Flutterby™! : Tab dump 2009-10-11 21:58:58.093885+00

Tab dump

2009-10-11 21:58:58.093885+00 by Dan Lyke 6 comments

Okay, solved my bug, have procrastinated long enough on going back under the house, here's a bunch of links:

A bunch of people have been pointing to I like Unicorn because its Unix. Nothing new here, just another voice saying "hey, we don't have to use threads just because Windows is broken".
English Russia has a car made of wood. Pretty, although like Sean says, I'd rather have it be one or the other, rather than the half-and-half.
Abstruse Goose on the problem I run into whenever I try to explain things to Charlene.
CJ forwarded along Wall Street Journal: A Young Tinkerer Builds a Windmill, Electrifying a Nation, about a young man in Malawi who figured out how to electrify his house. He's got a blog.
Fantastic Contraption: Prius Edition. Adds the kind of goofy concept of "efficiency", which basically rewards building with a "solar panel" stick, but new levels for the same Fantastic Contraption that you already know and love.
Jeff fowarded along this bicycling video that I haven't had a chance to watch yet.
Andrew Sullivan adds his voice to the "why Human Rights Campaign won't get any more of my money" chorus. As I noted, Viv said similar things.

Now under the house to finish sealing the edges of the vapor barrier. The dirt seemed pretty dry under the house when it wasn't covered, now that I've put plastic over it there's an awful lot of water down there.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-10-12 15:04:49.785218+00 by: andylyke [edit history]

I just have to jump in because you used the word "Windows" in the first item. Just installed SP 2 on a Vista machine. When done, all the "documents" directory in the primary user's (theWife's) account seemed to have disappeared. Another "oh s**t" moment. Opened the command line window, snooped around and found that the "documents" link pointed to some other "temp" directory, and that the actual documents directory was intact. managed to fix that. Then opened windows media center to watch Rachel M, and found that the audio had disappeared. In mucking around, found a link to an actual Microsoft site describing all the problems that occur when you install SP 2 on Vista, and offers "Microsoft Fixit" complete with cute logo. Selected that, was told that it had failed, was directed to an instruction list to repair manually.

The manual repair instructions directed me to confirm that some settings were "what I want". Fortunately, I've got 40 years + of engineering and computer application behind me, so I know what bits and Hertz(es?) are, but I can't imagine Arthur the author confronted with some of these choices.

The arguments that "MSW is less intimidating than Linux" are evaporating before my very eyes.

Yeah, this recent printer acquisition convinced me: Turned it on, selected the wireless network, gave it the keys. Went over to the Ubuntu machines, selected "add a printer", was asked to confirm the make and model, all was good.

Went to the Vista box, selected "Add a printer", was eventually asked to choose the make and model, realized it came with adisk, so canceled out of that process, inserted the disk and it took three reboots to finish the installation.

There are a few hardware support issues with Linux, mostly that the Redmond cabal is trying to make hardware deliberately obscure and complex to try to sink the Linux driver writers, but the Ubuntu experience is far better than the Windows one.

And Charlene's been using some Windows apps for school, the screams of frustration from the other room cursing Microsoft from here to Shanghai tell me I'm not alone in that opinion.

I gave up on M$ some time ago. I got tired of things breaking, chronic system freezes, malware, registry issues, reinstalls, reboots, and similar problems. The last M$ OS I used was Win2K.

Canonical seems to have put a lot into the hardware drivers and the setup software for Ubuntu. I like the feel of Debian a little better, but had difficulties installing it on a new custom box that I had specifically spec'ed out for *nix compatibility. So I reverted to Ubuntu which installed the 64bit system with no mods or headaches. Flash doesn't work well on my 9.04 64bit system, though it is fine on my wife's 9.04 32bit laptop. I don't miss it much. Both the 32bit and 64bit versions seem to handle multicore CPU's like a charm.

I probably could have gotten Debian 5 running with a day or two playing around, but I figured it probably would have broken frequently with upgrades as it has in the past. Solving this type of problem once can be fun, but repeatedly spending a day or two with each security or system upgrade is a frustrating waste of time.

I have run RedHat, RedHat's Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu each for a year or more and others for shorter, sometimes very short, periods of time, I find Ubuntu is by far the easiest to install and use. I only had Ubuntu break once as the result of an update, and it was fixed within a couple of days. I am tempted to try BSD and Gentoo for their security advantages, but am not yet sufficiently motivated to do so.

Jeff, there are parts of that video I find beautiful and entrancing, and then it's like "wait, I want a little more information about what's happening here to make this mean something". It's clearly happening in some super bright environment, but I'd love some narration of "and this is non-safety glass", or "and this is a .45 and a .22 bullet hitting each other in flight".

Dan--I watched it twice the other night. Totally entrancing. And I agree, I'd like to find some additional information about each of the shots (haven't had time to do any searching).

Materials engineering scientists (and others) are probably loving the ability to view this type of action in slow motion.