March 2008 - Posts
years ago, shortly after the first gulf war, it was very clear what was and was not to be done in such a situation, once the path had been chosen. it was very simple:
- let the generals do their jobs
- no half measures
these two points stood out especially in contrast to the conduct of the vietnam war, at least the little that i can directly remember.
but also important to consider in the original choice and planning:
- do nothing that you cannot commit to
that's pretty clearly implied by the first two. there's ways of taking care of that; one is by using such overwhelming force and third party support that the actual hostilities are as contracted as possible; the other is by having a just cause, and a distinct goal. the gulf war filled all of these criteria, and it showed.
of course, things like length, justice and goal are highly contextual, not least of which is the supporting population's will to continue and commit, especially in a democracy. also, "commit": not just someone else's life & treasure, but one's own resources - across all the nation's various strata.
all of these considerations have been violated by the current enagement in iraq.
and yet - we are there.
compounding matters by not following through would be far worse. two wrongs don't make a right; we can't rewrite history, go home, and say "oops".
and then there's the issue of the very real likelihood of misinterpreted reality. despite the wrongheadedness of how we got into the position that we are in ("we" being the nation i'm born to), and how badly executed, we may have blundered onto what might be the correct path in the larger sense. sure, americans do some really stupid, dangerous, silly - and wonderful - things, but sometimes the world is less optimistic a place than we may have hoped.
some reading offered for your consideration:
not to mention that other religious ideologies have also all had their significant toxic periods for the rest of humanity / planet. nope, this isn't a war of religions, but many people are reflexively casting it that way.
short-cutting much more extensive discussion, what about practical matters ? there's a u.s. presidential election coming up shortly. are there any answers there, any message we can send ?
there is much more of distaste that i have with any of the frontrunners than anything to recommend them. strictly on domestic matters, i wouldn't go in the republican direction, but i don't see democrats offering much of intelligence either. perhaps just slightly less and/or different damage.
on the other hand, there is one clear difference from a foreign policy perspective: obama is clearly for early pull-out from iraq. and i think any such talk is dangerously premature.
leaves me with one distasteful alternative: clinton.
of course, this predicament is largely an artifact of the sheeple and their continued blind adherence to a two-party system; combined with a lack of historical knowledge.
i'll leave this hanging with something craig said the other day, referring to a slightly different topic, but related as to background:
" The US like any other country has it's mood swings with capitalism, "corporatacracy", big government, empire, isolationism. And I really thought early on in the Bush presidency when everyone kind of went wacko with 9/11 and the overreaction that followed that the boat would rollback to even keel at some point down the line. It always has. There's enough people who care enough to fight to right the boat. I read, listen and watch them all the time. They do exist. It just seems there are so many more people today than say 30 years who really don't care. They view all of this like the compressor on the refrigerator, it just works so we no longer hear it humming anymore. I don't know if it's apathy or accepting that it's all on automatic. Think about it. Since the late 70s, this country has really had it good. That's 30 years of nobody rocking the boat too bad. This is the younger generation who usually are the ones who would march in the streets, protest, have the idealism to demand change. Why mess with things when they see their parents never being involved and have lived the high life. The hippies grew up in the idyllic 50's and were use to having things their way and when Uncle Sam started carting them off to war they said hell no. The biggest complaint today is the overbearing entertainment industry. Wha? But anyway I just hope the critical mass of people are out there willing to right to the boat again. I try in my own way to bring up issues in conversations. Not so much my own opinion but "do you think the president has overstepped his bounds? do you think that congress is honest? do you think that journalistic integrity has a place on our tv anymore? etc. At least bring some of this up, raise awareness. I have to say I am concerned how things are going. I really am amazed at how far things have gotten out of hand in the 7-8 years since 9/11. And I think it's because nobody is around to say "stop that" or "lets try something different". "
we had been discussing Rick Falkvinge: Why the US is collapsing, which is food for thought, if not entirely credible.
broadband, that is. check this out:
nice site, by the way, if more than a bit bloated. and i swear they have some sort of memory leak there...
anyway, the story gets more interesting when you look at the comparisons they have available:
eh, downloads, not so bad. but according to the site, the top isps in the world are offering more than three times this now.
now for the uploads:
now i feel cheated. friggin' roadrunner doesn't even match up to the pathetic state average, much less national or international. and the top isps ? near symmetric speeds.
and to think i pay nearly $50 a month for this joke. there are other places getting twice the speed for half the price. so much for free market systems in this part of the world. this also ilustrates the corporate control over p2p. want to publish here ? well, we'll throttle you. don't like it ? then go to one of the big corporate hosting sites, or buy our premium services.
yet again, so much for independent voices, or "free" speech.
the human kind. over the last few weeks we've lost a couple of oldsters in the extended family, my sister-in-law's grandparents in grand rapids. they got a very brief mention in this post. condolences to everyone.
geez, i'm pushing fifty (!) myself. jeep is pushing fifteen.
the cycles of life keep returning, same cast, different roles. until the final call.
this place doesn't even have a website, but i can "steal" bandwidth from an anonymous unsecured connection in the area well enough to post this.
