Meigs field has been closed. Bulldozers dug X's down the runway last night after 10 PM, and the land will become a park.
Monday, 31 March, 2003. 02:14:45 PM
Hong Kong has quarantined the residents of an apartment building complex to try to contain an outbreak of SARS. They also announced 80 new cases. On the bright side, Vietnam reports no new cases in the last week, suggesting they have the problem under control. On the not-so-bright side, I don't think I believe them.
Sunday, 30 March, 2003. 03:28:11 PM
The mystery disease SARS is still not getting much coverage in the press. The news on the war is taking all the headlines. I don't think people realize how bad this could be. It could be an airborne disease like the common cold, which has not been ruled out. It kills about 3.5 percent of its victims, which would translate in a country like the United States to millions of people dead. By comparison, the 1918 flu killed 100,000 people in the United States.
Saturday, 29 March, 2003. 11:35:17 PM
Hey you idiots, this mustard is American!
Saturday, 29 March, 2003. 09:48:57 PM
The mystery disease (SARS) has sickened 1,550 people and appears to spread more easily than first thought. It might be a form of coronavirus, which is also a cause of the common cold.
Saturday, 29 March, 2003. 03:13:49 PM
Gary Tuchman, a CNN reporter, just announced on the air that he's a moron. Not in those words exactly. As he was talking, a plane took off and he directed the cameraman to photograph it. Immediately after taking off, the plane dropped about 6 flares, which caught his eye. It's commonly known that planes drop flares as a countermeasure to infrared AA missiles such as the shoulder-fired Stinger (United States) or the old SA-7 (USSR). A good photograph of an F/A-18 dropping numerous flares is found on ABC News' website. At night, the Iraqi militia could sneak up close to the end of the runway and attempt to shoot an aircraft down. Just as a precaution, planes taking off will drop flares, even if there is not any missle threat detected. A flare costs a few dollars, but a plane costs millions. So, the reporter sees this perfectly normal activity as a major event. Though he claimed that he had no idea of what happened, he was hypothesizing on the air that the plane must have had some mechanical malfunction, and was amazed that it continued to fly on its mission, not even turning around to land. Reporters are expected to be something of an expert in what they report on, and this sort of reporting is just disgusting. CNN ought to be happy though, turning the mundane into news sells advertizing.
It's not just fighters that eject flares to fool infrared seekers on missiles. Large cargo aircraft do it too. Here's some neat photos of flares being ejected from AC-130 Spector gunships.
Saturday, 29 March, 2003. 12:34:43 PM
I need to find a new name for my website.
Friday, 28 March, 2003. 11:48:21 PM
Did anyone else see this?
Friday, 28 March, 2003. 04:29:34 PM
I am getting really sick of hearing TV reporters say "calvary" instead of "cavalry".
Friday, 28 March, 2003. 03:24:17 PM
Our neighbor across the street, Paul, died last night. We'd noticed that he wasn't going to work every day. Turns out that he has a heart bypass operation and there were complications. Alex and I really like Paul a lot. He was 76 years old I think, and he spent the summers since we moved in landscaping his yard. When he ran out of yard to landscape, he started working on the adjoining corner of the golf course. He was a dentist by profession, and after he retired he still worked 4 days a week as a hygenist. The last time I spoke with him we talked about the impending war and he told me about how he was in basic training when he heard the atomic bomb had been dropped and the war was over. He was glad the war was over, because he wasn't looking forward to an invasion of Japan.
Thursday, 27 March, 2003. 11:57:53 PM
All of my Santa Fe trip photos are scanned and in the photo section.
Thursday, 27 March, 2003. 10:51:16 PM
Here is part of a house resolution passed a week ago. I've reproduced the text here, and following it is the converse. Apologies to Twain:
--------------------------------------------------------------
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
March 20, 2003
Mr. AKIN (for himself, Mr. GOODE, Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland, Mr. JONES of North Carolina, Mr. KING of Iowa, Mr. HAYES, Mrs. JO ANN DAVIS of Virginia, Mr. BEAUPREZ, Ms. CORRINE BROWN of Florida, Mr. MANZULLO, Mr. ADERHOLT, Mr. TIAHRT, Mr. PITTS, Mr. RYUN of Kansas, Mrs. MYRICK, Mr. WELDON of Florida, Mr. BISHOP of Utah, Mr. BARRETT of South Carolina, Mr. MILLER of Florida, Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN, Mr. GINGREY, Mr. TERRY, and Mr. SOUDER) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Government Reform
RESOLUTION
Recognizing the public need for fasting and prayer in order to secure the blessings and protection of Providence for the people of the United States and our Armed Forces during the conflict in Iraq and under the threat of terrorism at home.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Here is the converse, an equivalent statement:
Recognizing the public need for fasting and prayer in order to curse and withhold divine protection for the people of Iraq and Iraq's armed forces during their conflict with us.
