Entries from February 2004 ↓

Hey, just a few cool links.

- Need a color schema for your website?
- This looks really promising, a subversion client and plugin for intellij’s idea .
- On that note subversion just released version 1.0, this has been long awaited and I’m pretty happy. Also I’m fairly ticked I spent half the day building the whole thing from source on the z/Series on friday.

I just got anonymous vsftp setup in the plans of having an etree server of my very own, also this means I can buy huge drives and a new case for my old pc. Yeah justification for buying toys. You can find the server at: skylark.unsure.org . As a preview there will be a Flaming Lips concert available for anonymous download by the morning.

Hahah, from the article on infoworld about IBM porting Office to Linux as part of their linux on the desktop inititive.

“It suits us fine the Microsoft and Sun fight about office application suites. We stay away from that. The reason we don’t collaborate with Sun is that they’re too small,” said Pettersson.

Well, this article pretty much articulates my feelings on a lot of matters. I suggest everyone reads it.

It’s been a few days since I posted, been busy at work and home. I have however been aggregating interesting web finds and ideas I’ve come across. I have a couple categories for posts so he’s the first one. The reason I set up this blog in the first place was so I had some voice on the cosi blogroll .

I’ve enjoyed seeing my posts show up there and I like reading what the guys are working on. One of the most prevalent authors there Oleg Dunlin . I haven’t met Oleg before but I heard quite a bit about him while I was at Clarkson and his posts are pretty interesting. However I disagree with this one .

The general opinion he expresses I agree with. There needs to be stronger separation of church and state, there is no place for the 10 commandments in courts (even though most of our laws support them), references to God should be removed from our currency, and most importantly the will of the people should not be over ruled by the religious beliefs of their leader.

However, there are a couple points that I disagree with as well. Specifically his support for a new French Law:

“PARIS (AFP) - The French National Assembly was set to pass a controversial bill that will ban the Islamic headscarf and other religious insignia from state schools, despite opposition from many Muslims and some human rights groups.

[...]

Though it does not specify the items that would be barred, an experts’ report listed the Jewish skullcap and “large” Christian crosses in addition to the Islamic headscarf. Sikh turbans are also likely to be included, and Education Minister Luc Ferry has said bandanas and even beards could be barred if worn with the wrong intent. ”

This is a freedom of speech issue to me although public schools cannot preach religion (they can and should teach about it) and they shouldn’t remove student’s rights to express their beliefs in public. Early introduction and familiarity with other ways of life is the best way to teach tolerance.

My second issue is with a comment he made about religious leadership. I loathe religious justification of government action, especially in it’s cruelest form of undertones and suggestions that our current president uses. This is a vague and nebulous statement but think about it, I follow Bush’s speeches fairly closely and I can’t think of an instance in which he said anything along the lines of ‘God has justified our actions in the Middle East’ or such, but many people immediately identify our actions with his religious beliefs. Oleg’s own statement reinforces this. Despite this unfortunate leadership I do not feel that religious people should be banned from running for office. Some of our great leaders were religious men; JFK being a Catholic comes to mind. He made a fairly famous speech saying that although his religion tied him to the Pope his duty lied with his country. (I know JFK wasn’t a terribly good catholic but it’s still an example.) I believe that it is up to the voters to decide who should be their leader are despite, or because of their religious belief.

To quote Oleg’s post:

“The point is that the separation of Church and State should be such that political decisions are not shaped by people’s faiths, and people’s faith is not shaped by political decisions of their elected officials. What I’d like to see is freedom of religion in people’s private homes and communities, but freedom from religion in the state and federal governments.”

I like the ideal but the fact is I don’t think you have much of a belief going on if it doesn’t play into all of your decisions. I wish I had a stronger conclusion to this post to wrap it all up but the best I have is this. It’s more complicated than that, we can’t just push it under a carpet and make it go away, not allowing the religious element in our societies to be public with their beliefs or share them with others is wrong. Not only is it a freedom of speech issue, it is also an unhealthy way to deal with a powerful and vocal section of our population.

Besides that pile of preaching I have a few other political bits to post.

- Q: Why is the US government so certain that Iraq has WMD?

A: Because they have the receipts.
- Move On ad controversy evaluate on your own.
- President Bush statement or Emperor Palpatine statement?

Ok, after that post here’s something a little lighter.

- A couple people have asked me about the buttons on the side of my page, this is where they came from.

- Occasionally I need some C examples this is always a good place to start .

- I think this is pretty funny, in a very geeky way. Note the error in the HTML at the bottom of the last frame.

- For those who are alone on saturday here are some friendly Valentines .

- Last but not least, here is one of my favorite web comics . It’s not updated anymore but the archives are pretty funny.

Bed Time.

So my parents finally decided to see my new apartment. This is my first place after college, so understandably it’s a bit rough around the edges. Cardboard boxes are currently serving as a coffee table and an end table, most of my stuff is on the floor still. Right now my bed is an old futon mattress on the floor. Not exactly classy and not terrible comfy. So when my parents came here to visit I heard what I believe to be number 7 on the top 10 things I’d never here my mother say:

“There’s no way you can bring a girl home past those cardboard boxes and ask her to shag on the futon matress on the floor … unless you get her really drunk.”

Yeah, so my folks and I went out and bought a bed today. They got it for me as a belated birthday and graduation gift. So apparently my mom wants me to get some…

Ok, I fixed the style sheet to work on IE correctly and I think I cleaned up the page some. The changes should be checked into cvs soon. Other than that not too much going on. We got a stupid amount of snow here in poughkeepsie so I worked from home.

I had other stuff to post but can’t find it right now. In other news I slammed my finger in the door. Yay.

I have a friend who’s getting an eMac and he was asking about some different programs. So here’s a short list of some of my favorites. I incuded a couple shareware apps that I payed for that we’re definetly worth it. So here we go:

- I do a fair amount of work on the command line so having a good terminal program is worthwhile to me. iTerm ; give me tabs, trasparency, bacground images, and with ssh keys i jave key combos to open seesions to my other machines.

- I use mplayer to watch my movies. Mplayer OSX is a mac port of the linux mplayer project. It gives you an ok gui but the nice part is you can play avi’s and divx. Additionally you can run in fullscreen and it has a much smaller footprint than quicktime. On of my favorites is to play family guy fullscreen with a transparent iTerm on top of it while I work.

- Aquisition makes stealing intuitive and userfriendly. This is the best p2p app I’ve ever used. It hooks into the gnutella network and does a good job filtering out peers that aren’t very userful. The best part is that it integrates with iTunes, acquisition will create a playlist in iTunes of music you’ve downloaded. It will also dim out tracks you already have during artist searches. Aquisition also give some excellent filters to search through all albums and particular songs for an artist. This is a shareware app that costs $15. You can try it out for free though.

- Whenever I reformat my machine I backup all my data on my 40gb iPod. To retrieve my music properlly i use iPod rip . This will get all my music and import to iTunes without difficulty. This is also a shareware app but it only costs $9.

- I saved the best for last. SubEthaEdit is a great program with a stupid name. This is a basic text editor that can do line numbering, syntax highlighting, and collabrative editing. That is the best part. It locates other users through rendevous and allows people to work on applications together monitorin their changes and showing where they are working quite elegantly. I only wish it was network enabled.

This is just a quick before bed post, here are a few useful unix utilities rounded up. Any serious linux user should know about.

I’ve been having a lot of wrist problems between typing all day at work and then most of the night for thesis. I was reading some about how I could ease my pain and this was the best suggestion I could find.