Month: July 2004

page 23, fifth sentence

Incoming Signals: A Weblog Back on the plains, there is space.[1] None of the crucial developments preceding political centralization in those same parts of the world were associated with river valleys or complex irrigation systems.[2] The left fielder had a good arm, and he got the ball right in to the second baseman, but when the dust settled Jennifer T. was safe with another double.[3] What is to be done can only be performed by some sense of elitism, and that is now unacceptable, for reasons both good and bad.[4] “Every man still has some boy in him,” Frank said, “and as a boy, I wanted to be a policeman.”[5] fn1.Sometimes a great notion fn2. Guns, Germs and Steel fn3. Summerland fn4. How to read and why fn5.

Another old draft I just found: one variant of this meme used the five books closest to hand, so I went for that.

Incoming Signals: A Weblog

Back on the plains, there is space[1]. None of the crucial developments preceding political centralization in those same parts of the world were associated with river valleys or complex irrigation systems[2]. The left fielder had a good arm, and he got the ball right in to the second baseman, but when the dust settled Jennifer T. was safe with another double[3]. What is to be done can only be performed by some sense of elitism, and that is now unacceptable, for reasons both good and bad[4]. “Every man still has some boy in him,” Frank said, “and as a boy, I wanted to be a policeman[5].”

fn1. Sometimes a great notion

fn2. Guns, Germs and Steel

fn3. Summerland

fn4. How to read and why

fn5. Americana

low hanging fruit

The Coming Search Wars:

“Mr. Gates readily acknowledges these days that Microsoft “blew it” in the market for Internet search.”
[. . . ]
Mr. Gates, belatedly waking up to the threat that the Internet posed to his business, aimed Microsoft’s firepower at Netscape and flattened his rival[.]
[ . . . ]
In Davos, Mr. Gates ruefully acknowledged that Google “kicked our butts,” reminding him of what Microsoft itself was like two decades ago.

“Our strategy was to do a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignore the other stuff,” he said. But “it’s the remaining 20 percent that counts,” he added, “because that’s where the quality perception is.”

Perception is reality. If all you ever go after is the low-hanging fruit, what are you really good at? After all, Netscape likened ‘Microsoft’s flagship Windows operating system to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers.”” What’s changed, other than its ubiquity?

It’s interesting that a company that guesses wrong so consistently is so powerful. Who would have thought that imitation would be so rewarding?

why FreeBSD, not Linux?

a crank’s progress Someone asked me about this the other day and I decided to see how often the two keywords had shown up in my past writings here. (Score another for WordPress: searching is very fast and requires no configuration — it’s just there.) This is perhaps the post spells out some of what I think makes FreeBSD superior.

…So while I have had problems, some self-inflicted, others just “the stuff that happens,” it’s been a good experience. The FreeBSD project comes from the one true UNIX pedigree, and while that code may be in the minority now, the ingenuity and aesthetic that informed it, 25 years ago, is kept alive today.

searching for “linux” and “freebsd” Someone asked me about this the other day and I decided to see how often the two keywords had shown up in my past writings here. (Score another for WordPress: searching is very fast and requires no configuration — it’s just there.) This is perhaps the post spells out some of what I think makes FreeBSD superior.

  • there is a single source for the codebase, not an ever-increasing number of slightly divergent distributions
  • the kernel and userland are treated as a single entity, so they never get out of sync
  • the ports collection crushes RPM like a bug: 10,000 ports that do just about anything you can imagine, with all dependencies managed for you
  • and did I mention performance? Or reliability?

So while I have had problems, some self-inflicted, others just “the stuff that happens,” it’s been a good experience. The FreeBSD project comes from the one true UNIX pedigree, and while that code may be in the minority now, the ingenuity and aesthetic that informed it, 25 years ago, is kept alive today.

why I like OS X

I got some photos attached to an email this evening that were HUGE — 1.7 – 2 Mb — and in the course of their being bundled up for transit, being sent, and unbundled, two of them were damaged…. They could be viewed in a browser, so all was not lost: they were recognizable as JPEGs, at any rate. So I quickly fired up the GIMP in X11, opened them up, resaved as something smaller that 2072 * 1200 or whatever they were, and all is well. Well, if you like OS X so much, what do you say to the fact that Preview.app — an OS X application — failed to open the files? True enough it did, but OS X, being UNIX and extensible through DarwinPorts, allowed me to run a different set of tools and get me what I wanted.

I got some photos attached to an email this evening that were HUGE — 1.7 – 2 Mb — and in the course of their being bundled up for transit, being sent, and unbundled, two of them were damaged. Apple’s Preview.app wouldn’t open them. They could be viewed in a browser, so all was not lost: they were recognizable as JPEGs, at any rate.

So I quickly fired up the GIMP in X11, opened them up, resaved as something smaller that 2072 * 1200 or whatever they were, and all is well.

Well, if I like OS X so much, what do I say to the fact that Preview.app — an OS X application — failed to open the files? True enough it did, but OS X, being UNIX and extensible through DarwinPorts, allowed me to run a different set of tools and get me what I wanted.

Not every OS is as easily extended.

Apple Store opportunity?

I have a pre-interview/meeting at my local Apple Store tomorrow. Wouldn’t it just figure a job arrives when school is out?

I have a pre-interview/meeting at my local Apple Store tomorrow. Wouldn’t it just figure a job arrives when school is out?

And the opportunity to play with all the shiny things is awfully tempting.

now playing: Conquistador from the album Greatest Hits by Procol Harum | Buy it

plainly, I missed a lot

Pitchfork: Top 100 Albums of the 1970s Today, we’re offering the last of three installments of our Top 100 Albums of the 1970s, showcasing our top 20 favorites. I have so few of these LPs (sadly, I hadn’t heard of some of the artists, which is a strange feeling). The reviews of the ones I am familiar with seems pretty accurate, so this might be a useful guide for backfilling one’s collection.

Pitchfork: Top 100 Albums of the 1970s

Today, we’re offering the last of three installments of our Top 100 Albums of the 1970s, showcasing our top 20 favorites.

I have so few of these LPs (sadly, I hadn’t heard of some of the artists, which is a strange feeling). The reviews of the ones I am familiar with seems pretty accurate, so this might be a useful guide for backfilling one’s collection.