Again, courtesy of xkcd, here’s one I just can’t stop going back to look at.

As a general rule, Linux users are not terribly prone to loyalty to any particular Linux distribution. This is due to the fact that open standards allow it to be generally pretty easy to move one’s settings from one distro to another. Thus there have been several darlings of the Linux movement. In the beginning, Slackware was introducted to server rooms and was the most popular. Then Red Hat Linux became the new distro to use with its easy to use GUIs. Mandrake (now Mandriva) became the best distro when Red Hat began to slow down their pace, leaving Mandrake as the most bleeding edge and easiest for new users. It was known for “just working” even if being on the bleeding edge also meant it was chronically unstable. Now the distro to be running is Ubuntu. It works flawlessly with most hardware, is easy to install, has a liveCD, and the great apt-get system to resolve package dependencies.

Recently I’ve been a tad annoyed at the criticisms of the Sugar interface to the laptops in the One Laptop per Child project (OLPC). The developers chose to forgo the desktop metaphor as the kids over there in the third world don’t even have desks or files or anything like that. Instead they tried to reengineer things to be as fun and intuitive as possible for the kids that will get the laptops. So many people have complained that the interface is so non-intuitive that there’s no way these kids will get the interface. It should have been made to mimic Windows they claim! I think they just find it unintuitive because we’ve been using the desktop metaphor here since the 80s.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the Walmart logo danced to regeton, a mostly crappy mix of reggae and booty music? Me neither! That’s why this video was so surprising. Enjoy!

With all the news recently about whether Tillman’s death was just a ploy by the White House to make the war sound great or whatever the heck was going on, I was very surprised to find that I had blogged about it when it happened.

You can read it here.

Here’s part of what I wrote:

It’s not often that one finds acts of selflessness and courage nowadays. Especially here in the States people seem to only be chasing after money, power, and fame. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with those goals - we simply tend to take things too far and puruse those goals at the blatant disregard for others. That’s why Tillman’s story has made such an impression on me. He was a football player who gave up a multi-million dollar a year contract to go fight in Afghanistan. He died last week in post-war combat.

Recently, Penguin Pete, who’s on my blogroll, wrote this piece about his disapproval about where Ubuntu was taking Linux. Some of his key arguments were….doh! He removed the posts. I guess I’ll have to summarize. He said, in a nutshell, that too many Windows users were going to Ubuntu and expecting it to be just like Windows. But Linux is not Windows. This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with people going from Windows to Linux, but their demands to rearrange Linux, which was made in the image of Unix, to be more like Windows, raelly rubs some people the wrong way. He suggested that if users wanted a FOSS version of Windows, they should go to ReactOS, a Windows clone.

I found this great web comic, xkcd, courtesy of my brother Dan. I don’t know how the site is overall and they do have a warning that some strips could be bad, but I found this one hilarious.

I love this particular strip because of the crazy circular logic involved to keep yourself sane if you start to succomb to urban legends and conspiracy theories. Here’s a mind trip for you - if The Matrix was real as told in the movie The Matrix, then the machines should make the movie The Matrix so that we would think it was just Hollywood machinations. If anyone came to us saying that The Matrix was real, we’d just dismiss them as a looney fanboy. Before we might think they were crazy, but maybe not. But after the movie came out, if they suggested such a thing, they got it from watching the movie. I know…don’t think about it too hard…..

Recently I’ve been reading a lot about guns. First, there’s Andrew talking about how he’s really into guns now. Then there’s esr’s Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun about how guns are our ethical duty to own. Finally, there’s that Cho kid from Virginia Tech that everyone keeps talking about. So guns have been metaphorically waved in my face quite a bit recently.

All three events have made me think about why it is I don’t own a gun. There are myriad reasons. For starters, I would be highly annoyed (to put it mildly) if someone broke into my house and killed me with my own gun. I’m too lazy to do the research in this case because I think that gun control is like abortion - all the information out there is total BS. Each side claims to have irrefutable reasons as to why they are right. However, the anti-gun people always counter the pro-gun intruder defense by saying that the intruders kill people with their own guns. How often does this actually happen? No one knows. Second, I’m afraid that my kids (well, when I have some) will find it and kill themselves or someone else. Again, there are tons of stories about kids killing each other event if the parents told them they weren’t allowed to touch it or had the bullets somewhere else or both. I know someone near my family died this way, but I don’t remember who - it was my parents’ friend. Third, related to these two is the scenario where I kill my own kid because I think he/she is an intruder. I’ve only heard this in that stupid chain letter and I know chain letters are BS. However, I could totally see it happening - it’s why was always careful when I woke my dad up in the middle of the night. He had a machete by the bed. (It’s a Cuban redneck thing)