Bone Chilling. The low temperatures over the weekend dropped to the frigid 68F degrees (~20C) range. Brrr. I may need to break out the parka <g>
Dead Tired. Not only was it a busy week at work last week, but I had class on Saturday - from 9:00am until 2:30pm. Almost six hours of precedent setting court cases relating to administrative rules. From the nudist that beat the law by exposing its defective promulgation to the drunk driver who made the police lurch to a stop about police road blocks. I'm still recovering and we have another 10-page paper due a week from tomorrow. Sigh.
Petulant Petreley. If it's Monday, it must be another story about InfoWorld's Nicholas Petreley. This week he explains the reason he chose Debian as his base distribution and why the important thing is that Linux become standardized. Whether it standardizes on Debian or any other distribution is not as important as standardizing on something. Anything. See the column here.
I need to get going on my paper so I gotta go - Aloha!
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Tuesday - 6 March 2001
Live Aloha. There are a lot of definitions of what the word aloha means. But what does it mean to live aloha? In other words, if you were to describe what actions a person living aloha might do, what would they be? A group of people (see this site here) got together and came up with the following list:
Respect all elders and children.
Leave places better than you find them.
Hold the door. Hold the elevator.
Plant something.
Drive with courtesy.
Attend an event of another culture.
Return your shopping cart.
Get out and enjoy nature.
Pick up litter.
Share with your neighbors.
Create smiles.
Create a list and share it.
Essentially, living aloha means to take individual responsibility. Each person, on their own, using their own facilities and talents, can make your own community a better place to be. It won't solve all of the world's problems, but then, it's not intended to.
But imagine a place filled with people doing the above! So many of our problems today are based on disrespect. Either for others, the environment, or sometimes, even ourselves. Now, I'm no fuzzy-headed liberal that thinks everyone holding hands and chanting "Ohmmmmmmm" will solve all of the world's ills, but again, each of us can take individual responsibility to make things around us a little better than it would otherwise be. And that, I think, is a Good Thing.<G>
Aloha!
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Hump Day Wednesday - 7 March 2001
Mediate This. One of the ways the Internet can facilitate business operations is in the area of conflict resolution. There are several companies who specialize in mediating or arbitrating disputes via the 'net (see the article from the morning paper here. Note that the link will expire at the end of the day). The electronic communications can bring groups of people together wherever there is a connection at a cost lower than flying them in. However, the final agreements may require fact-to-face contact, but until then, much can be done on-line.
Virus Alert. By now, most people should have heard about the "Naked Wife" Trojan horse virus. But if you haven't heard about it yet, it looks something like this:
If you areSubject: FW: Naked Wife
Message Body: > My wife never look like that :)Best Regards,
Attachment: NakedWife.exe
Mail Call.
To: Dan Seto
From: Mike Barkman
Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2001 14:32:04 +1300
Subject: AlohaTena koi, ehoa!
Loved the aloha piece; Joan says to tell you that we're already doing all that <g> An addition from someone in Analog (my favourite SF mag): The New Golden Rule:
1. Don't annoy people.
2. Don't be too easily annoyed.Arohanui
/Mike=======================================================
Visit my web site and daynotes at http://www.icarus.gen.nzFrom: Dan Seto
To: Mike Barkman
Subject: Re: Aloha
Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2001 06:33:22 -1000Mike,
Thanks for the additions to the list. Now if I could only live all of them all of the time!
I'm still doing research for my next 10-page paper on administrative rules in public agencies </snore><G> so I gotta go - Aloha!
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Thursday - 8 March 2001
Thanks Dan. Mahalo to Dan Bowman for his warning yesterday (see it here) about the proposed changes to the .org Top Level Domain which would have:
The net result of this would be a .org registry returned, after some appropriate transition period, to its originally intended function as a registry operated by and for non-profit organizations.
Dan has a link to the Hands Off My Site which then links to the public comments page of ICAAN. I decided to leave my two cents there. You can read below what I said:
From the perspective of an individual, not a company (profit or non), the only TLD available is the .org. To choose a .com or .net would do more violence to the meaning of the terms than the miscellaneous catch-all of .org. Further, the practical problem is what TLD to move to?In addition, the proposed changes appear to be a solution in search of a problem. What possible competitive advantage, to use an economic term, accrues to an entity that chooses the .org over the .com or .net? If there is no advantage, why would anyone use a .org unless that was the only choice?
