CryptoBox
Friday, June 18, 2004
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
liquid cooled macs
Liquid Cooled Macs
I've worked with some guys who say they used to maintain water-cooled
mainframes. Now Mac has a new G5 like that.
The mainframes used to sport what the old guys called a "de-ionized
loop" which circulated chilled water in and warm water out to some kind
of evaporator or condenser. Sort of like the primitive air conditioner
I once made for my car seat...until I spilled 5 gallons of ice water in
the car.
Saturday, June 05, 2004
Ronald Reagan
The end of an era: Reagan has died at 93. It makes me think of what a powerful symbol he was during my youth. As a young punk-rocker in the early 80's I made a spray-paint stencil of Wasted Youth's album cover featuring Reagan's face and painted it on the back of my jacket. That kids saw him as such a perfect icon to rebel against underscores what a perfect icon Reagan was for that era. One thing that I think all will agree upon about Reagan is that he was a real visionary who saw the moment when the Soviets were on their back and saw a way to end the cold war with honor for both sides. He and Gorbachev had a long summit, which at times was just the two of them and thier translators and nobody else, where they discussed nuclear disarmament. The amazing thing was that Reagan actually wanted to destroy ALL nuclear weapons on both sides and totally eliminate them as a weapon altogether. Unfortunately the compromise they came to did not destroy all of them. However, I think it is a real testament to what kind of statesmanship and leadership he was capable of. Eventually, of course, the two leaders signed the INF treaty, beginning the reduction of nuclear arms. Can you imagine Bush doing that?
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Thursday, June 03, 2004
Free Culture
I just began reading Lawrence Lessig's book, Free Culture, which just came out a couple of months ago. So far it is a very well articulated study of a concept that has been bouncing around in my head for several years now: Corporations are gaining too much control over our culture and are litigating and lobbying to control how culture is created and consumed and that this threatens the very foundations of many of our cultural traditions.
He was one of the speakers at the Harvard Law program I went to recently.
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Quantum Cyptography
I wish I'd blogged this first, but a couple of weeks ago SlashDot posted a link to a recent announcement of great interest to crypto-dilettantes and other IT security types. Seems the EU is trying to use the magic of physics to defeat Echelon, the NSA's alleged super-sniffer, program.
How to read Macchiavelli
Unfortunately, Machiavelli has been read by generations of capitalist leaders as an endorsement of their most primitive and anti-social urges. This is not the author's fault. Any ideological book can be interpreted as a guide to selfishness and hedonism. Similar misinterpretations have happened to Darwin, Adam Smith, The Bible, and just about any other manifesto or holy book you can imagine.
Machiavelli did not advocate cruelty and treachery; The Prince is really just a guide about how a leader should behave in order to survive and prosper when surrounded by the lowest sort of allies and opponents alike. I think the best read of Machiavelli can be had by discounting the advice you want to hear. The most growth will come from meditating on those observations that most displease or vex you. It is a book about trying to be strong, just, and wise, while threatened by weak, corrupt, and foolish people.
Madness
Recent experience has gotten me thinking deeply about madness in its many forms. I think that dementia and certain forms of new-age spiritualism are just two sides of the same coin. Adherents of cat-phychic-phonemna, etc. will take offence, and I'm sorry. But I think it is very significant that psuedo-scientific/spiritual "powers" like this are on the rise as America ages en mass.
Spooks & databases
Fed spooks still mining commercial databases looking for terrorist patterns of behavior. This is very creepy. They are even looking at Internet searches.
See: the article
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Fink for OSX.
You may have heard of Fink. But if not, you're missing out on a great opportunity to turn your OS X computer into a real Unix workstation. This means that you can easily install and use all of those cool open-source tools that Linux and BSD snobs are always talking about.
Fink is a very creative combination of "packaging" tools for two different Unix-ish operating systems. First, bow-down to the power of FreeBSD because FreeBSD has an incredible system called (confusingly) "Ports". It's basically a way for you to very quickly install any of about 4,000 open-source (free) programs that you may have heard of whithout having to waste your time searching for software dependencies and code libraries. Debian Linux took this basic idea and brought it to the Linux world. And now Fink brings Debian's
"Packages" (same as "Ports") system to Darwin, the BSD-based Unix operating system at the heart of Apple's OS X.
I'm installing Fink now. Click back here on the "Comments" link below to see how it went. So far it seems very similar to installs on FreeBSD, which is to say that so far there are none of the stupid missing library or broken link problems that ultimately led me away from RedHat Linux.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Reading Plato's Phaedo. Phaedo is a socratic dialogue wherein Socrates proves things like the soul having existed before birth and after death. He also demonstrates that things that are seen are in a constant state of change - and things that are unseen are eternally unchanging. An example of the latter is the concept of truth - it does not change, yet can not be observed, yet the mind (and the soul) knows it implicitly.
Laws such as SB-1386 are a great opportunity for salesmen. I am currently stuck in a meeting listening to some dweeb “consult” about those kinds of laws. I feel like handing him a copy of Death of a Salesman. I've worked alongside a lot of sales guys and when I saw that play onstage (starring Brian Denehy) I could not believe that someone had published a book that so accurately and brutally captured the pointless and hollow existence that so many men fall into by living on hype, lies, bullshit, and arrogance. It is a heartbreaking story. Whenever I want to yell at a dumbshit salesman, I just remember that story and I cut him some slack.
