All posts by rbowen

Go! Cower in terror!

Our big brave protector, Tom Ridge, is now going to protect us from attacks on the train system (CNN).

My absolute favorite quote from the press conference is:

“Clearly, we could provide enough security to put the mass transit systems out of business.”

I think that they need to jump straight to the heart of the matter and issue what is, of course, the final word in terror protection.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the overarching plan to protect you from terror is that you go and cower in your homes. We will send around our heavies to ensure that you are, indeed, cowering according to protocol. Anyone caught reading Farenheit 451, and noticing similarities between the real and fictional worlds, will be summarily executed by a mechanical hound.

That is all.

Observations

* My Tungsten E looks a lot brighter and sharper when I use a screen protector sheet that is actually the right kind.

* When you plug a three-button mouse (USB) into an iMac, it Just Works, and the other buttons do useful things. Also, it doesn’t pop up annoying dialogs telling me that it found new hardware, like some operating systems I could mention. Yeah, I know you found new hardware. I’m the one that plugged it in.

* Authors mailing lists are noisy places, because, apparently, authors like to write a lot. Whoda thunk?

* At the risk of ending a sentence with a preposition … the smell of baking bread is a wonderful thing to wake up to.

* A good breakfast makes the whole day better.

* People who need to deal with people all day every day should not wear overpowering perfume.

The Passion of the Christ

I just saw The Passion of the Christ. I don’t really have words to comment on it. I can’t really say I’m glad I saw it. It was truly a horror. But it is, I suppose, true to my understanding of the events of that day. It appears to be accurate in as much as the scripture gives details, and creative in those areas where scripture does not give details.

The depictions of Evil (as a personification) was very disturbing. Which was, I presume, the goal.

I think that, by the end, I was becoming numb to the severe brutality, and was filtering it out somewhat. Perhaps folks that go see gory movies every weekend could deal with this better than I.

I don’t know whether to recommend that folks go see this. It seems to accurately portray things, according to John, but I just don’t know that this level of graphic violence is really necessary.

But, much has been written, and much more will be written, so that’s about all I’m going to say about it.

The robots outnumber the people

Watching my Apache log files for this web site, I was struck by something very interesting. I used to notice in my log files, the occasional request by a ‘robot’ or ‘spider’ – some automated program that downloads web content on behalf of their owner.

Today, I’m noticing the occasional request by a real browser. Almost all of the requests to my web site are by automated programs, which download my content either for publishing on some aggregator or other, or from something like Amphetadesk that serves the same purpose on the desktop.

So it seems that, finally, we have been relived of the drudgery of reading websites by programs that do it for us, even as Douglas Adams foresaw in “Long Dark Teatime of the Soul”, and in his talk at ApacheCon London 2000.

As We May Think

After recommending, for nearly 4 years, that people read “As We May Think”, by Dr Vannevar Bush, I somewhat sheepishly admit that I had never read it myself.

I rectified this yesterday, and WOW. You have *got* to read this. It does a number of interesting things for me.

One, it shows me the astonishing foresight that some people have about technology, and trends, and where things are headed. This guy, in the closing days of WWII, foresaw the World Wide Web in a way that some people *still* don’t get.

The other thing is that we have absolutely no concept of what is going to happen with technology, because we express things in our current terms. Dr. Bush had amazing ideas of what would happen, but could not express them because he was trapped in the metaphor of his day. Thus, his “Memex” device contained reams and reams of microfiche, which are accessed by photoelectric devices that scan them in, visually, and then mechanically move them around to find the related (“linked”) ones.

This, in turn, makes me marvel at where we will be in 50 years, and how we will look back on the remarks made in this poor benighted decade, when we thought we were at the peak of technological advance. After all, every age thinks of themselves as the moderns. The folks in the early 1800s viewed themselves as supremely enligtened, risen from the ignorance and prejudice of the past, and technologically advanced to the point where no further advance was likely.

In the final remarks of Dr. Bush’s paper, he speculates that, maybe some day, it would be possible to not have to resort to a physical intermediate layer at all – that data could be taken directly from a stored form to a stored form, without having to manipulate a keyboard, or a physical printed version, at all. Then he almost dismisses this as pure fantasy. And just a few decades later, we have trouble imagining data as anything *but* electronic.

If you haven’t read this paper, it is well worth the time to do so, whether or not you are involved in technology in any way.

Romariz 10 year old Porto


I splurged on some Porto. I wanted to know what genuine Porto was like, having been drinking primarily Clocktower and Graham’s Six Grape. Graham’s is a real Porto, but, although it’s nice, it’s very simple.

The Romariz is much deeper/more complex and interesting. Very nutty at first, but with a bunch of caramel, pipe tobacco flavors, and perhaps chocolate as it develops in air. Possibly also apricot. Very yummy, anyways.

Platform independence


For a variety of strange reasons, this is my workspace today. The machine on the left is an iMac. The one in the middle is running RedHat 8, and the one on the right is running Windows 98. I should have taken pictures earlier, when I was in the coffee shop with the two laptops. *That* got some strange looks, I’ll tell you!

Apache blessing

As I sit here writing about Apache, I look up at the card display next to me and see the following:

“May your days be good and long upon the earth.” (Apache blessing)

Nice.