| The Supreme Court: in the pockets of business? |
[Jun. 27th, 2005|01:18 pm] |
What ever happened to impartiality in Supreme Court trials? In the past few days, the supreme court has demonstrated an undying allegiance to business. I will outline two of the more egregious cases here:
1. In a continuing violation of fair use, the Supreme Court ruled against Grokster in the case of MGM v. Grokster. What a stunning surprise that the motion picture and music industries should be able to slap around the makers of software that COULD enable the illegal transfer of music or videos. This is a lot like the Betamax case of the '80s, where the supreme court said the substantial legitimate uses of Betamax technology outweighed any risk of piracy. It also bears a striking resemblance to holding gun makers liable for murders committed with their guns, as the supreme court ruling appears to be based on their interpretation of the intent of the software makers. To help prevent further injustices like this, TAKE ACTION!
2. In the case of Kelo v. New London the Supreme Court ruled that private property could be taken for PRIVATE use, provided that it had some "benefit" for the public. In other words, they can take these peoples homes, build a shopping mall, and applaud the sales tax revenues. I'm sure the people whose old riverfront houses were destroyed will love the sales tax revenues. Maybe the city could use the sales tax revenues to build a paper mill in the place of the Mayor's house. |
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| God? |
[Jun. 16th, 2005|08:33 pm] |
Today in my philosophy class, we had a.. discussion.. on the existence of God. I was in the "maybe" group, mainly because I have no proof one way or the other. However, what I was more than willing to say is that I do not believe the Bible. It flies in the face of physics, of logic, and of evolution: three things I heavily believe in.
If anyone can make arguments other than "faith" or Biblical references in FAVOR of there being a God, please let me know. I'm all for a debate, if anyone's up to it. |
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| First day of Class |
[Jun. 14th, 2005|04:48 pm] |
Well, today was/is the first day of my summer semester classes. Professor Hundewale let us go... oh, about an hour and a half early. And my philosophy class of about 20 students has four of us with our laptops out. Yay for David sitting by an outlet. :)
In other news... HOW THE HELL IS MICHAEL JACKSON NOT GUILTY???
Did he: bribe the jurors? bribe the judges? Just impress the jurors with his large and well-paid legal defense?
One wonders what would have happened to Kevin Mitnick had he had an equally well-financed defense. Well, maybe you don't. But I do. And since this is my LJ, I will continue to wonder that. |
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| System Lockups |
[May. 14th, 2005|10:58 pm] |
My computer has frozen (hard locked) 4 times today. I have never seen it happen before on this machine. Prior to the lockup, the system was at 5 days of uptime, which I realize is not stellar, but it shows it had been working. The downtime was just an opportunity for me to dust off the inside of things and remove a failed cd burner. The cd burner was not replaced, as I had a DVD burner in there as well.
Before anyone asks, my system is NOT overclocked, and the memory timings are all relatively conservative. I have had this system for a year, with only minor modifications (added the DVD burner, added a new fan, etc.) No change to CPU/memory/video card.
The logfiles do not show any unusual activity that I see, other than a badblock or two on one of my secondary hard drives (shown by smartd). CPU Temps, as reported by 'sensors', hover around 52-55 degrees Celsius, which certainly doesn't sound like anything too high to me.
When the system locks up, it just completely freezes, screen unchanged. Mouse doesn't move. The hard disk activity light stays on solidly, but the drives don't sound like they're spinning. Not a single thing shows up in the log files. I'm currently running memtest86+, but as of halfway through the first pass, nothing has been found.
My system specs are as follows:
Motherboard: Asus P4C800-E Deluxe
CPU: Intel Pentium 4, 2.8C
Memory: 2x512 DDR400 (PC3200) Corsair Memory
I do wonder about my power supply: could a low voltage be causing a lockup? I do have 3 hard drives, 1 optical drive, and the above mentioned hardware on a 400W PSU.