"salem gardens" is the place. sippin' on a glenlivet, and some odd bock beer on the side.
gotta say, though, that this thing is not real blog post friendly, at least not with the community server built-in tools.
too annoying in this mode. ok, looks like another task to add to the list
later. "peace out", as the over-used sign-off goes.
dang, this was painful. ok, back to reading the intro to linux manual.
more "good news" from aol:
From: AOLMemberInfo
Sent: 2008.03.25 15:36:59 Eastern Daylight Time
Subj: Important Notice To AOL Bill Manager Plus/AOL Bill Pay Users
|
| | You are receiving this email because our records indicate you are currently a registered user of the AOL Bill Manager Plus/Spending Alerts/AOL Bill Pay service powered by Yodlee. Please read this notice carefully.
Effective April 30, 2008, AOL will no longer be offering or supporting the AOL Bill Manager Plus/Spending Alerts/AOL Bill Pay feature powered by Yodlee.
If you would like to use the latest (free) version of Yodlee's service, you can visit Yodlee directly at moneycenter.yodlee.com and set up your accounts there.
Before April 30, 2008, be sure to take note of all of the web site addresses (URLs) for each of the accounts you manage with AOL Bill Manager Plus/Spending Alerts/AOL Bill Pay, as well as the associated login information (username and password) for each account.
To view all of your accounts and associated login information (usernames and passwords), simply:
| - Log in to Bill Manager Plus via: money.aol.com/bill-manager-plus
- Click on the "Manage Accounts" tab
- Make note of each web site for each of your accounts
- Make note of each username and password for each account (found by clicking either the "View Login Info" or "Edit Login" links associated with each account)
| After April 30, 2008, any personal or account information you have stored as part of AOL Bill Manager Plus/Spending Alerts/AOL Bill Pay that you have not removed prior, will be permanently deleted from the service.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. |
again, minimal notice, no good automatic alternative options to sign up for, manual migration paths, or even data export, and certainly no long term strategy in the news or on their site that would let one anticipate such bullshit.
well. i had been considering changing to another system anyway, since this was the last tie-in i had to my paid aol account. i wonder when they are going to close up shop altogether.
now, with aol communicator dying (i still haven't transferred everything, there are "issues"), i'm not sure what shape i'm going to be in shortly.
bill paying: change to a desktop app ? use another online service ?
*grumble*
been spending some time trying to get this xo box more connected:
remote desktop access ? i don't mean ssh or the like here, i'm talking something along the lines of vnc or rdp. there is some interesting info relating to this on the olpc wiki, but i figure that this will probably be the more complicated task, so i move on. nomachine looks more promising than what i saw on the wiki, depending on the specifics, of course.
done how about ftp access ? to the xo from elsewhere, i mean. getting a good graphical ftp client running on the xo won't be all that useful, if my experience with the thunar graphical file system manager thing is any indicator - it gets a bit crippled when run outside of its intended gui desktop environment.
there does seem to be ftp over ssh installed on the box, but that's not what i'm looking for. vsftpd seems the best candidate, in terms of power vs. footprint (in all senses). took some time to get it configured properly, since i was basically just looking for secured full access for the root account, not in managing user accounts, and default ftp configuration is specifically set up to disallow that (i kept missing something obvious that i already knew about).
found out that the latest version of smartftp (3.x) now supports ftp over ssh, so i guess i could have gone that direction, but that wouldn't have quite given me what i wanted.
then there's access to windows server file shares from the xo. this gets sticky, because apparently the files system types i would need have been stripped out of the kernel, one (smbfs) because it's deprecated and no longer in fedora core (as of quite some time ago), and the replacement (cifs) because apparently the olpc folks were insane about reducing their kernel size (and insanely anti-windows as well). so even after messing with samba & samba-client installations, these filesystems are expected to be compiled into the kernel, and that leaves me with the not so pleasant prospect of having to do this myself. not a problem if this was a widely available linux version on widely available hardware with normal peripherals, but since this is not the case, i need to get the xo backup & rebuild provisions in place first.
the samba stuff looks cool, by the way, and i could set up the xo to have shares available to the windows systems, but that's not what i'm looking for. i need to have external server based storage available from the xo. not too big a footprint, either.
