One enabling factor in this was the new dosemu 1.4. I'm still addicted to my 20-year-old DOS text editor, and when I went to Linux a few years ago it never quite worked right under dosemu. For example, with the version 1.3 it would not do a capital "S". Under version 1.2 the shift-arrow commands wouldn't work, and so forth. It was probably some funkazoid interaction with the console driver or terminal configurations, but somehow I never got around to doing anything other than wave my hands and complain.
The new dosemu "just works." rpm -Uvh dosemu*, and there it is. Hot damn! I'm using the default FreeDOS OS image. Next step is to configure the 4DOS command.com replacement, and it'll be just like 1990 again... bash is okay, but 4DOS' command completion is much more sophisticated and easier to use, as far as I'm concerned. I used to use the Win4Lin virtual machine product with Windows 98SE, with three or four DOS windows open for file manipulation, editing, and general work. But Netraverse desupported the version I was using, and when their support people didn't respond to queries, I tried Wine again. It had come a long way in the few years since I'd messed with it last.
Wine is the *nix Windows emulator. ("not an emulator" according to the project, which is true, but trying to explain that it's a function call translation layer can lead to blank looks) I never had much luck with wine before, but part of it turned out to be that I was pointing it at programs installed in the Windows partition and typing "wine program.exe". That worked a discouragingly small percentage of the time.
The trick I found by accident was reinstalling the program from within Wine's Program Manager shell. Even when I was running Windows, I installed stuff by typing "setup" in a DOS window; I never played with the Program Manager at all. I don't know what's going on in the background, but the same programs that crashed and burned before run fine when reinstalled from the Program Manager.
The only Windows apps I hadn't found useable Linux equivalents of were Cool Edit Pro, which I used for ripping and editing .WAV files, and Paint Shop Pro, which I used for image processing. I had settled on those two because they had sane, simple user interfaces that made it quick and easy to do the kinds of things I do - ripping LPs and cutting tracks into separate files, and rotating and cropping images from my scanner and digital camera. Audacity finally improved enough to take the place of CEP, particularly since I seldom do LP rips any more, but nothing I found under Linux (or Windows) could hold a candle to Paint Shop Pro for ease of use. Yes, Photoshop and the GIMP will do all kinds of nifty things, but they're things I have no use for, and the things I want to do take a lot more keystrokes and mouse clicks in those programs than they do in PSP. Anyway, it runs perfectly under Wine, even though it's a heavy-graphics program. I am amazed and pleased.
Early engineering books were written by engineers, cleaned up by editors, and published. This meant you were often reading primary sources; information collected by men who had actually done primary research. There was a lot of that before WWII. After that, the best and brightest went off to the gas turbine stuff, or retired, or were embedded in "cheaper is better" mass production bureaucracy. There are only a handful of primary texts printed after the 1950s.
In Britain, Harry Ricardo's engineering firm got contracts from the Admiralty and the RAF to do basic research. The actual papers aren't freely available (both Ricaro Consulting Engineers and the IMechE want far too much money for them), but Sir Harry's summary "The High-Speed Internal Combustion Engine" was considered a basic work since it came out in the 1920s. RCE has kept the copyright up, even though it has been out of print for decades between editions. The last edition was forty years ago, but they now have a new 2007 edition out. I'll check it out via ILL before purchasing.
In the USA, primary research was done by various automotive and aircraft companies. General Motors Research Laboratory published some papers, which you can still get from GM. Boeing published technical papers, but they appear to have vanished; their internal library doesn't appear to have them any more. But all those were of limited distribution, just like the Ricardo work. The Mother Lode is the NACA papers. NACA was the predecessor of NASA, and from 1918 to 1958 generated thousands of technical papers. When you start tracking back through the bibibliographic references in any automotive or aeronautical engineering textbook, you'll eventually wind up back at some NACA papers.
Most of these papers are online, but NASA keeps changing their web structure, and has mysteriously taken some of them back offline. Do a web search for "NACA papers" to find their current location. They're grainy, low-resolution PDFs that will make your eyeballs hurt, but the information is there for the taking.
ILL is "Inter-Library Loan." If you're in the USA, you can go to most public or college libraries and request an ILL. There are a few that choose not to participate in the ILL program; if the one nearest you doesn't, you can try a different library. Give them the title, author, ISBN, or as much information as you can, and they'll go out on the ILL network and find if the book is cataloged in any participating library. Then they'll get it for you. The service is free in some places. My local public library charges $2. Since that's less than the postage to get it from somewhere else and return it, I can't complain.
ILL will let you read books that are out of print, and it'll let let you preview a new book before buying it. I don't know about you, but when the price of an average technical book went over $50 my new book purchases became very few. And $100, or even $150 aren't considered excessive nowadays. Urk!
Last year I was riding with some guys from sport-touring.net. The ride broke up early, with many people spooked by seeing deer. I hadn't noticed any, and thought they were just using it as an excuse to leave early. Then we had a nasty wreck that was, best as we could reconstruct, due to a rider hitting a deer at 55mph. The deer got away, but the rider wound up with an amputated leg. So I got a bit paranoid about deer, but I still didn't see any.
At night, on the other hand, it's a whole different thing. I'd never realized there were so many deer, or that they were primarily nocturnal, or they ran in packs. I guess I'd bought into the whole Bambi propaganda thing. I started hearing a lot of stories about motorists who had encountered deer on the highway, and the sometimes-fatal consequences.
Here's a view of the deer problem: http://dog-assassin.livejournal.com/21030.html
> http://boortz.com/nuze/index.html > Illegal aliens have dumped nearly 25 million pounds of trash at the > Mexican-Arizona border. After 3 years, only 1 percent of the trash has > been removed by the federal government. This is the same government that > is so concerned about granting them amnesty.I object to the idea that the Fed would pick up any trash at all; that's a problem to be recognized and dealt with at the state level.
