Month: April 2003

what’s really important?

Is There Life After Silicon Valley’s Fast Lane?

“Productivity should be about producing more with less rather than more with more.”

Interesting article, looking into how the relentless pursuit of transistor density at lower prices has created and burned out so many adrenalin junkies. Some have moved away from the valley, some remain, but on their own terms.

Of course, the next article from the Times is blurbed thusly: ” Two Silicon Valley start-up companies will unveil new products that will make it less expensive for Internet and phone carriers to route their data traffic.” So where chip speeds may peter out as the benchmark of performance, networking metrics — throughput or some other measure — will take its place and we’ll do it all again.

Maybe.

appletalk in a hostile environment

I had been wondering how to print to some of the remote printers in my windows-dominated environment: they never showed up in Print Center. Well, I sorted it out today when I tried printing on the command line with atprint and used atlookup to see what I could see. It turns out I needed to initialize printing with AppleTalk by running at_cho_prn as root. This puts a default printer name in /etc/atalk/atprint.dat and all is well. After that, all other AppleTalk device show up just fine.

And I was amused to discover a few Macs on the network, not all of which are officially sanctioned by computing control.

senior moment or ego?

CNN.com – McCartney ‘puts record straight’ – Apr. 5, 2003

But McCartney, who has long complained that Lennon, for instance, had no input in the hit “Yesterday,” wants the songs fairly labelled.

I had always heard that Lennon named the song and gave it it’s hook (Paul had been singing “scrambled eggs” for lack of a more appropriate choice).

Seems that was apocryphal, after all.

But why does he care, after all these years? It seems ungracious to care about billing after 40 years, especially when your partner has been dead 20+ years.

back to nature

The Seattle Times: Local News: Good earth gives urban sustenance for 30 years

The P-Patch program began in 1973, when the Picardo family no longer found truck farming profitable and allowed an activist to use their land to teach youngsters about gardening. The kids’ produce was then donated to Neighbors in Need.

Within the next few years, activists expanded the program, and P-Patches, named for the Picardo family and “passionate people producing peas in public,” sprung up around the city.

The Picardo farmhouse is where I catch the bus every day, and I find the P-Patch a nice place to reflect and take a breath. So we couldn’t stay away when we saw the draft horses at work in the patch.

Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom.

Performance Computing – Features – The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

Nowhere is this word/image culture tension better represented than in the contrast between UNIX and NT. When the much-vaunted UNIX-killer arrived a few years ago, backed by the full faith and credit of the Redmond juggernaut, I approached it with an open mind. But NT left me cold. There was something deeply unsatisfying about it. I had that ineffable feeling (apologies to Gertrude Stein) there was no there there. Granted, I already knew the major themes of system and network administration from my UNIX days, and I will admit that registry hacking did vex me for a few days, but after my short scramble up the learning curve I looked back at UNIX with the feeling I’d been demoted from a backhoe to a leaf-blower. NT just didn’t offer room to move. The one-size-fits-all, point-and-click, we’ve-already-anticipated-all-your-needs world of NT had me yearning for those obscure command-line flags and man -k. I wanted to craft my own solutions from my own toolbox, not have my ideas slammed into the visually homogenous, prepackaged, Soviet world of Microsoft Foundation Classes.

Lots of great images and ideas here, some of which I have felt but never articulated. The “short learning curve” is a great summary of my brief-but-still-too-long experience with Windows 2000. It was boring: you couldn’t do anything.

Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price of freedom is always dear, but there’s no substitute. Personally, I’d rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon like NT. I’m hoping that as IT folks become more seasoned and less impressed by superficial convenience at the expense of real freedom, they will yearn for the kind of freedom and responsibility UNIX allows. When they do, UNIX will be there to fill the need.

There’s approximately zero chance of this happening in my workplace, but then, I look at it as self-imposed exile. I’m not willing to force someone to expand their horizons, enlarge their mind. They have to want it for themselves.