Radix Fidem Blog

CentOS 5.3

Posted on April 1, 2009 by ehurst

Finally, CentOS 5.3 has been released. I’m getting a DVD ISO myself.

Much as I love Debian Etch, there are some things broken which won’t be fixed anytime soon. Further, Etch will die in less than a year, whereas CentOS 5.x will be supported for several years to come. It’s possible it will fail me on this laptop, but I’m going to give it a shot.

Some of the things they have fixed is adding drivers for my wireless cards, and upgrading and fixing the power management utilities. I should be able to get suspend and hibernate working as easily as I did on Debian.

I’m installing it tomorrow.

Posted in computers | Tagged centos, linux | Comments Off

The Road Back Is Long

Posted on March 31, 2009 by ehurst

During my youth in Anchorage, AK, I discovered running. Like most kids, I resented what the coaches made us do in school. In my case, I was fat and lazy in the first place. High school PE was just about tolerable, but one semester the new coach decided we could take advantage of our school being near a large wooded area. Twice each week we were supposed to head out into the woods on a guided jog of about 1 mile on some trails. One day he didn’t guide us, and trusted a couple of athletic students. Being the arrogant jocks they were, they took off, leaving the rest of us to find our way back.

A bunch of us did not, since we weren’t fast enough to keep up. It turns out the trail system was quite extensive, used for district competitions in Cross County Skiing in winter, and Cross Country Running in warmer weather. A small group of us got really lost following the markings for the most recent races. We got back to the practice field just before class was dismissed for showers. I was embarrassed and angry with the snickering jerks, but this was hardly new.

Later, it dawned on me I had run that whole hour, and only afterward did it really hurt. From there, I read up on it in the library, and began distance running on my own. It was one of the few physical activities I could pursue which didn’t hurt so bad, especially once I got into it. I kept running all through college, though I was never good enough to compete in anything. I didn’t care. I ran because I loved it.

Keep in mind, I have a broad, chunky build. It’s really easy to gain weight and get too heavy. I also enjoyed lifting weights, but running was more fun. I never played in sports much, just one semester of intramural flag football. I was a star player, but only because most everyone else was even less fit — mostly Baptist preacher boys with varying experience levels from tiny country high schools, at a college with no varsity football. Very few of these guys worked out after high school graduation. I kept running, and did some lifting when I had time.

So when I enlisted in the Army, leadership often thought I was too heavy. Yet, I never fell out of formation on even the longest morning runs, and always scored well on PT tests. I remained utterly non-competetive, but always raced against myself. It continued during the long break between enlistments. When I decided I needed another shot at the Army, I trained even harder, because I knew exactly what to expect. However, during that second time in service, my knees came apart, as it were. Right when I was just starting to train for a marathon, the medical system discovered I had serious knee trouble — Patella Femoral Syndrom. Basically, it’s where the kneecap drifts laterally out of the track, and the underside of the kneecap chews up the cartiledge. By the time they found it, my knees were pretty chewed up inside. My records were marked with a strong indicator I was just barely fit to stay in service.

I left service for the last time, then. The problem got worse, and I ended up in a wheelchair by 1994. Eventually I got surgery at the VA Hospital, but the pain hardly declined. I was in and out of the wheelchair over the years. Finally, about 2005, I began walking some on the country roads near home. I was also riding a bike someone gave me. I was still a very long way from recovery. In fact, there were several times it all came crashing down, and I was unable to exercise for long periods.

The miracle came two years ago, about this time of year. I had been praying for the better part of a year about how I could stay reasonably fit, since I then weighed about 265 pounds. Suddenly, the pain abated and I felt driven to exercise. There was a trail system in the parks near my apartment, and I began using them. Eventually, I was able to jog just a bit. There were periods of set-backs and improvement both. Recently, I was stunned to discover I could jog four miles without stopping. Something in my body told me I was coming back. I’ve been at 225 for two months, now.

It’s been some 17 years since I was able to run much. I’ve been trying to stay consistent, 4.5 miles every day except Sundays. It’s entirely possible I’ll get back to running 10-12 milers again. We’ll see. There’s a lot of miles between here and there.

