Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at October 8th, 2004

So here’s an odd little ethical question that I’ve often pondered…

Soon after I got my current job, my supervisor in the job I left took me (and the rest of the department) out for lunch. We went to San Chez Bistro.

Bearing in mind that it basically serves appetizers, we all ordered and shared what we’d ordered. San Chez Bistro serves pork (which is just fine), but my supervisor was Muslim.

As it happened, I ordered something that did include pork (in the form of prosciutto). Like everything else, it got passed around the table. I don’t know if my supervisor had any, but I’ve often wondered if I should have said something (or simply not ordered pork…).

On the one hand, I tend to figure that people can make their own decisions about whether to follow their religion’s teachings. On the other, the man was from Pakistan originally. As such, it’s possible that he wouldn’t know what prosciutto is. If I were in that position, I might want to be warned.

Kind of funny the ethical situations one can get into in a religiously diverse society.

Posted by Jim at October 6th, 2004

So, I mentioned recently that I’d probably put my master’s project description online sometime. This is it.

It’s basically a content management system for a website. With any luck I’ll be able to finish before the semester ends.

One cool thing about working on something like this after being in the master’s program and having a few years’ experience under one’s belt is that I’m finally to a point where reading the documentation for the tools is no longer intimidating. It’s nice to be at a point where I don’t get stopped by concepts that are completely unfamilar but totally basic to the technology.

Now I get stopped by new and unusual concepts.

Posted by Jim at October 3rd, 2004

I’m a bit of a web statistics nut. Every month I go to my web stats page with a level of anticipation that rivals Christmas morning. Once I get them, I look them over for much longer than I need to, obsessing over the meaning of small, inconsequential details.

At work there’s some use for this. It really does matter which pages are getting hits and which ones aren’t. That helps me understand who comes to our website and why.

For my blog, of course, looking at stats is merely an exercise in self-absorption. Arguably, this might apply to writing my blog as well.

That being said, I’m still interested in who links to me. So, I look into the “external links” section of my site statistics with some enthusiasm. Some entries are easy to explain (links from the Pirate, Polytropos, and the late, great Blog that Goes Ping) but others make no sense.

For example, I seem to get a lot of external links from the /MT/mt.cgi folder of some people’s blogs. This wouldn’t surprise me if I’d every heard of these people (they might have been responding to a trackback), but in most cases I haven’t.

Even after looking over their actual blogs, I still haven’t found any evidence that they’ve linked to me. One of these days, I’ll have to find out exactly what the stats program uses as evidence of links, but until then I’ll post a few of them.

http://www.asianlabour.org
http://www.theisociety.net
http://www.evangelicaloutpost.com/
http://www.muninn.net/
http://www.asianamericanfilm.com

And then there are links that remind me that anyone could randomly come upon my blog. Here my site appears as a detail in a class assignment about blogs.

Should anyone mentioned on this page want me to remove the link I’ll gladly do it, but if someone has any idea how these sites link to me (or where) I’ll be interested in finding out.

Posted by Jim at October 1st, 2004

There’s a tool in FreeBSD that allows a person to update every program running on the machine. This is a good thing in that it’s always nice to run the most recent version of any program.

Portupgrade makes it really easy. If you want to, you only have to type in “portupgrade” and all your applications will “magically” improve themselves.

That’s the way it’s supposed to work anyway. As anyone who uses computers knows, things don’t always go as planned when you upgrade. And today I decided to take a chance. I’ve always been tempted to run portupgrade in the setting where it not only updates all programs, but also updates all the programs that those programs depend upon (if they happen to be old).

This is not a good thing because I haven’t really had a need to make my system totally up to date since installation. Thus, a lot of programs have the potential to be old. And I ran portupgrade in a mode where it upgrades everything.

Hopefully the computer will still work tomorrow morning. If not, I suppose I can always reinstall the operating system.