[Quote:]

Vermont Gov. James Douglas said he’s disappointed he had to eat imitation maple syrup during his recent visit to Vermont troops in Iraq and Kuwait.

A photograph of the governor eating with troops in Kuwait showed a bottle of “pancake” syrup. Douglas spokesman Jason Gibbs said the governor had to eat what was on the table.

Gibbs said Douglas was disappointed it was not real Vermont maple syrup.

I’m happy to hear he has his priorities straight!

It’s pretty obvious the system was made to be bulk-installed in a 19″ rack in a datacenter. The 19″ rackmount slides are a dead giveaway, and the only thing looking remotely nice is the 2U high front of the machine. Other than the machine and the rails, there’s a packing list and a few bits of legal documentation, and that’s it. Nothing more. The outside of the box is self-documenting:

and the inside of the box is very, very neat and tidy:

(if you’re wondering about those cables, the disks are SAS – two very small sized 74Gb disks, and two empty bays)

Installation is easy – any Sun admin will recognize the steps:

1. connect a serial cable to the console port, and to a PC or terminal server
2. connect both power cords to power, connect any network cables you need
3. set your favourite LOM settings, (including the network address of the admin interface)
4. type “poweron”

At that moment the machine starts making far more noise as all the fans kick in. The Solaris 10 initial configuration starts up, also well known to any good Sun admin.

No need for other documentation or CD’s – everything is preinstalled.

So, no surprises, really. And that’s how it should be. Tomorrow I’ll talk a bit about the target market of this machine, and why I’m personally very much interested in it. If any of you reading this has questions at any point, either technical or non-technical, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with the boot messages, after the link…

Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the java coders at the office read the site I’m linking to in this post – I’m posting part of today’s entry, just the comments, not the code. Our developers were uniformly horrified with this piece of work, and rightly so:

[Quote:]

/* This is bad. Reaaly bad. It’s a really, really bad hack. If you’re an employee of
* Intertrode Communication, then I’m really, really sorry that you have to maintain
* this. I was honestly planning on removing this tomorrow, but I’ve been known to
* forget things like this. It happens.
*
* So here’s the thing. I can’t seem to figure out why the AccountId variable isn’t
* set. I’ve looked and looked, but I gotta leave now. Anyway, I’ve found that I can
* just grab the AccountID from the debugging logs. I suppose that to fix it, you’d
* have to locate where it’s clearing out the ID.
*
* Again, I’m sorry.
*/

if ( (AccountId == NULL) || (AccountId == “”) ||
(ServerSesion["AccountId"] == NULL) || (ServerSesion["AccountId"] == “”) )
{
//open session logs

FileHandle file = f_open(LOG_PATH + “\sessionlog-” + LOG_FILE_DATE + “.log”, 1);
while (file != NULL)
{

TString line = f_readline(file);

//look for IP and changereg
if ( (sfind(line,REMOTE_ADDR) != -1) && (sfind(line,“changereg”) != -1) )
{
//0000-00-00 00:00 /accountmaint/changereg/?AccountId=123456 255.255.255.255 …

// *
AccountId = substr(line, 52, 6);
}

if (f_EOF(file)) { f_close(file); file = NULL; }
}

}

[Quote:]

“Blame” is an interactive kinetic sculpture consisting of a robotic arm with a pointing hand on the end that scans the gallery, and when it finds a viewer, the arm stops with the hand pointing at the viewer, and then the sculpture proceeds to blame the viewer for some horrible crime against society. After that, the arm returns to scanning for a new victim to blame.

[Quote:]

Just when you thought that censoreware was only for oppressive goverments, and for use with children, and institutions by that treat their employees like children — the US Military, General Electric (GE), Procter and Gamble, Exxon Mobil, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Bayer, Conagra Foods, Lockheed Martin, British Telecom, Fujitsu, Volvo, Kohler, and Tiffany & Co.)* — politicians in Australia propose to turn censorware on their population: Labor to force porn block.

(We already know that where such systems are in place, for example Secure Computing’s SmartFilter, they block a whole lot more than what any reasonable person would consider porn.)

[..]

