David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I’m outta here. In just a few hours, I’ll be boarding a plane with 37 other crazy people and we’ll be touching down a few more hours later. We’ll be there a week.
Meanwhile, you can read about us at www.adventures.org.
I’ve got people keeping an eye on things around here while I’m gone. There’ll be a little new content. And of course I’m sure there’ll be comments on some of the old stuff.
I’m equally sure I’ll have lots of stories when I get back.
Since there was no Windows 2000 version of my book Optimizing Windows, sometimes people ask me what tweaks they can use to improve Windows 2000’s performance.
It turns out there are a few things you can do to optimize Windows 2000. Here are some tips that I use on a fairly regular basis.
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I hope you can help me.
I’m looking for the place I need to go to resign. Reign from what, you ask? Why, resign from being a human being. I’ve been a human being my whole life, and I’ve decided I don’t like being one. It’s time I try something else.
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Steve was coding last night, so if the site was acting really goofy on you for a while, that was why. Meanwhile he got a few chuckles out of some minor changes I’d made to the code myself. Now we’ve got a recent comments sidebar, which’ll help me keep up with conversations on those really old threads. That’s always a good thing…
We had two Christian authors at church Wednesday night. I went to Tim Wesemann’s presentation. The topic was family devotions with your children. I don’t have children. I’m still glad I went, because I didn’t have family devotions growing up, and neither did anyone else I know. So I’m dealing today with people in their twenties and even in their thirties who don’t know how to pray.
It’s a good thing I learned how to pray when I was 23, so there’s someone now, four years later, who can teach them, eh?
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Tonight, as I was preparing for my upcoming mission trip (read: doing laundry and waiting around on it), I started messing with a piece of software called bk2site.
Like most cool software, it’s included with Debian. RPMs and tarballs are available if your distro of choice lacks it. Its purpose is to take your Netscape/Mozilla/Galeon bookmarks file and a few RSS feeds of your choice and make a site out of it, much like the Yahoo! of many years ago before its size got out of hand.
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The next time ZDNet runs a story about Linux and you start feeling the urge to click on the link and read it, I’ve got a piece of advice for you.
Lie down until it goes away.
If you have a clue about Linux, the story will just make you mad. If you’re trying to learn about Linux, ZDNet will fill you up with enough misinformation to confuse you for weeks.
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One of my professors at the University of Missouri, whom I fully expected to outlive me, as well as all of my classmates, died in 2002. His name was Walter Johnson. He was the most unforgettable professor of my career.
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I keep seeing “someday someone will write a DOS edit clone for Linux”-type longings in Linux publications. These are pointless, because someone already did, years ago.
And no, its name isn’t vi or emacs. It’s a true blue (it really is blue) DOS-like editor that uses a lot of the same keystrokes as the Microsoft QuickBasic-derived editor we all learned to tolerate, if not love, in the early ’90s. Hey, it wasn’t very powerful or fast, I know, but it was easy to learn and a whole lot better than edlin.
This one’s called SETedit, it’s from Argentina, and it’s just as easy to use but a whole lot more powerful. It’s also been ported to Win32, if you want to run it in more than just Linux.
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Probably everyone who’s ever been to Sunday School is familiar with the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of his son, Isaac.
Matchbook-cover version: To test Abraham’s faith, God ordered Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his long-promised son, born to him and his wife Sarah when they were aged 100 and 90, respectively. He was their only son. Abraham loaded them up, and as he prepared to slay his son on the altar, an angel came to him and stopped him.
Did you know there’s another case of human sacrifice to God in the Old Testament, and the Bible is a whole lot less forthcoming on whether the burnt offering actually happened?
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