Entries in Life

Dave is so full of it when he says “ Email is getting more and more useless. Soon it will be time for the next thing after email.”

(And he’s wrong about opening mail when he can see the extention… Several trojans diguise themselves as .TXT files.)

Email is the “killer app” of the Internet. Just guessing, but I would imagine that it is the reason 90% of people use the Internet. It is more private and personal than setting up a webpage and if what you want to keep in touch with your family on the Internet, there is no better way.

I guess he thinks that email is useless because of the spam and viruses. There are ways to fight Spam (Black Hole Lists, for example), and viruses are not endemic to email — they are more the problem of Outlook. Now, it would be unfortunate if Outlook’s problems caused people to stop using email, but I don’t see that happening either.

I think that I’ll learn Lisp instead of Java:

Perl is an inspiring example of brevity. Larry Wall broke all the rules, and in the process discovered some good ideas. Perl may be a kludge, but it makes your programs short, and you have to respect that.

(From “Arc at 3 weeks“)

By the way, SOAP::Lite is the bomb. I used it to add non-browser-based uploading to slideshow.org and it was sweet!

So I got mail from this permission-based marketing firm. At the bottom of their introduction, it says something to the effect of “Some people don’t like spam at all…” That’s me. Their server is now blocked from sending mail to everybody.org.

Over on jefflog, Jeff seems to think that a java-based weblog is going to enable him to use XML-RPC. Maybe I should point him towards XMLRPC::Lite.

I’m more and more convinced that Java is better than Perl in primarily this way: employer’s love it.

Oohh… Look another sysadmin with a weblog: Librenix — get it? Libre (free) nix.

From there, I found a pointer to an article by Nicholas Petreley on ext3 and reiserfs. Some good information that I didn’t know: reiserfs doesn’t journal data, just meta-data. That would explain the lossiness I’ve seen.

I’ve decided to try out SGI’s XFS for a filesystem instead of ReiserFS. I think I see some immaturity in ReiserFS and it bugs me. Corrupted files on reboot ain’t good.

While compiling the kernel, I ran into a Signall 11. Not a good thing. apt-get install gcc seems to have fixed it, though.

Also, after going home to El Dorado, AR for Thanksgiving, I’m getting a little nostalgic for a small town.

Basil (almost 3) and I laid out one night and looked up at the dark sky. He loved it. He also spotted a falling star and, later, so did I.

Alexis, though, wants to stay here, near her brothers, so I doubt that is going to happen soon.

At Thanksgiving, I said something about Buy Nothing Day. Of course, someone raised the objection of the poor economy.

But, check out Robert Riech’s piece on the recession and war:

But we don’t live to support an economy. The economy exists to support us and the standard of living we choose. And if terrorism reminds us that what we can buy is less important than the lives we want to lead, that’s OK with me and probably OK with you.

Debian’s dpkg system ported to solaris.