When you say the resolution in the converse, it sounds like something a VooDoo priest would say. But it's exactly and logically equivalent to the resolution of the House. If the House really wants to have one nation under god, then we really should fill out the paperwork to become the second state of Iran.
Thursday, 27 March, 2003. 06:06:01 PM
Since yesterday, the number of cases of SARS is up from 45 to 51 in the United States. Out of the 1,408 cases worldwide, 53 people have died. That is about a 4% mortality rate.
Thursday, 27 March, 2003. 02:57:24 PM
The Iraq war now has a scenario like the infamous "highway of death" that prompted Colin Powell to call the continued pursuit of Desert Storm in 1991 "unamerican". A column of vehicles left Basra and were basically wiped out by heavy B-52 air attack. It wasn't clear if they were just moving to a defensive position in the North, or if the column was moving to attack American forces. Anyway, moving their forces in a column was a stupid thing for them to do. There's very little coverage of this right now, other than a couple sentences here and there. The force seems to be somewhat smaller than the 1000 vehicles that were reported on Tuesday. I suspect that much will be made of this in the future, after combat photographers are able to access the area to document it before debris is cleared.
Thursday, 27 March, 2003. 12:51:25 PM
The website for Al-Jazeera is behaving very strangely. It's not reachable, and the DNS is also not working properly. Skipping the DNS and using the IP address of 217.26.193.10 shows that the website is also not accessible. I did a traceroute from my home network, and it shows:
pdrap:oxygen:~>traceroute 217.26.193.10This is very strange. The packets are being dumped immediately before they leave the swbell.net network. News reports indicate that this is the situation all over the world. Nobody can reach Al-Jazeera, and the traceroutes show that packets are dumped immediately before leaving the local network. The next stop after 151.164.243.13 on the trace should be a sprintlink backbone connection.
traceroute to 217.26.193.10 (217.26.193.10), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 adsl-66-141-47-126.dsl.austtx.swbell.net (66.141.47.126) 26.322 ms 13.090 ms 18.500 ms
2 dist2-vlan20.austtx.swbell.net (151.164.20.67) 13.047 ms 13.568 ms 15.932 ms
3 bb2-g1-0.austtx.swbell.net (151.164.20.226) 12.915 ms 12.840 ms 15.609 ms
4 151.164.243.13 (151.164.243.13) 19.384 ms !H * 19.793 ms !H
The English version of Al-Jazeera went live yesterday, and they also posted photos of supposedly executed American soldiers. The reason for the outage appears to be some kind of denial of service attack, and the Internet routing was changed to stop the attacking traffic from hitting Al-Jazeera, thus the reason for the strange packet drop inside of the swbell network. I can only imagine that the people attacking the site were upset at the photographs that were posted on Al-Jazeera.
Thursday, 27 March, 2003. 12:13:57 PM
Alex and I went with three of our friends to see "Mamma Mia" last night. It was a really good show. All the music in the show was originally a hit by Abba.
Tuesday, 25 March, 2003. 10:07:12 PM
My camera formats all memory cards as FAT16, which is fine for the 8 meg card that came with it, but not for the 64 meg card that I bought for it. The FAT16 filesystem is only used on Linux for filesystems 32 megabytes and smaller, so the 64 meg card cannot be read on Linux with the Sandisk reader if it's formatted by the camera. Fortunately, the camera works perfectly with Linux, so I'll just return the Sandisk reader to the store.
Tuesday, 25 March, 2003. 08:31:43 PM
My Toshiba camera works out of the box with my Linux desktop. I have it configured with the USB mass storage driver (to work with the Sandisk driver) and it recognizes the camera perfectly.
Tuesday, 25 March, 2003. 05:57:23 PM
Nine more people from Hong Kong are reported to have contracted the mystery virus.
Tuesday, 25 March, 2003. 05:19:20 PM
Alex got a paper accepted at a conference in Helsinki Finland, so we're going there together. She wants to also visit St. Petersburg while we're there.
