Standard disclaimer: I’m not a rabid anti-Microsoft zealot, Bill Gates is not the devil, etc, etc.
All that being said, this is funny.
Monthly Archive for March, 2005
It’s 46°F in Minneapolis today. I’m wearing short sleeves. I went to Borders over lunch, and on the way back to work I actually turned on the air conditioning in the car. And then the thought occurred to me:
46°F is really not all that warm.
However, this is Minnesota; and even though it hasn’t been an especially cold winter (for Minnesota, anyway), it’s stayed fairly cold for quite awhile. All the lakes are still frozen. The side effect of this is that you become acclimatized to this, and then as long as it’s more than 10, it’s "not that cold" — if it’s over 32 it’s "nice out", and if it gets to 40, well, boy: it’s warm.
Reminded me of the old story, a staple of preachers and motivational speakers, about how frogs will allow themselves to be boiled to death without hopping out of the water, as long as the water is heated gradually. They become acclimatized to the current temperature, and incremental changes do not alarm them, and they don’t hop out.
Made me think (and I’m not trying to sound like a motivational guru, here, but take it any way you like) — could it be that in life, we just become acclimatized to our state, and don’t even bother trying to move on, or to increase? Could it be that we just get used to failure, or poverty, or "just getting by" — and never even consider that it could change?
I’m not going to offer a six step plan to success, or try to come to any hard and fast conclusions about things based on this observation, except to ask the question: could it be — is it possible — that one main reason most people don’t experience the sort of success they’d like is simply that they don’t think it’s possible?
Paul Arden says "Most successful people are not notably more talented, smarter, or better looking. They become rich and powerful because they want to become rich and powerful."
Hmm.
Scott Hodge over at Happyweeble.blogspot.com just had a contest for banner creation for his soon-to-be launched new blog, which will use Typepad instead of Blogger.
From this post, he has links to pages with shots of his favorites, and he’s looking for feedback. I liked #7 and #9 the best. Go ahead and put in a vote, or just check out the blog.
Eric Butler has written a blog entry about "How to ask questions on the internet." His language is a little salty, but there’s some very good advice on how to be specific, and do a little homework before asking what might be a simple question. The document is a little reminiscent of ESR’s well known "How to ask Questions the Smart Way."
I’ll close with the same great picture/piece of advice that Eric did:
No, not the mono you or someone you know had in high school and was out for two months. Mono is (from their website) :
Mono is a platform for running and developing modern applications, based on the ECMA/ISO Standards. Mono can run existing programs targeting the .NET or Java frameworks.
Specifically, Mono began as a cross-platform implementation of .NET, with part of the idea clearly being that you could run C# programs on Linux.
ONDotnet (OReilly Network) has an interview with Miguel de Icaza, father of the Gnome desktop, and also the founder of the Mono project. He (again) answers the frequently heard questions; why C#, what about patents, why do we need this, etc. He gives a reasonable explanation, and the fact that people are already using Mono to develop applications for the Linux desktop would seem to indicate that others agree.
This (yet another) one of the programming challenges which is somewhere on my list. Right now I’m leaning a little bit more toward more web applicatoin development, even though I enjoy developing desktop applications a little more… Maybe more on that in some other post.
Homestarrunner.com has a new game out. In the spirit of most or all their games, it is reminiscent of games almost 20 years old… the kind that are still fun. Flying under the usual Videlectrix banner, the semi-mythical game company that "produces" all of the games at Homestarrunner.com, Stinkoman 20X6 is a simple side scrolling action game; it requires Flashplayer 7, but that’s probably not an issue in most cases, flash is so ubiquitous these days. If you’re at work, you may not want to click the link, lest you lose an hour or more of productivity. ;-)
I’m not sure how old the Chaps brothers are, but it must be nearly about the age the I am, because all their games bring me back to the first games I ever played on computers, on platforms like the Commodore 64, or the first x86es. Peasant’s Quest is another that especially stands out.
More screenshots:
The other day (yesterday?) my installation of OpenOffice.org(ximian) started crashing every time I clicked the "Open" icon. Not a good thing, you might say. Another example of a Linux problem?
