Almost There. I have one more week of my practicum to go, but most of my time will be spent writing my paper. It's been interesting looking at a successful private business (First Hawaiian Bank, having recently surpassed the former number one bank in Hawai'i, Bank of Hawaii) and being surprised by what it apparently took to get there.
I won't go into the specifics but I remember a recent report on, I think, CNN that talked about the possible relationship(s) between a company's stock price and the number of employees laid off. The study seemed to be saying the reason(s) for the lay offs has a role to play, but in general, laying off people tends to keep the stock price at least even, and most times increases the price.
I don't know over what time period the studies looked at the stock prices, but frankly, I would be surprised if the relationship lasted over a long period of time. Why? Because as you cut personnel, your level of service to your customers soon begins to decline (why is it the first people to go is "Customer Support"?). If nothing else, common sense would tell you that you can't cut your way to profitability if by doing so you don't have enough people to provide the service your business is supposed to provide in the first place. In other words, too much of a good thing is a Bad Thing.
Now, I'm not saying this is, or is not, happening at First Hawaiian Bank (parent company BancWest, who is in turn owned by BNP Paribas - a French company), but it could be. I'll let the stock holders decide.
On the Computer Front. I recently put together a box at home to run Linux. I've been dual-booting at work between Windows 2000 Pro and Caldera OpenLinux eDesktop for some time, but I did not have a regular Linux box at home (not counting my CoyoteLinux firewall/router box). So I bought an Intel 850MHz Celeron and 815EEA2 motherboard. I stuffed these into an Antec mid-tower size case (replacing the 250-watt supply with a 300-watt), an old 6.4GB Quantum Fireball hard drive, 128MB of Kingston RAM, and a spare Panasonic/Matsushita CD-ROM.
I then picked up a copy of SuSe Linux 7.2 Personal Edition for my Linux distribution at CompUSA for $29.95 USD. I could have chosen RedHat or Mandrake but decided to see if the semi-automatic updating capability of SuSe was as good as some Daynoters have said it is. The 7.2 distro includes, among other things, the 2.4.4 kernel, XFree 4.0.3 (anti-aliasing included), KDE 2.1.2 or GNOME 1.4, and glibc 2.2.2.
The hardware went together without too much trouble (although having to set a jumper on the motherboard, to get at the BIOS is kind of a pain, you can bypass the jumper and set things so using F2 will get you there also).
The installation of Linux, from the CD had one snag. The hard drive I am using is an old one that had Windows 98 on it. It was also partitioned into C: and D: drives because I typically put the operating system and applications on the C: drive and only data files on the D:. That way, it's easier to backup the data and, should I decide to upgrade the operating system, the data is safe on a different partition.
So anyway, the install did not have a way to delete the DOS partitions and wanted me to reduce the number of Linux packages to install to fit the C: partition. This is not what I wanted. So I aborted the install, rebooted off of a DOS bootable diskette with fdkisk on it, and deleted the logical D: drive on the DOS extended partition (where the logical D: drive was on). And then, in turn, deleted the extended partition, and the boot partition - thus leaving a bare drive for SuSe to play in.
I re-booted off of the SuSe install CD and began again. SuSe correctly identified the motherboard's video, sound, and Fast Ethernet correctly but could not figure out what monitor I had (Mag Innovision DX-17F). This was a little surprising as this is a fairly well known monitor and its been around for at least five years (as opposed to the motherboard, which just came out a month or two ago). In either case, I chose a generic VESA resolution of 1024X768 for the monitor and moved on.
Getting access to the Internet, via my CoyoteLinux firewall/router and Road Runner cable modem consisted of inputting my gateway IP address into a dialogue box. Couldn't be much simpler.
I haven't had much time to play with this new box but I'll note a couple of things. First, SuSe seems to insulate you from the underlying system more than Caldera OpenLinux does. For example, the graphical login does not have an icon for the "root" user. Whether this is a Good or Bad Thing depends on you point of view. On the other hand, the the YaST update works as advertised. Just click on the update and away you go. I think, on balance, this is a Good Thing.
As I play with this distro, I'll update you more on what I think.
Aloha!
Top / Home / Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday
Tuesday - 10 July 2001
Two Days In a Row. Gee, is this why it's called Daynotes (hehe Don Armstrong)? On a completely unrelated tack, congratulations to the owner and crew of the yacht Pegasus. As its name seems to imply, the swift 75-foot sloop won the 75th running of the Transpacific Yacht Race yesterday. Pegasus completed the 2,225 nautical mile race from Los Angeles to Diamond Head, O'ahu in 8 days, 2 hours, 34 minutes, and 3 seconds.
Antec Redux. I forgot to mention yesterday that I have one nit to pick with the Antec mid-tower case I got. For some reason, some manufactures like to have a plastic bezel covering the floppy drive slot. Yes, the bezel has a slot in it through which you can slide the diskette through but it took me 15 minutes to get the floppy drive aligned just right so that the diskette could enter/exit and the eject button was aligned correctly. Excuse me for this mini-rant, but I see no practical reason to have this bezel. As the old saying goes, form should follow function.
I'm also a little disappointed with the SuSe manuals. One of the reasons I paid cold, hard cash for the distro (rather than downloading an ISO image for "free") is that I wanted printed copies of the manuals (paperless society? What paperless society?). Well, I have copies of the manuals but they don't make finding information easy. For example, SuSe allegedly comes with a "personal firewall" and a "SuSe firewall." If you use the index, all you will end up seeing is one sentence, in the section on setting up your modem (which I do not use since I have a cable modem) which mentions the two firewalls but does not say how to enable/configure/what the heck they are good for. Sorry Aunt Minnie.