Any thoughts on my lockups are welcome. I appreciate your time reading this. |
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| LDAP For authentication? |
[May. 10th, 2005|09:54 pm] |
My home network is a bit of a confusing bit of work:
I have a firewall/printing server running samba, a file server for backups (samba and NFS), a desktop for myself (which also shares a printer over samba), and a development box (which really doesn't do much but let me test stuff that has a tendancy to break it). So I guess my question is not HOW I set up LDAP for authentication, but whether or not it's worth it. I guess I could authenticate 4 Linux systems and 3 sambas against LDAP... but I realize LDAP authentication is not the easiest task ever. Not to mention I'd keep my notebook off LDAP so I could use it when not on the network. Thoughts? |
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| Can you hear me now? "I don't care!" |
[Apr. 18th, 2005|11:46 am] |
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Can't hear the person on the other end? "I don't care" is the apparent answer of Verizon Wireless CEO Ivan Seidenberg. This sfgate.com article illustrates the CEO's attitude towards dropped calls, crappy reception, and yes, municipal wifi. Hopefully he can get enough bad press from this article (recently /.ed) to make sure T-Mobile and Cingular can take a big bite out of the company's market share. |
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| Socks? |
[Apr. 4th, 2005|03:45 pm] |
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So, I'm sitting here at work and a professor comes out and wanders down the hall... wearing no shoes, just socks. And his class is only half over. I have no idea what is going on, but the guy always struck me as a tad odd. |
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| Microsoft's Best Work |
[Apr. 4th, 2005|02:16 pm] |
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Most people who know me would probably be shocked to see me trumpeting Microsoft's horn. But, as this ZDnet blog shows, they've actually done good! |
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| Video Game Violence |
[Mar. 13th, 2005|12:50 am] |
So, though I will be creating a new blog for my non-personal writings in the near future, I wanted to post this now.
Many people have suggested that video games increase one's propensity to violence. I disagree. People inherently have an instinct towards anger when something provokes them. I feel that, for myself and many others, video games provide an outlet for frustration and anger. These energies might otherwise be bottled up and taken out in less... appropriate manners.
I'll be writing a longer essay on this later, but this is just an interim thought. Let me know what you all think. |
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| Free Linux CDs!!! |
[Jan. 26th, 2005|03:57 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  happy | ] |
Been looking to join the open source movement? Now is the best time ever! Ok, enough sales pitch. Here's the deal: I'm trying to encourage people to join the open source movement. I want people to try linux. I realize linux is not for everyone and am not going to shove it down people's throats. But, if anyone who reads my livejournal is interested, I will be MORE than happy to send/give them a complete set of CDs/DVD for a linux distribution. I'm going to reccomend (for installation) Debian, Gentoo, or Fedora, because I've worked with them. Also, I'll be happy to distribute the Knoppix LiveCD which does not modify your system in any way, but allows you to try out Linux on your computer and tests the hardware compatibility in advance.
With Gentoo, Debian, and Knoppix, I can provide reasonable levels of help, though I make no guarantees about support. I just want people to be given an adequate chance to try out what I feel is a wonderful operating system. By the way, I do use Gentoo on my desktop and Debian for a firewall, so I actively use and reccomend those strongly.
Ann is sitting here behind me. "Is it all about linux?" she asked. "So far," I responded. She promptly turned around and ignored me. I guess she thinks I shouldn't be wasting time on Linux. *shrug* I love her, but well... I'm also a computer geek, and there's no getting around that one. I'm sure she'll get used to it. |
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| Yeah..... |
[Jan. 21st, 2005|11:40 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  blah | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | UN Lecture | ] |
Well, Seagate really works at trying to avoid getting returns. Returning a product "inappropriately packaged" (i.e., not up to their standards of packaging) invalidates your warranty. I am told, however, that the UPS Store has the "special" packaging for their desires. So I drove by the UPS Store this morning... but they were of course closed, not opening until probably 9. And I am certain they will be closed when i go home today. So I suppose I will need to run by there tomorrow to drop off the hard drive.
