For want of a better title…

Elliot graduated from UTD Saturday. I’ve never been to a US university graduation ceremony before, and I thought it was very well done. I still don’t understand why it’s called “commencement”.

The one sour note for me was the commencement speaker. It just seems like it’s become obligatory to describe the world in terms of terrorism. My own opinion: that means the terrorists have won. They, not we, define our world now.

Well, UTD would never be likely to be considered a center of opposition to the establishment. Even so, to hear a student claim that terrorism is the result of the modern-day loss of compassion brought on by the information age and high-speed computing, and that video games desensitize us to violence is sadenning. If a young person is out of touch with reality, I’d prefer it to be in a creative, challenging way, not in media-fed adherence to fear.

Where was the computerized information age when Hitler exterminated six million individuals? Where was the compassion in the crusades, or the Inquisition, or in the buying and selling of human lives in the slave trade? People have always been capable of great evil, and blaming technology or lack of the One True Faith doesn’t help recognize and deal with the nature of that evil.

Meh. I need to stop whining about politics. But before I drop the subject completely, I came across a World of Warcraft image that I took as part of a humorous story a while back. I didn’t see the resemblance when I took the screenshot – someone pointed it out later in an IRC channel.

George and Laura, or “Chimp Gone Wild”

(“Laura” is my old character Erice, a warlock. “George” came in a gift-wrapped box from the WoW equivalent of Santa.)

I guess it’s a sign of how I perceive the world to be that I can’t bring myself to give this entry the title I want, which is “I want the terrorists to win,” or even give it the title it has without adding this disclaimer. Yes, it’s irony, dammit. Bloggers seem to love online quizzes, so I figured I’d post the results of one of the better ones I’ve taken:

Do you want the terrorists to win?

I have to admit I totally failed the quiz linked on the results page: “Do you drink Republican cool-aid“. Zero percent.

—

In other news, Mr. “I have a PhD and I’m not afraid to use it” has won. Again. I came up with an alternative that followed all of his rules, and he changed his rules and turned it down flat. If this wasn’t about the artistic opportunities of a 10-year-old kid I wouldn’t even care, but I guess working parents have no business wanting kids to play music.

It’s good to have some pressure to write again… now I’d just better be sure that lunchtime meetings don’t lose me my day job.

Way too many people are writing about politics these days, and most of them are smarter than me on the subject. But it’s election day, and I’m despondent for the future, so what the heck. I’ll post this tomorrow, whatever the results.

Continue Reading »

Terry Pratchett just gets better. I’ve always loved the Discworld books (except the first two; they’re okay, but not up to the standards of storytelling of the later ones). The stories are so imaginative that it’s easy to forgive a few places with sloppy point of view or a climax that drags a little.

I think one of the reasons his books work so well is that you have to suspend so much disbelief that it leaves you open for unexpectedly touching moments or drama that, if you’d consider it outside of the Discworld context, would be clumsy. “Reaper Man” and “Soul Music“, for instance, are surprisingly moving stoies.

The third Tiffany Aching book, Wintersmith, is probably the best I’ve ever seen him write. Even if it is in the teen section. While it might be being marketed as young adult, that seems due to its thirteen-year-old heroine rather than any attempt to write down to a junior market. There’s still plenty of boozing, innuendo (“Is this about sex?” Tiffany asks Nanny Ogg) and musings on what the Nac Mac Feegle wear under their kilts. If Nanny doesn’t add any verses to “The hedgehog can never be buggered”, well, she hasn’t done that in a while.

What do you need to make a man?

Iron enough to make a nail,
Lime enough to paint a wall,
Water enough to drown a dog,
Sulfur enough to stop the fleas,
Poison enough to kill a cow,
Potash enough to wash a shirt,
Gold enough to buy a bean,
Silver enough to coat a pin,
Lead enough to ballast a bird,
Phosphor enough to light the town,

Strength enough to build a home,
Time enough to hold a child,
Love enough to break a heart.

Open Source is the worst form of software except all the others that I’ve tried.

I’m still in pain from migrating my mail system from mireille (my server in Tool, TX) to kirika (my supposed replacement server in Plano, TX).

With one exception, every package has somewhat adequate documentation, but none do a very good job of explaining the connection between this package and all the others that are required. Mail Transfer Agent, spam checker, virus scanner, delivery agent, authentication agent, management / configuration utilities, mail server (the piece that your mail client actually connects to) – all of these have to work together. If they don’t, you will a) lose legitimate mail, b) get inundated with spam, c) act as a relay for spammers / malicious software, d) any or all of the preceding.

There are HOWTOs around which cover subsets of the whole system, but I haven’t found a single one that adequately covers everything. Then, we used the most complete HOWTO to set up the mail system at the office. A few months later, a stupid configuration mistake in this instructions led to a cumulative problem that caused our mail system to go into meltdown, and took a few days to fix. Still, I had everything mostly working (having done it before) in just a couple of days.

The one piece that has woefully inadequate documentation is the mail server component, cyrus-imapd. It supports “virtual domains”, which I need, except that the configuration utility supports a different implementation of virtual domains, which required some serious hacking. And then it’s not directly compatible with its own authentication server. That took many hours googling, and I found the workaround by accident in an unrelated thread. And even so, it can’t support my primary domain, which required a “roll-your-own” kludge on my part.

The upside is that the 25,000 spam emails or so that I’ve accumulated in the last few months has dropped to 3-4 per day, which I can live with. It’s definitely been worth the effort.

All this makes commercial packages look attractive. In a homogeneous system, all of the parts designed to work together will be documented together. Until you start to consider that the main reason I’ve had so much trouble is that I’m trying to do something not quite standard. I dread to think what an Exchange admin has to go through to do anything that wasn’t directly intended by the developers. At least I can do what I need, even if it’s painful.

Now, just another twelve or so domains to migrate… (sigh).

Would you bother to get into an email argument with someone who puts PhD in his reply address?

Well, I’ll know better next time.

(Edit: By that, I don’t mean arguing with someone who’s smarter than me. I do that all the time. I’m just wondering about the kind of person whose ego requires PhD to show up in “From” lines.)

… so I should, too.

I guess.

I’ve been fooling around with WordPress for a while, so it’s far easier now for me to set up the blog than to think of a title for it. Maybe in a week or three.

For today’s comment: spent a long time wandering around Barnes and Noble. Mainly the SF section, as usual. I almost left without a book today, but saw Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett’s latest in the new releases – for teens. It makes sense, I guess, the Tiffany series is intended for young adults, but that’s not where I expect to look for Pratchett.

On a slightly more serious note: I didn’t learn of Roger Zelazny’s death until at least a year after it happened. Before I knew, I’d regularly check the Z section of any bookstore in case there was a new anthology including something I may have missed; or, better yet, a novel. I’ve never been especially pleased with the last Amber book, and had always hoped there might be just one more… but no. I was dismayed to learn that there would be no more.

Today I looked again. There’s a new edition of Amber – all ten novels in one huge paperback – and two other books. That’s it, for a writer who used to have half the shelf. I understand why, and there really is no point in continuing to sell books that everyone who’d read them already owns. But it saddens me to see a great name fade.

Everyone who has even the vaguest notion that Science Fiction can be more than high-tech adventure stores owes it to themselves to read Zelazny’s “24 views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai.” It is one of the most beautiful pieces of fiction ever created. And even now, only twenty years after it won a Hugo for best novella, the collections which include it are out of print.

Rogher Zelazny died of cancer in 1995. As he’d have written about one of his characters, “we are all diminished by his passing.”