May 22, 2003
Debian 3.0r1 on Laptop
Some may recall that I recently installed SuSE 8.2 on my laptop. I finally decided that I had wireless networking so screwed up on there that I would have to do a fresh install of SuSE 8.2 to get it working. But before doing that, I've been wanting to try the latest official Debian release, code-named Woody.
Well, actually that's not accurate. I wanted to try the more bleeding edge version called Sarge, and so at first I downloaded 10 CD-Roms worth of Sarge only to learn that the Sarge installer is seriously broken. Don't bother with that just yet.
But boy was I amazed at the installer on Disc 1 of Debian 3.0r1! It worked perfectly, and before I knew it I had booted into KDE. Granted, I had to know a little bit about partitioning hard drives and find out that my laptop's graphics card is by Neomagic, but all-in-all, WOW. A year ago I tried to install 2.2r5 Potato and it was nightmarish. The Debian folks have made major improvements.
The coolest thing was that when I got into KDE it still had not configured my PCMCIA ethernet card, but I read that I could user etherconf to configure it, and just did: apt-get install etherconf and in no time the card had received an IP address via DHCP. Wow.
The apt package system is working wonders for me elsewhere too. I've managed to apt-get gaim, openoffice.org 1.0.3, and did all the security upgrades seamlessly. I am now working on the java and flash plugins for mozilla. This thing will be a free-software running blaze of glory shortly! There's still the wireless card issue to tackle, but I want to get everything else working first.
If you have no idea what Debian is, then you are missing out. Go to debian.org and start learning. It may actually not be the best GNU/Linux distriubtion for first-timers, but once you take back control of your computer, I get the feeling that Debian might be one's last, because so far, it is sweet.
May 17, 2003
Summary for New Visitors
Hello! I've just let a lot of people know that I am running this little online journal, so besides the stuff you find on the front page here, which will give you some idea of what to expect if you ever come back, I thought I'd offer a sampling of entries you might like to browse:
From April:
From March:
May 16, 2003
Digital Rights Management (DRM)
If, unlinke me, you manage to do something other than read technology news, then you might not know that Digital Rights Management software (and even hardware) is being rapidly crammed down your throat. Besides being insulted by not being informed about this or given a choice, why should you care? David Weinberger (of JOHO the Blog) has an article in Wired on DRM that makes a mighty fine argument. (Link from Doc)
For me, this is also one of the primary reasons I use Free Software alternatives to Microsoft products. Microsoft builds this stuff into its Media Player, its Operating System, and is hoping to get even more control over your computer by building these controls right into the hardware you'll buy. Black boxes that we cannot understand are not good for technology innovation. We need the freedom to tinker to advance. Besides that, if I buy a piece of hardware it should be mine to do with what I like. I do not need a monopolistic software company telling me where I can go today. I'll be my own tour guide, thank you.
Intuit (makers of TurboTax) learned how much customers hate DRM the hard way and is dropping DRM from all its software. People didn't like being spyed on or having their machines slow down so that these draconian controls could hamper honest customers. The simplest way for the average person to take a stand on all such issues is by sending some money to the EFF who always makes it a point to stand up for the public interest on these issues. Educate yourself about these issues, because they're the ones that'll really bother you once it's too late. Or worse, they'll silently stifle creativity without us being any the wiser.
May 15, 2003
Total Lunar Eclipse Tonight
I just learned there will be a total lunar eclipse tonight! Scroll down on that linked page to see the chart that shows what time it starts in your area. In Pacific Time, the partial eclipse begins at 7:03 pm, and total eclipse begins at 8:14 pm. Total eclipse is over by 9:07 and partial eclipse over by 10:18pm. Check it out! I have to teach during most of the eclipse, but I'm gonna try and take a break and see the total eclipse begin.
May 14, 2003
Photographs from Iraq You Haven't Seen
While Americans celebrate our victory in Iraq with flags, bumper stickers, and dramatic aircraft carrier landings by our President, perhaps it would be useful to stop for a second and look at the results of this war. I mean actually look. With our eyes. 
The American Media has decided that your eyes are too sensitive to see these disturbing photos. But there they are: 20 pages of the images of war you haven't seen. I do not apologize for sending you to view such graphic and disturbing images. They serve an important purpose. They answer a question many people have asked lately: "Why do they hate us?" The answer is obvious. We're the people who did that. And now we're the people who are celebrating the fact that we did that. I cannot imagine anything more monstrous.