It's funny - politicians seem determined to fob off both responsibility and power to some "higher authority." Part of this, of course, is the influence of the media; if they actually did anything and someone didn't like it - and there's always *someone* who won't like it - the media will hose their re-election chances.
I guess we'll wind up with a king sooner or later; modern America seems to want one desperately. That "democracy" thing was interesting for a while...
Japanese intermix three writing systems - Chinese kanji ideographs, where a picture stands for a word or idea, native Japanese kana, which more or less combines each vowel with a consonant (ba, be, bo, bu...), and romaji, which is (usually) English characters, which might phonetically represent Japanese words or plain old English words borrowed by the Japanese.
My knowledge of Chinese stops at two or three characters, but I can tell Chinese from kana, or most other Asian scripts. So I spent half the movie wondering what the hell was going on, since almost all the street signs, writing on papers, etc. was Chinese. Not only that, in several spots, the voice track sounded a whole lot more like Chinese than Japanese.
Well into the movie, we find out that most of the action in Tokyo is taking place in Tokyo's Chinatown.
Oh. Never mind...
I looked out my window, and saw Kyle Pettys' car upside down,
then I thought 'One of us is in real trouble'.
-- Davey Allison, on a 150 m.p.h. crash
The problem with putting 4wd in the Kelmark was routing the forward driveshaft. The engine sits smack in the way. You can play silly buggers offsetting the shaft with joints, but by the time you get done the whole setup is pretty Rube Goldbergish. So the body sat on the spare trailer for ten years, until I finally gave it to a friend. He immediately acquired a Maserati Biturbo engine (2.5 liter twin-turbo V6) and went looking for VW Thing or Vanagon Syncro drivetrain bits.
Dave: "You're going to put the engine in the rear?!"
Bob: "Why not? If the engine is light enough, it doesn't matter where you put it."
Well, DUH. I'd spent years, off and on, trying to solve the wrong problem. Well, I'd started off with a 460 Ford and a 6-71 supercharger, which certainly wouldn't have worked out in a rear engine configuration, but I have several aluminum Buick V8s on hand, and I'd even thought of using one of them midships.
It was a good lesson in identifying the correct problem to work on. I wanted four wheel drive; that was a given. But I made "mid-engine" a given when it didn't need to be, and scuttled the whole project with that mistake.
Since then, I've figured out how to modify a GM 4T60 or Ford AXOD to work in midships configuration. I'll expound on that later. Since getting rid of the Kelmark, I'd scoped out mid engine V8 swaps into Geo Metro, Honda CRX, and small Nissan sedans. Any would provide a compact, low-polar-moment race car.
But... I recently realized I don't particularly care for low-polar-moment cars. Yes, they're easy to snake through autocross courses, but I'm not into that any more. On the highway and at track events, they're nervous and tend to have very quick transitions from understeer to oversteer unless heavily biased by the chassis setup. Track events don't require that level of chassis response, and looking back over cars I've owned, the ones I enjoyed the most were the ones with the higher polar moments of inertia. The various German-made Mercury Capris I used to have, for example.
The other day the squirrels in my head presented a new idea: flip an Audi Quattro 4wd driveline around and put one of the aluminum Buicks in the back. Careful positioning of moveable bits to the front of the car could get the weight distribution reasonably close to 50/50, not that it's a big deal, particularly with 4wd. And I learned how to drive on dirt and ice; oversteer never scared me... and with a very high polar moment, transitions would be slow and easy to catch.
So, what kind of body to drop over it? The VW Karmann Ghia suggested itself. A quick check on one of the lists I subscribe to, and I found a guy who'd already done one. It's tight, but it will fit.
A quick check of eBay showed several Ghia parts cars within one-day driving distance for $400 to $1000. A complete Audi Quattro driveline is a few hundred in the local junkyard. I have several aluminum V8s on hand, and the tools and know-how to stick it all together.
Unfortunately, I lack time for another project. Or more specifically, I'm still choosing to use what time I have to finish up Tyrannosaurus RX and to put the B2000 back on the street. I dumped a whole bunch of stalled projects a few years ago (the Kelmark was one of them) and it has been nice not to be so far behind in the things I want to do.
Planning and dreaming cost nothing, however. So I've created a file for a V8 Ghia project along with the many others I've thought about over the years. Sometimes just planning a project is enjoyable even if you never intend for it to go anywhere.
The driver's side caliper had a full set of mostly-different sharp sheet metal bits. [sigh] I hate it when some bozo has been in there before and messed stuff up. On the other hand, I'm not about to go junkyarding for all the fiddly bits. On most of the brake jobs I've done, I've just thrown all the sheet metal doohickies away and glued the pads to the caliper, which works just fine.
Most of the new book stores have folded as well. I guess everyone sits at home and worships the Magic Box. Meanwhile, I have to scrabble to feed the monkey on my back. Yeah, I have several thousand books at home, but I've read most of them several times.
Part of my problem is there's not a whole lot of new stuff out there. I mostly buy used, but there aren't any used books if there aren't any new books. The little that gets printed is mostly, to put it baldly, crap. So nobody buys it, and the bookstores fold, and then the publishers fold - the shake-out in the publishing industry looks more like mass suicide than business.
I guess that's what you get when you have aquisitions editors who don't read, and treat everything as "product." You can do that when you have a buyer's market. I used to chat with G. Harry Stine on occasion, and he told me it had become difficult to make a living when he was competing with people who would sell a book for $1500 and a box of author copies. He was correct, and that's why I gave up at two; it wasn't worth my time to write them.