DVD Easter Eggs. I guess it had to happen, eventually. Easter eggs embedded in movie DVDs. You know, the hidden extras that occasionally turn up in software. Well, now they are showing up in DVDs of movies such as "The Matrix," "Terminator 2" and "Independence Day,". See the story from the Los Angeles Times here or the Easter Egg database here.
In local news. The Hawai'i Legislature is reconvening today to override the Governor's veto on a piece of legislation. What piece of legislation is not as interesting as to why the veto is being overridden. Since statehood, in 1959, no Hawai'i legislature has ever overridden a Governor's veto. So why, after all this time, has this legislature grown the cajones to do so? Republicans. Republicans?
Since the last election, in which Republicans picked up
unprecedented, in modern times, numbers in the state House,
the Democrats have been running scared been more
responsive to the electorate. Not wanting to be seen as
"soft" on crime, the current legislature decided to override
the veto of a crime related bill (forget the fact that the
legislation is in fact flawed and deserved to be vetoed, even
the Prosecutor's Office recommended vetoing the bill).
<RANT> Is this the best way of running a state? Aren't you supposed to lead, not do things because you are afraid of how things might look? Aren't you supposed to put substance over style? In present day Hawai'i, I guess not. This is not a Good Thing.</RANT>
Aloha!
Top / Home / Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday
Hump Day Wednesday - 11 July 2001
Welcome to Wednesday. There are two stories in the morning paper that catch my attention. The first is a Wisconsin Supreme Court Decision (239 Wis. 2d 235, 619 N.W.2d 308, see it here) involving the question whether a person can be barred from having children as a condition of parole. The question, quoted in relevant part from the opinion is below:
First, we must decide whether as a condition of probation, a father of nine children, who has intentionally refused to pay child support, can be required to avoid having another child, unless he shows that he can support that child and his current children. We conclude that in light of Oakley's ongoing victimization of his nine children and extraordinarily troubling record manifesting his disregard for the law, this anomalous condition--imposed on a convicted felon facing the far more restrictive and punitive sanction of prison--is not overly broad and is reasonably related to Oakley's rehabilitation. Simply put, because Oakley was convicted of intentionally refusing to pay child support--a felony in Wisconsin--and could have been imprisoned for six years, which would have eliminated his right to procreate altogether during those six years, this probation condition, which infringes on his right to procreate during his term of probation, is not invalid under these facts.
The court affirmed the condition of probation.
On a lighter note. "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" opens today. Roger Ebert, film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, gives it three-and-a-half stars (out of, I believe, a possible four). You can read the review here. The Hawai'i connection is that is was created/animated, in great part, right here in Honolulu. Square USA, located in Honolulu, employed a reported 250 people to create the animated futuristic look at a world besieged by aliens (I know, where have we heard that one before). Those of you who are gamers already know about the Final Fantasy video game series but from what I understand the movie creates a new story line. In either case, what I've seen of the movie previews show very good detail, but not yet photo-realistic (which is how they were promoting the movie earlier).
Aloha!
Top / Home / Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday
Thursday - 12 July 2001
OpenLinux News. Caldera announced the release of their newest Linux distribution: OpenLinux Workstation, Release 3.1. Built on the Linux 2.4 kernel, Workstation includes KDE 2.1, glibc 2.2.1, and XFree86 4.0.2.
"In addition, it incorporates SUN® Microsystems JavaTM 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SETM) Software Development Kit version 1.3, StarOfficeTM 5.2 and ForteTM for JavaTM, release 2.0, and JBuilderTM 4 Foundation from Borland®."
When it becomes available locally I'll pick up a copy and use it at work. As far as I've seen so far, Caldera is the only one that included Novell Netware support. Now, I don't know if the latest version includes such support or not. If it doesn't, Novell has a page with some resources which may help people who need to access a Netware server (see the Novell page here). However, as usual, if you are running NDS (and you probably should be), good luck trying to get third-party clients to work.
Speaking of Updates. The Opera browser is now at the 5.12 revision (see the full press release here). The newest release includes the following:
Aloha!
Top / Home / Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday
Aloha Friday - 13 July 2001
It's Friday!
Cats Bite Dog! Film at 11. I know it seems like a bad joke, or something out of a movie, but a pack of feral cats attacked a dog and its owner Deena Frooman, two nights ago (see the story here).
"It was like a horror movie," said Frooman, 37. "It was like five or six cats that came at us.""They flew at us, hissing and clawing."
The Hawaiian Humane Society was investigating the incident today, described as "bizarre," by Linda Haller, director of shelter operations.
Beijing Olympics 2008. So Beijing it is. I am reminded of the old joke: "Doing [insert whatever you want here] is like feeding raw meat to lions in the hope that they will become vegetarians." I'm referring here to fuzzy thinking people who say having the Olympics in China will "open" it up to democratic reforms. Hmmm. Is that why China's courts executed more people in the last year, than all other nations combined (over that same period)? Is that how we should view the murders at Tiananmen Square? I don't think so. I think the analogy to the Olympics held in Hitler's Germany comes closer to the mark.
What was that about being doomed to repeat the mistakes of our past?
Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!
© 2001 Daniel K. Seto. All rights reserved.