Before you object: Shouldn't we be glad the Iraqi people have a chance at freedom now? Of course. But it could never properly be the sort of jubilant happiness on display currently. Instead it's the sort of happiness a mother has whose only child was killed saving someone else's life. They ask her, "Aren't you happy about the great thing your child did?" She may well respond, "Yes. Yes I am. But also, I may never get over my deep sadness about the manner in which it was accomplished."
May 13, 2003
Univ. Wisconsin not Renewing Microsoft License
The University of Wisconsin will not sign a new campus or enterprise agreement with Microsoft to replace the one that expires on July 31, 2003. 
None of the options presented by Microsoft were acceptable, as UW's only options were to give up license ownership by entering into an open-ended lease or to continue license ownership at an over 100% price increase. Budget shortfalls made the latter option impossible. UW says they will now support Sun's StarOffice suite as they expect many of their current users will not wish to pay for continuing use of the previously licensed MS software. Sun offers educational institutions a no-cost site license of Star Office. Seems to me someone else needs to jump on this opportunity. Red Hat or SuSE should strike a deal with this campus of over 40,000 students to offer them an alternative to the monopoly taxes they are facing. Anyone listening?
Sony AIBO Robot Dog Soccer Competition
The Washington Post has an article about teams of college students who program Sony AIBO Robotic Dogs to play soccer against each other in teams of four. 
While Beckham's job is not yet jeapordized, the cool thing from an AI perspective is that "once the humans flip the switch, the robots are on their own." They compete in RoboCup whose stated goal is to "by the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team." RoboCup also has competitions with wheeled soccer bots (of varying designs) and have a humanoid league in which the Honda ASIMO appeared. The students in the above article are preparing for the four-legged international championship coming up in July of 2003 in Padua, Italy. (This was an accepted Slashdot submission of mine that turned out to be a dupe!)
May 05, 2003
SuSE 8.2 Pro Review
I've been using SuSE 8.0 on my Sony PCG-F370 laptop (dual boot with Win98SE) and on my ancient cobbled together desktop for over a year now. I skipped the upgrade to 8.1 because everything was working and I didn't hear any rave reviews of 8.1. On the contrary, many upgraders to 8.1 seemed to end up breaking things, so I've waited until now to make this move. I was also scared of the switch from LILO to GRUB. I'd like to see three things from SuSE 8.2 Professional:
I'm going to start on the Pentium III 450MHz laptop first, mainly because I care less if it happens to trash everything on that computer. Also, since it has a DVD drive, I'm hoping to swap discs just once during the whole install.
I picked up SuSE 8.2 Pro at my local Fry's Electronics for $79.99 + tax. The first thing I noticed was that the seal on the bottom of my box was broken. Doh! I hope no one stole my SuSE sticker! (8.0 offered no stickers at all!) Aha, once you open the bizarre CD holder, a puzzling SuSE sticker reveals itself. It's not the familiar chameleon/lizard, so far as I can tell, but looks to me more like a green radioactive symbol. Ok, in goes DVD 1.
I choose "Installation" (while wondering what "manual installation" means) and it starts loading the Linux kernel. I'm surprised at the blue screens, since SuSE has always been green in the past. Looks nice. After five minutes the laptop's touchpad is working to allow me to select English as my language. (My USB mouse is not yet working). SuSE has recognized that I already have linux on this laptop and so I select "Update an existing system". I am automatically prompted to create a backup of config files and I comply. I can choose an update mode, and go with the default system, allowing it to "clean up the system" by deleting unmaintained packages. It realizes that I have SuSE 8.0 and is going to update 340 packages and check 14 packages manually.
There is a button called "Detailed selection..." and, perhaps foolishly, I click it. SuSE finds a dependency conflict between cups and lprng and between libdvdnav for xine versus the one for MPlayer. I choose to delete lpdfilter and lprng and to "not set libdvdnav to Protected" (whatever that means) to resolve the conflicts. It looks like that resolves the cups/lprng issue, but now my only option is to remove MPlayer and xine-dvdnav, as that conflict remains. It is happy now.