A new double-cut carbide burr will do two pair of V6 heads before it gets dull. I let it chatter a few times, which probably shortened the life of the cutter noticeably.
Opening the computer was a pain in the butt, so I finally acquired a USB case and put a backup drive in it. Hmm, it's been running for 12 hours and moved 47Gb so far. That won't do at all. I guess I'll price out one of the "network storage device" cases.
28 hours now, one gigabyte to go. Well, it's no slower than the last tape drive I had, and I don't have to change a shopping bag full of tapes... but next time I'll just open the box and stick the drive on the IDE cable.
I had a couple of slidemount carriers and a 1/2-height receptacle that would take 3.5" IDE hard disks, but they were cheaply made and the pins on the connectors, which looked suspiciously like ordinary Centronics printer connectors, got flaky after a dozen or so drive swaps.
The first part of the book is a fairly straightforward history of Marx, Lenin, the October Revolution, and the Terror. It's said that part of the book was ghostwritten by an underling; I suspect this is the part they're talking about.
The second and third parts described the rise of the communist parties in America and their activities up to the time the book was written; 1958 for the original hardback publication.
Hoover is free with derision and inflammatory phrases, and keeps alternating between "the communists are a menace" to "the communists are a bunch of incompetent nincompoops" depending on whether it's trying to play up the importance of the FBI's anticommunist work, or describing their opponents directly.
It's interesting that Hoover's stated objections to communism (other than the anticommunist and antirevolutionary Acts they were enforcing) was "the communist hierarchy might split up families" and "communists reject God." He apparently wasn't concerned with nationalizing private property, loss of personal freedom, or other consequences of Soviet communism. It's an interesting view of Hoover's thought processes - he owned a house, where he slept and changed clothes; that's the only property he had that I know of. He wasn't concerned with property because he had little to lose, and he wasn't concerned with money, because he never bought anything anyway. His family and religious objections seem curiously weak and contrived.
This is the Penguin edition of 1965; 20th printing of the 1959 paperback. I've seen dozens of them at flea markets and used book stores. The interesting thing is, the book is a lot like those "how to file a sexual harassment suit" courses businesses hire speakers to come in and teach, or those "how to hold up a convenience store" cop-documentaries AB watches. Interleaved with Hooverisms and FBI propaganda, his description of how the communists worked behind the scenes with front organizations, established cells to protect their members from arrest, how to work fund drives, party discipline... the book is a blueprint for establishing and running a revolutionary organization. Most everything you need to know is to be found in the book, all neatly slanted for use in American-type societies. I didn't even notice this 20 years ago.
Then there were the ones who insisted on four levels of passwords for a user to get to a database... but their policy was to leave the computers on all night, because someone told them it was bad to turn them off. So they left them on, logged in, active data on the screens, monitors on, all night and weekend long. Because they locked the door, nobody could get in... except the cleaning crew, ex-cleaning crew, every employee and ex-employee (everyone had keys), all of the building people and ex-people... probably no more than four, five hundred people could just waltz right in. Assuming the last person out locked the door, of course.
Much security work (on both sides) is social engineering. I'm not real good at that. In fact, I was starting to see real advantages to the jackbooted Nazi thug security Gestapo mentality...
"Oh, you're responsible for all this stuff. But you can't do anything to defend it, or watch who accesses it. You're just responsible for it." A friend of mine rotated through the "security czar" slot at a large business, lasted about three months, same as all the guys before him, same setup. But he knew it when he went in; he just wanted the entry for his resume.
This is where being a crusty graybeard pays off. I know DOS, and I know Netware Lite. I didn't know any BASIC, but once you know a couple of languages, another is no big deal. You already know what to do, you just need to learn the new way to do it.
The software updates didn't take long, but getting the stuff to run on the new network was a nightmare. Probably why the previous guy gave up; I could see where he'd tried. The basic problem is that the "DOS" in Windows XP is, as far as I'm concerned, deliberately broken. We're talking butt-simple BASIC programs here, no hax0r-d00d code. But XP would just stop the program for seconds at a time, and I could type way faster than it would accept characters into the keyboard buffer. But the killer was that the DOS box wouldn't let you print until you exited the program. Many hours of Googling found many other people with the same problems, and no solutions, unless "upgrade to a Windows program" counts as a solution.
Well, okay. Delphi has a "console mode" where you can make console apps. Maybe I could port the QuickBASIC code to Visual BASIC. More Google... hm, it appears some early versions of VB would do that, but the capability was deleted in later versions. Thank you, Microsoft...
Okay, we have more than one tool. I tried VMWare and DOSBox. I really expected VMWare to work fine; I'm not sure what the problem was. Both it and DOSBox ran so slowly they were unusable. Which is crazy, since the Linux versions of both work just fine.
I took a copy of the code home and fired it up under DOSEMU under Fedora Core 6. Worked like a champ. So I had a meeting with the customer and told him I could rewrite their apps in VB.NET, or I could move their desktops to Linux and runtheir applications under DOSEMU.
They chose Linux. I had downplayed the option quite a bit, trying to avoid the "everything looks like a nail" thing.
Hokay. They're running Novell, I'll slap OpenSUSE on there. 10.2 was the current version. Shrink the XP partition down to 60 Gb, put it in GRUB in case they ever need to get to it. Heck, the XP licenses are paid for.
Their new server was running Windows 2003 Server. I decided to leave it alone. Konqueror could see the shares fine, but I couldn't mount one to a directory. A little research showed that SuSE, for whatever reason, didn't have smbfs enabled in the kernel. This is one of the problems with the current direction of Linux - this sort of thing should be an installable module, not built into the freakin' kernel! A quick kernel recompile fixed that, though. Mount the share to a directory, use DOSEMU's lredir to point a DOS drive letter (F:) to it, and bammo - "F:" sees the files on the Window server.
