Month: March 2003

do not irritate the programmers

LogSpammer

There’s this evil company out there at ZipCodeWorld.com. They have a tendency to leave bogus comments in peoples blogs that have links back to their site as a way of advertising. Well, one day they made the mistake of leaving that crap in my blog. Silly people. They shouda known better then to screw with a programmer. So, I sat down and wrote this.

I haven’t been victimized by these losers yet, but now I have something to turn loose on them if I am.

the muy borracho theory of foreign policy

[IP] a pirce very worth reading till the end SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL byJo

[ . . . ] By these terrible means, they will create a world where war conducted by any country but the United States will seem simply too risky and the Great American Peace will begin. Unregulated Global Corporatism will be the only permissible ideology, every human will have access to McDonald’s and the Home Shopping Network, all “news” will come through some variant of AOLTimeWarnerCNN, the Internet will be run by Microsoft, and so it will remain for a long time. Peace. On Prozac. If I were in charge, this is neither the flavor of peace I would prefer nor the way I would achieve it. But if I’d been in charge back in 1983, there might still be a Soviet Union and we might all still be waiting for the world to end in fifteen nuclear minutes.

What’s scarier than this theory is the notion that we might actually be following it.

I read this a month or so ago and was reminded of it again today when an otherwise reasonable friend opined that he thought G W Bush’s intellect is under-rated. While I’ll concede that he must has some level of smarts to get where he is, he’s not the one to be concerned about. The guy who ran the search for the VP candidate and found no better choice than himself is the one to watch.

Teddy Roosevelt on corporate power

Theodore Roosevelt

“The captains of industry . . . have on the whole done great good to our people. Without them the material development of which we are so justly proud could never have taken place. . . . Yet it is also true that there are real and great evils. There is a widespread conviction in the minds of the American people that the great corporations known as trusts are uncertain of their futures and tendencies hurtful to the general welfare. This . . . is based upon sincere conviction that combinations and concentration should be, not prohibited, but supervised and within reasonable limits controlled; and in my judgment this conviction is right.”

What would he say about today’s corporate combinations and concentrations of power?

curing MT’s senior moments

[the girlie matters] tips, tricks, and things to do to my site: remember me misbehavior

I found this information while I was looking for something else: I was so excited to see a solution to this problem, I forgot what I was looking for.

If your MovableType instance forgets that you or your readers have already established a relationship with it, try this fix in your individual entry template.

Change

setCookie('mtcmtauth', f.author.value, now, '', HOST, '');
setCookie('mtcmtmail', f.email.value, now, '', HOST, '');
setCookie('mtcmthome', f.url.value, now, '', HOST, '');

to

setCookie('mtcmtauth', f.author.value, now, '/', HOST, '');
setCookie('mtcmtmail', f.email.value, now, '/', HOST, '');
setCookie('mtcmthome', f.url.value, now, '/', HOST, '');

I’m Switching

Apple – Switch

I ordered a 2 * 1.25 GHz G4 today and will move away from this superannuated Windows machine as soon as it comes in.

One of the major annoyances is how poorly non-MSFT applications work in Windows. While they be be OK for awhile, after some time, things get flaky, the machine slows down, applications don’t respond, and you find yourself in Task Manager, killing off the zombies in hopes of getting some work done.

The opacity of the OS is another problem for me: I’m used to being able to see what’s happening on the system, and while the article referenced in my previous post mentioned a Resource Kit that offers tools a UNIX admin would recognize, they’re not standard and as far as I can tell, not available in my workplace.

I can’t print to a printer that’s physically located on my desk because the computer thinks it’s out of paper. So I have to send my print jobs to a printer on the floor below mine and go get them.

I tried to print a simple one page document last week and while I could get one copy, the subsequent request for 100 copies was all gibberish: font substitution or the lack thereof wasted 100 sheets of paper (for some reason, I couldn’t kill the print job). So I found to our overworked communications director (who uses a Mac) and in 5 minutes, we did what I couldn’t do in an hour in Windows.

The bottom line is that my job is a multidisciplinary one, and the right tools to do that aren’t forthcoming from Windows. Maybe a bigger, faster machine would have helped, but I have a problem forcing a person with a given set of skills to use unfamiliar or unsuitable tools “because everyone else does.”

To reference the previous post again, assuming the document it covers is genuine, using a system with the transparency and flexibility of UNIX with the power and focus of a commercial enterprise is the way to go, as endorsed by MSFT itself. So I’m just getting ahead of the crowd.

UNIX -> WIN2000 migration tips

M?crosöft Secrets

This white paper discusses the approach used to convert the Hotmail web server farm from UNIX to Windows 2000, and the reasons the features and techniques were chosen. It will focus primarily on the planners, developers, and system administrators. The purpose of the paper is to provide insight for similar deployments using Windows 2000. We will discuss the techniques from the viewpoint of human engineering as well as software engineering.

It would be interesting to read some similarly detailed docs that detail migrations from Windows to other OSes.

It doesn’t mention that the migration took more than three years: it didn’t take the Hotmail team that long to build the site in the first place.
Continue reading “UNIX -> WIN2000 migration tips”

the iPod as language lab on your hip

[Mac-users-discussion] A Question…

Obviously, life is Better when you can read, write, and listen to language.

You learn faster, absorb material better, and retain information longer. Unfortunately, IMHE (edit: in my humble experience), while there is often _extra_ material available online, it’s very rare that a listening portion of a class will be required for, say, homework. It’s also rare that you would be able to learn vocabulary words, or study readings or dialogs, by listening to them. The iPod, of course, changes that. You can do all of this and still have room for Dave Matthews and Cake.

So my proposal is to get these iPods in the classroom: Those who want could “check out” iPods for the duration of a quarter from the language department (it would require copious amounts of personal information, for sure… okay, maybe just the student name and number). It would be pre-loaded with all the audio material for the quarter, all dialogs and readings would be in there, and all vocabulary words would be on it. The advantage of studying vocabulary on the iPod, IMHO, is that you can put the foreign word as the song’s title, and the English translation as the song’s album, thus giving you one line of space between them. Voila, no more flashcards are necessary.

I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent making flashcards for Korean, and now I just have all my vocabulary on my iPod. And since the iPod displays Unicode just fine, well, there you have it. Flashcards, both visual and audio.

The best part: The students need not even own a computer to take advantage of it.

The author of the original message is Apple’s campus representative, so his goals are not unbiased. But I think there’s merit to the idea.

Shame Steve still hates the Newton so much . . . .