Man, this weekend has been a brutal install fest for me. I’ve finally got Debian up and running (with the exception of the sound card which is out of laziness and apathy not real problems). I had a rough time configuring the adsl stuff as usual but that had more to do with stupidly trying the pppoe client that comes with the distribution. Why is it exactly that no one can get this right? Roaring Penguin takes about ten minutes total to setup from the download to the compile. Every other attempted pppoe client I’ve ever seen for Linux just plain sucks. We’re talking corporate bastards here that are jockeying for position under the tweed suited teet here and they cannot build a functional adsl interface into their bloated distros?

Anyhow, I’m off of the commercial Linux habit for good and will suffer through no RPM dependency hell temper tantrums again.

There is a new version of Moveable Type out so I guess I’ll move along to breaking this site next. Big fun.

Churches do not pay taxes therefore they should not expect representation or endorsement of their agenda by the government. This is pretty much it. Jerry Falwell disapproves of the decision which is the ringing endorsement that we all needed, right? Good thing for him that we had that whole presidential sex scandal so we can forget the fact that he got busted fucking prostitutes and can count on him to be the moral conscience of, well, nobody except some ninety year old lady in Iowa or something.

Witness incredibly annoying photo of suited white guys enthusiastically stumbling through said pledge and wonder why this didn’t happen sooner. You’d think that this fairly recent addition (intended as political ammunition against the godless Commies, of course, who were sort of the predecessor to the current our god-hating whipping boy, Islam) was part of the original document with all the fuss raised by the greyfaced mob. To be honest, the whole idea of being under the same spiritual aegis as those folks creeps the shit out of me anyway.

By the way, dig a little deeper into the Home of the Heroes and find all of your favorite assholes celebrated ahistorically without the slightest hint of irony. Gee whiz, I wish I could be so arrogantly cocksure that the embarrassing parts of history would just melt out of my way, making my persuasive attempts that much more mighty and my HTML, uh, colorful.

Yoon is back. I just finished another ridiculous project on my own (that was supposed to be a group project) and I need to sleep. There are several responses to my responses out there that need responses…

I tried again to install Debian again last night but X still chokes on my video card every single time. I install the nv kernel module, configure everything exactly as it should be, and X bombs every single time. I wonder if the card (Nvidia GeForce 2 MX 64 mg) needs something that I don’t know about. I need about a month of stability which will give me ample time to do a little research and get heckled on some mailing lists. Ack.

I had no dsl service for a day which doesn’t mean much in particular other than not being able to get any work done or play around much. Unfortunately having a slight clue what you’re talking about wins no love at the phone company. I have a land line that is 100% dedicated to dsl service (meaning that when it rings I know there is a telemarketer is on the other end) and maintain dsl service through another provider. I came home from work yesterday to find the magical third eye of my dsl modem blinded. I picked up the phone and heard nothing. Strangely enough, my neighbor (in a duplex so we actually have some common walls) had repair service scheduled for yesterday. Her phone was mysteriously forwarding to somewhere else with no regularity. In fact, she would’ve never known if the person receiving some of her calls hadn’t spoken with her mother and called her directly. Anyway, I don’t know if her phone got fixed or not but mine was dead.

Without trying to personally insult people who do telephone tech support I really have to say that most folks who do it are not particularly clueful. This makes sense because I can’t imagine someone with any degree of technical experience aspires to sitting in a windowless room of cubicles trying to calmly read outdated scripts out of a binder to enraged customers. Sadly, I got a live one.

There is nothing more irritating than having someone read something to you out of a binder with an accusatory tone. Again I made the mistake of mentioning the evil L word in the course of the conversation ie. explaining why rebooting my computer would help no one. This of course is the root of all my problems, right? The process of explaining that whatever operating system I happened to be using had absolutely nothing to do with the presence of dial tone on a residential phone line was a long and painful one. I finally got to a second tier and got a help ticket filed.

All this shittiness aside the service tech who came out was very cool. He was honest enough to admit that the tech who was here yesterday had simply left my main disconnected and actually left me with a tool to get into my own box in case it happens again. How ridiculous, though, to just unplug a phone line and leave it unplugged. Argh. Anyway, I’m back in action and will be able to fix my own phone line if it happens again. Hooray for field techs and boo hiss to phone support.