Ah, but then there's the print thing again. The Novell Lite network was set up peer-to-peer, and everything printed to "LPT1" on different machines, which were hooked to different printers as Novell shares. I did a few tweaks to the programs, moving some to LPT2 and LPT3. Then I bought some D-Link Ethernet to Centronics adapters, and networked the printers (tractor feed, preprinted multipart forms) to the Windows server and created Windows shares for them.
Next, create three network printers in YaST, then configure .dosemurc to point to them. Fire up one of the programs, tell it to print... a couple of seconds delay, and the printer starts chattering!
I'd anticipated some trouble making all this work. It worked perfectly the first try. I'd like to take credit for it, but a lot of luck was involved. Let me describe how this works:
We're running a QuickBASIC program. It calls a processor interrupt 21h (DOS) with the parameters to tell it to accept an incoming byte stream, which is the file.
DOSEMU (DOS EMUlator) intercepts the interrupt and translates it to a Unix function call. This calls the "lpr" print service.
lpr does a bunch of stuff behind the scenes, which I frankly haven't bothered to trace. It's also entwined with CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System, which is part of the SuSE distribution, and the spooler daemon. There's a bunch of stuff going on here, depending on what kind of file is is, the printer type, etc. This is where I expected to do some twiddling.
lpr gets done gumming the file, then looks to /etc/printcap to find out where to send it. Printcap tells Linux where the printer is; in this case, that it is on a Windows server, it connects with Windows SMB message blocks, the name of the Windows printer share, and a username and password for the Windows server.
The Windows printer service wakes up, accepts the file, and drops it into a directory somewhere. Then it looks up what the share is pointing to, which in this case is the IP address for the D-Link adapter stuck on the back of the printer across the building. It sends the file to the D-Link via TCP/IP.
The D-Link is actually a little computer that can receive the file. It then spools the file to the Centronics parallel port built into the adapter. And then the printer starts to work.
Is this pure Rube Goldberg or what?
I could have set up each desktop machine to talk to each D-Link, but this was a lot more fun... It was partly for aesthetics - if the file shares were on the server, it seemed reasonable for the printer shares to be there too.
Now, anything server-based involves putting all your eggs in one basket. If the magic smoke escapes, you're dead in the water. So I appropriated an unused machine and set it up as a backup server, with all the shares and IP addresses and user accounts configured. All they have to do is turn it on, insert the most recent backup disc, and they'll be back in business within ten minutes.
Quote for the day:
"If carpenters built buildings the way programmers build software, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." - Edgar Dykstra
My three, after about two seconds of thought, are:
Merck Manual (medical handbook)
CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics
Machinery's Handbook (technology)
If given five, the first three, plus
"The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli
"The Art of War" by Sun Tzu
My civilization could bootstrap its technology quickly with the first three, and the second two would tell them what to do with it.
I've usually been amused by the selections other people make. Books on religion, "literature," philosophy, or art appreciation? Yeah, like those are going to be much help when you've just had a heart attack, or the bad guys come to take all your stuff, or you're tired of holding off the dark by burning twigs and animal fat.
Further discussion reveals most people think of "civilization" as politics, religion, and art, with the justification that there were plenty of civilizations before modern technological civilization. True, as long as your nontech civilization doesn't have any technological competition. Working copper, working iron, the stirrup, the wheel, the gun, the atomic bomb... once any group starts making progress, they'll become the civilization, with everyone else following along behind.
[later edit]
I've changed my mind again:
Kent's Mechanical Engineer's Handbook CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu
Kent's has more theory than Machinery's Handbook, but it covers enough of the basics. Most engineers are more familiar with Marks' Handbook, but that's in two volumes, while Kent's is a single volume. If you allowed multi-volume "books" you could choose the Encyclopedia Britannica... Kent's is about technology in general.
Some people have questioned the CRC Handbook. It's not of immediate practical value, but it has the basics of most of the hard sciences, from chemistry to quantum physics.
The revised list would jumpstart your technology, and Sun Tzu would tell you what to do with it.
He did bring me back a small bust of Lenin, which sits on my desk. It doesn't look much like the photos I have of him; it's interpreted via New Soviet Realism, or something. It looks very... Vulcan. Every now than then someone will ask about the bust. I tell them it's a Romulan commander from an obscure Star Trek episode. So far, nobody has called me on it...
Roosevelt died, and Truman was eventually informed that the weapon was ready, the base at Tinian was ready, and a list of possible targets was included. I don't think anyone ever considered *not* using the bombs. Truman technically had the authority to tell them to not use them, but he had his hands full trying to figure out what was going on, since Roosevelt had made no provisions whatsoever to brief his new VP on the things he needed to know. The decision, had there been one, would have been that of George Marshall, in his capacity as supreme commander of all Allied forces. There being no conceivable reason why Marshall would want to stop the deployment, it went ahead as scheduled.
By the terms of the original Tube Alloys agreement, the Brits had a full share in all development and all its results, including the devices themselves. By this agreement, half of the nuclear weapons dropped on Japan were British. In the spirit of international amity, I'll let the Brits decide if they want credit for Hiroshima or for Nagasaki. Actually, since it was a British project all along, they might want credit for Hiroshima.
Technically, Churchill was to have been informed before the bombs were used, but that agreement was between him and Roosevelt, as heads of states. That was one of the many things Roosevelt never bothered to pass on to Truman. It's unlikely Marshall ever knew about the agreement. I can't see that Churchill would have had any reason for objecting to their use; British troop ships were already en route to the Pacific staging areas for Operation Overlord.