Tuesday, 25 March, 2003. 03:08:39 PM
The UPS site said my camera was delivered, so I went home during lunch to pick it up. I took a couple test shots and it looks really nice.
Tuesday, 25 March, 2003. 01:18:07 AM
People are still getting sick from the mystery virus. Four more people died today, and a Hong Kong hospital official is ill.
Sunday, 23 March, 2003. 08:04:04 PM
Alex and I went out driving and I took my FirstFlex TLR with me. I'm not sure, but I think I had my shutter speed set incorrectly for some of the shots, and I forgot to advance the film before my first shot. Oops.
Sunday, 23 March, 2003. 01:04:52 AM
The best review of the Toshiba PDR-3300 camera that I've found is here. This camera has an amazing number of features. I was expecting a basic point-and-shoot camera with a high quality zoom lens, but it's actually got a full range of auto program modes (point and shoot), shutter priority exposure, apeture priority exposure, and a full manual mode as well. This is really surprising to me, because I've never heard of a digital camera with a full manual mode costing less than $700, let alone less than $200. Besides that, it's got spot and multi metering, ISO sensitivity control (100, 200, and 400 speed), a remote control, and all the usual gadgets and features that come with other digital cameras.
Saturday, 22 March, 2003. 10:16:35 PM
In anticipation of my new Toshiba digital camera, I picked up a Sandisk SDDR-73 Compact Flash/Secure Digital USB Card Reader. Since most of these digital cameras are Windows-only devices, a separate supported card reader is essential to use these cameras with Linux. Also picked up a 64 meg SD card, since the camera only comes with an 8 meg card.
The trick to getting the second port (the SD port) to work with Linux is to add the line 'append="max_scsi_luns=2"' to the /etc/lilo.conf file and reinstall lilo. Or, if SCSI support is loaded as a dynamic module, then /etc/modutils.conf needs to have a configuration line for the scsi driver. If a kernel configuration solution is desired, then the appropriate thing to do is to check off the SCSSI/Probe all LUNS option in the kernel configuration menu. LUNS are a logical device partition within a single physical SCSI device (exactly the situation with a single Sandisk card reader that holds two cards). Only the first LUN is probed at boot because some faulty hardware locks when LUNS past 0 are probed.
Friday, 21 March, 2003. 01:07:39 PM
News reports indicate that at about 9 AM Central time B-52's left their bases in Britain and are heading to Iraq. The flying time is about 6 hours, so the massive strike from their cruise missles and GPS bombs should happen at about 3 PM Central time. A single B-52 can fly over a target and attack more than a hundred individual targets at the same time. There are probably quite a few B-52's in the air, so there could be 1000 or more individually targetted precision bombs hitting Iraq at the same time. This capability is something that we didn't have 12 years ago.
Wednesday, 19 March, 2003. 11:55:02 PM
I installed my own cacheing DNS server on oxygen just now. Got sick of waiting for SBC's DNS servers to come back with addresses. SBC has good DSL, but crappy DNS.
Wednesday, 19 March, 2003. 10:16:48 PM
"What does the candle represent?"
"Life."
"Whose life?"
"All life, every life. We're all born as molecules in the hearts of a billion stars, molecules that do not understand politics, policies and differences. In a billion years we, foolish molecules forget who we are and where we came from. Desperate acts of ego. We give ourselves names, fight over lines on maps. And pretend our light is better than everyone else's. The flame reminds us of the piece of those stars that live inside us. A spark that tells us: you should know better. The flame also reminds us that life is precious, as each flame is unique. When it goes out, it's gone forever. And there will never be another quite like it. So many candles will go out tonight. I wonder some days if we can see anything at all."
Sheridan and Delenn, And All My Dreams, Torn Asunder Babylon 5
Wednesday, 19 March, 2003. 04:26:28 PM
Bush has declared diplomacy dead, and he's preparing to give the order.
Wednesday, 19 March, 2003. 12:49:46 PM
The war looks like it will be on tonight. Bahrain has offered sanctuary to Saddam Hussein, but it doesn't look like he'll take it.
Tuesday, 18 March, 2003. 11:04:11 PM
The killer virus has been identified as a member of the paramyxoviridae family. The bad news is that with the identification of the virus, there is also the knowlege that the patients have been receiving correct treatment for that type of infection, and they are still dying. 5 so far are dead, and more cases are being discovered all the time. The number of cases in the United States now stands at 14.
