the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Reporters Find New Outlet, and Concerns, in Web Logs
Some journalists have already run into trouble with their employers over the contents of their personal sites, with one
I guess it all depends on how professional you think a given journalist.
So if a guy has a weblog and takes a few shots at the mayor or some local person, do we then suspect his bylined pieces as serving an agenda?
since I upgraded the snmp daemon on one of my boxes a few days ago as part of a portupgrade run, snmpd hasn’t been running. It seems someone “improved” the rc script for snmpd to check in /etc/rc.conf for snmpd to be enabled.
case “$1” in
start)
case “${net_snmpd_enable}” in
[Yy][Ee][Ss])
echo -n ‘ snmpd starting’
${net_snmpd_program:-${PREFIX}/sbin/snmpd} ${net_snmpd_flags}
;;
esac
<grumble>
Turns out, the maintainer mentions this in pkg-message, but I’m not likely to see that when I upgrade a bunch of ports: perhaps some kind of email or logfile would be useful for changes like this.
<UPDATE> The maintainer suggested I look for “heads up” messages in the logfile, which makes sense except for the fact there isn’t one unless you specify it. So one more step to the process: export DATE=`date “+%m-%d-%Y”` && portupgrade -aP -l /var/tmp/portupgrade.log.$DATE
Amazon.com–Earth’s Biggest Selection
So the Gold Box is now holding 15 items, all as unappealing as the five we started with. I see the Gold Box as the moral equivalent of the impulse items at the checkout: a $1,300 film scanner is not an impulse buy. The prices have to get a lot better before I can get excited about any of this stuff. I like the fact that on the Internet, you can change to be whoever you think your customers want you to be. The new shipping deal — free shipping on orders of $25 or more — is great. I just can’t see buying a film scanner (and having it shipped) or a cabinet door jig from Amazon. Perhaps I haven’t evolved: I still think of them as a books and music store.
But on the upside, my associates link has netted me $.43 so far. (Thanks, John.)
The Seattle Times: Lou cuts loose in M’s win
With little else to play for, Lou Piniella showed last night that pride and passion are still part of his game in the dying days of this long-gone pennant race.
Following his own call to win as many as possible, the Mariners’ manager went berserk when first-base umpire C.B. Bucknor blew a close third-out call on Ben Davis at first base that ended the ninth inning and cost Seattle a win in regulation.
A week or so back, Lou Piniella put on quite a show, protesting a blown call that cost his team the game. It provoked this response:
Another lesson you can draw is that a leader stands up for his guys, and if he loses his temper, so be it. Sports at that level is not a passionless exercise. It’s not like he took a bat to the umpire: he vented his energy on inanimate objects (though the first base bag flying into right field might not count as inanimate).
I sometimes wonder if Seattle isn’t too concerned about appearing emotional, rather than displaying a bit of passion and drive.
Where is that x86 version of OS X anyway?
All the News Google Algorithms Say Is Fit to Print
Mr. Page said the origin of the service was a demonstration program written in January by a Google engineers that could identify similar articles on many Web pages. Yesterday, for example, Google’s site used this technology to offer users a choice of 1,897 articles on the siege of Yasir Arafat’s compound.
[ . . . ]
“Their front page is not too far off from what is on the Post site at the moment,” said Douglas B. Feaver, the executive editor of washingtonpost.com. “It’s a useful service, but it’s not going to drive me to the unemployment office tomorrow.”
It’s one thing for the bright young new hires to consider you a milestone they will inevitably surpass, but when engineers can make it happen, it can’t be a great feeling.
A dystopian vision is coming into focus: the Machines pick our news for us, program our meals (for optimal nutrition), tell us what crops to plant and when, assemble our entertainment (perhaps even writing the books and composing the music). What do we do for them once they built and plugged in? Make a list of the jobs that are or could be placed under the control of a machine. Then remove humans from the scenario (like the highway or the airways) and we might be on our way to redundance.
The pictures can speak for themselves.
Friends of the Library Book Sale
“It is not unusual to see people buy scores of books at once, carting them out on something you would carry luggage on,” she said. “They line up an hour or more before the sale starts and when the doors open, they make a mad dash to various parts of the sale, piling large numbers of books into boxes.”
It sure isn’t unusual to see that, but I never see all that much I want to take home. I did get some kids books (a couple of colorful natural history references), and my best score was a hardback of Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson” — with dust jacket — for a buck.
Woodland Park Zoo Press Release
As the (African wild) dog days of summer begin to wane, it’s time again to look forward to Woodland Park Zoo’s annual fall Fecal Fest! Now’s your chance to purchase a load of that rich, multi-species feces known as Woodland Park Zoo Doo®.
My third trip to the Zoo for this garden accelerator, 8 bags full (the tall Kraft paper yard waste bags). Loading it (each bag weighs about 100 pounds), carrying it up the stairs at my house, and spreading it around was a wearisome task. My back is already stiffening.
But some next spring, I’ll reap the benefits. And it will be time to get more, anyway.
I had planned to put most of today’s harvest on the vegetable garden, but summer doesn’t seem to want to end just yet, whatever the calendar may say about it. So tomatoes are still ripening, and I’m not going to disturb that process.
(The wordy title is to help make sure anyone who needs it can find it.)
I have not had working audio on this laptop since FreeBSD 4.6 was released (or at least since I upgraded to it). Turns out I had an IRQ conflict with the internal PCI bus: the sound chip/card and the network interface were trying to share IRQ 11 and if the card was inserted at boot time, the sound driver (pcm) never attached to the sound card. Bummer.
After many, many Google searches and a couple of queries to the freebsd-mobile list, I finally hit on something that unlocked the puzzle. I saw some notifications about the sound driver’s failure to attach: that led to a discussion of an IBM tool (called PS2.EXE) that allows you to rejigger how IRQs are assigned. In my case I wanted the PCI bus to pick from more than one, in hopes the different drivers would take take separate ones.
It worked.
Continue reading “resolving IRQ conflicts in FreeBSD on a ThinkPad A20m”
