One Square, Many Problems
I don’t know what fare Sheryl Crow enjoys, but using only one square of toilet paper per… ahem, session ...would simply be a flipping miracle.
I don’t know what fare Sheryl Crow enjoys, but using only one square of toilet paper per… ahem, session ...would simply be a flipping miracle.
Acrobots is one of the coolest things of its kind I’ve seen.
It means something to me that the “world” is finding ways of crafting simplicity instead of layering on another Baroque excess to an already-complex base.
We see it in the iPod with its multi-purpose wheel, and we definitely see it in the sacrifice of buttons to the cause of motion-sensing in the Wii. I’m even seeing it in furniture.
I think we have proven to ourselves that we are quite good at making bells and whistles. Perhaps the triumph of the future is to say, “Look what I have done with the surface and shine of this bell.”
This warms my somewhat increasingly GPL-apathetic heart.
Right now, my Firefox RSS Live Bookmarks are showing side-by-side top stories of “Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Released” and “Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Released” (Slashdot and OSNews, respectively). I had this mental conceptualization of these being the first two horsemen of some open source-driven apocalypse, with the two extended middle fingers of a brazen Mark Shuttleworth completing the foursome.
I don’t think you, whoever you might be, need necessarily get in on all this action. There are a lot of highly- (and also just somewhat-) technical people who are driving this thing forward, enjoying it, learning from it, and saving a lot of money using it. But know that there is a world out there that halfway works economically and is thriving altruistically, and that world is doing all it can to provide reasonable, workable alternatives to the stuff that forms the “gold standard” today.
It’s a fun time to be a nerd. Music is pretty blah, art is off the radar, movies seem to star Will Farrell more often than not, and even computer hardware is in a sort of postmodern funk, but the software and web world moves along at a high rate of speed.
What we really lack today is a distributed file system for the People. Whenever this truly comes to exist (expectation: Google), the People will not know this as such. It may be “Live Files” or “Shared Files” or “Web Files.” They will know it as that thing that lets their cell phone’s files be used by their laptop, and what lets them edit their report on a computer in a public library. It will also let them send and share files between their friends and families without the cumbersome trappings of the e-mail system.
This Firefox extension, AllPeers will probably have to survive an RIAA/MPAA firestorm, but it is a start. We’ll see where that goes from here.
joey is coming down as soon as my thrice-redundant backup procedure completes.
I downloaded the Lightning extension for Thunderbird, which actually finished up my decision-making process. Lightning is an iCal-compatible calendaring agent for Thunderbird, produced in-house by Mozilla. If I can get my Debian-based Apache2 install up and running, I can share a calendar across multiple systems in my network.
Thunderbird 2.0 is poetry. Pure…poetry.
Network services are already back up (obviously, as I’m using a client computer on my network to submit this entry).
SMTP is up and running with the proper trappings, and I’m now using the correct server, Postfix.
IMAP, IMAPS, POP3, and POP3S are all working. The wonderful imapsync is currently running on my VMWare backup image to synchronize my message backup with the new server. This is working flawlessly.
Still need to get fetchmail, MySQL, Apache 2.0 (!), and cowsay up and running, but those aren’t too hard with apt-get at my fingertips.
I have been gifted with 3 Joost beta invites if anybody wants to try it.
It’s quite a bit less skippy, as of last night. I watched half an episode of a vegan cooking show before going to bed, with no skips at all.
My sinuses (Sinai?) have officially cast their vote in opposition to Oklahoma weather. Perhaps the grumpiness imparted has caused me to realize my aversion to the word “blogroll,” which — in fact — is not really a word.
I think I dislike “blogroll” even more than “blogosphere,” as the former doesn’t signify anything at all. To quote Vonnegut speaking of an unrelated topic (the semicolon, in fact), it is a “transvestite hermaphrodite.” It is a term without a purpose, no better than “Links” or “Blogs I Read” or “Blogs with Authors I Wish Would Read My Blog.”
apt-get update, apt-get upgrade to keep things secure, as opposed to endless, sporadic changelog crawling on slackware.com.