Red Hat, Fedora, what's the difference?
In case you don't follow these things, let me be the first to point out
that Red Hat's 'consumer' product is no more - in name, at least; it's
now called Fedora. Apparently this
represents a merger between RH and a preexisting project.
I'm a little skeptical of the press releases that come out of these
sorts of events. The first real indication of how things will be under
the new regime came yesterday, when the first test release of Fedora
became available - though it's really the second test release of what
was once going to be Red Hat 9.1 (or 10?). I was unimpressed that the
Fedora download page was missing links to a bittorrent of the
ISOs. I've been using bittorrent for a few months, and it's amazing - a
really smart combination of the strengths of P2P apps, webservers, and
FTP. The server hosting a file is spared much of the bandwidth that
would normally be consumed, and the end user gets greatly improved
download times.
To illustrate - I'm pulling the ISOs down to a colocated server at the
moment, from http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/, and was floored when I saw that the transfer was starting at
rates of around 660 KB/s. That was only the beginning, though. A few
minutes later, download speed was continuing to inch its way up, hitting
a high water mark of over 2200 KB/s before dropping to a
steady rate in the mid-1900s. I didn't keep a close track of the
overall time, but all 2 GB must have taken around 20 minutes to get onto
the server.
Absolutely amazing, and when such good technology is easily available,
you have to wonder why a project like Fedora wouldn't continue Red Hat's
recent inclusion of torrents for their ISO files.
I don't want to be down on the project before they get started, but it
is at the least an annoyance. Hopefully this is just an isolated
teething pain; the last test release of Red Hat was the slickest and
least painful *nix I've installed on a workstation, and I'd hate to see
that momentum lost in the reshuffling.
[/net]
It's so easy to believe what you hear on the news
I forget where, now, but somewhere I had seen or heard that many of the numbers and facts in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine were inaccurate. Not only did I believe this, but I repeated it, telling friends and family that Moore didn't always do such a good job of fact checking.
Today I see that Moore has persuasively responded to his critics. And so my beliefs change again. Note that, through these personal flip-flops, I have not consulted any original sources - not that it would be possible for the average citizen to do so while going about their lives. Still, Moore's points about the necessity of a film studio checking its facts in this sort of film, together with the referenced articles and transcripts from Moore's site, go much further than the unsubstantiated claims that I've seen against Moore's film.
[/media]
Wed, 24 Sep 2003
I forget where, now, but somewhere I had seen or heard that many of the numbers and facts in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine were inaccurate. Not only did I believe this, but I repeated it, telling friends and family that Moore didn't always do such a good job of fact checking.
Today I see that Moore has persuasively responded to his critics. And so my beliefs change again. Note that, through these personal flip-flops, I have not consulted any original sources - not that it would be possible for the average citizen to do so while going about their lives. Still, Moore's points about the necessity of a film studio checking its facts in this sort of film, together with the referenced articles and transcripts from Moore's site, go much further than the unsubstantiated claims that I've seen against Moore's film.
[/media]
Editing Text
If you want to do low-level (or even mid-level, really) things with computers, you need a powerful text editor. There are many and I'm sure they're all great, but I've settled on vim. Oh, look at that, Bram's replaced the index page with a protest against software patents. Good for him. Living in the US, it is a little hard to feel like one can do anything useful about the issue, but it's good that Euros still have a chance at preventing the insanity that software patents lead to.
But I was talking about vim. The one thing that gets me every time, is that the default settings aren't quite what I'd like. So, to save myself some trouble in the future, allow me to present my ~/.vimrc file:
syntax on
set autoindent
set nocompatible
set expandtab
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=2
set textwidth=72
[/code]
Tue, 23 Sep 2003
If you want to do low-level (or even mid-level, really) things with computers, you need a powerful text editor. There are many and I'm sure they're all great, but I've settled on vim. Oh, look at that, Bram's replaced the index page with a protest against software patents. Good for him. Living in the US, it is a little hard to feel like one can do anything useful about the issue, but it's good that Euros still have a chance at preventing the insanity that software patents lead to.
But I was talking about vim. The one thing that gets me every time, is that the default settings aren't quite what I'd like. So, to save myself some trouble in the future, allow me to present my ~/.vimrc file:
syntax on
set autoindent
set nocompatible
set expandtab
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=2
set textwidth=72
[/code]
Back in Action
Yes, it has been a while. In my defense, I moved cross country in the time since my last entry, and spinning up the blog was not #1 on my list of priorities. Also contributing was the fact that this site moved from my personal server to a shared machine, that was itself moving across country, and whose owner was himself moving, though only across a few states.
I'd summarize the moving process by saying that it was a royal pain in the petard, only to be contemplated for the best of reasons. It was also a great reinforcement of the lesson to minimize one's possession of material objects, lest they become an albatross about one's neck.
My initial impressions of Massachusetts were not wholly positive. Drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists, and the roads themselves are just barely functional. The air quality is much worse than anything I've experienced before, with the possible exception of Denver. Simply walking or cycling at a brisk pace is enough to cause my lungs to tighten - when in Minnesota I could go for a leisurely jog sans additional medicine and be just fine.
Bureaucracy, too, is much thicker here. Getting vehicles and health insured are completely different games than they are in the rest of the US; restrictive state regulations prevent most companies from offering any sort of coverage, and for vehicles, those that do have little choice in what they offer.
It's not all bad of course. People are surprisingly friendly, there are a wealth of historical and cultural resources, and the ocean is nearby. Haven't had a chance to explore as much as I'd like, but that should change now that the settling-in process is winding down.
[/general]
Yes, it has been a while. In my defense, I moved cross country in the time since my last entry, and spinning up the blog was not #1 on my list of priorities. Also contributing was the fact that this site moved from my personal server to a shared machine, that was itself moving across country, and whose owner was himself moving, though only across a few states.
I'd summarize the moving process by saying that it was a royal pain in the petard, only to be contemplated for the best of reasons. It was also a great reinforcement of the lesson to minimize one's possession of material objects, lest they become an albatross about one's neck.
My initial impressions of Massachusetts were not wholly positive. Drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists, and the roads themselves are just barely functional. The air quality is much worse than anything I've experienced before, with the possible exception of Denver. Simply walking or cycling at a brisk pace is enough to cause my lungs to tighten - when in Minnesota I could go for a leisurely jog sans additional medicine and be just fine.
Bureaucracy, too, is much thicker here. Getting vehicles and health insured are completely different games than they are in the rest of the US; restrictive state regulations prevent most companies from offering any sort of coverage, and for vehicles, those that do have little choice in what they offer.
It's not all bad of course. People are surprisingly friendly, there are a wealth of historical and cultural resources, and the ocean is nearby. Haven't had a chance to explore as much as I'd like, but that should change now that the settling-in process is winding down.
[/general]
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