Posted in health | Tagged fitness, running | 1 Comment

WOD Is a Fraud

Posted on March 30, 2009 by ehurst

For just about a year of my life, I drove a taxi cab in OKC at night. That was some 16 years ago before it became dangerous. I got robbed once, and assaulted twice. By God’s grace, I never got hurt, because neither assault was effective, and in the end I got double my money back on the robbery.

One of the most interesting parts of the job was learning where riders could buy dope. That is, learning where they went when it was painfully obvious to a recently released Military Policeman what they were doing. These were the one class of passenger guaranteed to pay, many offering to pay up front to gain my cooperation. They didn’t care how far it was across town to certain neighborhoods, asked only that I drive past such places and let them decide where to get out. Legally, I could never be charged with anything, and these passengers went to great lengths to make sure I knew they knew what that meant. If they were successful, it meant a tip. Always.

These were not poor slimeballs, but cash flush middle class or above. Only rarely did they wear something besides white skin. It was the same people who plied all the other vices I knew where to find. The few idiots who assumed I was on the take got nothing useful from me. The rest all seemed to know in advance I didn’t like that part of my job, and did their best to keep me out of the loop. They were, thus, the most self-reliant and responsible passengers, too.

So it’s no surprise the War on Drugs would never, ever actually do anything useful, like arresting those who actually created the problem. Fred Reed knows even better than I do:

Latin America does not have a drug problem. It has a United States problem. The problem is that Americans want drugs. The US is a huge, voracious, insatiable market for drugs. Americans very much want their brain candy. They will pay whatever they need to pay to get it. All the world knows this.

Why, Mexicans wonder, is America’s drug habit Mexico’s problem? If Americans don’t want drugs, they can stop buying them. Nobody forces anyone to use the stuff….

Now, on the off-chance that you live in an impermeable bubble, and don’t know who uses drugs, I will tell you. I note that I am not speculating about this. I spent eight years working as a police reporter from Anacostia to South Central, and know whereof I speak.

Blue-collar people use drugs — crack, for example. I’ve spent whole days arresting down-scale beauticians in rattletrap Chevys as they bought the stuff from black dealers in the grubby satellite towns outside Chicago. High rollers in Houston use as much powder as they ski in (and it happens to my certain knowledge on Capitol Hill). White professionals have bags of grass in the garage. So, most likely, do their children: In the suburban high schools of metro Washington, e.g., Yorktown and Washington and Lee, kids have easy access to Mary Jane, acid, shrooms, nitrous, Ecstasy, crystal. Good ol’ boys in Texas make, grow, and use drugs. Country kids in Virginia have a few plants out in the woods. And so on….

In short, the WOD is a fraud. In America the drug racket is a mildly disreputable business, tightly integrated into the economy, running smoothly, employing countless federal cops, prison guards, ineffectual rehab centers and equally ineffectual psychotherapists, and providing bribes to officials and huge deposits of laundered money to banks. Narcos in the US do not engage in pitched battles with the army because they have no reason to. The government barely inconveniences them.

Of course, living inside the world’s largest insane asylum — the United States of America — does seem to create a need for medication. God help us.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged culture, government | Comments Off

Whitelining

Posted on March 27, 2009 by ehurst

From Henney Road, I looked west across the open sand pit. On the far side, heavy forestation provided a dark background against which I could see curtains of heavy mist blowing back the direction I had come. This was what was blowing into my face as I chugged up the hill to SE 15th Street.

Both of those thoroughfares are section lines, paved routes following more or less the mile-square grid layout covering most of Oklahoma. My latest running efforts take me on a 4.5 mile route, including passage on Hiwasee Road and SE 29th Street, as well. I was just beyond the 1-mile mark when I knew I would be getting a little wet today. The cold and wet front sweeping across the Heartland comes and goes, but each wave is a little wetter than the last. Tonight the temperatures will drop, turning it into snow. In Oklahoma, the heaviest snowfalls, when they come, are during March. We expect at least a foot of snow over much of the state, after several inches of cold rain.