For the moment, I have moved the contents of hda (80 GB Seagate Barracuda, PATA Interface) to hdc (20 GB Hitachi, PATA Interface). Even as I write this, Gentoo is installing itself on my 80GB hard drive. When I get the 120 GB hard drive, I'll probably partition it for /home and move/remount all existing /home data. I'll probably need to spend a good portion of this weekend reinstalling and reconfiguring everything. I might end up making myself a private post later for my todo list.
Hackers are generally thought of as relatively unsocial and solitary persons. However, occasionally we look for others to discuss problems, possible solutions, and just general tech stuff with. I have come to the conclusion that I seriously need to get to know other *nix people from around the Atlanta area. I should also try to get more people into the community. Many people underestimate the operating system.
Warning: The following content may appear technical to some.
Once I get my system re-functional, I'm probably going to burn hdc to DVD media, then set up a nightly cronjob to copy /home/david to hdc as a backup for my files. (Actually, I'll probably use a local rsync so unchanged files do not get re-copied. Or perhaps 'find -newer' or 'find -mtime'. Something to reduce the I/O load under those conditions. I did lose a lot in this last crash and I'm determined to, for once, set up a backup procedure and use it regularly.
Will I return to running a local rsync mirror for gentoo portage? Probably. And I'll probably export distfiles via NFS. It's a good bandwidth-saving procedure. Distfiles will likely get its own 10GB or so partition when my SATA hard drive is returned to me. This will prevent it from filling up the rest of my system. I'll also need to use some smarter logging facility, I'm considering moving away from the default sysklogd to syslog-ng or one of the other alternatives. Built-in rotation sounds good to me. I also need to look into better logfile monitoring systems for both my desktop and the firewall. I have to wonder if there were any warnings of hard drive failure in the logs that I just missed.
A lot of the existing log monitoring tools seem under powered. Perhaps I should work on a new log parser of some sort. Of course, that requires regular expressions. :( Oh well. Maybe I'll find something to work on soon. Maybe an AI poker player in conjunction with Adam Clark's poker virtualization program. He and I will probably figure out some sort of way to play our AIs against each other.
Comments welcomed. |
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| The return of EmptyCinema. |
[Jan. 20th, 2005|11:09 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  bored | ] |
That's right, EmptyCinema is back. Many people have asked me why I don't post anymore. Well, honestly, I suppose I don't really have any reason. And since at least they seem to read it... I will be updating from time to time.
So updates:
Ann and I have exceeded 6 months... so go us. :)
My wonderful 120GB Seagate Barracuda SATA hard drive died yesterday. It was only 6 months old, so still under warranty. I will be contacting Seagate for replacement. More updates as that progresses. Of course, Ozone is down for now. That really sucks. Maybe I'll learn more about backup now. :) At least I was able to salvage some data.
My Computer Geek side is lacking... substance. I need a project to work on. Something preferrably for GNU/Linux for me to work on. I'm considering a couple of things, so if people would give me input, that would rock:
1) A website/forum for an online Linux community targeted at people under 25 new to Linux. Help and so forth. A virtual users group.
2) A personal mission to make copies of Knoppix CDs and teach people about Linux.
3) Some other programming projects. Suggestions encouraged.
I'm going to try to post more often. Feel free to leave comments. Please, at least let me know these posts have a point. |
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| GSU IS&T |
[Aug. 19th, 2004|08:39 pm] |
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Well, for anyone who was unaware, I have been hired by Georgia State University's Information Services and Technology Department as part of the new wireless help desk. I started today, and so far it seems like a pretty cool job. Tomorrow I'll be updating the FAQs for the various Operating Systems' wireless capabilities. I'll probably edit this post with more details later. For now I am bored of writing. |
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| My best friend? |
[Aug. 19th, 2004|08:04 pm] |
My Best Friend is ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) marksahara | | Our 23 common interests are: cinematography, computer science, computers, cryptography, cryptology, dreaming, ebay, girls, itunes, itunes music store, linux, movies, mp3s, music, procrastination, starbucks, talking, techno, thinking, tom clancy, unix, west wing, women | Who is your best friend?
| | Created by macoto |
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