Oh, and as an aside - Britain couldn't go anywhere with Tube Alloys since the manufacturing capacity simply didn't exist in the home islands. Churchill worked *hard* to get the Canadians to take on the project; he traveled to Canada personally to try to talk whatsisname into it, but the Canadians didn't think it would work and anyway, it would cost too much. For some reason he didn't try to have it made in Australia or India, or at least, he doesn't mention proposing it to them in his voluminous history of WWII.
As a matter of historical record, both Germany and Japan had atomic bomb projects online before the USA became an equal partner in Britain's atomic program. The USA was the only major player that did *not* have its own atomic bomb project.
primary sources: Rhodes' atomic bomb book, Churchill's history of WWII, "The Japanese Atomic Bomb", and "German Secret Weapons of WWII"
It took ten or fifteen minutes for the connection to gel. David Tennant as Doctor Who.
Some rabid Who fan? Someone dressed for a party? Or some new sartorial archetype? Sometimes those appear and take off - the jeans and T-shirt I mentioned earlier go back to James Dean, best as I can figure.
One archetype that I haven't seen in person, but which seems to bubble up through the DNA of various movies, is that of the Toecutter from the original Mad Max movie. The bulky sheepskin jacket, the big hair... and the high brown motorcycle boots with the rows of buckles. Those are late-1960s motocross boots, before they became colorful and spangled with advertising, and they would have been long out of stock anywhere by the time Mad Max was filmed in 1979. They probably dug them out of some prop closet somewhere and knocked them against each other to shake out any sleeping scorpions. I was watching some weird Vin Diesel movie a couple of years ago (XXX?) and... there was a Ukrainian mafiya guy, the spitting image of Hugh Keanes-Byrne's Toecutter character; he was instantly recognizeable. I could never figure out of this kind of thing comes about as some kind of tribute to past movies and characters, or if the casting director is too lazy to come up with any character styles of his own.
The primary difference, of course, is that you're only "wealthy" while you're making money. If you're rich, your supply of money is assured.
It's probably some kind of financial truism that goes back centuries, but at least I managed to figure it out for myself.
Sam Walton used to be the richest man in the USA. He lived in a modest tract home and drove a 15-year-old pickup truck. I bet he had it fixed up so that, no matter what kind of disaster happened to his chain of discount stores, he'd always have enough money to at least maintain that standard of living.
Dave Ramsey does a "financial ministry" radio show, advising people about debt management. In his book, he talks about how he went from a paper millionaire to bankrupt literally overnight. Just having a lot of money moving through your hands doesn't mean you have financial security.
"The vast preponderance of reports, scientific, political, journalistic, or a mix of, all pretty much agree. No, 'might be' about it, there *IS* a global water shortage, both potable an non-potable. Even in the US, eg., much of South Texas (excluding the coast) is deemed an 'economic water shortage' area."
I remember the "running out of fresh water" flap from the early 1970s. There was probably one before that. And a preponderance of ignorant Chicken Little BS is still BS, no matter how zealous its believers.
The water supply is pretty much as it has been; human population density has overrun the supply in many areas. People forget that most of Southern California is desert. Temperate, but still desert. The area pipes water in from four states. The explosive growth of cities in Arizona has also caused problems; the area was short of water even before six million Californians swarmed over the state line.
Water problems have existed in the Southwest since the 1800s, when available supplies were divided up by treaties. Unfortunately, existing treaties allocate 140 times more water than actually exists, last I noticed. And a great deal of Texas is "arid" or borderline desert.
Even Rome had problems with its water supply, 2300 years ago. Some of the aqueducts they built are still in use. And there are remnants of canals and wells in Iraq that are over 3000 years old. Too many people in the wrong place.
Where I live, the problem is *too much* water; I can dig a hole with a shovel and it will seep water in. Houses tilt on their foundations. Roads sink. And "wetlands" breed mosquitoes and cottonmouths, but they're protected by law, now.
What the enviros can't seem to fathom is that water isn't spread out conveniently for them, and most of them seem to think every other place is just like wherever they are. If San Diego has a water shortage, everyone has a water shortage, isn't it obvious? [sigh] The Fed has the same kind of blind spot, which is why you can't sell a house unless you "upgrade" it with "water-saving" 1.6 gallon per flush toilets. But that's a whole separate rant...
So, we're driving through the "estates" in the wrecker, and it's quarter of ten in the evening. Not particularly late by most standards. I guess it was late in ritzville; almost all the houses were dark. A few had a lamp on here or there, but no sign of anyone up and about.
Since these were big fancy houses, they have a lot of glass - picture windows, bay windows, or whole glass walls. So we're driving along, and a whole lot of these houses have no curtains, blinds, or anything. Mostly built on open floor plans, so I could look into the living room, family room, kitchen, and dining room as we drove by. Maybe one house in five was like that, which meant a whole bunch of them.
I could understand it if they were behind hedges or privacy fences, but the life-in-a-fishbowl thing would creep me out. I don't particularly want to have people driving by see me eating dinner, or scratching my balls on the couch, or whatever. I do a lot of driving at night now, and I see a lot of people living curtainless, all over the state, so it's not just a local thing.
Tommy brought me along because the deadbeat had talked a bunch of BS to the GMAC guy. I guess he went to bed early too. He'd had the ignition switch changed out so the key we made off the VIN data wouldn't work, but we got the car anyway. Absolutely uneventful, unlike the time we took a Camaro from the parking lot at Taco Bell. The ex-owner was working the drive-through window, saw us hooking up the car, and instead of going out the door, he started climbing through the window. Unfortunately, he weighed about 350 pounds, and the window was only 18" wide. Tommy and I just stood there and watched in awe as he got stuck, and there were people on the inside trying to push him the rest of the way out.