Tuesday, 18 March, 2003. 06:24:10 PM
I just won an auction for a Toshiba 3300 digital camera. 3.2 megapixels for $185. It also has a Cannon lens, which should solve the fuzzy image problem that I have with my current digital camera.
Tuesday, 18 March, 2003. 02:59:08 PM
Linux is now booting on an early version of IBM's POWER5 chip, according to Anton Blanchard on the Linux kernel mailing list.
Tuesday, 18 March, 2003. 01:20:05 PM
I watched GW give Saddam the ultimatum last night. From Hussein's response this morning, it appears that there will be war on Thursday.
Tuesday, 18 March, 2003. 12:01:45 PM
The mysterious respiratory disease marches on. There are cases reported in Los Angeles and Australia now. Two members of a family in Toronto have died. And one of those people visted Atlanta.
Monday, 17 March, 2003. 03:10:35 PM
Editorial From the Austin American Statesman:
Killing for God shows dangers of religion
One of the most important books you can read in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks is "Terror in the Mind of God"
James Dee
LOCAL CONTRIBUTOR
Monday, March 17, 2003
One of the most important -- and scary -- books you can read in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks is "Terror in the Mind of God" by Mark Juergensmeyer, professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His book is an attempt to understand the mindsets of five different forms of religious terrorism, drawing on print sources and face-to-face interviews with group members.
Juergensmeyer discusses varieties of Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Sikh and Buddhist terrorism, detailing the real-world frustrations, perceived humiliations and deeply held religious beliefs that have driven certain people to commit merciless atrocities. This makes for painful -- and repetitious -- reading, because each sect has an alarmingly similar self-centered vision of its role in cosmic history.
They share the notion that the world is in the midst of a giant struggle between good (in essence, their group and its ideas) and evil (everything else, especially anyone who openly opposes them). The doubt-free rigidity of their convictions leads them to demonize their enemies and perpetrate horrific acts, thus playing their part in a fantasized, divinely ordained drama.
Juergensmeyer takes his own (nonviolent) version of religion very seriously, but he has to acknowledge that many religious traditions, not least those of Judaism and Christianity, are saturated with extreme violence. Nonetheless, he expresses confidence that "the same religion that motivates such potent acts of destruction also carries an enormous capacity for healing, restoration and hope."
In my view, that is just wishful thinking. Although supporters may say that religion has beneficial effects, the big problem is that the fundamental tenets of the world's religions, especially their assertions about divinities, are either demonstrably false or completely unverifiable. Even worse, their adherents are reluctant to apply standards of rational argument to their claims, which makes it difficult to prevent unusually ardent believers from slipping into the pathological hatreds that have produced so much mayhem.
The most thorough critique of theistic defenses is Michael Martin's "Atheism: A Philosophical Justification," published with little fanfare in 1990 by Temple University Press. It's difficult reading, even for an academic, but a well-written (and well-promoted) popularizing abridgment of this book might set off a nationwide firestorm of debate. Previously contented believers will find his calm, extraordinarily detailed and unanswerable refutations of the standard "proofs of God's existence," especially those based on "intelligent design" and "cosmic purpose," absolutely devastating.
As you might expect, modern theological philosophers have developed new approaches to replace those now-abandoned proofs. However, this only leads from frying pan into fire, in the form of convoluted arguments that seek to escape the relentless force of rationalist criticism -- an ironic parallel to the way religion has yielded ever more of the natural world to science since the Renaissance.
And there is a deeper problem: All but the most abstract concepts of divinity display an unblushing anthropomorphism that is simply taken for granted. Familiar phrases such as "the mind" or "the will" or "the power" or "the word" of God may seem to make sense, but theologians are unable to explain how such characteristics can apply to a supposedly infinite non-corporeal entity.
In spite of their worldwide popularity, the traditional beliefs in divinities have no credible basis in evidence or argument. So people who justify acts of extreme violence by invoking divine authority are making false claims, and, by logical extension, so are people who tell us what a divinity says or wants us to do. Religion may indeed offer healing and hope, but humanity should learn to live in the real world, free of its pleasing -- and dangerous -- delusions.
Dee is a retired classicist living in Austin.
Monday, 17 March, 2003. 02:12:50 PM
Hong Kong health officials have doubled their number of the cases of the mysterious respiratory disease. It's definitely not a flu, and most think that it's a previously unknown viral disease. Some are concerned that this disease could be as bad as the 1918 flu that killed 20 million people - more dead than were killed in the 4 years of war previous to that.
