Month: March 2003

“what a linux distribution *is*”

http://nlug.org/mail/nlug__2003_03/0608.html

“i think you, along with many others, don’t correctly understand what a linux distribution *is*. linux is the kernel. that ~1MB chunk of binary built from the ~30MB (for 2.4 kernels, at least) of compressed source that handles all the low-level important shit like memory management and interrupts and process scheduling and io interfaces and other fun kernel-level stuff i want to hack on but don’t.

“everything else is user-level applications. wine, ls, cat, X, kde, gnome, evolution, kmail, login, getty, init, ssh, apache, etc, et. al, and so forth and so on.

“a distribution is just a pairing of the two. each distribution uses their own packaging methods (rpm, dpkg, ebuild, tar.gz) and their own installation methods (which are usually interactive applications, making it easy for anyone with half a brain and an install guide to handle).”

-mike

Posted on by miklm

The Rachel Corrie Saga

I’m sure you’ve all seen the news of Rachel Corrie, the Washington-based hippie that lost a fight with a bulldozer while “peace protesting” in Israel. News story links: [Seattle Times, AP]

In celebration of her sheer idiocy, blatant stupidity, and blissful ignorance, I submit for your review the following.

Definition of stupidity
Maddox: No More Hippies!
There was another cartoon that Spade had which is now offline. I’ll post it when I find it again.

Posted on by miklm

Kid in a kandy store, part 18.

Today=g00d.

Well, it started off lame. My cell phone goes nuts at 00:53 telling me that our web server isn’t responding to our off-site monitoring service. Turned out to be about a 10 minute drop on all our T1s. So I have to come into the office and assess the situation and reconnect the audio stream. Bleh. It gave me an excuse to sleep in this morning, anyway.

So I get to the office at 10:15-ish and soon an NCR field rep shows up to repair my laptop that I decided to push off the counter yesterday. <3 some on-site service, or something. Good thing this laptop came with a 3-year onsite warranty that was transferrable — I’ll probably extend it for another year, because I’m sure to do something else destructive to it soon. New keyboard, new bottom plastics, and we’re back running. This also got my keyboard issue fixed where the left Shift and CTRL keys were going nuts.

Then FedEx shows up with my Kershaw Ken Onion Blackout knife.

Things got even better as UPS hit the door early afternoon with a new Blaupunkt DVD-ME1 DVD player. Instead of repairing the one I shipped back to them last week, they just sent me a new unit. The 4Runner is now rolling mobile movies again.

Today has been a good day for customer service, imo.

Posted on by miklm

today’s random pointless battery of links

[0] google news – that this site has managed to elude me for however long is remarkable.

[1] netflix – i signed up for this tonight; will update on the service.

[2] asus a7n8x-d – this will be the motherboard i shall purchase if i ever get around to building a new pc.

[3] puerile – a word i learned over the weekend from brandon.

[4] napster set to return – this will only end in tears. i had missed the news that roxio bought napster’s assets, as well. i don’t suppose that one broke tech company absorbing the paper debt of another is exactly earth-shattering anymore.

[5] serial scsi standard coming … sometime. and leave it to /. to get the numbers wrong.

[6] linus comments on sco nonsense – article link is slashdotted; maybe i can read it in the morning.

btw, you know the tech revolution has happened when you can order pizza online in pulaski, tennessee.

Posted on by miklm

Bad poetry.

i debated with another whether pigs “grunt” or “gruffle”. i hold the former, my opponent the latter. thus, i wrote an haiku:

i delcare that pigs
grunt but they do not gruffle
as they swim in mud.

btw, i am right. definitions of grunt and gruffle.

Posted on by miklm