By the time I had slogged the full distance, I was wet to the skin, head to toe. That was still a lot better than my first time out on this route. I had forgotten to pay attention to my stride, and beat my knees up pretty badly. I had to take the next day off until the swelling went down. The day after that, I was careful to maintain a long low stride. That means sticking as much as possible to asphalt.

There is a courtesy you give to motorists. First, wear highly reflective clothing so you don’t surprise them, especially on ugly weather days. Second, as you see a vehicle approaching (you are running against the traffic, right?) you glance back to see if there is traffic coming at them. If there is, you need to yield as much road as you can. My good fortune in this case is most of the route has a decent shoulder.

Traffic was light this morning, so I didn’t have to consider it much. I could concentrate on form and cadence. Right now, the most important thing is consistency. I have to make sure I can finish the distance with the maximum pace, and the minimum of beating on my knees. Every little detail counts. For example, asphalt is far better than concrete; when you get past 40, your knees will tell you this. Second, out here most of the roads are improved enough to include a white reflective line to mark the edge of the pavement. That white line is mostly a rubberized compound poured on top of the asphalt, making a wide smooth strip, with just a tiny extra bit of rebound.

The big thing when you are arthritic, over 50, and just trying to be consistent, is whitelining it.

Posted in health | Tagged fitness, survival | 1 Comment

The PC and Net Are Dead

Posted on March 26, 2009 by ehurst

Let me define the terms here. PC refers in this context to the consumer devices not related to employment. That’s the home computer you buy for kids’ games, email, surfing, etc. Even if you use it for banking and taxes, as long as it’s not essential for a job, it is the subject of the following speculation. Net refers similarly to the consumer experience Internet, largely what’s called “Net 2.0” these days. All the stuff most people do when at the keyboard of a home computer, or perhaps at the library, or school, whatever. There is some overlap because the majority of those who do the consumer version of the Net also have a commodity home PC for such use.

Perhaps the title makes more sense now. Most people realize today’s kids find the PC and Net 2.0 already “old school.” They have texting, cellphone chatter, plus all the other uses from fancy extra features on their handheld devices. Aside from school assignments, and some selected downloading and viewing of entertainment, they could easily live without seeing another PC. All the more so as iPhone and its competitors drop in price, and “full data packages” become more mainstream and affordable.

The Internet itself isn’t going anywhere. It will become ever more essential, but how it is accessed and used will very quickly evolve to something we serious Net geeks will not recognize. While the netbooks will continue to sell well, those will be for serious geeks, those who perceive a requirement to maintain some form of traditional Net use. Fewer and fewer such devices will have significant installed package counts, as the browser will become the single portal to everything else. Office suites will be a matter of cloud computing, if they are used at all.

In other words, the mere use of a computing device will fall under the increasing control of providers. Software you install will thin down greatly, and more development will turn to server-side. The entire modern world will be one mass of dumb terminals — cellphones, game consoles, netbooks, music players, HD TV — all provided through the Net. All you need is an access device based on your purpose for connecting, and the most versatile will be the handheld phone-GPS-palmtop whatever.

That means all this struggle to make Linux mainstream for the consumer desktop will be wasted effort. I’ve already noted elsewhere we are past the pinnacle of PC software achievements. KDE and GNOME will have to concentrate on embedded devices or find themselves suddenly without a fan base. The next generation of Linux users will hardly know it’s Linux, much less will they be aware of KDE versus GNOME. It will be as obscure and specialized as the debate between SysV versus BSD init today. Not gone, just not part of the mainstream conversation.

The only question is how soon, because the current economic malaise is unpredictable. It’s possible we could fall back almost to the Stone Age if it really comes apart. I find it more likely we’ll be distressed, lots of companies will die, be devoured by others, and the big players’ names and logos will fluctuate. Fundamentals won’t change. Consumers will be less able to pay, but still demand services. The providers who can meet the market will grow. I expect that market to demand more convenience services in more places, and technology will continue to make it cheaper. Already users are demanding full data packages with a flat rate, with uninterrupted access across borders.