Maybe the best way to fight the censorship movement is push to have the bible blocked on the basis of its violent, sexual and disturbing nature. It starts out with people running around wearing only fig leaves. Slightly later the the population of the earth is drowned except for one family. We have Sodom and Gomorrah, Slaughtered babies, incest two instances of father’s ready to sacrifice there sons, although only one goes through with it. Stonings, polygamy, discussions of prostitution and lots of other disturbing things.

I keep thinking I should teach my kids some bible stories but I can’t find any that I can’t find distribing. I understand it was a rough brutal time back when it was writen but I feel the bible is not sutiable material for children by any objective measure.

[Quote:]

Are you still not convinced that you shouldn’t buy games that use Starforce? From Gadget Life:

Now, Futuremark has uncovered a very dangerous anti-piracy system Starforce is now using. This copy protection system installs a driver that runs at the highest level of access on the system, which gives it low level access to the PCs hardware and any drivers and processes. This driver runs regardless of whether the game runs; keeping an eye out for any suspicious activity such as attempting to copy a protected disc. If something suspicious is detected, it forces the PC to make an immediate reboot, regardless of any other applications running and whether or not the user has any unsaved work.

Gee, why would anyone not want to purchase a product that relied upon Starforce for its DRM? According to a Starforce PR spokesman, it is because they just must be members of the Russian mafia:

StarForce Technologies, for its part, often takes extreme offense to negative comments… …When questioned, Zhidkov [SF’s PR manager] told us, “The issue on StarForce is obviously sponsored by our competitors or organized crime groups that run CD/DVD piracy [operations]. We are now in close coopreration with [US and Russian officials] investigating the matter and trying to find out who stands behind the boycott campaign.

That quote was obtained from the latest issue of Computer Gaming World.

[Quote:]

In 17 years of working on the city’s bridges, Joe Vaccaro has made some unusual finds: a 100-year-old copy of a newspaper, sepia-toned photographs.

But none matched the discovery he and his co-workers made last week in the structural foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge.

There, in the musty dark, the workers found a Cold War-era cache of provisions to have been used in the wake of a nuclear attack: some 350,000 packaged crackers, paper blankets, metal drums for water and medical supplies.

There’s a couple of Flickr photosets of the place..

[Quote:]

American’s increasing acceptance of religious diversity doesn’t extend to those who don’t believe in a god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology.

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.�? Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

[..]

The researchers also found acceptance or rejection of atheists is related not only to personal religiosity, but also to one’s exposure to diversity, education and political orientation—with more educated, East and West Coast Americans more accepting of atheists than their Midwestern counterparts.

My first computer, ever, was an Apple ][+, way back in the early ’80s. Every time I install a new computer small enough to fit on my desk, I do a back of the envelope calculation how much faster that new box is.

I think I broke the 10 million barrier today. It’s comparing apples to sunsoranges, of course, but this T2000 is somewhere between 10 and 50 million times as fast as my very first box.

I can’t think of another occupation where the tools have increased in power this much… even if my calculations are off by an order of magnitude…

I’m going to evaluate a Sun Fire T2000 server, with the new CoolThreads stuff. Sun is running a 60 day evaluation deal, and I’m going to make it go through its paces with humongous amounts of Java stuff (for KPN) and for the stuff I do with my own company, mostly apache, mysql and php, with a bunch of mail thrown in for good measure.

The box is still sealed at this point. So why post already? Because the transporter that Sun picked to transport the box has broken the record for most flexible and friendly delivery I’ve dealt with. Ever. I called the drivers boss afterwards to deliver my compliments… That doesn’t happen often, and the guy who picked up the telephone at Bos/TKS was quite surprised. Most people don’t bother to call unless they’ve got a complaint, but I feel service beyond the call of duty deserves recognition as well.

Anyway, this evalution is definately off to a good start. I’ll post more of my experiences here – as well as the reasons I decided the T2000 is a worthy candidate for evaluations; as some of you know, I prefer to build my own servers…

[Quote:]

“When Governor Mike Rounds signed HB 1215 into law it effectively banned all abortions in the state with the exception that it did allow saving the mother’s life. There were, however, no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. His actions, and the comments of State Senators like Bill Napoli of Rapid City, SD, set of a maelstrom of protests within the state.