The Four was one of those odd dome theaters, with a curved screen and steeply inclined seating. I'd seen "The Empire Strikes Back" there back when it came out. It was a pretty impressive place.
A few years back they had a midnight showing of "Heavy Metal." I gathered some friends and we went to see it. That's my all-time favorite movie; I saw it at a mosquito-infested drive-in when it came out, and when it finally came out on DVD, that's when I bought one, and a DVD player to play it with. So I *had* to see it at the Big Titty, as we called the Four.
It rocked, of course, with the big screen and Klipsch sound system. But what was interesting was the demographics - mostly new cars in the parking lot, SUVs, Lexi, and BMWs. The audience was 100% white, mostly couples, fortysomethings to sixtysomethings, with half a dozen pierced and mohawked teens who apparently thought they were going to see something like manga or anime.
Every single person sat all the way through the credits, and nobody got up until the lights came on. Not even the teeners.
"Back home I'm nobody, but here, I'm Denn!"
High Priest: Armaments Chapter One, verses nine through twenty-seven:
Bro. Maynard: And Saint Attila raised the Holy Hand Grenade up on high,
saying, "Oh Lord, Bless us this Holy Hand Grenade, and with it
smash our enemies to tiny bits." And the Lord did grin, and the
people did feast upon the lambs, and stoats, and orangutans, and
breakfast cereals, and lima bean -
High Priest: Skip a bit, brother.
Bro. Maynard: And then the Lord spake, saying: "First, shalt thou take
out the holy pin. Then shalt thou count to three. No more, no less.
*Three* shall be the number of the counting, and the number of the
counting shall be three. *Four* shalt thou not count, and neither
count thou two, excepting that thou then goest on to three. Five is
RIGHT OUT. Once the number three, being the third number be reached,
then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade towards thy foe, who, being
naughty in my sight, shall snuff it. Amen.
All: Amen.
-- Monty Python, "The Holy Hand Grenade"
Five is a sufficiently close approximation to infinity.
-- Robert Firth
King Arthur: "One, two, five!"
Sir Galahad: "Three, sir! Three!
King Arthur: "Three!"
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Today I downloaded all the sources, set up an ext2fs partition, an "lfs" login and .profile, and so forth. The LFS site had the 6.2 "stable" book, and the today's-date "in progress" book. So naturally I chose the fresh one.
Oops. Got binutils compiled, then bombed on the kernel headers part. Found some headers, but several guesses at where they might be installed were apparently wrong. Ran out of time.
So far I've learned:
1) how to use the "patch" utility to patch the source code. Being clueless, it took quite a few tries before finding that the patches wanted "patch -p1 < patchname" to work correctly.
2) He wants you to build gcc in stock configuration first, *then* patch and rebuild for the second iteration. He actually tells you this, but it's indirect and spread out, so it took a lot of paging through the book to figure out what was going wrong.
3) When he says "log in as lfs" he means "go to a console and log in as lfs." I wound up destroying Fedora's C compiler when LFS overwrite it. The "lfs" PATH was correctly set. However, I was doing "su lfs" in an xterm from my usual login, and "su" keeps your original PATH and other variables. I vaguely remembered something about su and the environment. The man and info pages weren't very clear, so some smurfing around found that I needed to use "su - lfs" to force the lfs user's enviroment variables. I'd blown away the C compiler twice, and I need to reinstall again before I can proceed.
So far I feel like I'm playing "Simon Says" or one of the more annoying text adventure games from long ago. I'm building a detailed note file, though... for a while I was annoyed at all the little gotchas I keep running into, but to be fair, Beekmans has probably been doing this for so long he doesn't even notice the little details any more. And other versions of the book might not have been so persnickety...
update: I just found where the Book says to use "su - lfs", so it was my fault, not Beekmans'. Dang, it's my right as an American to be able to blame someone else for my mistakes, isn't it? Paging back and forth through the HTML links sucks. Which is probably why there's a printed book available...
"Taffit" with Pierce Brosnan.
Brosnan plays Don Johnson (which seems to be his normal role other than Remington Steele) playing an Irish strong-arm man. It's an Irish movie filmed in Ireland, which was interesting. Stable camera work. Reasonable acting. Brosnan's character gets hired by a town council to block a consortium trying to build a chemical plant on their soccer field. There are parts of the plot that don't make a lot of sense, but I'm willing to allow cultural differences; it might be perfectly obvious to an Irish viewer.
Unfortunately, at about 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through the movie, at a guess, Brosnan's character skips town and the credits start rolling up. AB and I sat on the couch, looked at each other, and couldn't figure out exactly what happened. This isn't the first movie we've watched that suddenly seemed to end right in the middle.
If the movie had actually had an ending, even a bad one, it might have made a 2.5 on the Dave Entertainment Scale. However, since it didn't have an ending, it was mostly a waste of time, so it only rates 1 out of 5.
The first two were:
Flint
and Hondo
Both of those are well-written adventure stories with decent characters, plots, etc. They rank high on the Dave Arbitrary Literature Scale.
I've grouped the others into the so-so and schlock categories:
so-so:
Chancy
Dark Canyon
Reilly's Luck
The Broken Gun
schlock:
The First Fast Draw
Son of a Wanted Man
Lando
The Man from Skibbereen
Mustang Man
The Quick and the Dead
AB has three or four hidden in her stacks of crap, and I don't know what they were now.
The "so-so" category contained defects in plot, cardboard characters, or other problems, but were otherwise readable.
The "shlock" category contains books which read like big chunks were left out, or they had been assembled from two or three different short stories or fragments, or were written in weird dialects, or were verbose and repetitive, or (worse) combinations of the above.