the final access item was http access to the xo, but that looks relatively simple and is also not really what i need, being a read-only protocol (without enabling all kinds of server-side processing, which bloats fast). i'll save this until later.
other: mentions of email, skype, various im clients & other human-to-human communications protocols are in the wiki. not high on my list, but i can see where it would have been good to have some of this built-in for the olpc target audience. but the more i dig into this, the more i wonder about the real political hurdles they had to cross that forced the technology into its current shape. intra-village comms ok (mesh chat, school server, etc.); but not inter-village! wider external information flows are incoming only. would xo-packaged versions of these tools be accepted ?
a correction to an earlier post: thunar reported total file space usage around 2.5gb, apparently due to counting linked objects in addition to physical ones (?), resulting in a lot of duplication. the real total persistent memory size (flash memory, not a drive) is 1gb, as documented. the originally installed xo os & ancillaries weigh in at just under 200mb. after being used to multi-gig windows behemoths, that's quite eye-popping.
currently i'm at about 400mb total space used, with a most of the non-built-in stuff being the "activities" i downloaded earlier. with multi-gig sd cards & usb drives (and external hard drives of all sizes do reportedly work just fine), i'll be able to stretch a bit. i'd like to reconfigure things such that an sd card could be considered & used as if permanent as far as the os is concerned, which would give a lot of breathing room, but i suspect i would need to be rebuilding & partitioning devices from scratch. that would seem to be a better approach though, where the base system resided on the built in device, and all extensions, user & other volatile activity used the removable devices. that would be tricky. also makes me wonder about their 1gb internal storage - if sd cards can be so much larger, why not also what's inside ? since these things don't take kindly to being filled up & don't recover easily from that situation (numerous reports of this), trading off more hardware cost to reduce the frequency of this scenario of unusability would make sense. risk management, eh ?
that discussion covers the pre-networking connectivity needs, sneakernet. but since external devices are also needed for backing up, looks like i need to invest there as well.
unless - i wonder - has anyone out there been able to use "regular" imaging tools on their xo's ? like norton ghost or acronis true image. sounds like another research avenue.
i could not dissuade my sister & gang from maryland from including me on their easter ohio visiting itinerary last week, no matter what horror stories of dust bunny avalanches & pizza box / beer bottle towers i threw at them. at least i managed to convince them that it was in their best interest to stay at a local hotel instead of attempting to find a spot to sleep here.
so sis & husband & their "littlest", 14 year old alden (who has got to be approaching / exceeding either or both of six feet & 200 pounds, pontoons for shoes (dad is 6'7'') ), arrived friday evening. couldn't believe the weather we were having, 60s and almost clear. so we did the usual out of towner dinner at montgomery inn (with left overs for me ;-) ), desert at graeter's, and ended up at mt. adams looking for some palatable music (blues? no. and the old jazz bar has been a sports bar for a while now). i was surprised at how relatively empty the area was; in the past, there were almost always lines for everything, or at least a sardine situation inside. must have been some combination of the holiday, time of year and unexpected nature of the nice weather. we sat in the blind lemon for a while, then walked around the rest of the area looking at churchs (the one at the top was open & people were doing the hillside stairs thing), pubs, etc. beuatiful night & views of the near flooded ohio river.
next day was a late brunch, and we ended up at the museum center for the "body" exhibit (huh - there are a number of these now, "body world" is apparently the original). only moderately crowded, we got in right away. it's an unusual display, and somehow oddly unsatisfying combined with a strangeness that didn't hit until a couple of days later. they seemed to have this penchant for stripping various layers off the body, but always leaving intact gentialia. what the hell is that all about ?
favorite overheard quote - four year old, reading a label: "mommy, what's an 'anus' ?". no prompt answer was forthcoming from mom.
the (omn?)imax was broken, so we wandered over to the shops for a bit, then saw flyers about the old train station control tower being open. apparently, the local train club has had that space for some time now. cool view of the tracks out back & the usual historical museum type stuff.
leaving that, we discover the omnimax is now working, so we go to that film, more about bodies - but not really associated with the exhibition. hmm, that should have been mentioned. i was wondering if alden could get extra credit for biology - or maybe marketing ?
nothing extraordinary, but nice to see people. it's been since last june with all the graduations.
and i traded my chocolates for homemade banana bread.
had a lot of flashbacks going back 10 & 25 years, to unix & dos times. i never really felt comfortable with a system until i could graphically browse the directory structure. getting around with cd & memory (that's "change directory", not "compact disk", and the memory in question is my own) just isn't a whole lot of fun. luckily i remember some minimal stuff from an assignment ten years ago that bumped into unix a bit, enough to find my way around.