For the first in many days I’m not cranking out a whole bunch of incoherent babbble here. This is probably a good thing (especially after Jose recommended “crunchy peanut butter” as a topic for my next rant. Point taken) but has more to do with trying to finish this C project. It’s finally dead although my wacky schemes to deal with errors made the diagram look like some insane cubist versionof connect the dots. So, yeah, blah…

Noticed that Linux and Main had some new articles up. I really like their project of the week series. The one this week is about the sexy Webmin administration tool. It looks nice but I don’t like the fact that it creates configurations that can’t be fucked with outside of it’s oh-so-pretty web based GUI. This is the reason that I got so fed up with using SuSe. The loss of control that comes with easy to navigate interfaces is going to scare away most command line zealots (myself included). It’s arguable, though, that Webmin isn’t really intended for “serious” administration but more like “holy shit, I’m responsible for this?!” administrators. It is very nicely put together and seems pretty comprehensive for its relative newness. The modularity is also nice though that third party module development is always a little omninous. It’s worth looking at, though, because it is a pretty cool tool and regardless of my paranoid suspicions about proprietary modules and alienation from the command line.

To bed to recover the rest of the way from way too cheap pitchers last night… don’t go to the bowling alley unless you intend to bowl.

After the ludicrous number of angry emails I recieved from the whole blog who I’m really sick of linking to episode I changed my mail filters around to weed out the bulk of the really stupid stuff. What I forgot to add was “fagot”, “fagget”, and “faggt.” I think my filter ploy worked in reverse. I also added a filter for AOL addresses because they’re either spam, scriptkiddies, or just pointless ruminations on why I should be deported, strung up, and generally wiped off the face of the earth like the commie fagget I most certainly am. The smirking typo gang doesn’t relent. How embarrassing. I have logged 247 pieces of mail that went down the spout since then but since I don’t log subject lines anymore some of you might just be hot, wet teens or REDUCE DEBT NOW. This shouldn’t effect anyone I actually know since a). They’re a little brighter than that and b). I think I have all the exceptions taken care of. Why I’m bothering to write all of this out I couldn’t tell you.

Oh, kids, when you try to send me a virus entirely irrelevant to my operating system you really should try to compile it first. Somehow I don’t think I’ll be compiling any diskfucker.c or files attached to email any time soon. I guess I could compile them and send them back to you but then I’d have to start up VMWare and that’s just too much effort. Nice try, though.

I grabbed this directly from the PostNuke site and reposted it here. They asked people to and this just bums me out. I exchanged a few emails with Greg (I actually knew him as Adam) when I was toying with the idea of converting this into a nuke site. Anyone who is nice enough to provide detailed PHP tutorials in an answer to a generic email is priceless in my book. My condolences to those who knew him better than I did. Anway, blah blah, read it below from the people who worked on the project with him.

Greg Allan a.k.a. Adam_Baum, the lead core developer and one of the four founding members of the PostNuke CMS Development Project passed away from injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident. The accident occurred June 16, 2002 near his home in Meaford, Ontario in Canada.

Steve MacGregor (grape)
Support Operations Manager

Boy it would just be easier if I could just buy in to the reductivist view of the situation between Israel and Palestine. I’m certainly baited often enough and have the full development of my sexual characteristics questioned by enough uncritical folks. Then again I’m looking at it from an outside perspective and I’m open to new information. If you really have something to say or a resource to point me in the direction of, you might want to try wiping the foam from your mouth. It’s kind of freaking me out. From the apologist technoweenie to the smug motherfucker…

Simple fucking facts make this more complicated than counting bodies on one side of the line and being voted in as the Grand Wizard of Warblogging. I cannot support either Israel or Palestine. It’s obvious to me that both sides are fucked. But the simple question of who has the most resources, professional soldiers, and overall support is pretty easy to figure out even if you just skim the news for body counts. Just because you have shiny tanks and missiles and an incredibly overequipped army does not make you the good guys.

On to the threats I guess
Oh, and a quick disclaimer here: this section has absolutely nothing to do with Amish Tech Support. Even if I don’t agree with the guy I really doubt he’d bother sending me subliterate hate mail – McCarthyist condemnation of an entire population not withstanding.