Apparently SuSE would like me to delete GAIM, IBMJava2-JRE, several dvd libraries, ogle, RealPlayer, StarOffice 5.2, and xine. I'd like to make the latest version of GAIM work anyway, and don't much care about the rest, so I'll delete 'em all to make the installer happy. Wait, there's an option to "update if newer version available" which apparently works for RealPlayer and some of the dvdlibraries.
Under Package selections I see that none of the Games will be installed. What!? This is a laptop I'll be taking to classes and to the library. How am I supposed to procrastinate without games!? I check the box to install all of them!
Under Multimedia packages it looks like gtk 2.2.1-29 is already scheduled for installation. Woohoo! This should hopefully mean I can manually install the latest GAIM without incident.
Under Package Groups, Applications, Internet, it looks like I can tell SuSE to update GAIM. I'm gonna try it.
One last Dependency Check and bindutil conflicts with bind9-utils and postfix conflicts with sendmail. (I don't recall messing with any of that!) Telling it to remove bindutil and sendmail fixes things. I click Accept and realize it does its own final dependency check. A screen comes up whose "Next" button barely appears on the screen due to the lousy 640x480 resolution we're working in.
One last warning comes up indicating I'm about to do some installing and I say, "Go for it!" The clock indicates I've got around two hours of installation time ahead of me, so I go to the other computer to play.
Clock is moving much faster than estimated. After just 20 minutes, I've only got 42 minutes of installation left (supposedly). While waiting I think about the fact that my wireless access point uses 128-bit encryption. I wonder how I'll configure that... A quick glance at page 80 of the included User Guide suggests that SuSE's setup tool, Yast, has a way to handle this. We'll see!
After just 50 minutes I'm on a screen that says "Finishing Basic Installation". I never had to put in DVD #2. It claims it's going to install the boot manager and prepare for initial boot. [Tremble!]
The initial boot is in process, and if that is GRUB, it looks just like LILO but is blue. Perhaps 8.2 merely updated my boot manager?
Ooh. The USB mouse works now! (But the touchpad seems not to work anymore.) We're back in Yast and the resolution is more like 1024x768 or something much more bearable than before. It's writing the system configuration which Yast used to always do when you made system changes. Now I'm back to the blue startup screen apparently bringing down and back up PCMCIA among other things.
Wow. I'm at a login screen and it remembers my users. KDE 3.1 is booting up and looking sleek! My old desktop is back with different icons and the blue background. It thinks that my USB connected Sharp Zaurus is a modem, perhaps because the Zaurus has its own wireless card. I'm gonna let it try to detect it to see what happens. It knows to call it a Sharp SL Series (It's the SL-5500 PDA), but I have a feeling it shouldn't be set up as a modem! What the heck I'll let it do this since it wants to.
A quick Konsole check of 'ifconfig' shows eth0 without an IP address, so I'm gonna start up Yast2 and hope to configure the wireless card. Hmm. I don't know what I'm doing, but iwconfig says, "no wireless extensions". Can't check GAIM out until I'm online, and I'd like to do it with the wireless card. If necessary, I'll try the regular ethernet card. More on this later...
Old Man of the Mountain Crumbles
The BBC is reporting that New Hampshire's most famous landmark, the Old Man of the Mountain, is gone. See this article for before and after photos. This is the mountainside formation that is featured on the New Hampshire state quarter. Apparently over the weekend it fell due to natural causes. From the report, "The image was immortalised in Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "The Great Stone Face", read by generations of US schoolchildren." New Hampshire's state motto is, "Live Free or Die" and I can't help wondering if the Old Man took that to heart, and given recent events, found it was time to let go. Goodbye old man. It's sad to see you (and our freedoms) go.
