Can I get someone to hum me a D sharp? Kthx.
better !pout !cry
better watchout
lpr why
santa claus town
cat /etc/passwd >list
ncheck list
ncheck list
cat list | grep naughty >nogiftlist
cat list | grep nice >giftlist
santa claus town
who | grep sleeping
who | grep awake
who | grep bad || good
for (goodness sake) {
be good
}
better !pout !cry
better watchout
lpr why
santa claus town
Merry Christmas from all of us here at Guerrilla Tech Support, to all y’all wherever you are.
Wow, I got a lot of hits on that last post, which got me to wondering what others have been saying in the last 48 hours or so. So here’s a semi-random sample of some of the Linux/free software/free culture bloggers that I read and enjoy, and their reactions to the Obama victory.
Penguin Pete – I Have Never Been This Shocked
My concession is that I have been too cynical before. I had given up on my country. I had seen too many former friends in the past eight years turn to enemies because they suddenly came out Red (as in Red State) and I would not be a party to their terror-mongering. I had seen too much civilization rot back to savagery. I had seen too much racism. I had seen too much enlightenment torn down by too much ignorance.
Roy Schestowitz – Change, Hopefully?
There will be a new guy and a new political party in the House. My personal feeling, however, is that the United States administration has done nothing to rid itself of corruption, despite the depression that seems to be coming as a result of deregulation. This means that those running the country will continue to be mega-corporations which fund and contribute to decision-making figures like Obama.
Aaron Seigo – Overcoming Cynicism
Can we overcome our cynicism and believe? .. and not in a God we can not see or in people we build up to heights they can never live up to .. but in each other as we are right now, tonight?
Works With U – Now The Real Work Begins
We’ve done a lot of things right — and a lot of things wrong — as a nation. Regardless of whom you supported in the US Presidential Election, it’s time for us to capture the energy we’re witnessing this evening and move forward. We’ve all got a lot of work to do.
Hi there. You know me, I’m Pete Daniels. The guy who wrote this. Today I’m going to write something a little different.
Last night I (of all people) was in downtown St. Paul, at the Minnesota DFL election day party. Now one thing you have to understand here is that the last time I was in downtown St. Paul I was assaulted and gassed and brutalized by the police state at the Republican National Convention. That was only two months ago, and my feelings about it are still fairly raw. Going back to St. Paul was slightly weird for me.
After Obama’s victory speech last night a few of us who were there went down to the place we were attacked on Labor Day. It was… an emotional experience for me, one that I’m not even going to try to convey here. No offense, but you just wouldn’t get it.
The whole night was incredible, and needless to say it was a hell of a party. I firmly expected a Democratic victory and I didn’t think it would be close, but holy shit. As Nancy Pelosi said in her press conference early in the evening, it would be “a wave upon a wave.” Fifteen seats in the House, four or five in the Senate. The rejection of the South Dakota abortion bill. And state after state, a wave upon a wave for Barack Obama. As we were getting ready to leave for the party last night ABC called Pennsylvania for Obama, and I looked to the person I was with and said “It’s over. This is what you’re going to see for the rest of the night.” And damned if it wasn’t.
Last night in St. Paul grown men wept and people danced on Kellougg Boulevard. Strangers embraced, children stared, and everyone got totally hammered. A few blocks away, two Americans (who by the way, love each other very much) stood on a street corner and watched the lights reflecting off the river and listened to history happening above us, and in a small way took back the spirit of our city from a great darkness.
Do I sound like I drank the Kool Aid? I did not. I’ve never made any bones about the fact that I wouldn’t vote for Obama, and I did not. I said in the post I linked to above that Barack Obama was “not the change we need,” and I stand by that. We’re in deep shit. America’s on the ropes and the world’s on the brink. We have serious problems and we need serious solutions, and no one man is going to magically fix things, and to project that sort of expectation on anyone instead of taking responsibility for our own lives and our kids’ futures is childish. Grow up. No one man can be “the change we need.”
We are the change we need. We have to be, or we’re finished. But even if Barack Obama getting elected President isn’t the change we need, it may very well be the chance we get.
Let none of that diminish the fact that we saw history last night. In twenty years, you’ll remember where you were.
-p.
For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime — two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.
Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after the children fall asleep and wonder how they’ll make the mortgage or pay their doctors’ bills or save enough for their child’s college education. There’s new energy to harness, new jobs to be created, new schools to build, and threats to meet, alliances to repair.
The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you, we as a people will get there.
There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as president. And we know the government can’t solve every problem.
But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And, above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation, the only way it’s been done in America for 221 years – block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand…
This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.
It can’t happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice. So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other…
In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people.
…Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.
So here’s an LJ meme.