First and foremost, calling me anti-semitic is a little silly. I am not the one with cariatures of Arabs plastered on my website. I know it’s rough but not swallowing the party line whole does not a Nazi make. In fact I have some scars on my body inflicted by people who would call themselves Nazis and they aren’t from Greco-Roman wrestling. Sorry, I know it’s easier for you this way but I’m going to have to let you down. I do vehemently defend the right of women to do whatever they want with their bodies. That might be a starting point if you feel the hate cooling.

Secondly, you folks with who don’t know how to properly forge email headers (shout outs to my creeps in the 206.65 range) need to be more careful. When you threaten someone’s life in these post-September 11th I’ll trade every freedom I have for a cheap flag and a parade times threats via email are sorta frowned upon by the powers that be. I’m not a fan of that sort of thing but be careful. The same anti-terrorist legislation folks of your bent are pushing so hard for make saying things like “poking your towelhead eyes out with a rusty spoon the next time I’m in Denver” slightly more controversial than they used to be. Just because I don’t particularly like you doesn’t mean I want you in jail. That ‘A’ in AOL does not stand for anonymous. Anyway, fair warning.

Thirdly, The Red Cross is not a terrorist organization, OK? They fucking help people regardless of what personally branded number one by god religion they belong to. That’s why we don’t shoot at them during wars. Funny because you were probably the same folks climbing all over each other to donate blood not so long ago. Regardless of what some executive fuckhead says (and, by the way, I do agree that the exclusion of the Israeli Red Cross from the larger organization is pretty fucking stupid), they’re all about helping people. I’m eagerly awaiting the day when an organization that doesn’t take sides and spout epithets is deemed antithetical or at least neutral. That love or it leave it thing stuck pretty hard, didn’t it?

Fourth, ‘Your’ is possessive. It means something belongs to you. You’re is a contraction of ‘you’ and ‘are’. Check it out sometime when you’re not planning to strangle me for my opinions.

Getting Back to Reality
Fifth and Final, What really bothered me about the Amish Tech Support piece (and what I thought was racist) has absolutely nothing to do with Israel/Palestine. It has everything to do with the analogy he uses which prominently features a black gangleader, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson all in exaggerated and stereotypical terms. Why not just say “nigger” when that’s what you mean. Just get it out your system. Then you can append “sand” to the beginning of it and get your true feelings about Palestinians out. You cannot expect to use an analogy like that and not get shit. Give me a fucking break. This is the beauty of the right – the utterly unshakeable confidence that they’re right about everything if only because they absolutely refuse to consider any other perspective.

I don’t have any arbitrary loyalty to uphold. I am fully aware that I am thousands of miles away from what’s going on and snug in front of my computer with a fresh cup of coffee. BUT I will not summarily dismiss an entire populace as “terrorists” because they don’t support the colonialist policies of some country you have a tenous connection to. Of course if you read anything other than the post you found through Daypop while you were vanity surfing your clue phone might be ringing loud enough for you to hear. Maybe I could send a four line summary to one of the news agencies?

Yeah, so that’s it. I’m writing the mail filters now as we speak so if you want to actually get through to me please refrain from using the word “faggot.” Thanks.

Helluva week, kids. I really need Yoon to get back here from guiding her parents all over the East Coast and Canada post haste and remind me that I’m not fed up and disgusted with the human race as a collective whole. Also thanks to the sweet kids who email supportively. You guys are frighteningly swell.

It’s been all about weird weather in Denver these days. In case you didn’t know a bunch of Colorado is currently on fire. The Forest Service has little good news. The amazing part is that some of these fires are getting weeks old now. For some reason that’s difficult for me to imagine – a fire steadily burning for weeks at a time. I haven’t been watching much of the news lately (like I ever really do) but the last picture I saw from a newspaper box looked like some NASA photograph of the Sun. There are continual electrical storms but no rain. Lots of cool pictures of the sun though.

Still struggling with a very simplistic project in C. I’m much more familiar with Perl and I’m getting really bummed that I can’t do the kind of error control that I’d be able to if I knew the language a little better. I’ve been pounding away on it all day and it works fine as long as I don’t try to make it deal with errors in any way but terminating. It’s depressing but also reminds me that I don’t really know shit about coding when it comes down to nuts and bolts. My summer resolution is to get more comfortable with regular expressions which I use now but with varying degrees of success. Most of the time I get bogged down pretty quickly and the whole thing blows up in my face. There is the egotistical part of me that really wants to hand in a perfect project even though it’s pretty far outside the scope of the class. I despise mediocrity most of all in myself.