see, the xo's primary user interface (a graphical one) tries very hard avoid any sense of a folder or directory structure. the result is interesting, but not very helpful, especially for someone with gearhead tendencies like me. i found that i pretty much ignore most of the pre-packaged applications this thing came with, and instead - well...
i made some progress on that list in my last post, but not in any organized manner. the xo is supposed to be an ad-hoc learning tool, so i figured ok, i'll just play & do what i like. so i grabbed a few "activities" from the olpc wiki page of that name, almost all of the game variety. that just leads to trouble with me, resulting in a few lost days spent on golden moldies like doom and simcity and the like. yes, one of the xo packaged applications is a crippled version of doom. that'll teach those third world children what they need to know.
can't remember off-hand now what got me digging around in the os (maybe it was the hardware clock being off by an hour, or trying to get access to local dns server settings), but i got tired of the ls / grep / cd thing, found a mention of a linux based graphical file manager, and dinked around with that until i got it installed. that exercise took me through even more command line playing.
anyway, some stuff that isn't really obvious about this machine: it's got no hard drive, it's got some sort of flash memory instead. all 3.5gb 1gb[2] of it. only about 800mb of that is free when the box arrives. now, this is good hardware for its mission in terms of low power consumption & physical robustness, but it's, well - odd. peripheral storage is through usb connections & an sd card slot. i've seen no mention of it yet, but i wonder if this thing will work with a usb connected external hard drive, not just a usb thumbdrive.
hmm - i keep forgetting to look for how it uses ftp. i'm not sure their browser (something that sounds firefox derived, but stripped down) will handle this, and command line ftp is of limited use, so maybe i'll be looking for another linux application soon.
as for linux - that world, too, is odd. people actually seem to think it's an advantage to have to cobble stuff together from all kinds of bits & pieces found all over the web. i'll have to say, though, that i wouldn't have learned much about the nuts & bolts of computing, and what makes me a well rounded software developer today (relatively speaking), if i had only been exposed to gui's. the world needs both, but for very different reasons.
and the olpc undertaking itself has its own peculiar set of idiosyncrasies relating to what it thinks education is, its purpose & priorities. they are pushing a distinctly non-neutral worldview, whether they realize it or not, and it's often condescending & pretentious. however, there is a worthwhile kernel wrapped up in all of these technical & socio-political trappings. at the very least, the whole enterprise will provide a useful case study for future endeavors of a related nature. sure, they haven't been pulling it off as well as a big corporate machine, but that's the whole point. and their flaws, well, we've grown accustomed to the many serious flaws found in the status quo and no longer notice them. the fact that we're sensitive to new ones in a new approach only reveals our humanity, not (necessarily) something fundamentally wrong in the project.
so - i'm having some out of town visitors stop by tonight, and they have my 14 year old nephew with them. i'm thinking i may just secure the root account on this thing[1] and hand it to him, see what he makes of it while the rest of us go out on the town.
[1] yeah, it's wide open. there's mention that future os releases will have that account "disabled", but that's not completely acceptable either. it should just be appropriately secured, is all.
[2] the documented value is is 1gb, my mistake - see later post.
so it didn't take too terribly long to get this thing connected to my network, but i needed to dig around in their wiki first; i needed the mac address so that i could maintain security here. hey, if i had been just a little bit more of an experimental mindset, i would have found it myself quick enough. (arrow on activities bar - click on it - doh!)
if it hadn't been for my own lan security it would have connected immediately. also noticed that it really picks up on all kinds of other wlans in the area. the range seems to be as good as they say, much better than anything else i have.
lots of immediate observations, but i'm mainly focused on:
- network connectivity - done
- post to my blog - in progress (not this post)
- disk storage management & access (incoming / outgoing)
- backups
- new software acquisition & installation
- (5b) security
- os learning
- eventually, development
i am so far from that last item. but i'll just play for a while.
the browser "activity" (applications are "activities") is my first focus. and i can't help a lot of head scratching over the keyboard and other controls as well. so kids over yonder are supposed to figure all this out for themselves through trial & error, without internet access ? interesting. that will develop an interesting subculture in itself, of gurus & dependents and myth & reality.
physically, it is tiny, but works rather well. the weight is mostly in the screen part, which is unbalanced feeling unless the thing is placed on a hard surface. the display is nice & clear, resolution & colors good. the networking stuff is the cool part; a village full of these would be - well, revolutionary, perhaps even literally. imagine kids at night in their mesh network chatting in the dark while the villages sleep, plotting - what? - needs a scifi story here. that's where this thing will reach its true power - sharing.
