Month: December 2003

This was all a lot easier than I imagined it would be. For one thing, my issue of being unable to renew my DHCP lease could have been solved with dhclient -r, from a response I got on the FreeBSD-questions mailing list:
The -r flag explicitly releases the current lease, and once the lease has been released, the client exits.

So if it happens again, I can test this (though I’m happy to skip that experience).

A little sleuthing turned up a python app (3412 lines is hard to call a script) that will update my DNS records at ZoneEdit.

So buying a domain from GoDaddy: $7.95/year.
DNS from ZoneEdit: free.
Running my own domain, and being able to see if Google AdSense is worth all the hype: priceless.

In the Capital of the Car, Nature Stakes a Claim

PAUL WEERTZ lives less than 10 minutes from downtown, but the view from his window is anything but urban. On a warm day this fall, the air was ripe with the smell of fresh-cut hay and manure. In the alley behind his house, bales of hay teetered and listed where garbage cans once stood. Chickens scratched in the yard, near a garage that had been turned into a barn. Mr. Weertz drives a Ford — not a sleek sedan but a rebuilt 1960 tractor.

“My sisters and brothers gave me a pig for my birthday,” Mr. Weertz said, referring to his newest barnyard resident. “I am not sure what I am going to do with it.”

After decades of blight, large swathes of Detroit are being reclaimed by nature. Roughly a third of this 139-square-mile city consists of weed-choked lots and dilapidated buildings. Satellite images show an urban core giving way to an urban prairie.

Rather than fight this return to nature, Mr. Weertz and other urban farmers have embraced it, gradually converting 15 acres of idle land into more than 40 community gardens and microfarms — some consuming entire blocks.

A year ago, I mentioned a great site that cataloged the reclamation of Detroit by nature, but where that writer laments the waste, the NYTimes article looks at the situation more impartially (or ambivalently).

At the very least, enjoy the irony of this image: an opulent theater, emblematic of a modern cultured society, turned into a makeshift parking garage.

Are we headed for a post-industrial agrarian future, with the ruins of Motor City as our blueprint?

Pentagon Bars Three Nations From Iraq Bids

The Pentagon has barred French, German and Russian companies from competing for $18.6 billion in contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq, saying it was acting to protect “the essential security interests of the United States.”

The directive, issued Friday by Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, represents the most substantive retaliation to date by the Bush administration against American allies who opposed its decision to go to war in Iraq.

I dunno, it seems the Iraqis should have a say in this: it’s their country. Haven’t we made enough decisions for them?

Rockin’ on without Microsoft |CNET.com

Sterling Ball of Ernie Ball Strings on dumping the MSFT suite of products:

I don’t think there’s any such thing as free software. I think there’s a cost in implementing all of it. How much of a cost depends on whom you talk to. Microsoft and some analysts will tell you about all the support calls and service problems. That’s hysterical. Have they worked in my office? I can find out how many calls my guys have made to Red Hat, but I’m pretty sure the answer is none or close to it…It just doesn’t crash as much as Windows. And I don’t have to buy new computers every time they come out with a new release and abandon the old one.

Has Microsoft tried to win you back?
Microsoft is a growing business with $49 billion in the bank. What do they care about me? If they cared about me, they wouldn’t have approached me the way they did in the first place…And I’m glad they didn’t try to get me back. I thank them for opening my eyes, because I’m definitely money ahead now and I’m definitely just as productive, and I don’t have any problems communicating with my customers. So thank you, Microsoft.

Interesting article: he points out some of the gaps in Open Source offerings (payroll software for one), but tells a good story debunking the TCO myths that Open Source needs the same or more care and feeding than the Leading Brand.

I didn’t realize the BSA had such a cozy arrangement, RE court costs.

Shell Corner: CoPy Tree

CPT: CoPy TreeHave you ever needed to copy or move a large block of files, maybe many hundreds of megabytes, from one place to another? Or even just a small directory tree, but you wanted it done fast? Then cpt is the program you need.Cpt is written in a POSIX shell dialect that is accepted by the bash shell, Korn shell (88 version), and the *BSD versions of /bin/sh. It only uses common system utilities, and tries to degrade gracefully under pressure during moves, something that mv does not do.