Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at June 6th, 2004

So, I moved over to Gnome 2.6 from 2.4 over the past week. It was less a result of enthusiasm for a new version of the Gnome desktop than a desire to avoid screwing up my life.

The great thing about FreeBSD is that it’s easy to upgrade to a new version of a program from the old version. FreeBSD automatically upgrades all the old things that a new version depends upon. This works great except in one situation.

If you’re using a program that includes many parts and you upgrade a different program that depends on some (but not all) of those parts, the original program may stop working or work rather strangely afterwards. In reading blogs, I ran across the story of that sounds rather similar to that.

Thus, in an effort to avoid having that randomly happen to Gnome when I’m not expecting it, I upgraded Gnome myself, running the script that FreeBSD provided.

The first time I tried, it took literally hours and then informed me that it couldn’t install some libraries. In looking over the instructions, I suspected that I would have to deinstall an old version of a program (gstreamer) and install the new version. That’s where the log seemed to be informing me the problem existed anyway.

GNOME’s documentation, however, seemed to indicate that installation problems with gstreamer had been solved earlier. This worried me because I wasn’t sure what would happen if I deinstalled an old version and installed a new version that this installer was supposed to install itself.

Worse, I was trying to think this out and read the documentation while watching Abby. Trying to do system administration or even thinking coherently while a toddler is entertaining him/herself is near impossible. Bored toddlers have a tendancy to pick on their siblings, hit things with toys, climb on parents and sometimes press computer reset buttons as a way of making life interesting.

They also sometimes attempt to press buttons on the keyboard. This is particularly bad when you’re logged in as the root user. Root users are capable of deleting the operating system if they so desire.

Thus, rather than trying to figure things out (a lost cause given my state of mind at that moment), I just ran the GNOME 2.6 installer a second time, occupying my computer for the next 6 hours. I went to bed before it finished.

The next morning, however, I was relieved to find that it had worked. I can’t say that I’m awed by 2.6, but I don’t have any complaints. It works. That’s all I ask for.

Posted by Jim at June 5th, 2004

On Wednesday, a man from Detroit Edison (our gas provider) came and installed a new gas meter inside our house. Our previous meter may have dated back to the building of the house. There were no problems with the old meter, but they replace them whenever they find them.

It smelled strongly of gas in that room of the basement, but since he had bled some gas off when he installed the meter that was to be expected.

On Thursday, it still smelled bad.

On Friday, it smelled worse. I wasn’t sure if it smelled that much worse, but Kristen was quite sure, so I called the gas company.

They had someone there within a few minutes.

It turned out that the piece of metal that used to suspend the old meter in the air had a problem at the point where the meter, the piece of metal and a pipe met. As such, it was leaking a lot of gas. Naturally, the man who came didn’t have the part needed to fix it, but he did call a “fitter” and turned off the gas.

When the fitter did come (an hour later), he fixed things fairly quickly.

It’s an event that makes me happy that 1) I live in an old house that lets a lot of air in and out and 2) I don’t smoke.

Posted by Jim at June 4th, 2004

Kristen and I have been home for the week (with children) on vacation. As such, we’ve had to find ways to entertain them and ourselves during the day. The alternative is 1) wasting a vacation and 2) going insane while watching 2 toddlers in one house for hours on end.

Yesterday we went to Millenium Park, a new park that the city of Grand Rapids/Kent County created on the northwest side of the city. It’s not far from John Ball Park Zoo (where we went on Tuesday) in some ways.

Millenium Park has (among other things) places to grill and eat picnic lunches, a beach (not open yesterday), and lots of playground equipment. Children can play there for hours. The equipment includes a climbing wall, some very tall slides, familiar equipment such as teeter-totters redesigned to the point of being unrecognizable (but still usable), and some things that I’m not sure I can even describe.

Abby and Rebecca did not want to leave.

Another option for cheap entertainment: Grand Rapids’ airport’s viewing area.

Though closed after 9/11, the airport viewing area is open again. If you drive slightly to the south of the airport, you can stop on a hill with some picnic tables and watch planes take off. It was a bit slow initially when we arrived, but within the hour we’d seen some 7-8 planes take off or land.

