Sunday, November 29, 2009

Mission Accomplished - Tamiya Forklift


Virginia and I just finished assembling a remote control forklift kit.

It looks much like the advertised picture. I only had a few tweaks to make because of some slightly unsprung switch contacts.

It is amazing how many small parts of pretty tight tolerances can be made from a few ounces of plastic. I'm in awe of modern injection molding technology.

Monday, November 02, 2009

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)

Sunday, November 01, 2009

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.