These demands will grow, and you can guess it will be the key to breaking down national barriers in business and banking, and thus government. People will demand a more global atmosphere, even as they draw down their circle of associations to those of their own narrow social group. We’ll see a fragmentation of tribal identity over things we would hardly consider a genuine dividing line today. Governments and businesses (already hardly separate entities any more) prosper most when society is fragmented, and when people are dependent. Those two features go hand-in-hand. Folks who don’t have to learn how to deal with a wide range of humanity are far more insular, hanging only with their own kind. But the “own kind” will tend to be a shifting focus from year to year, so that lifelong relationships will become increasingly rare. People who enjoy a wide experience of humanity can form powerful bonds, bonds which make them interdependent, but completely independent of government which is outside their community.

So the genuine sense of community is the biggest threat to money and power. It makes people independent. Count on marketing and propaganda to promote fickle fashion in building and breaking apart transient “in groups” to keep folks from forming communities. It won’t take much reading to find this is a conscious concern among The Powers That Be (TPTB). It won’t matter what goals of TPTB may express, a teeming mass of disconnected humanity, with ever-shifting associations and interests is the best way to get there.

The PC and Net, as defined above, were the entry point to making this happen. When that mechanism became the primary means to underground community, with free-wheeling and chaotic information passing, it was marked for death by TPTB. It’s not hard to see how marketing has virtually destroyed the pure vision of what could have been. By some counts, spam is 90%+ of all Net traffic, and 99% of all email traffic. That protocol would be dead were there not such feverish activity in blocking technology, and efforts to reduce the number of zombies used to send all that spam. Sites laden with advertising have reduced content, which in some places approaches zero. The only thing keeping such sites alive is reduced expectations for content, and the increasing inability of the current generation to process very much content.

I suspect the geek’s Internet will still survive in some form, but highly marginalized compared to what it is now. The zenith is already passed. Today’s broadband Net access will be like yesterday’s BBS. People who can and will use current methods will become an ever-shrinking pool. The bandwidth will be consumed by background traffic from all those Net-enabled refrigerators, toasters, washers and dryers, and business-government data transfers, and entertainment delivery. PCs will become a tiny minority of devices connected to the Net. The demand for a different set of protocols is already there. Just when we are poised to make Linux/BSD king of the desktop PC userland, nobody is there in userland any more.

Posted in computers | Tagged economics, linux | 1 Comment

Cranky Old Bozo Computer User

Posted on March 25, 2009 by ehurst

I can accept that label. So while one of the comments I got on a previous post called me a “bozo” I wasn’t offended. The problem is the comment was merely that one word, with no qualifying explanation. It’s a waste of time to do that.

As I often tell people, I don’t take myself that seriously. I’m always surprised by the high amount of traffic this blog gets when I post about technology stuff, particularly Linux, and most especially Debian. Why would anyone care what I think? When I stumble across some new trick and explain how to do it, I can understand how that would draw some views, but when I whine about not liking this or that Linux distro/version, I’m not really trying to stir up flames. I’m just venting here on my own personal blog space. If I published such whining on the ezine site, that would be a different matter.

I don’t love Linux because it’s Open Source, or because it’s “not-Microsoft” — I use Linux because I’m used to the way some things work. Little things. I like the mouse text buffer, separate from the GUI clipboard. I can understand MS having no interest in implementing it, but there’s no excuse for Apple, since the mouse-paste is a Unix thing. I’m told it would not take much to make it happen. It even works on the console. I also like how the Linux framebuffer is so advanced and downright pretty.

There are plenty of things I don’t like in Linux. I really do not like X at all. I do like the way HAL and DBUS have saved a lot of heartache, but I have come to despise the primary desktops which use that. The GNOME Project reflects the very worst of Open Source coding practices and mentality. I use GNOME 2.14, and have used 2.16 a great deal in the past, but later releases are less usable. However, the entire GNOME community is bluntly hostile, even ugly, over the mere suggestion they should ever consider supporting the best of their previous releases. GNOME says there is no yesterday. KDE is no better, but at least I have had better luck getting later projects to compile on older releases. Still, if they respond at all, both will be openly hostile if you suggest backporting a fix might be nice. Neither is ever really “fixed,” always broken, always moving forward and incorporating new features with new bugs, etc.

