Entries in Life

I love new technology.  I love the Internet.  I love the ways we can connect people who might never have met before. But (you knew that was coming, right?) I try to keep a cautious attitude and remaind mindful of how it affects me, the people around me, and my relationships with them. Neil Postman calls this the Faustian bargain:

The first idea is that all technological change is a trade-off. I like to call it a Faustian bargain. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. … Think of the automobile, which for all of its obvious advantages, has poisoned our air, choked our cities, and degraded the beauty of our natural landscape.

Lately, there has been a rush to biofuels.  This is because, instead of examining our relentless appetite for energy when the price of oil becomes uncomfortable, we adopt new ways of satisfying old desires. Since many people are promoting corn as one of the primary sources of biofuel, this means the price of corn rises, and puts it out of reach of the poorest people.  Poor Haitians (who, admittedly, have to deal with systemic problems on top of poverty) are reduced to eating dirt. (Side note.  To demonstrate just how wrong-headed biofuels are, I’ll just point out that solar panels are better at converting the Sun’s energy into useful energy than plants.)

I was a little worried that the hard drive in my laptop was dying (though, looking at the Load_Cycle_Count, I don’t think it is Ubuntu’s fault, at least not because of cycle time) and since I was on-site, I was able to get a loaner laptop.  I decided to use XFS (/boot would be ext3). Big Mistake. Everything worked great on the installation, but as soon as I installed all the updates and rebooted, gnome-terminal wouldn’t start. Took a little doing, but I discovered that my XFS partition had become corrupted.  Ran xfs_repair and it dumped a few files in /lost+found. But now things work. Take heed.

At least not the way most people think of it.  “That rapist deserves to rot in Hell.  I’m sure God will see to it.” The Holy Trinity wills only the good of the sinner, even at the cost of justice. (From The Injustice of Grace)  But does not the Scripture speak of God’s anger and wrath against sin? These texts, says St Isaac, must be interpreted figuratively, not literally. God does not act out of anger or wrath. He never acts to harm his creatures. He never acts out of vengeance. This is a long way from the god who reacts to our actions with anger and condemnation.  Read the whole post.  It’s worth it. By contrast, check out how some Protestants deal with sin (the instances mentioned in the WSJ article seem to be primarily focused on challenges to the power of the Pastor).  And I’ll come right out and say I’ve seen similar abuses in Orthodoxy, but even when the priest is abusive, his power isn’t ultimate.  So many of these people obviously lack the humility and grace that should be the identifying characteristics of Christian leaders.

In talking to some people about my mother’s experience with Ubuntu, I decided that the one thing Canonical could do to make it all easier would be to build a Windows- or C#-based downloader-and-cd-burner. (C# so that it would work on a Mac or Linux as well as Windows.) Using this hypothetical app, people like my mother could download an ISO, fetch and verify a GPG-signed MD5 checksum, and burn a cd using a single application. No more fumbling with multiple unfamiliar applications to accomplish a single task. Still, with prominent mention of Dell computers on Ubuntu’s front page, with the advent of $200 computers loaded with Linux, with nerdy sons like me, even the streamlined ISO burner may not be as urgent to get Ubuntu on Grandma’s desktop. But it would really help.

How is it that some fancy-pants framework is always the right tool for an abstract job and PHP is the right tool for a real job? (The right tool for the slob) Exactly. Though I would say “Why do all these freetards talk about freedom, but then give their Mama a Mac?” So it is good that an idealist, freetard like myself actual tests his ideals in the real world. In this case, the test subject was an important one: my mother. A couple of weeks ago, Mark Pilgram’s post about switching his father to Ubuntu reminded me that I had told my mother she should try Ubuntu since her Windows laptop was slowing down. That weekend, I mentioned it to her again in email. Her response was “Ubuntu is what? … oh I see something about printing. That would be GREAT if I could communicate from my computer to the printer.” (You can read our whole email exchange, if you like.) Given her limited knowlege of Linux, I asked her to try it out. In fact, I made it more challenging. I pointed her to the Ubuntu download page and asked her to download the ISO and burn it … and I wouldn’t help her. She managed to get a Dapper installation CD burned (I didn’t tell her which version to try) but ended up thinking she had failed because the MD5 checksum process didn’t work. Or maybe it did and the download was bad. Still, I was able to use the CD when we met up a week later. In the end, that part of the experiment showed part of the failures of Ubuntu’s efforts. At least when it come to 56 year-old grandmothers, Ubuntu’s download page is too filled with jargon to be really useful. And I don’t know where to report this bug. Even though we live a thousand or so miles apart, we happened to be getting together the next weekend. So I got a Gutsy CD ready so that I could walk her through the Ubuntu installation and finish it up. Even then, my faith in Ubuntu was shattered. When I asked her to boot off the CD, she did, but she started it in safe mode (which probably created other problems). Still, there were a few bright spots. Perhaps the biggest thing Ubuntu got right was converting her existing Windows user, including bookmarks and IM account, over to the equivilent programs in Linux. That feat, in and of itself, makes me almost forgive all else. Still, there were a number of things that the installation didn’t get right:

1. When it is converting the only existing Windows user, it asks for a username and password. And then it asks for the “default” username and password on the next screen. Why?
2. Resizing the disk when you want to preserve the existing Windows installation is too confusing. Still.
3. The Live CD installation tells you to “remove the CD and reboot”, but you can’t remove it when the Live CD environment is still running.
4. The boot splash screen was a blank screen and you would have thought the installation failed if you hadn’t seen this before and watched the drive activity light
5. She has a widescreen laptop, but it defaulted to 1024×768 and a VESA driver instead of 1280×768 and an ATI driver
6. Suspend on her Compaq Pressario V2000 doesn’t work.
7. Her broadcom wireless meant I had to download drivers on my laptop and transfer them to hers.

(Yes, I still need to report these bugs.) But even after all this, I was still encouraged when I explained that we wanted to preserve her Windows partition and she asked “Why? I won’t be needing it any more!” In the end, she went home with Ubuntu running on her laptop and seemed pretty happy with it. Hopefully, in a few weeks I can write more about any snags she has run into.

This year, my small town decided to have its New Year’s Celebration on my doorstep. This is the risk you take when you buy a house on Main Street. Happy New Year, y’all!