JamesLindenschmidt.com

On his webpage, Steve Hogarth of marillion refers to himself as a “pagan” in his latest message:

Well blimey here it is again!
No matter where you are in the world – whether you’re traveling, visiting or staying home, I’d like to wish you a happy and peaceful Christmas in your MIND (which is where it matters most). Try to be NICE to someone who doesn’t entirely deserve it (we can give more than presents) and, if you’re not totally broke, choose a charity and send something to those less fortunate. Don’t be afraid to sing a carol. Don’t be afraid of anything. Drink LOADS, try not to get sick and be patient with those who do. Don’t eat too much, and I’ll try not to also. If you’re not a Christian, have Christmas anyway just for fun. If you’re a pagan (like me) dance naked and I hope you don’t get arrested. Here comes summer…
It’s a circular ride.
LOVE, PEACE, UNDERSTANDING
h

Now, “pagan” is basically Latin for “redneck,” and is furthermore arguably the most broadly-defined terms in history. Not sure exactly what he means, but it would fail to surprise me if he means “pagan” in the “modern neo-pagan religious practitioner” sense. I’ve suspected for a while now, actually, based on his lyrics and comments in interviews, etc….

How can I trust Firefox? is an article/blog entry by a microsoft employee. According to Slashdot, the article raises “some interesting security related points.”

But I didn’t read the article that way. To me, this article cannot imagine a reality outside of its centralized system of control. There are ways around his concerns that do not involve giving control of one’s machine to microsoft or anyone else. Open Source software is open, and you can examine it as deeply as you want, right down to examining every single line of code if you are so inclined. If you’re that concerned, download the source code from two different places, double check them against each other (using, say, the diff command in Linux), compile it, and run it.

But even if you aren’t so motivated, let’s think about this pragmatically. How many people are having security problems with Firefox? Raise your hand? Hello?

And I know countless people out there are using Firefox. Even some of my friends are starting to switch. Firefox is the first Free software application to be attractive to several of my friends, which is saying something. You, my dear readers, have been listening to me (and probably others) pontificate about free software for years. I have not yet been able to turn a single person I know onto Linux. Or OpenOffice. But I know several people using Firefox, which is significant.

This is, at bottom, nothing more than FUD. There is no pragmatic need for such draconian security measures. It’s not about control. It’s about openness.

Alright, I’m sure my readers are growing weary of my geekish technical ruminations here. Too bad for you. ;-) I got ftp between my 2 machines working last night using ssh. This means that, from the laptop, I can transfer files to and from the desktop machine, all wirelessly, from whereever I happen to be. Very cool.

There are 2 things I need to work on now; the first is security to ensure that my network is reasonably safe, and the second is transfer speed. I was getting about 600kB/s in file transfers, which is about twice the typical rate I get out of my cable modem. I was expecting it to be much faster. I still don’t know much about this networking stuff; there are doubtlessly many parameters to tweak that will improve performance.

But hey; at least it’s working.

At this point there are really only 2 things left to get working optimally on my laptop. The first is getting ACPI working with the fnfx package, which will allow things like suspend to work, and make things like the volume controls etc work properly. This package will require me to recompile my Linux kernel, which I’ve done before and has its benefits; I can slim it down and get rid of things that I won’t need. The problem with it is that it’s more work, and it introduces another layer of complexity that doesn’t need to be there. I’m tempted to just leave it be and live without the ACPI features. We’ll see.

The second thing is to get the Synaptics touchpad driver. At the moment, the touchpad in my system works as a standard mouse-ish driver, but this driver would allow some advanced features of the touchpad to work.

I’ve also been updating my Linux on Toshiba page to reflect this stuff; before too much longer I should have a more concise version of that page.

Well, now that my router is working and both machines (desktop and laptop) can see the Internet, it’s time to get the 2 machines talking to one another. I was able to set up a simple network, and I can copy files from one to the other using ssh. But all this networking stuff is new to me; pages like this and this. Ideally, I’d like to be able to transfer files from one machine to the other using gFTP, it would be basically the same as uploading files to a website. Not sure how to make this happen, but hopefully it won’t be too difficult to set up.

Anyway, things are working well in this area. Hopefully I can continue to climb the learning curve….

Well, that was simpler than I expected it to be. Today I bought a Linksys WRT54G wireless router, and brought it home. Lo and behold, it Just Works™ with Ubuntu Linux! Everything was preconfigured in the install. All I had to do was run the Network Setup wizard from within GNOME on my Linux desktop and it worked fine out of the box.

So now I can be online while wandering about the house. Maybe I’m typing this naked….you’ll never know. Heh.

I’ve said it before, but Linux has come a very long way in terms of user friendliness….there was a time when stuff like this required recompiling the Linux kernel. And if you don’t know what that means, count your blessings.

I’m sure an experienced, professional typesetter would laugh at this question. “If it was easy, we wouldn’t have jobs.” And they’d be correct. However, I’m not referring to typesetting in general, but rather to using sections, master documents, and subdocuments in Openoffice. I’m getting it, and once I grok it it will be a very good tool for the work I have before me. But until then, grrr…..
it’s like beating my head against a brick wall.

I sense a theme here. The ways in which I use computers have been pushed to their limits recently. New laptop. Studio computer giving me fits. Trying to grok OpenOffice for advanced document preparation. Getting wireless working (that’s on the horizon actually).

Well, in theory I’m good at this stuff….

When I first saw The Return of the King in theaters a year ago, I decided that I would reserve judgment until the extended edition DVD came out. After all, for the first 2 films in the trilogy, I regard the extended editions as being definitive. It just seems ludicrous to me to limit a movie to 3 hours, just for marketing reasons. The extended edition movies are just better, in every way except brevity.

Well, suffice to say that this third extended DVD continues the trend of the first two. Indeed, I take all the movies together, extended edition, as one long 11-hour movie. And I also regard it as the most striking cinematic achievement in history. It’s certainly my favorite film, without question.

I won’t go into the details and the nitty gritty. But man. Peter Jackson, along with the thousands of people working with him, have cemented their place in our cultural legacy.

Now I want to take the time to watch the entire trilogy, back to back, blocking out an entire day to do so. Anyone feel like throwing a LotR party? ;-)

This article on Salon.com is a very interesting expose of how spammers work. I use Mozilla Thunderbird, which filters out much of the spam I get, but it is still interesting to know the levels of masking and deception at work in spam. I think a study on the relationship between spam and capitalism is in order….

Well, I’ve been watching the Extended Edition Return of the King DVD. In it, there’s a scene that I regard as Peter Jackson’s jab at President Bush and the war furor that is being protrayed in the American media. In the scene, Frodo and Sam get swept up in an orc batallion and are forced to march to war, with an orc sargeant smacking everyone with whips. His words are straight from George W Bush’s mouth: “Don’t you know, we’re at war!”

It is of course entirely possible that Jackson meant nothing by this and that I’m reading way too much into it. But somehow I doubt it.

This looks very cool:

In the coming months, Google will collaborate with Harvard’s libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of the 15 million volumes held in the University’s extensive library system. Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library.

The beginning of complete digitization of information, perhaps? Harvard’s library is 2nd only to the Library of Congress in terms of number of books contained. I can’t imagine the labor involved in this process.

Though it’s important to note that this will only be the case for books written before about 1920, since very few books published since then are actually in the public domain, Creative Commons stuff notwithstanding.