I’ve vented about that enough already. Those who know how to code don’t want to hear from those who don’t. Elitist snobbery never once imagining maybe there’s a such as thing as pleasing the user, the only users they will talk to are users who think like them. So it’s only natural some of the best ever to come out of Linux development, some of the most brilliant solutions, was something from a few years ago.

Right now, I’m very unhappy with the way the Linux community is acting, and the way development as a whole is going. Obviously, some things are working; there are bright spots. I don’t think it’s just nostalgia which finds the bad outweighs the good right now. I believe there is a natural peak of human accomplishment in every endeavor, and we are sadly too slow to recognize when we have reached the climax. And there can surely be more than one high point, but right now the entire Linux thing has huge chunks still sliding downhill. We’ve passed the Zenith on a lot of issues, but no one with any leverage wants to stop and see that. Sure, I could be totally wrong, or simply deeply deluded, seeing something no one else sees because it’s just my own thing.

However, I find there are symptoms of decline everywhere, regardless of the numerous causes. SUSE was a great product until Novell got it; now it’s lost just about all the reputation it gained with their pinnacle release, 8.2. RedHat is still doing great work, but they have an almost casual disregard for laptops. It can be fixed, but it’s a pain in the butt. Various releases of Ubuntu and friends might thrill a lot of folks, but I find they fail to detect some of the most common commodity hardware. On a standard Dell Inspiron, for Pete’s sake, I can’t get past the loading of the desktop background. And on a desktop system, it failed to even recognize the signature on another piece of Dell equipment, a fairly common CRT. It was just as bad on an older HP system, again all standard commodity stuff found all over the world. Other distros are little better.

We are in a very difficult time for Linux right now, but anyone who suggests such a thing is dismissed. It’s too much like a bad religion, with only a handful of standard-bearers allowed to suggest things aren’t heavenly. When they do, it’s likely they’ll be whipped until they get back in line. And surely, if some nobody like me says it, there’s something wrong with me, but gods forbid we should ever think Linux might be going in the wrong direction on some things.

I use the stuff that works for me. Call me what you like and go on down the road. There’s nothing to see here. Move along. Keep your sacred cows inside your fence and they won’t be gored. Meanwhile, I really don’t think I’m alone in this. There’s a lot of stuff broken right now, and those who could fix it don’t want to know.

Posted in computers | Tagged culture, linux | Comments Off

Etch Is Still Better

Posted on March 24, 2009 by ehurst

I’m not sure why, but after testing Lenny several different ways, Etch is still better. In fact, Lenny is downright inferior.

After messing around with Ubuntus, Lenny, then Win2K, then XP, then openSUSE 10.3, I’m back to Etch. I just found out the other day it’s still being supported under the Debian scheme of “old-stable.” The patches will continue until about February 2010. That’s very good news, because Lenny can’t hold a candle to Etch.

On this Inspiron 4100, Etch installed faster, more accurately identified the hardware, and did a much better job of configuring it. Lenny was bloated and slow on this machine, and Etch is the fastest thing I’ve tried so far. Even after adding the later kernel from Backports, it’s still zippy as can be, and it handles my cheap Linksys cards better than Lenny. In fact, I didn’t have to diddle with the setup as I did with Lenny; Etch immediately gave me the chance to run it from the GNOME interface. Best of all, it seemed to stay connected better.

I can’t say why Lenny is inferior to its predecessor, but it is painfully obvious on this laptop. Being this thing isn’t exposed all the much to the Net, I may keep Etch after it’s support expires, just because it works so well. Let’s not forget: I don’t give a rat’s patootie for what’s latest and greatest in Linux. Having something actually work, allowing me to get work done, is better than all the bells and whistles you can offer. The main reason for wanting to move from XP was it had gotten bog slow, as bad as Lenny had been. Etch was up and ready to fly in less than one hour, and completely customized to my liking, including added packages, etc., in less than a day.

That’s the way it should be.

Posted in computers | Tagged debian, linux | 7 Comments

Forcing Smuggling

Posted on March 23, 2009 by ehurst

I’ve noted before the current trend in federal government is to restrict what’s good and ignore what’s dangerous. The obvious reason is that’s where the money goes. A primary example is the FDA. The people running that show are paid by drug companies not regulate them, but to go after the competition, namely, natural remedies.