Rebecca and Abby hung onto my legs when the larger planes took off, but again, did not want to leave.

We intend to hit Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts some time this weekend.

Posted by Jim at June 2nd, 2004

A few years ago, back when Ed was living in Chicago, I drove down to meet him and go see Yes in concert. It happened that people could go see Yes and Kansas for free if they went to “Taste of Chicago,” a festival at which Chicago’s restaurants sold food and people could attend a variety of musical events.

We walked in during the end of Kansas’ set (which we really hadn’t wanted to see anyway) and before the beginning of Yes.

Ed surveyed the crowd. It was noticeably different in ethnic make-up from the crowds near the food. “This is the whitest crowd I have ever seen in Chicago,” he said. He was probably right about that.

An exception to this rule stood about 10 feet ahead of us–an African-American man who obviously knew all the songs because he was singing along the entire time.

While listening to NPR today, I was amused to hear a commentary on Yes from one African-American man’s perspective. He loves the group and apparently his friends in the 1970’s did as well–to the point of renting two rows of seats to their concerts in Philadelphia and making black power signs and high fives when Yes started playing “Heart of the Sunrise.”

Strange and amusing.

Posted by Jim at June 2nd, 2004

I moved over to using FreeBSD as a desktop computer recently.

As a result, I’ve become much more familiar with the operating system than I was from using it at work. That’s because I’m just using it at work as a file and print server. After setting up samba and configuring a few programs of personal interest (I installed erlang, php, mysql…), I haven’t had much reason to change anything.

To be honest, owing to the fact that it’s not at all connected to the internet, I haven’t even bothered to do very many security updates on it. As such, I haven’t used the ports collection much.

It is easier to deal with than I expected.

Basically what the ports collection allows a person to do is to automatically download updated versions of the programs you use (or even the operating system itself), compile the programs and install them. There’s often some post installation work. Also, there are times when you have to manually download a file yourself (like java) and put it where it can be used (/usr/ports/distfiles).

It turns out that there’s a program to test which server would make for the fastest download (fastest_cvsup). In addition, there’s a program called “portupgrade” which allows a person to identify which ports need to be updated and to update them all at once rather than update each individually.

I’d argue that it’s not quite as easy as the Debian Linux system, but it does have it’s good points.

Posted by Jim at June 1st, 2004

During the past year or so, I’ve often wondered about whether the parallel some people make between Iraq and Vietnam really makes much sense. For example, Vietnam was an attempt to indirectly work against the goals of China and the Soviet Union. In Iraq, we went to war against a nation with much less power than ourselves. We are also losing far fewer people than in Vietnam.

There may be similarities in that there’s ongoing resistance to us, but in Vietnam we had North Vietnam vs. South Vietnam sort of situation. In Iraq we’ve conquered the country and now we’re dealing with the normal cost of occupation–military personnel being sent home in coffins.

I’d argue that the Phillipines are a much better historical comparison.

President William McKinley led the war against Spain, picking up some territory in the bargain (Guam, the Phillipines, Puerto Rico…), viewed the war as an opportunity to liberate Cuba and to Christianize the Phillipines. Interestingly, the period in which this happened a period of revival in the US. This was the period of Dwight Moody and many others with the goal of evangelizing the world.

Here’s a quote from William McKinley as reported by Mark Noll (a historian), “there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”

What we got out of going to the Phillipines was a long occupation, resistance to the occupation, some atrocities and eventually withdrawal.

Interestingly, one of the people involved in pushing the war against Spain was Theodore Roosevelt, a person Bush apparently admires. Also, I’d argue that US has had a big push toward evangelical influence in politics for the last long while, much like the Protestant influence of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (of which McKinley was a high point). I’m not arguing that Christianity is the problem here, but there are similarities in the tone of our period and that one. For example… “muscular Christianity” and the Christian Businessman’s Association of that period vs. the Promise Keepers in ours.

If you feel the urge, you can check out look at someone else’s argument for similarities between Iraq and the Phillipines. Unlike me, the guy who wrote it appears to actually have some background in history…

Oh… One other thing, I was interested to note what a blogger in the Phillipines thought of the situation.