Posts

New military regulations prevent journalists from publishing photos of wounded solders without the written consent of those soldiers. It seems sensible to respect the rights of soldiers who have been wounded in combat not to have their photos published, but the net effect of this regulation is that it prevents the media from documenting what’s happening on the ground in Iraq every day. Of course, no such rules exist when it comes to Iraqis, and we don’t see many photos of the horrors they face every day, either. ...

One thing stood out to me about Dave Winer’s painful experience of trying to go to a clothing store and buy a jacket – every clothing store he went to before he got to REI is actually owned by the same company.

The server is back up and running, now under FreeBSD 6.2. First things first, I had forgotten how slow compiling packages is. And I’d forgotten about fun with dependencies. Getting the latest and greatest ports collection with portsnap was easy enough. The first port I installed was vim and its installation led to a cascade of dozens of other packages that had to be installed first. Did you know that vim depends on the presence of Perl? Then of course it wanted to install GTK+ and that meant X11R6. Then it tried to install a package that has a known vulnerability, so it stopped the presses. (Yes, portaudit is really cool.) I found out that I hadn’t downloaded the latest and greatest index of ports yet, and that there’s a vim-lite package that leaves out all the X windows that’s not really needed when you just want to run vim in a shell. ...

My Web site is back, now running under FreeBSD. Getting everything configured correctly was a big pain, although that’s not FreeBSD’s fault. I’ll have a more detailed post later.

I’m going to get the server this site lives on reloaded sometime in the next 24 hours, so this site will be down from then until I get everything to work again. If worse comes to worst I’ll move everything to backup hosting, but lets hope it doesn’t come to that.

I didn’t know that Curse Gaming (the very popular site for World of Warcraft fans) runs Django. Looks like they’re wringing some serious performance out of it, too.

Google runs its own public transit system to get its employees to and from work in relative comfort. I had no idea.

Much hay has been made of the results of a recent poll that asked Muslims whether suicide bombings are justifiable. In the poll, 78% of Muslim Americans said that suicide bombing is never justifiable. FP Passport dug up a December 2006 poll which asked Americans whether intentionally bombing civilians is justifiable. Less than 50% of Americans believe that it’s never justifiable to intentionally target civilians. I guess some forms of barbarism are less palatable than others. ...

In his Bible studies, David Plotz learns that the first documented encounter between Jews and Arabs presages everything that follows: Let’s pause for a moment to observe the entrance of the Bible’s first, and I believe only, “Arab.” Arabia is referred to a few times in passing in various books, and anonymous “Arabians” are mentioned, but Geshem is the single named Arab. (Geshem is king of part of the Arabian Peninsula, according to a footnote in my Bible.) In what can be seen as a darkly humorous divine joke, the only Arab in the Bible turns out to be 1) an enemy of the Jews and 2) at odds with them over who should control Jerusalem. Given the poison between Arabs and Jews today, isn’t it appropriate that their relationship was born in strife? ...

So I have a Web server running Fedora Core 4. That was the latest and greatest Fedora when I opened my hosting account, but now it’s slightly out of date. The Fedora project is up to version 6, and the stuff installed on my server no longer really gets updated. I’m not a systems administrator, and I’m not even qualified to pretend to be one in meetings, so I’m at a bit of a loss when it comes to dealing with this situation. ...