Not really. For starters, the problem was caused by an update of gtk (gtk is simply a library which handles a lot of the GUI widgets of the Gnome desktop), which is not something that a beginning Linux user would probably attempt (at least, I hope not). I expect that this issue was isolated to systems like Gentoo, and possibly Debian, which allow the user to quickly and easily (and at their own risk) update individual components of the system.
So at first, I was a bit distressed by this. I mean, a word processor that crashes when you try to open a document is not a very handy tool. So, I decided to see if our good friends, the Gentoo community, had seen this same problem and found a solution.
Sure enough they had.
All that was necessary was to open gconf-editor, and set the key /desktop/gnome/interface/file_chooser_backend to gtk+ instead of gnome-vfs. I believe this is just a workaround due to a possible bug in gnome-vfs, but sure enough, it worked like a charm and OpenOffice no longer crashes for no good reason.
The ever-helpful Linux community; yet another reason I love using Linux.
Symantec seems to be warning Macintosh users that the Mac could be a potential target for malware (adware, spyware) or viruses… Real Soon Now. By this what they really mean is that there are still no significant reports of malware or viruses for the Mac, but that you should purchase Symantec Anti-virus just in case.
I do think that the reasoning is more or less sound, however. The main attraction of Windows as a target for malware or viruses is it’s enormous market share. As Macintosh gains market share, it becomes more appealing as a target.
The Mac does have a couple things in its favor, in my opinion. The first is that, for the time being, they still don’t have this market share. Mac is a pretty small blip in the aggregate field of Operating Systems at large. Sorry, but it’s true; even Linux, the "ragtag Operating System pulling itself up by its bootstraps™" has more desktop share than Macintosh. So this is actually in the Mac’s favor in this case — despite Symantec’s warnings, I don’t think they are a very big target, yet.
The second thing in their favor, and the feature which will hopefully help them in the case of an increase in market share, is the fact that it’s based on BSD. Now, before you shout out that *nix has potentially as many vulnerabilities as Windows (which I think is an exaggeration, but not a total exaggeration) — I’m not saying that BSD/Linux/Unix is the be all/end all of security. But certain features — the fact that only the root account has execute permissions in most of the file system, for example — will help malware and viruses from being as much of a juggernaut as they have been on Windows (where most users run as the Administrator — the equivalent of the root user — all the time).
So, my take on this is that it’s just a little bit of FUD. It is possible, but even if it were to begin, I doubt that the problem would be near the level we’ve seen in the Windows world. Again, a good part of that is simply the huge volume of Windows PCs out there to begin with. On the other hand, a huge install base is certainly a problem that Apple would love to have, and there is no question that in that case, they would become a larger target.
Today in Red Lake, MN, there was the worst school shooting in America since Columbine.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s report is here.
It appears that is was one young man, and that he acted alone. The shooter shot himself after apparently shooting his Grandfather and his Grandfather’s wife, then proceeding to the high school, and shooting several students and at least one teacher.
There aren’t really words to comment on events like this; we like to think that tragedies like Columbine are isolated events which will not be repeated. Then, when something like this occurs, we hope that this, then, is the last time we hear of this sort of thing… even though "logic" would suggest that we will probably see it again.
If you’re the sort of person who prays, it would probably be appropriate to pray for the families of those who were killed, and for the survivors (there are at least 14 injured, as well).
Not sure what else to say. I do hope we can find a way to reach out to the youth of America (and everywhere else), and that these sorts of events might be prevented in the future.
I first found this in an Ananova blurb, but there was no information other than a reference to the illustrious UK tabloid The Sun.
So I looked around (where else?) on Google, and sure enough, there it was.
Extreme Accounting is (apparently) the practice of going on some adrenaline-producing venture or another… but bringing your work with you. I suppose you rush right back to the lodge after snowboarding those double black diamond runs, and quickly balance some books and do some rapid double entry, all before heading out for some night skiing.
Extreme Programming already exists as a practice, but it doesn’t seem nearly this interesting. I never thought I’d want, even for a moment… to be an accountant…
;-)