Interesting story on search engine spamming or more specifically what happened to the AOL search engine. Given the target I doubt anyone would have noticed anything different other than the results of their search being Russian. Don’t read the comments kids, they’re too stupid to even be funny or maybe the exhaustion is just catching up with me finally. More coffee!

Gentle introduction to partitioning that is pretty basic but I’m sure would help someone out. The illustrations are kind of a nice touch but Linux Planet has that irritating standard of breaking a story up into four or five attention deficit disorder sized chunks to get more ad impressions in. Ah, the corporate money teat…

I need moments of blinding clarity and lucidity to offset some of the tech and internet addled stupor that I often find myself mired in. The down side of this need for goofy Western enlightenment is that these urges for a clear head often come to me in the wee hours of the morning.

“Put down the coffee cup, leave those function prototypes for another day, and go for a walk, dumb ass, ” says my poor dissolving brain. I get the hint.

Like every other neighborhood I’ve lived in this one is becoming rapidly gentrified and filled with more people who look like me only with fatter wallets and monstrous SUVs. It sucks to be a representative of the man. I like living in neighborhoods where kids are playing and people are barbequeing and no one is particularly interesting in creating some post-fraternity nightmare world that stretches from here until some house-buying, baby-making epiphany carries them off into some suburban vanishing point. Anyway, to some kind of point – I always find myself living in places undergoing uncomfortable transformations. I blame this on the other white people in the neighborhood being afraid of people who aren’t white but I’m mean and pessimistic and think redevelopment is a catalyst for dispersing vital fucking communities that exist within neighborhoods that are not esthetically appealing to people with huge bags of money and a vision slightly to the left of Hitler. Hyperbole, kids, before you waste a lot of time hate mailing me.

Somehow my other white neighbors think I’m going to sympathize with their inane fears about earth shatteringly loud ranchero music being the first step in a bloody uprising. I don’t. I get the smiles instead of the cautious glances. I get the invitations over for a beer. I get the nudge nudge wink wink when loud arguments in Spanish are going on across the street. When I’m not receptive or sympathetic or amused they just think I’m an asshole. I can’t express how I’m actually feeling because

a) I don’t have the patience for teaching my fellow honkies to treat people of color like fucking humans every day.
b) Would it even make sense to them.
c) When I do feel especially benevolent and patient I get stock replies (some implied and some explicitly stated) about political correctness or just uncomfortable silence.

While Noel Ignatiev offers a quick fix by just saying you’re not white and living a guilt-free existence of imagining yourself as a newborn and non-oppressive greyface, I’m not buying the easy solution because like most easy solutions the problem it addresses is making the folks with the upper hand feel better about themselves. Abolishing the white race sounds great but encouragement to do so through cultural appropriation and burying your head in the sand is not a starting point. It’s a big fucking excuse to colonize actual culture instead of just physical territory. I’d rather be uncomfortable and actively thinking about things.

So, I’m walking around my neighborhood at three in the morning and inadvertently end up walking about 100 paces behind a white woman in her party dress. Normally this would call for a pause to tie my shoes or changing my route slightly. There is no neon sign above my head that says, “I’m not a rapist.” For whatever reason I’m not paying enough attention and don’t notice that she’s looking over her shoulder at me until I’ve nearly caught up with her. Fuck. I need to pay more attention when I’m stumbling around on a semi-darkened side street.

“Hi,” I say to break the weird ass silence and try to send psychic signals that I’m O.K and after my salutation I’m going to keep on walking.
“Oh, thank god,” she says.
“Uh, what?” I ask, momentarily confused by why she’s so relieved.
“I thought you were a Mexican,” she says and I walk past her as fast as I can more confused and angry and tired than I started out. In times like these all the easy slogans and militant beliefs fall around your ankles like underwear with a faulty waistband.

