A new Rick Roll?

If they say, there's no more room at the bottom, then tell them to look again. When plumbing the depths, Rick Astley is still miles above Rebecca Black.

The parodies were amusing...

• Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert


• Daily Grace

This video shut up a lot of the critics, though...

p.s. I'm still stuck on OT7.

Linux at 20

Twenty years ago (April 1991) Linus Torvalds announced that he had begun development of a simple kernel based on the Intel i386 task switcher. Five months later, he had a usable kernel ready for download. This kernel added the final missing piece to the GNU project. Here is Slashdot's
headline.

The contribution of the GNU toolset should not be minimized, especially its C compiler, because without a compiler, source code projects are mostly academic exercises. The overall synergy of the two projects was magnified further because both employed the same free software license, the GPL. That license enables others to build upon existing work. That broke the cycle of having to reinvent the wheel over and over again, or else pay someone for every single installation. With this solid foundation in place, the stage was set for the rise of the free software movement. This was good timing- it was just in time for GNU/Linux to play a major role in the rise of the nascent internet. Free software, open source software, and other permissive licenses fueled the movement that allowed servers to be setup with software that would otherwise have cost thousands of dollars. Free software forms the basis for very usable software platforms, as typified by LAMP. GNU/Linux lies at the heart of Web 1.0,Web 2.0, and beyond.

GNU/Linux has proven itself on the server side, and is widely deployed (examples: Google, the New York Stock Exchange, and high performance computing installations.) I hadn't realized the extent to which Linux dominates high performance computing. Check this recent tabulation.

Unfortunately, GNU/Linux has not fared as well on users' desktops. The overall usage percentage of GNU/Linux remains small even though a rich set of software has been developed for it, and for use at no charge. As tight as budgets are right now, it seems that it should be getting more attention. It looks like people would rather continue to pay more than have to learn something new. Schools and governments should consider their long term savings by getting off the never ending upgrade train of commercial software, and own their own home, instead of continuing to rent.

Cut costs with online education?

The New York Times has an interesting article about moving K-12 education online to save money. The article discusses both the pros and cons, an interesting read.

The current economy has given local school districts a big incentive to cut costs. Giving kids computers to attend online classes is a lot cheaper than local flesh and blood teachers, but the article cites cases where it's not just a win-win for everyone. Specifically, the students can short circuit learning by cutting and pasting answers from wikipedia, and teachers can be overwhelmed with very large virtual class sizes. The net effect is an online school can become a diploma mill, a for-profit diploma mill. In my opinion, the basics of learning still need personal attention, especially in the primary grades. It's not clear that online education is suitable to do that job. That's the downside. On the positive side, students can enroll in courses where there would be too little interest. The online environment seems ideal for that- i.e. allows students to choose advanced or special interest courses. Another good use is when students are living widely dispersed from the school. Online courses would allow studends to "phone" into their classes via broadband links. That would save both the time and the energy costs of busing students. It's a balancing act, for sure.

I last mentioned online education on my blog last October. I had just seen a video presentation about the Open High School of Utah

dm-live rescue/boot environment

A few packages from a Slackware base repository can be used to setup a nice rescue or generic boot environment. Simply, build the environment and save in the proper initial ramdisk format using the standard cpio sequence. Next, build a boot disk by combining the bootloader, kernel, the initrd image that is described here. By the way, I use the grub bootloader. I call the resulting environment "dm-live" (device mapper -live) because it relies heavily on device mapper for various modes of operation (booting live-usb's or live-cd's, booting encrypted filesystems, etc.) Note: I have also replaced the standard "init" program, with my own variant.

I will probably move this to its own web page in the future as it "fleshes out." I want to use it to record the packages I used in the environment for each matching Slackware release. For now, here's a graphic showing the relative space used by the environment
.


Update: 2011-04-08
I have updated the packages in this environment to match Slackware -current to this timestamp in the official Slackware change log: Fri Apr 8 06:58:48 UTC 2011
Here is the updated package list.

Update: 2011-04-25
I have updated the packages in this environment to match Slackware -current to this timestamp in the official Slackware change log: Sun Apr 24 03:20:33 UTC 2011
Here is the updated package list. I am also testing with both Slackware compiled kernels: 2.6.37.6 and 2.6.38.4 (with the latter working a bit better. YMMV.)


By the way, this project is an unofficial derivative work based on Slackware Linux.

Trademarks and Copyrights

Slackware is a registered trademark of Patrick Volkerding and Slackware Linux, Inc.

Linux is registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Epsilon data breach

Over the weekend, Slashdot reported that a company, epsilon, notified users it had been attacked and suffered a web intrusion into their databases. The intrusion resulted in a data breach. The data that was stolen constituted several million valid email addresses tied to the users' known vendors. This could lead to immediate "phishing" attempts- i.e. the bad guys impersonating the known vendor to trick the user into revealing more account details, etc. Here is Slashdot's
headline.

I received a notice from Abe Books informing me that their customer list was stolen. It's still to be determined how many different vendors accounts are affected.

...24 little hours

It's that time of year, just like Dinah Washington sang, only in reverse. Yesterday, we were outside enjoying ourselves, and within 24 hours the plants in the yard got yet another winter hammering. The desert willow doesn't look like its going to make it.
cell phone pic

Update: 2011-04-30
This is becoming a real weather pattern this year. This has to be adding a lot to the mountain snowpack if we get 6" (15 cm) in the valley:
cell phone pic

Hits the proverbial nail...

Yesterday, Diane Rehm interviewed Bernie Sanders, senator from Vermont. They discuss the shift of the center of the political spectrum toward the right. Sanders hits a lot of right notes in this interview- I'd vote for him. He voiced the opposition to extending the Bush era tax cuts; explains the extent to which wealth is being concentrated by the few; the destruction of the middle class; the decimation of the manufacturing labor base; the bailouts for the rich at the expense of the poor; and he doesn't spare our president. Sanders notes how much of missed opportunity we've had with him not living up to the promise for "change." Instead we've gotten a lot more of the same. By postponing taking a stand, we're just catering to the interests of the rich. If you weren't cynical about this country before, then you should be! We were wrong thinking that business doesn't control this country- the Supreme Court drove the point home, just in case we missed it.

Definitely worth listening to.

p.s.

Socialism never took root in America
because the poor see themselves
not as an exploited proletariat,
but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

--John Steinbeck

Update: 2011-05-01
Sanders appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.