May 03, 2003
Ashleigh Banfield Gives Impressive Speech
You should read the full-text of Ashleigh Banfield's Landon Lecture at Kansas State University given last Thursday. Apparently NBC has chastised her over this, but if you focus on that aspect of the story you will miss what's really interesting here. I first noticed Banfield on MSNBC after September 11, 2001. I thought she was likely another ditzy cable-news talking-head. When she went to Afghanistan, I thought whether she was ditzy or not, she was at least driven. Since then I haven't seen much of her (I got rid of my cable.) Well, I am writing to report that Ashleigh Banfield is a smart, devoted journalist that cares about getting the real story. You will hear a journalist say things you didn't think any of them realized when you read this speech. If I were NBC, I would give her whatever she wants and look high and low to hire twenty more just like her. I wasn't sure there were still journalists that devoted to their craft. An excerpt,
You didn't see where those bullets landed. You didn't see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage-? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you're getting the story, it just means you're getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that's what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn't journalism, because I'm not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid of a horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn't see what it took to do that.If NBC wants to reprimand one of their employees, I know someone now who they should simply show the door. Ashleigh continues,
We hired somebody on MSNBC recently named Michael Savage. Some of you may know his name already from his radio program. He was so taken aback by my dare to speak with Al -Aqsa Martyrs Brigade about why they do what they do, why they're prepared to sacrifice themselves for what they call a freedom fight and we call terrorism. He was so taken aback that he chose to label me as a slut on the air. And that's not all, as a porn star. And that's not all, as an accomplice to the murder of Jewish children. So these are the ramifications for simply being the messenger in the Arab world.Don't stop fighting for the story, Ashleigh! Some of us still like to hear all sides of a story and don't run in horror when someone expresses a minority opinion. (Thanks to Siva for the pointer.)
May 02, 2003
REDUCE Spam Bill Introduced
U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., has introduced the "Restrict and Eliminate the Delivery of Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Spam Act," or the REDUCE Spam Act to Congress. (full-text of Bill) This is the Anti-Spam Bill that offers a bounty of "not less than 20%" of the civil penalty collected from the spammer to the person who
This is also the Bill that Lawrence Lessig has bet his job on. That's right. He says if a bill like this that offers a bounty on spammers passes and does not "significantly reduce" the amount of spam we all receive, then he will quit his job as Professor of Law at Stanford University. (The folks across the bay at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall should go ahead and start putting together a job offer for him, as I'll explain.)
There are three problems I have with this Bill.
The first problem I have is that the Bill won't work.
1) It will be nearly impossible to collect any money from spammers, most of whom operate from locations overseas. I send what little spam I get (see my Spam-avoiding techniques) to SpamCop who looks at the fake header information and determines the true origin of the spam. Almost all of the spam I get comes from Korea or China. You are never going to collect from someone over there and those spammers who are in the U.S. will move operations overseas once this Bill passes.
The next two problems I have are that the Bill will work too well.
2) I do not like vigilante justice. I was opposed to the Coble-Berman Bill intended to stop file-sharers for this very reason. It would have authorized the RIAA to launch a DDS attack on a file-sharer's computer, possibly creating collateral damage on your internet connection speed. This was a stupid idea. Now, the REDUCE Spam Act is not allowing this exactly. Defenders of the Bill can argue that they are not advocating vigilante justice, but instead are merely increasing the size of law enforcement personnel by deputizing every 18 year old with a computer. Maybe that's true. But we've seen what happens when the Slashdot crowd gets a hold of a Spammer's regular mail address. In the case of an unrepentant and unrelenting Spam King, I have to admit I find it downright funny. But, whoa be unto us all, if we are falsely accused, or through some case of mistaken identity this wrath were to befall us. Authorizing a legion of young pranksters to go after people and luring them with the promise of financial reward seems to lack the sort of safeguards that we like to see in a society where we (used to) think people are innocent until proven guilty. The potential for abuse looms large.
3) Would we accept a law exactly like this one that targeted copyrighted music file-sharers? Everyone hates spammers. We want to see them suffer, and delight in the idea of them having to pay a bounty hunter a hefty fee for their evil practices. But while most people are not spammers, millions of people are infringing copyrights everyday. But, Copyright Infringement is still a crime. So, suppose the RIAA pushes for a similar bill that places a bounty on the heads of each infringing sharer? Someone out there needs the money bad enough that they'd gladly nail you for sampling that Eminem tune. It doesn't sound like quite as pleasant a scheme anymore, does it? Many want the RIAA to wake up to the possibilities of a new business model and many want artists to realize that they gain more from having loyal fans than from extracting every last royalty out of every last performance. But, if the RIAA catches wind of the idea behind this Bill, and especially if it is successfull, we just might see the same thing truly put an end to music downloading. This could work where lawsuits are failing, and then the Recording Industry's motivation to innovate, to stop enslaving their artists, and to stop charging artificially inflated prices all goes away. Uh-oh. Is that what we wanted?