What should I have done? Part of me wanted to start yelling. The part of that won saw too many conflicting dimensions in this situation and bailed. I’m not entirely convinced that it was the right thing to do. Sitting here at my desk twelve or more hours later I’m pretty sure that I should have tried to calmly explain that she probably shouldn’t be relieved because statistically I am the rapist a thousand times more often than Latino men. I probably should have told her that despite the fact that we look alike we’re not on the same team. I probably should have said any number of things ranging from explanatory to yelling. I walked around the block and arrived home with a mouth full of ashes in total failure.

A few days back I wrote a little bit about why I thought using the LindowsOS for preinstalls on end user intended computers was problematic. Hello Lindows Zealots!. The email keeps coming in about what an elitist schmuch I am in my ivory computer tower (it’s beige more precisely) and how I want to keep Linux for my own private playground and blah blah blah. All the blatant abuse of the caps lock key is giving me a headache. Well, that’s mostly since I had to rewrite one of my mail filters that sends all caps email down to Davey Jones’ locker but nonetheless!:

A quick recap:

Reason #1: Lindows runs in root. You’re in the root account all the time. If Lindows really is intended for the inexperienced end user this is a frightening terrible idea. There is simply no good reason for ripping out the security intrinsic in Linux to dumb down the interface that much. Hello, my name is sudo. Pardoning the fact that I like to make jokes about the mental sluggishness of end users (I do tech support, pal) they aren’t stupid. Make the purpose of the root account obvious. Have your users dancing around in glee when they realize that one fucked up account does not a reinstall make. Make the goddamn login look like Hotmail. Anything is better than having people unfamiliar with the ins and outs of *nix operating systems running everything as root. It’s just a terrible idea and a diservice to the customer.

Reason #2: The whole software mart thing is just lame. The Click N Run Warehouse is full of GPL’d software that is widely available on other ftp sites for absolutely nothing but your time. According to the FAQ you’re not allowed to redistribute software obtained through them. This isn’t just ignoring the GPL that much of their software is distributed under but in total violation of it. They also want to limit the use to family members per license. All of this for only 99 dollars a year. I can’t say anything about this more damaging than what Lindows posts in their own FAQs. I can’t believe I can finally get gcc for free!.

Lindows Folks You obviously have been here. I see “Lindows, Inc” all over my logs. I have some secrets to share with you:

FreshMeat
SourceForge

I’d also encourage you to check out Linux.org since that’s the core operating system that runs underneath all the shiny candy graphic interface of Lindows. I’d also like to encourage you (if you like the Linux) to switch to a different version. There are a million cheap places to get inexpensive Linux CDs with no restrictive licenses or expectations for you to shell out a hundred bucks a year for something that should be free.

If you want the security of some documentation and installation support, there are quite a few companies that would be more than happy to sell you one for far less money and none of the restrictions that Lindows places on you. Mandrake is a fine place to start. While Mandrake has recieved a fair amount of criticism it is indeed a very friendly install and maintenence is trivial once installed. If you’re feeling up to it (and have a a CD burner and some bandwidth) you can just download that shit for free.

OK, this is my pseudo-community service for the month. Expect only anger and retribution from here on out.

I’m feeling more mean than I should. I am thinking too many negative thoughts. I think it’s time to talk about things I like.

I’m sure that it’s not ready for public consumption yet but the ever awesome Naked Writing is looking good in beta. I have to say that I totally admire Jody for not only switching from Blogger to Moveable Type but getting elbow deep into the painful and frustrating world of cascading style sheets and other nastiness without previous experience. I have unending respect for people who learn on the way. It’s a rough ride but I imagine that I’ll soon be seeking her counsel for my own css issues.

If you’re not reading Uppity Negro every damn day you’re missing out. Give up the slow grinding descent into hell for a couple of days and read his stuff instead. There are very few weblogs that I read frequently that are spot fucking on politically, advocate geekiness, address African-American issues in a critical and engaging way, and make you laugh your ass off every single time. Aaron is a breath of much needed fresh air in the stagnant pond of self-important, pontificating blowhards that compose the soul sucking ass slaughter (I have no idea what that means but it sounds pretty badass at 3 in the morning) of the blogosphincter. Goddamn, I even have the Elvis-like bombastic theme song now.

Now I am all sun shiny and filled with happy thoughts about bunnies and kittens and sparkly unicorn stickers. I am in my happy place and those bad people can’t get me now…