Napoli suggested that if it was a case of “simple rape,�? there should be no thoughts of ending a pregnancy. Letters by the hundreds appeared in local newspapers, mostly written by women, challenging Napoli’s description of rape as “simple.�? He has yet to explain satisfactorily what he meant by “simple rape.�?

The President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, was incensed. A former nurse and healthcare giver she was very angry that a state body made up mostly of white males, would make such a stupid law against women.

“To me, it is now a question of sovereignty,�? she said to me last week. “I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.�?

This brings back memories – remember this great Bush quote?

“Tribal sovereignty means that, it’s sovereign. You’re a — you’ve been given sovereignty, and you’re viewed as a sovereign entity. And, therefore, the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities.”

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – 1968)

[Quote:]

In the years immediately before Roe vs. Wade, hospitals around the country had separate septic abortion wards for women bleeding, injured and infected because of illegal abortions. Many of these patients had tried to abort by themselves.

Chicago’s Cook County Hospital housed almost 5,000 women per year in its septic abortion wards.

Deaths due to illegal abortion approached 50 percent of the nation’s total maternal mortality, according to a U.S. Department of Labor study titled “Maternal Mortality in 15 States.”

In countries where abortion is illegal today, 25 percent to 50 percent of all maternal mortality is due to illegal abortion.

Those deaths are preventable.

Abortions performed by skilled practitioners in sterile environments are extremely safe. After abortion was legalized in the United States, maternal mortality fell dramatically. Hospital abortion wards closed because they were empty.

It’s clear that those against abortion don’t value life at all…

[Quote:]

Those who seek to outlaw abortion often use the rhetoric of “protecting the most vulnerable and helpless” in our communities. Many of them are Christians who see their opposition to abortion rights as inextricably linked with their faith and their understanding of Christian ethics. After all, wouldn’t a God of love and life want us to protect life wherever we found it?

If only it were that simple.

In practice, there are other questions we must ask. Does a God of love and life ever support war? Does such a God understand that some innocent civilians will die when we fight to protect our freedoms? In other words, does God approve when we make the decision to kill other people to protect our quality of life? What about when we kill to prevent genocide? Does God have a holy balancing scale that weighs intangibles like “intent” and “the greater good” or one that compares the number of innocent lives lost against the number of innocent lives saved?

We do not know. For every Christian with a “God Bless Our Troops” sticker on their bumper there is another with “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” on their rear windshield.

[..]

The issue of abortion is not about whether life starts at conception. There are convincing arguments either way. The issue is which carries more weight: the life that may be in the embryo, or the life and needs of the woman in whose body that embryo was conceived?

After spending time in women’s health clinics, I have come to realize that the “most vulnerable and helpless” who need our active protection are the women and couples who are faced with the agonizingly difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy. As a Christian pastor, I strongly support protecting the right of women to make this decision. Other Christian pastors have chosen otherwise, and our division on this issue is proof that there is no Christian consensus here.

[..]

The beliefs or prejudices of some, regardless of who has a majority, should not be used to take the choice out of the hands of the woman who will be the main bearer, perhaps the only bearer, of the consequences of her decision.

[Quote:]

During the 2000 Presidential campaign, Al Gore, a movie fan in general and a fan of Being John Malkovich in particular, asked Spike Jonze to come down to his house for a day to follow him and his family around with a camera. Spike brought his tiny handheld video camera and came up with a portrait so real, so humanizing, and so powerful that of course Gore’s advisors had to bury it.  

You should all see it now.

Amazing how much the dem advisors are out of touch with mainstream america if they really had a chance to use this in 2000 and decided not to.

[Quote:]

Texas has begun sending undercover agents into bars to arrest drinkers for being drunk, a spokeswoman for the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission said on Wednesday.

The first sting operation was conducted recently in a Dallas suburb where agents infiltrated 36 bars and arrested 30 people for public intoxication, said the commission’s Carolyn Beck.

Being in a bar does not exempt one from the state laws against public drunkenness, Beck said.

When you let sissy Democrats run your state, you get this type of nanny-regime. Why, if Tom Delay were in power…