the one thing i keep tripping over is not having touch pad tap-to-click capability.
the built in camera is nice, but i can't take a picture of it with itself. thank me for not subjecting you to the accidental pictures that i took of myself as i was figuring out special keys ;-)
the browser: what is it based on ? all that work i did recently on making my sites firefox friendly has no effect on this one. well, the javascript & css work paid off, but behaviors ? forget it.[1] which means my main site barely renders at all, like before. also noticed that my chosen font for my sites (trebuchet) is not available, and it falls all the way back to times roman. i need to put in a reasonable set of fallback font families, but y'know, it doesn't look bad that way.
anyway, my main priority now is just to prevent myself from screwing things up permanently as i experiment, or to protect myself from that if it happens.
meanwhile, this thing was withstood the initial dust bunny assault well, and may even be soon be subjected to the accidental beer spill test. the environment here is not a lot less electronics hostile than some other destinations this machine was designed to withstand.
security: hmm - hope this thing is robust against attacks. does it need firewall, virus, worm, spybot, etc. protection ? at home, i should be ok (?), but elsewhere, i'm not so sure. added 5b above.
philosophy, very briefly: just as computers do not "get" humans (yet?), humans do not intuit computers. that's still a huge gap. animals & people "get" each other far better, yet also still, very clearly, incompletely. these things have "personality" - unintended perhaps, or maybe only vaguely conceived - but not even in an "understanding alien intelligence" sort of way. yeah, how long until these kids figure out the linux os internals all on their own ? yeah, right. they are dependent on being spoon fed "activities" and knowledge, until some threshold is crossed. before that, it's all myths, magic and superstitions - not so much different than the average computer user anywhere, i guess, especially in corporate america.
he who controls the stories, controls the world.
[1] well, ok, spoke too soon there. the behaviors part is working; it's the specific xml transform behavior that is the problem. should be able to figure that out, when i get around to it. and of course the css work has an impact. i just (over)reacted with my disappointment that everything didn't just work, i guess.
so me & self are pulling in the drive on the way back from the beer store, fog everywhere, and a nice cedar fire burning somewhere in the neighborhood, and self notices something on the dark porch. "what's that?" i wander over to take a look - and surprise, surprise - the xo is here !
i had pretty much given up on this until april at least, given some statistics & such that someone had recently worked out on deliveries. but yeah, it just suddenly appeared, no knock or anything, and i was home all day (unless it got here before ten & i was still asleep). i checked specifically yesterday, nothing.
somehow i was expecting a white box with green markings. glad it was less conspicuous than that.
so now what ? it's late-ish, i'm sipping suds, perhaps now is not the time to dig into the unknown and unboxing. not sure why there's two boxes, though. oh, ok, what the hell, i'll just do some unpacking then. not like i'm missing anything good on tv tonight. self says "take some pictures!". fine. *eye roll* "but first get another beer!"
well, here's box #1: hey - what the ... ?! that's candy !! aww, shucks, the olpc people are trying to make nice ;-)
no, wait a minute - that's an american express thing. says "... please enjoy this ... as a thank you for attending one of our By Invitation Only® experiences in 2007. ..." um, sure - where exactly have i been this last year ? skiing, and a bunch of graduation trips that i will probably never write about (too rich for words). but ok, whatever - chocolates are in hand, and they're never going back.
in fact - i hadn't even used my ax platinum card last year - i haven't used ax for years, it seems - until a few weeks ago, when i forgot my usual card of current choice. maybe it was a welcome back gesture. or maybe someone's using my card - i guess i should check my statements. nope - nothing unexpected there either.
anywho, back on track - where was i ? "*nudge* pssst - xo" oh, right. but the chocolates...
weird how those two packages arrived at one time. man - peanut butter bonbons, "la parisienne" cocoa, "exotic" truffles, and a small bar of - what - "buddha leaf" - "malaysian pandan leaves + dark chocolat" - that one's not even on their lists.
best i can tell is that this stuff falls somewhere around $60-70 - ! just lifting the lids of the boxes - and not breaking the seals - the aroma is amazing.
hate to say this, but at the moment i'm more excited about the chocolate than the xo. check the video on their about page. i'm impressed.
so if you want to really blow away your significant other, get one of their $300-400 gift boxes - complete with champagne.
i'll get to the xo manana...
a hall of mirrors, kicked off by a story :
the brain is the vat !
who, 'me' ?
out of my mind
one focus of reading for the day, rabbit-holing into many related corners. even found my way to "space settlement" at one point.
eh, self is back. says we're out of beer...
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