Bill Sardis explains this particularly well:

Despite recent outbreaks of foodborne disease (Salmonella in peanuts) and approval of deadly or problematic drugs (recently Vioxx, Seroquel, many others) compared against few if any reported deaths in the newly implemented Adverse Event Reporting for dietary supplements, the Federal government is aiming its regulatory muscle at vitamin, mineral and herbal pills.

What can you do about it? Short of dangerous foolishness such as assassinating those responsible, there’s almost nothing you can do to change the path taken by bureaucrats. They don’t care about you and I, and have every intention of working against our interests knowingly. I refuse to grant them the cover of sincerity. They lie, and they know it’s a lie.

The other thing is doing what folks have done for centuries when government has been wrong about human needs: smuggle. All this regulation does is raise the price on natural remedies, but they could hardly stop the actual the trade. War on Drugs, anyone? Were I in the position to do so, I freely admit I would smuggle and deal vitamins and herbs in the future. The government is wrong on this, and merits zero respect.

Posted in health | Comments Off

Does It Take Unplugging?

Posted on March 22, 2009 by ehurst

I really don’t know who Wayne Porter is, but some network security people I read do. Apparently he took a sabbatical from the Net for about 6 months, and learned a bit from it.

I’m puzzled. Did it really require such a complete withdrawal to become more human? “Technology should serve people, not people serving technology.” I seem to recall saying such words years ago when I first got my own used computer (DX2-66), and was debating something with folks on a RedHat forum. I don’t count myself among the profound thinkers of the world, so I’m wondering how Mr. Porter missed out.

Is it really that bad in the geek world? I read jokes about poor social lives, but is it real?

Could be. Even I got too wrapped up in Computer Land. I could spend hours each day doing nothing important on my computers. Then I began helping people learn how to use theirs, and realized just how unimportant they were. It gave rise to a series of articles here about eschewing the “rolling release” mindset of Open Source, always chasing the next new feature, never finished, never settled, never anything really accomplished.

As I tried to get away from that, I did my best to get hold of a laptop. The logic of that was simply my own mental frame of reference. It’s easier to hibernate a laptop and walk away from it for several hours each day. It was the reason for accepting such a low-powered laptop (1Ghz P3), so I was forced to pare down the toys and stick to what was really needed to do actual work (I pretend I’m a writer). At one point I actually tried to get a decent system not too useful for anything but DOS, rather like my first computer, but those machines scarcely run any more.

It’s why I also played with going back to Windows, so I wouldn’t be tempted to play with it too much. It was just too hard, since all my habits are built on Linux/BSD. When I realized XP was no better for the hardware (Win2K wouldn’t run on this thing), I decided to try one more time some various automated install Linux distros. Puppy runs fine, but too much function is missing. DSL was even faster, but misses more function, since it still uses the 2.4 kernel. FreesBIE did run okay, but FreeBSD is still limited to APM for things like laptop suspend. I may still end up using that some day, since this laptop includes APM in the BIOS.

But for now, I’m running OpenSUSE 10.3. Yes, I know it’s “obsolete” and won’t be supported past October this year. I don’t care. Anything more recent is unforgivably bloated on this machine, not to mention broken in too many ways. Should it continue working the way I like, I may just ignore the end of support and deal with whatever consequences come with it. More likely I’ll have time to research until I find something else just as light, but the point was to get an install which would work out most of the details of configuration without my intervention. Debian Lenny did almost none of that, and actually ran slower. None of the Ubuntu stuff worked properly, and was harder to fix. The point was, I was tired of having to tweak for weeks. SUSE did more things right out of the box.

I don’t want to play with it any more, I just want to get my work done. It helps to know Linux is so much more secure, and matches my work habits. On XP I was stuck using Kmeleon and Sylpheed, not because I liked them, but because everything else was too heavy, too slow. With SUSE 10.3 I at least get to use Firefox and Kmail is just dandy. They work, and all the other tools are usable without slowing the machine to a crawl.

Newer is not always better in Computer Land. When chasing the next upgrade means serving the computer instead of vice-versa, it’s time we did something else.

Posted in computers | Tagged linux, suse | 2 Comments