For some reason, a disproportionate amount of stories take place in Texas. "The west" was everything past the Mississippi back then. Most of the stories take place between 1865 and 1885; L'Amour didn't have much use for anything that happened before the Civil War. Mexicans occasionally show up as secondary characters, usually in a favorable light. Indians seldom make an appearance, and are usually bad news. (probably true in those days, despite modern ideas.) And finally, almost all of his protagonists are very young, ranging from early teens to mid twenties. That's usually a sign that the author is trying to target the "young adult" market, though as far as I know L'Amour wasn't trying to do that. Most of the books follow the "young man trying to make his way in the world" plot, with a few notable exceptions, like Flint.
For the most part L'Amour was a fairly good storyteller. A lot of people bought his books and read them. In the back of one, he mentioned getting an award from President Reagan, who was one of his fans. He was talking to one of the Secret Service guys, who mentioned he'd started reading L'Amour's books because President Eisenhower gave them to him when he was done with them. I guess that would inflate your ego nicely.
Some of the commentaries at the ends of the books were interesting. In a few, he talked about how his agent had bungled the rights to some of his books, giving other people ownership and control of his work. This is what was behind at least a few of the more horrible of L'Amour's books - I've read several which were the same book, except with the names changed, or inflated from a short story to a novella. Hacks butchered the books and were still able to use L'Amour's name. Or at least, that was his side of it.
L'Amour mentioned that the most frequent criticism he got was people who were bothered by his characters; the good guys were good, and the bad guys were bad. This didn't sit well with some modern readers, used to ambivalent, angst-filled antiheroes.
L'Amour's reply was that in the early days of the old west there was essentially no law and no social pressure to ensure compliant behavior, so if a man were decent and ethical by nature, he'd remain so, while if a man were a sociopath, there would nothing to restrain him. I think he might have a point there.
Fedora didn't want to be repaired a second time, so I went for a reinstall. It made it to disk 2, which it then decided was bad, and aborted the install when it found a file it couldn't read. Mandrake will warn you and keep on going if you want, which I considered to be more practical.
Okay, I've been on FC6 for six months, time to try something else. I had a recent Debian on hand. It chugged along until it reached "libservkit-2.4-java", then opened a subspace channel to V'ger. I had to power the system down since it was hung. This is the same Debian that wouldn't install on the old Dell server I have as a play box; the Dell has a SCSI RAID array, and Debian wouldn't install the root filesystem there.
Okay, Slackware 11 on hand. It's been over ten years since I've run Slackware. Chugging along... kernel 2.4? 2.4?! That's freakin' ancient. Ancient enough that I was wary of library dependencies if I tried to upgrade.
The only other thing I had on hand was OpenSuSE 10.2. Last time I ran it, I never successfully managed to make it play .AVI video files. Well, it did it once, but when I rebooted it wouldn't do it again, and reinstalling the binaries and libraries didn't help. But at least it will let me download something else. I guess I'll try Ubuntu and FC7.
The sad thing is, I like OpenSuSE 10.2 a whole lot. X apps zip along noticeably faster than FC6. Novell finally fixed YaST's annoying habit of snapping shut every time you changed something. That is, older versions would let you tweak one single thing, then they would exit. Since it took YaST a while to load, extensive customization became very annoying.
A "scientist" is someone who does research. Most of the people the media slaps that title on are white-lab-coat goofballs who wouldn't know how to set up a repeatable experiment if their life depended on it.
"Science" is just a model of how the world works; this model is based on repeatability and prediction and stepwise refinement.
Plain old Newtonian physics will predict 100% of the events you can see by the unaided human eye. 1930s quantum theory will do just fine to build an atomic bomb; everything the guys at Los Alamos knew in 1945 is as obsolete as alchemy by modern standards. It doesn't make them wrong; it's just that there are always niggling little details out at the edges, and when you start trying to pin them down, you wind up having to change the whole way you look at things.
You don't need twistor theory to calculate the trajectory of a thrown rock; Newtonian physics will do that to as many decimal places as you can reasonably expect. It's just that when you get off into unreasonable territory - you start measuring things in femtoseconds, or you throw the rock at 186,000 miles per second - that things begin to depart from Newtonian predictions.
Got OpenSuSE 10.2 fully configured today. SuSE adds an extra script file called "/etc/bash.bashrc" that overrode my system prompt. I renamed it and things worked normally. Odd. I also found a web site that successfully described how to get .avi and .mp3 playback, among other things, working in OpenSuSE. The link is:
http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/60/
It's all done through YaST and the package manager, so I'm not sure what's going on behind the scenes, but the other method of individually downloading and installing the uncrippled packages didn't work, so I can't complain that much. Looks like OpenSuSE will be here for the next six months.
One of the problems I had last time was it absolutely insisted on forcing one screen to 1280x1024 and the other to 640x480; I had a no-name ATI chipset card and an old Matrox Mystique. Some script in SuSE kept overwriting my hand-tuned xorg.conf file. Now I have a cheap ATI dual-head card, which it seems to have no troubles with.
My gkrellm RPM was for Fedora, but such things usually work. It wanted a bunch of libraries that SuSE didn't have, so instead of tracking them down I found a SuSE 10.2 build of gkrellm on rpmfind and did an "rpm -Uvh gkrellm...". Voila!
And what, you may ask, is gkrellm? It's a system monitor that tells you the processor load, disk accesses, free space, net accesses... almost anything you can imagine, presented any way you want. Yes, there are other programs that will do that. But gkrellm takes only a tiny amount of disk space and even less CPU, and it's pure eye candy too.
Gkrellm's home page seems to be down at the moment, but here are some links with some screenshots:
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/10/28/1355235&tid=150&tid=27&tid=31&pagenum=2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GKrellM
My bank was giving away pens as promotional items. I snagged one. It was satisfactory, until it broke in half in my pocket. A second pass by the bank netted a stick pen instead of a click type. That one had the ends fall out.