To sum up, the proposed changes give rise to several questions:
1. What is the problem and how will the change solve the problem?
2. What are the unintended, but no less real, side effects of the change?
3. Who benefits from the change and who loses?
4. To what TLD do the newly disenfranchised move to?
The Gospel According to Tux. This beginning excerpt is quoted in "The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age" by Pekka Himanen, Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells. (Random House, January 2001, 288 pages)(see Linux.com for Chapter 1 and Chapter 2). The full text of the Gospel can be found here.
Now it came to pass that Microsoft had waxed great and mighty among the Microchip Corporations; mightier than any of the Mainframe Corporations before it, it had waxed. And Gates' heart was hardened, and he swore unto his Customers and their Engineers the words of this curse:"Children of von Neumann, hear me. IBM and the Mainframe Corporations bound thy forefathers with grave and perilous Licenses, such that ye cried unto the spirits of Turing and von Neumann for deliverance. Now I say unto ye: I am greater than any Corporation before me. Will I loosen your Licenses? Nay, I will bind thee with Licenses twice as grave and ten times more perilous than my forefathers. . . . I will capture and enslave thee as no generation has been enslaved before. And wherefore will ye crye then unto the spirits of Turing, and von Neumann, and Moore? They cannot hear ye. I am become a greater Power than they. Ye shall cry only unto me, and shall live by my mercy and my wrath. I am the Gates of Hell; I hold the portal to MSNBC and the keys to the Blue Screen of Death. Be ye afraid; be ye greatly afraid; serve only me, and live.
<snip>
Now in those days there was in the land of Helsinki a young scholar named Linus the Torvald. Linus was a devout man, a disciple of RMS and mighty in the spirit of Turing, von Neumann and Moore. One day as he was meditating on the Architecture, Linus fell into a trance and was granted a vision. And in the vision he saw a great Penguin, serene and well-favoured, sitting upon an ice floe eating fish. And at the sight of the Penguin Linus was deeply afraid, and he cried unto the spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore for an interpretation of the dream.
And in the dream the spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore answered and spoke unto him, saying, "Fear not, Linus, most beloved hacker. You are exceedingly cool and froody. The great Penguin which you see is an Operating System which you shall create and deploy unto the earth. The ice-floe is the earth and all the systems thereof, upon which the Penguin shall rest and rejoice at the completion of its task. And the fish on which the Penguin feeds are the crufty Licensed codebases which swim beneath all the earth's systems. The Penguin shall hunt and devour all that is crufty, gnarly and bogacious; all code which wriggles like spaghetti, or is infested with blighting creatures, or is bound by grave and perilous Licences shall it capture. And in capturing shall it replicate, and in replicating shall it document, and in documentation shall it bring freedom, serenity and most cool froodiness to the earth and all who code therein."
Go forth my children and be fruitful. Fear not, for the Penguin shall be with thee. Even unto the end.
Aloha!
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Aloha Friday - 9 March 2001
It's Firday! Ummm Friday! Yah, that's the ticket.
I finally got around to getting my new PC up and running yesterday. This is the one to replace the 400MHz Celeron which died when the power supply went snap, crackle, and pop. The new one has an Intel 933MHz P-III, Intel 815EEAAL motherboard, and IBM 75GXP Deskstar 30GB hard drive. The speed of the CPU is not as noticeable as the speed of the hard drive. This IBM is one sweet drive. It runs fast and quiet. Recommended.
Pearl Harbor. The latest movie to memorialize the events of December 7, 1941, starring Ben Affleck, Alec Baldwin, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Kate Beckinsale (among a cast of thousands), is set to open Memorial Day weekend - May 25th. I understand there will be a preview to be shown on Ford Island, in the middle of the harbor. See the movie publicity site here.
A big howzit to Dave Vega from my high school days. Long-time no hear.
Have a Great Weekend Everyone, while I'm working on my next term-paper. Aloha!
© 2001 Daniel K. Seto. All rights reserved.