Monday, 17 March, 2003. 04:04:31 AM
Monday, 17 March, 2003. 03:47:58 AM
I'm going to start making notes of what I'm currently reading. Right now, John Steinbeck, "Of Mice and Men" and "Cannery Row". I've got a thick stack of books in my shelf of unread stuff.
Sunday, 16 March, 2003. 04:27:09 PM
The mysterious disease that is sickening hundreds and killing a few hasn't slowed down at all. It doesn't respond to any treatment, so it looks like containing it will be a matter of quarantine.
Saturday, 15 March, 2003. 02:36:09 AM
Looks like I was completely off on when the war would start. I predicted that it would happen by now, and it hasn't. That's a good thing, although I don't really think that GW Bush is going to find a way to avoid war. He seems dead set on having his war.
Saturday, 15 March, 2003. 01:05:03 AM
There's a mysterious respiratory infection in Asia that has killed a few people, but sickened hundreds. There have also been reports of the illness in Vancouver, Canada, with one person dying there. The people who were not killed from the disease still have severe breathing difficulties. Nobody seems to know what is causing the disease. It's non-bacterial, and it is not a flu. It could be a previously unknown infectuous agent.
Thursday, 13 March, 2003. 05:50:45 PM
New photos of the dogs, the ice storm, and the neighborhood up in the photo section.
Wednesday, 12 March, 2003. 04:11:39 PM
I've been testing my new Soviet Leningrad 8 light meter, and I'm satisfied that it's working perfectly. Under many different light conditions, the readings that it gives agree with the readings I get from two other cameras with built-in meters. The meter is calibrated for film speed ratings in DIN (German film speed standard) and Gost (Russian film speed standard), but not ASA (American film speed standard). Luckily, the Gost number is 90% of the ASA number, which is close enough for any modern film emulsion. I used the light meter this morning to take a photograph of the house with the Firstflex TLR.
Wednesday, 12 March, 2003. 04:02:16 PM
The New Scientist is reporting on an artificial hippocampus. Some will see this as just another tick mark on the way to robot immortality. First we learn how to replace a single part of the brain. If that can be done, there's no reason why each small part of the brain can be replaced with an identically functioning machine part. After all the meat is replaced with circuits, you have a human brain implemented as a computer. The only thing that seems impossible would be to come up with a plot for a science-fiction novel that won't seem quantly out of date within 50 years.
Tuesday, 11 March, 2003. 06:36:46 PM
I fixed up my website scripts so that photo albums can be organized in arbitrary ways.
Tuesday, 11 March, 2003. 11:41:20 AM
www.w-uh.com writes:
I maintain that programming cannot be done in less than three-hour windows. It takes three hours to spin up to speed, gather your concentration, shift into "right brain mode", and really focus on a problem. Effective programmers organize their day to have at least one three-hour window, and hopefully two or three. (This is why good programmers often work late at night. They don't get interrupted as much...)
Monday, 10 March, 2003. 11:37:53 PM
Google searches can be very interesting with the right selection of keywords.
Monday, 10 March, 2003. 06:43:04 PM
Alex and I are back from Santa Fe. It was a great trip, and I shot two rolls of film. Once they are developed, the photos will be up on the website.
Friday, 07 March, 2003. 12:01:52 PM
As an example of how far US military capability has progressed in the 12 years since Desert Story, a carrier battle group can attach 700 targets in a day today, vs. 200 a day 12 years ago. And those targets can be hit in any weather, day or night. 12 years ago, weather and darkness were limiting factors.
Friday, 07 March, 2003. 08:57:29 AM
Alex and I are headed off to Santa Fe for the weekend.
Wednesday, 05 March, 2003. 09:16:56 PM
Space Daily has an article about various design points of the Space Shuttle that are questionable from a safety standpoint.
Wednesday, 05 March, 2003. 10:02:06 AM
I got an e-mail from a reader about the Colin Powell quote that I included about the 13% of Americans who can find Iraq on a map being all Marines. That quote is FALSE, Powell never said that. Since it's a funny joke, it's been repeated several times, and attributed to various sources, including the New York Times and the New York Post. Even Doonesbury ran a comic strip featuring that joke.
