As always, I’m having one of those “What the hell happened to the
week-end?” moments late Sunday night. I didn’t even get that much
goofing off done, fer Ghu’s sake! Guess I was a bit behind on
sleep…
I did get the thesis handed out on Friday, which means that I’m
still on schedule to graduate when I’m planning. It also means I get
to do some real coding this week, in between bouts of biting my
fingernails and wondering what my committee members are thinking as
they read my work.
I also spent quite a bit of time tweaking computer stuff this
weekend — which is a time sink if there ever was one. I think I’ve
got everything set up ‘The Right Way’ — at least until next
weekend… One of these days I’ll get some screen shots from the new
box posted.
Oh yes, and I did fun things like sort old mail to see if there was
anything I needed in there (there wasn’t), and fixed ID tags in mp3
files, so that everything gets picked up right in
xmms. I should have spent that time
blogging, but oh well — that’s what late nights are for… on with
the update.
(These are pretty much in the (reverse) order they were bookmarked
in; I’m not going to bother to topicalize them. You understand, I’m
sure…)
With all the design flap going on in the ‘blog world, I decided I
should probably get my fonts set up correctly, so that I could see
what all the fuss is about. The
TrueType
Fonts in Debian mini-HOWTO was invaluable in that respect, and the
web now looks quite a bit better. Some of you high-falutin’ design
types might want to try to rustle up a stock Linux box, without any of
the ‘doze TrueType fonts installed, and have a look see at how your
pages render…it’s not terribly pretty.
One of the HotWired editors
bags
on the effects of the VA Linux/Andover merger on
/. Nothing too surprising, although I’d
forgotten that VA tried to buy out Rob and co. before Andover
succeeded — that is a bit cheesy.
Simon Cozens takes on
the Top 10
Myths about Perl. My favorite? Number two:
Perl
looks like line noise:
Each time I look at a piece of Perl that seems to have been uploaded
in EBCDIC over a noisy serial line, I stop and wonder `what
possesses someone to write something so ugly?’ Over time, I’ve come
to realise that a consequence of Perl being easy to use is that it’s
easy to abuse as well.
…
In short, Perl doesn’t write illegible Perl, people do. If you can
stop yourself being one of them, we can agree that Perl’s reputation
for looking like line noise is no more than a myth.
Most non-geeky people haven’t heard about UCITA yet — check out
UCITA 101: What You
Should Know About the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act,
and then hit this page to find
out when to mount the fight in your state.
Last week, Salon reviewed
Rattling
the Cage, a new book arguing that some of the (other) higher
primates should be granted some of the legal privileges of
‘people’. Book sounds moderately interesting, but I’m linking it
because it made me go back and re-read Heinlein’s Jerry Was a
Man, which covered much the same ground — over 50 years ago.
Remember how you learned in biology that all proteins start with
the same amino acid, methionine?
That’s wrong.
Another piece on the always-fascinating
Lake
Vostok mentions some new data (new to me, at least) concerning
bacteria in deep ice cores. The piece also expounds on the Europa
connection a bit — a good intro if you have no idea what I’m talking
about…
And now, the other side of the story:
Justice Department and FBI officials Wednesday told a
Senate panel that last week’s denial of service attacks provide ample
reason to give law enforcement bigger budgets and additional powers.
I’m shocked! Shocked, I say!
The Gnome Project now has a
Documentation
Status table up. Just the thing if you’d like to pitch in and
help, but can’t code a lick…
Last week’s RISKS digest
talks about the recent denial of service (DoS) attacks, as well as a couple other
interesting bits.
Speaking of DoS, the
results
of my recent poll were interesting — I expected the MPAA to score
higher than it did. Overall, you seem like a fairly mature
bunch…
LinuxPPC popped out a new release
last week. Sounds pretty good — one of these days I’ll get around to re-populating the
second drive of the 7500 with some flavor of Linux — although at the rate I’m going,
Debian’s will be out, and I’ll just use that.
LinuxPlanet interviewed Alan Cox
last week — he’s the number two kernel hacker, after Linus, and, from the sound of it,
a fairly interesting guy.
Whew! That’s probably enought — and I’m starting to run low on links, too, so it all works out.
Before I go, a hardy wave to my aunt and cousin, who’ve apparently
taken to wandering through here occasionally — I’ll be getting back
to you on the mail thing directly. Actually, there are several people
I owe mail to — I’m working on it. Additionally, I’m making another run at ICQ;
these last for a bit, and then I quit using it because nobody else
does, apparently. Add me if you’d like; my UIN is 57685922. See you tomorrow…
Oh, and good luck to LIM!
