I first read about Xen while still at Cornell. I think it may have been my Junior year. I don’t have the magazines with me at the moment, so I can’t verify. When I finished reading about the new technology in Linux Format Magazine, I racked my brain, but couldn’t find a reason to run it. I mean, I could see a reason to run it if you were running servers, but not at home. So why put it on Fedora, Debian, and all the other distros? The paradigm wasn’t there, so I couldn’t figure it out.

It’s March 14 or 3/14 or 3.14 so happy Pi Day

3.14159….

The Hitch Hiker’s Guice to the Galaxy had such wonderful and amazing quotes in it that I was horribly dissapointed when the movie didn’t share more of these quotes. Here are two of my favorites, with more to follow.

The intro to the first book, which set the tone and got me very happy about the book to follow:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

In the olden days of computers, they were as good at communicating as the people on earth after the Tower of Babel incident. Not only did none of the scant networking protocols interact well, but the floppy disks were sometimes completely different sizes. That is, when there were disks; there were some systems based on cartridges, like video game systems. In fact, on an Ataric, not only could you play pong, but you could balance your finances via spreadsheet.

flickr has a top-secret formula, on par with Google’s PageRank, that ranks how interesting your pictures are. Since the top 500 appear each day on flickr.com/Explor e, they don’t want people to know the secret or they may game the system. Here are my top 10 most “interesting” pictures in suspense (reverse) order. See if you agree with flickr. #10

#9

#8

F-Spot is looking really good and sporting a much better looking website. They now support RAW files as well as XMP data. Perhaps some of their programmers can share this with the GIMP people - hint hint!

Fluxbox, one of my favorite window managers, and the one I’m using now, won a 2005 linuxquestions.org Choice award!

Fedora Core 5 release has been pushed back to 20 March.

God’s Debris, by Scott Adams, is a total mind-blow. It is, indeed, one of the most provacative philosophy books I have read in a long time. As Adams says himself, the book is not a reflection of his opinions or necessarily of anything more than nonsense. He just took the simplest answer for the philosophical questions he poses. However modestly he begins the book, it’s clear he hasn’t fooled around. The points he presents in the book on religion, the sexes, and other topics will cause you to seriously think about your beliefs and why things are the way they are on this earth. Especially poingnant is his chapter on Holy Land when we have so many groups fighting each other on account of Holy Land.

I wanted to get an idea of what the Brits thought of this whole scandal with the US allowing their ports to be run by a company owned by the country United Arab Emirates. I found a British article with an interesting side to the story. As you know, the ports used to be run by a British company. The article said that he couldn’t believe that a company based in England for over 140 years could be sold away to another country. It was, he said, one of the last vestiges of the British Empire. The former CEO was nearly outraged at this. The biggest irony in the whole situation is that the new company is owned by the state of Dubai, a former English colony. So a symbol of English colonialism was bought by a former colony. I couldn’t help but smile a little at that. That particular article didn’t have much to say about port security and Arabs. Personally, I think most of the American outrage came over the fact that the proposal came out of nowhere. Even pres Bush *claims* not to have known about it until it came out in the news even though he said he would veto any negative responses. Kinda weird for someone who was supposedly in the dark. In the end, it’ll probably pass, but his credibility has been sorely damaged. I heard the other day his approval ratings were down to 34%.

England is, well, England

Great Britain is England, Scotland and Wales

United Kingdom is England, Scotland, Wales, and South Ireland.

The British Isles are England, Scotland, wales, South Ireland, North Ireland, and some other little islands.

Sure, this is mostly a technology (read linux) blog with some politics thrown in. But long-time readers know I am a religious person. Not a religous fanatic, but religious nontheless. I just wanted to take a post to express my gratitude for things that have been going so well for me. For instance, my mother’s flights to and from, and her time in, Mexico were safe. There are many other things, some of which I may be able to discuss in the future. Thank you God.