With the demise of Geocities, I remember back to my first web site, which was hosted on Geocities, back in 1996/7. I can’t even remember the address, to be honest. It was a simple site, with little original content. But, it reminds me how transitory the internet really is. It is always changing, which is a great strength and weakness. This is why, through it all, I have kept Cyberphreak.com. Yeah, it costs money, but since I am paying for it, it is much less likely to disappear some day. Myspace, Facebook, Bebo will all be gone eventually, along with all that content. This is why books and magazines are still printed. The death of a website does not wipe out that knowledge.
In other news, I don’t know about your area, but Chicagoland had no summer this year, and, so far, a really cold fall. It dipped near freezing with frost everywhere this morning. I think Halloween will be a cold one this year.
I have been keeping busy, work is going well. Things are picking up, to the point that overtime has come back for the hourly people and a few people who were laid off are back. It is a good sign if the electronics industry is looking up, since electronics is in everything. I have never seen a recession this long or deep. I hope we never see one like this again.
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I really feel sorry for the typical windows user. You are surfing the web, and you come across this rather scary looking window which loads in your web browser:
It has changing numbers, a moving status bar and everything. Notice one other little thing, that is not a windows taskbar running under there. That’s KDE, and I don’t have a “C” “D” or any other lettered drive on my computer since I run Linux. I am sure for a typical windows user, this looks pretty convincing. It tries to download some ‘antivirus’ software, which I am sure either costs $100 a year or is actually a virus or trojan. Here lies the problem with everyone running the same operating system with the same theme, it is very easy to trick uneducated users. By the way, this is what my file browser actually looks like:
No drive letters, thank goodness. Drive letters are a really stupid hold over from Q-DOS from 1979. It really restricts how many partitions and drives you can have. Make everything a file or directory and be done with it. It has worked for UNIX for 40 years. I would show you what a virus alert looks like for Linux, but, alas, there are no in the wild viruses for Linux.
I had to add this blog post since Facebook doesn’t allow comments this long:
Turning now to the rest of the agenda for XXXX, the time is at hand this year to bring comprehensive, high quality health care within the reach of every American. I shall propose a sweeping new program that will assure comprehensive health insurance protection to millions of Americans who cannot now obtain it or afford it, with vastly improved protection against catastrophic illnesses. This will be a plan that maintains the high standards of quality in America’s health care. And it will not require additional taxes.
Now, I recognize that other plans have been put forward that would cost $80 billion or even $100 billion and that would put our whole health care system under the heavy hand of the Federal Government. This is the wrong approach. This has been tried abroad, and it has failed. It is not the way we do things here in America. This kind of plan would threaten the quality of care provided by our whole health care system. The right way is one that builds on the strengths of the present system and one that does not destroy those strengths, one based on partnership, not paternalism. Most important of all, let us keep this as the guiding principle of our health programs. Government has a great role to play, but we must always make sure that our doctors will be working for their patients and not for the Federal Government.
Now that you have read the above paragraphs, guess who wrote them and when. If it sounds like Obama, you are dead wrong. It was written by President Nixon, in 1974, for his State of the Union address. 35 years later, we still don’t have comprehensive health care in this nation. If you read about Obama’s and Nixon’s plans, they are very similar, and still just as needed.
In case any users out there use Firefox 3.5 series on Linux and have found that when you try to run a video full screen, Firefox crashes, here is why. It looks like Adobe does not play well with the OpenGL (GLX) implementation for most graphics cards. Firefox/Flash does not preload the GLX extensions properly so it causes a crash when Flash attempts to load the GLX interface to run fullscreen. To solve this, create a text file with the following contents:
#!/bin/sh
## replace firefox-3.6 with what you use, e.g. firefox, firefox-3.5, swiftfox
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libGL.so.1 firefox
Name it something like firefox_preloader.sh and make it executable. You can either point your shortcuts to it, or copy it to your /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin and use it launch Firefox. It is a minor kludge, but it works. This problem is reported on Nvidia and ATI cards. (I personally like Nvidia cards.)
After being greeted with one of he stinkiest diapers ever, Glenn decided to puke all over the only carpeted area in the house. He could puke on the 1450 square feet of hardwood, oh, no, he has to go on the carpet tile.
Kill me.