Tuesday, 04 March, 2003. 04:05:18 PM
Here's another page run by the marketing house that put together the Raging Cow site network. They lay their little scheme out in black in white.
Tuesday, 04 March, 2003. 03:13:03 PM
Dr. Pepper is trying out a new form of viral marketing, using unpaid shills in their early 20's who also write web logs, as well as making bogus weblogs of their own. Right now, only the fake logs written by Dr. Pepper are on the Internet, but the fake logs written by the unpaid shills will start showing up soon. These kinds of tricks are becoming more common, though usually they take the form of a pretty woman in a bar striking up conversations with random people, and then casually happening to mention that they use "product X" and that it's the most wonderful thing ever invented. Dr. Pepper's shills are not paid with money, but they are given goodies like hats and T-shirts, and told to advertize the new Raging Cow milk-based drink. That Raging Cow website is written in the style of a blog, but it's not what it appears. At first glance, it looks like the random musings of a kid running his own Moveable Type based blog. But it's actually written by marketing people, who are probably in their 40's, trying to sound like college kids. There's advertizing embedded in the logs, but it's obviously out of place there. Any reasonable reader would hear their bullshit detectors going off loudly. The site even has a bogus link to another site supposedly run by a girl named Shelby LouAnn Brown. The suspicious cowsay on the page is obvious. At one point, Shelby writes:
Surprise, surprise, we had another fight after dinner the other night (he saw my navel ring when I was stretching at the table), so I took off to calm down and walk around the farm because it was really pretty out with the moon shining and all. I saw Tubby and my cow over by the fence line again. My cow was pacing and kept throwing her head back. Tubby was running back and forth trying to keep up with her. He almost got stepped on. Something is SO up around here. You dont have to be psychic to pick up on that. For the last few days, Ive just felt this heavy aura of restlessness hanging over the farm. But today, it all came to a great big fat dairy cow head. Now someone is in indefinite solitary confinement. And for once, it aint me.Now, if that isn't the wet dream of a 45 year old marketing slave, I don't know what is. It sure isn't a rebellious 18 year old girl, that's for sure. The dead giveaway is when "Shelby" describes the belly button piercing experience as a "freakin' hole puncher ripping through my belly." What kid with a naval ring is going to avoid the word "fucking," especially on the Internet?
The shit gets piled higher and deeper if you click on a link that takes you to the page of Sir Lee Pig (hahaha, get it? get it? get it? Ahhh, nevermind.) That's a blog written by a pig who's got his tail all curly for the cow over in the next barn.
Viral marketing has to be the most cynical form of marketing, put together by the most cynical people. Not all marketing is bad. It doesn't take such crass manipulation and seemingly deceitful tactics to build a strong brand and build a positive product image. But this type of marketing is low, and insulting to our intelligence. Just for hysterical laughs, here's a couple of limericks that the pig supposedly wrote:
There once was a fat stupid cowWhat does "feeling like a sow" mean exactly? These sites aren't the ones that were built by the unpaid 20 something shills, these are the ones written by Dr. Pepper's dirty minded marketers.
Who said, What do I do now?
Im so strong and so big
Ill mess with the pig
And make him feel just like a sow.
Oh, this girl she has long lovely tressesOh har har, a cross-dressing pig. That's so UN-funny. OK, enough picking on the stupid marketing and even stupider logs. The moral of the story is that there are some people and some companies so cynical that they think you're stupid enough to fall for this trick. And the other moral of the story is that not everything you see on the Internet is real.
But with the pig she always messes
Why, dearie, why
When you visit my sty
Must you always adorn me with dresses
Monday, 03 March, 2003. 04:19:10 PM
The way to make the kernel revert to using the name 'core' as the core file name is to add the line 'kernel.core_uses_pid = 0' to the file /etc/sysctl.conf
Monday, 03 March, 2003. 04:11:30 PM
When programs dump core on my laptop, they leave a core file with the name 'core'. When programs dump core on my desktop computer, the core file is named core.{pid}. I hate the extra typing, and am trying to figure out how to force the name of the core files.
Monday, 03 March, 2003. 01:30:18 AM
SECRETARY of State Colin Powell put a snarky Iraqi reporter in his place the other day. The scribe tried to sandbag the statesman by asking, "Isn't it true that only 13 percent of young Americans can locate Iraq on a map?" "That may be true," Powell snapped. "You're probably right. But unfortunately for you, all 13 percent are Marines."
-As reported on NY Times' Page 6 gossip column