Rummaging in the deepest corners of my desk drawers, I found several pens that had dried out long ago, one from a fairly nice batch that I had forgotten about, and one giveaway pen market "US ROBOTICS." Best as I can remember, I bought a USR 14.4 modem (state of the art! in 1993, and it probably came with the modem.
The pen still worked. For that matter, so does the modem, or at least it did a few years ago when the 56K modem died.
There's a bit of a history with that USR modem. I had obtained a netnews feed from the local university in 1992, and was pulling news and email via uucp with a CompuCom 9600 modem, which would connect to a matching CompuCom at UALR. Then UALR upgraded their modems, the I could only connect at 2400 baud. Back when the big jump from 2400 to 9600 happened, every modem maker had their own protocols, so only matching modems could talk at the blazing speed of 9600 bits per second. UALR had gone to US Robotics modems, so I scraped up $500 to buy one.
As a further digression, US Robotics' company name was a nod to Isaac Asimov's fictional company, "US Robotics & Mechanical Men," which was mentioned in "I, Robot" and most of his robot stories.
So, I order the modem. USR didn't take credit cards, for some reason, and I was in a hurry, so it came COD via Federal Express. That Friday I found a Federal Express sticky tag on the door when I heard the gnashing of gears as a heavy vehicle raced away. The local Federal Express drivers have perfected the "tag and run" technique - they don't bother to knock at all, they just slide up in front of the house, silently stick the "we missed you" tag to the screen door, then run back to the truck and haul ass. It happens *every* time. In this case, I was sitting in the living room waiting for them, having talked to the terminal earlier and finding out the package was in the truck and headed this way.
This was the Friday before the Labor Day three day weekend. I wanted my damned modem *NOW*. So I called the office, went through the "you must not have heard the knock" crap, and they finally said I could pick the package up back at the terminal in Little Rock after 4 o'clock. They claimed they had no way to get hold of the driver to send him back. Cellular phones were rare and expensive in 1993, but back then pagers were more common than cellphones are now. But whatever.
So, that afternoon I headed to Little Rock. I stopped by and picked up my buddy Felix on the way out; we were going to do dinner or something. So I headed off 25 miles, to grind through rush hour holiday traffic to the Federal Express terminal, locating in the heart of Little Rock. We got there right at 4 PM.
By 4:15 we'd advanced in the line to the counter. I had my tracking number on the sticky tag. Another 15 minutes and they'd found the package, flopped it on the counter, and wanted their money. I counted out the *exact* amount due, which was something like $495.75, and pushed it toward the clerk.
"We don't accept cash. We only take money orders or bank checks." And she whipped the box under the counter.
WHAT?! Any other courier firm I had ever dealt with wanted *only* cash. So Felix and I went back out to the truck. I was seething mad - banks in Arkansas had mostly been closed for half an hour by then, since 4 o'clock was the witching hour for Arkansas banking back then. I guess people who worked days weren't supposed to use banks. Anyway, Felix suggested we might find a grocery store that sold money orders. I vaguely remembered seeing "Western Union" signs somewhere, so we're limping through rush-hour traffic in a part of town neither of us is familiar with. And finally we found a Safeway.
"The hurrier you are, the slower things get." We waited in line, paid $5 for a money order, and ratcheted back to the Federal Express terminal. It was 4:55 when we ran back into the building. The counter-bitch was off at one end of the counter, chatting with some friends, ostantatiously ignoring us. We waited. The clock passed 5 PM. A few minutes later, the kaffeeklatch broke up. The counter-bitch started toward a door off to the side.
"Hey, we're back to pick up that COD!"
[looks at clock] "We closed at 5."
"We were here before 5."
This might have developed into a shouting match, except Felix walked down to where she was and loomed. Felix is 6'5 and does a pretty effective loom. The counter-bitch changed to "surly" and said, "It's back in the warehouse."
We stood there and looked at her for a while. Then she stomped out the door. Felix observed, even if she left, someone would eventually come to lock the outside door, and we could begin anew. So maybe ten minutes passes, and counter-bitch comes back. I showed her the Western Union money order. She put the box on the counter. Then she slapped a whole stack of paperwork on the counter. The first page wanted my name, address, social security number, phone number, driver's license number, and other information, and I don't remember what the other four or five sheets wanted. And that pissed me off. I'd never had to fill out any crap like this before, not even with Feral Express. So I just picked up the box, turned, and walked out the door. It was my damned package, paid for. CB was jabbering something as we left. I didn't pay any attention.
We got in the truck, I fired it up, and the counter-bitch came running out the door.
"I wonder how she got around that counter," I mused. It had been wall-to-wall, with no gate.
"I think she climbed over it," Felix said.
CB charged up to the truck and grabbed the door handle. "You can't leave! You have to fill out these forms first!"
"Let go of my truck, bitch."
[babble, babble, rant, babble]
I backed out of the parking place, with her trotting alongside, then put it in gear and moved off across the parking lot, CB still holding on to my door. She was able to run 15 miles per hour, by my speedometer. Then she finally let go.
These kind of things happen to me *way* too often - enough that friends refer to them as "DaveWorld(tm) incidents. Times when the whole world goes weird for a while.
I called Feral Express' "customer support" line to file a complaint. They were absolutely not interested, either in my repeated sticky-tag incidents or the nutball at the terminal, though the lady I spoke to did seem interested that CB had been clocked at fifteen miles per hour. And I have put Federal Express (which has now renamed itself "FedEx") onto my shit list, and I refuse to deal with them, and I have refused delivery on packages people have sent using them. I always tell vendors I don't accept Federal Express, but some of them use it anyway.