nobel that makes sense..

http://www.slowpokecomics.com/strips/terminatrix.html

How do I extract Picasa's "Name Tags" for use on Flickr, etc?

I'm quite happy with the feature of Picasa which does facial recognition as a concept, but not in practice. I can't get the data to couple to any other place, and for now it remains in a Walled Garden that is Picasa. I was hoping that I could get it out via EXIF or ITPC tags, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Does anyone know how I can get this data into a more useful (portable) format?

Revolution, fear, and what to do about it.

I read a lot of things I classify as "tin foil hat"... but that label is increasingly inapplicable, because a lot of things that were previously fringe, seem to be working their way towards the mainstream... one of the sites is What Really Happened, which I started reading soon after 9/11/2001. It's a collection of story summaries, with links, to all sorts of tin foil hat material.

One of the stories What is the threshold for revolution? asks about something I do NOT want to happen... revolution, and how to discern the cause or trigger point. Today's experience waiting with a lot of my fellow Hoosiers has me convinced that local government still works, is fairly competent, and has the trust of all of those in line. This is a good thing.

As long as we all believe that we have some measure of control over things, and we have some transparency, and that we're all in this together things still have a reasonable change of not spiraling dangerously out of control. The key here is to work on the local level, coordinate on the larger level, and change the rules to allow the conversations open and honest.

The Federalists have amassed a great deal of central power, but the corruption costs due to the lack of transparency, and capture of the government by lobbyists and other non-citizen groups has to be addressed. I would like to see the transparency promised by the current administration materialize, and I fear the consequences if this part of the promise is not kept.

We, the people, will pull together, and make it through the consequences of the Federalist agenda that have savaged our nation, but we have to sense that there is at least hope of turning things around.

The airwaves are filled with a lot of Left vs Right noise... it's all a distraction, to keep you from talking with your neighbors who you might not agree with on specifics, but definitely agree with on the general issues: Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. If you avoid the hot-button issues, I bet you'll find you really have a lot to agree with, and some common cause.

Revolution is messy, wasteful, and gets a lot of innocent people killed, and destroys much... lets all pull together and prevent it, while making things better, and getting our government back under our control.

Thanks again for your time and attention.

--Mike--

Novel N1H1, a nice dream, and a world of hurt.

Dear diary,

It's been an interesting day. Today I write about Novel N1H1 Influenza, a dream about a parts exchange program (PEP?) and a world of pain.

The day started off innocently enough. I awoke before 8:00 AM to get Virginia ready to go, and we went to Crown Point, Indiana, to get her immunized against the Novel N1Hi strain of influenza that will be making the rounds soon. We arrived at the county courthouse at about 9:00 AM, the stated opening time, to find the line wrapping around from the side of the building to across the front. It took approximately 3 hours, 40 minutes, to reach the front of that line. During this time, Virginia got tired a few times, and wanted to be picked up. (She's currently 3, and weighs about 45 pounds with all of the layers we had on today). I knew I would pay the price later, but that's what fathers do to help their little girls.

Here's a story from the local paper that covers the experience from a few days ago.

Virginia, like always made friends in the line. Hi Lauren and Mario!

She ended up getting the mist variety of immunization. This apparently contains a live, but "attenuated" virus to give her immune system something to recognize later, with a life-saving head start. Not what we expected, but good enough. The actual immunization only took about a minute, with about 2 minutes of paperwork leading up to it.

The car made the day more interesting by having a loose bit under the front, which I had to re-secure after returning home. There is an air dam, to help with aerodynamics, great when it works, but not fun when it flaps around on the highway. It's fastened down, and should be good enough for a while.

We all took a nap. I had a nice dream about writing a program, open source, that sounded really nice during the dream. It was called PEP - Parts Exchange Program, and was a way to deal with the situation I found myself in during the 1980s... lots of parts, a surplus in fact, but always missing something I needed. PEP would allow you to list all of the parts you had for sale, trade, etc... and automatically find things you needed from nearby sources. (Radio Shack, EDI, friends,ACRO, Digikey, etc) In the dream... it was really sweet, and everybody was excited by the idea.

Upon waking... the world of pain made itself apparent. My back hurts... a lot! I'm fortunate that I now have time to rest and let the Advil kick in and do it's thing. I'm also fortunate to have a blog to write into to distract me from the pain for a while.

The PEP program is a good idea, but the actual cataloging of all my parts would take more time than I can imaging spending right now. I think the concept could be applied to a number of places, especially in a world of decreasingly available cheap new parts. It can also be applied across a number of disciplines, pretty much anywhere people have things to share.

I also have the idea of a cheap curve tracer / parts measurement box for discreet and or 3/4 pin semiconductors, which would interface with PEP.

Well... that's it... Novel N1H1 gave me an interesting day, and gives you a hopefully interesting blog post.

Thanks for your time and attention.

--Mike--