Ten Things I Wish I Could Say To Ten Different People:
These are my first thoughts after my first ten minutes with the new Facebook (this, like a great many of my posts, started as an email to friends. Hi friends!)
New Facebook is here. And despite myself and my total readiness to hate it, y’know, it’s not bad. People and their five thousand stupid fucking applications no longer have the power to turn pages into an unreadable mess, which has been my biggest gripe since the applications framework hit the streets a year and a half ago. So kudos to the Facebook developers for knowing what the problem was and dealing with it.
That having been said, I dunno about all this ajax-y “drag all these little boxes around and customize your layout!” crap. I didn’t really like it when Google did it, and Facebook’s implementation is not as good as Google’s was. It’s an unwieldy implementation of an idea that was simply not that great to begin with.
I do like the “tabs” thing they’ve got going on though. One tab for your “wall” (which has morphed from a quick way to drop a message on your friends into this super-behemoth that has now completely swallowed what used to be “status updates,” so I guess it’s good that it now has its own tab, but really I think it was fine before), one for basic info like school and work and interests (n00bs, did you know that used to be all of Facebook? It’s true!), and one for all your applications. You can no longer have applications on your “front page” (which is good for the reasons I mentioned above, but that’s no reason to punish me and my three tastefully and thoughtfully arranged applications), but you can make any of your applications into its own tab. Okay compromise, I guess.
Oh, and my greasemonkey scripts are all b0rk3n again. Why do they do this to me every three months?
So to sum it up, not horrible, not fantastic, some good ideas, some sloppy band-aids over problems they created by fucking with things that didn’t need fucking with in the first place, and some breakage of whole new things that worked fine before for no discernable reason whatever. Which if you’ve been a Facebook user for any length of time at all, is probably exactly what you expected.
-p.
I don’t usually do drive-by link postings, but I’ll make an exception for this excellent linux.com article on OpenStreetMap.
We have written about the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project many times, but we have yet to explain how to get started with it as a contributor. Since it is the vacation high season in the Northern Hemisphere and many more people will be hitting the maps, this is the perfect time. You can contribute a lot to the project even if you don’t own a Global Positioning System (GPS) device — or even a compass.
This is not meant to be an authoritative guide to the project; OSM maintains a detailed wiki with extensive documentation for newbies and experts alike, in multiple languages.
OpenStreetMap is an awesome endeavor: trying to create a free (as in freedom) street atlas of the planet, and make it all available under a Creative Commons license for anyone to use (for instance, the KDE globe application Marble uses OpenStreetMap data). No small potatoes. But you can help. There’s a ton of raw data in the form of census maps, Yahoo aerial photography, and just about every other freely licensed map data they’ve been able to get their hands on, so the base is there. All you have to do is make an account and help map your city, your town, your neighborhood. Put in landmarks, make sure the one-ways are pointing the right way. Easy stuff, and if enough people do it, amazing results. Give them twenty minutes, and they’ll give you the world.
-p.
I put together a little thing for an email list I’m on when I feel like doing so, but today’s is such a special one, and such a vivid memory from my childhood, that I wanted to share it with you all. So, without further ado…
August 4, 1993: In the 3rd inning on a hot Texas afternoon, Nolan Ryan hits 26 year old Robin Ventura with a pitch. In what must have seemed like a great idea at the time, Ventura charges the mound. The result is captured in the immortal image below:
Ah, memories...
It was a scene that was broadcast nationwide and replayed at least umpty-billion times. The 46 year old Ryan (that’s a 20 year gap for those of you keeping score at home), in a move he later claimed to have learned as a youth to subdue cattle on his Texas ranch, proceeded to put Ventura in a headlock and beat the absolute living shit out of him. This is the only video I can find of it right now and it doesn’t really do it justice, but I remember being 12 and watching this on the Sunday Game of the Week. It was merciless. It was like something from a middle school hallway. Robin Ventura bled, a lot, and was probably lucky to not get his nose broken.
So anyway, this goes on for some little while, until one of Ryan’s teammates (a young Pudge Rodriguez) pulls Ryan back, obviously pitying Ventura for being utterly unmanned on national television. Ventura would go on to play professional ball for thirteen years, get elected to the All Star Team twice, win six Gold Gloves and hit 294 home runs. But he would always and forever be remembered as the man Nolan Ryan beat the piss out of. This here is an object lesson in the price of fame, kids.
To add even more insult to already sufficient injury, Ventura and Sox manager Gene Lamont were ejected from the game. Ryan was not even warned, as he had never left the mound. Ryan did not allow another hit for the remainder of the game.
There’s a lesson to be learned here. And that lesson is this: Nolan Ryan will totally kick your ass, and when he’s done he will tell you to get the fuck off his lawn, son.
Have a great Monday, everyone.
-p.
