21 January 2005

vakkotaur: (kick)


Evidently pointing out an error by some within within a group is "selling out"[1] that group. This sort of silly accusation is why I don't have much use for blind group loyalty and prefer to do something unusual: think for myself.

[1] Link masked by poster.

vakkotaur: Centaur holding bow - cartoon (Default)


There are a few cartoons that stand out as memorable to me. These I remember though I haven't seen them in years. Some I saw in newspapers, and a couple I saw in the yearly supplements to an encyclopedia. Here are descriptions of a few:

From a 1950s supplement: A kid stands with crutches and watches other kids running and playing as he wonders, "Why didn't my parents get me the Salk vaccine?" (I think it said Salk, but it might have just said polio.)

From a 1950s or maybe 1960s supplement: A personified world, a man whose head is the globe, looks at smallish rocket in the first panel, "The missile." He, a bit unnerved, looks a bigger rocket in the next panel, "The missile to stop the missile." He looks, now worried, at an even larger rocket in the next panel, "The missile to stop the missile to stop the missile." I no longer recall how many panels there were, but in the next to last panel, the personified world has fallen backwards and is sitting, staring up at a huge rocket, "ad infinitum" or such. The last panel has a technician in a lab coat running into a hanger-like building, arms extended, shouting "It's coming back!"

One of the few Peanuts cartoons I remember, from the late 1970s: Charlie Brown panics at it starting to snow, until someone explains that it is just snow. He had thought it was fallout.

From a newspaper in the 1980s: A lone house is labelled "Europe" in the first panel. In the second panel a figure, the USSR, pushes a large nuclear bomb up to one side of the house. In the next panel a USA (Uncle Sam?) figure pushes a similar nuclear bomb up to the other side of the house. In the final panel, a personified Europe is out of the house and yelling "Warmonger!" towards the U.S.

From a newspaper in the 1980s: Uncle Sam is walking away, possibly brushing his hands together, having just hit Libya. Two well-dressed gentleman, representing France and Italy, watch. One says to the other "That Sam, such a ruffian!" Meanwhile both have documents in their pockets, "Secret deals to let terrorists go."

From a campus newspaper, I think: Some scrap haulers are about to remove a junk pile when they're interrupted by a well-dressed fellow, "Stop! That's the Art in Public Places project. The junk heap is over there." And he points to something that doesn't look quite as bad as the alleged art.

On the wall outside a physics professor's office door: A scene of protesters with signs denouncing animal research. The caption reads, "Thanks to animal research, they'll be able to protest an average of 21.4 years longer." I might have the number wrong, but I think I have it close.

vakkotaur: (computer)


I tried to install Peanut Linux on icelandic and had some trouble. The latest version, 9.6, needs 140MB RAM to install, rather than the 64MB as claimed on the Peanut web site. Further, 9.6 is beta, according to a few forum entries. So I went and got the not so well mirrored 9.5 and that could install. But every time it had a chance to impress me, it ticked me off instead. It wants to be small and light, but can't because it's too busy being coolkewl. So I decided after trying to whack it into shape that it wasn't worth the effort.

I tried BeatrIX which is meant to be a super simple LiveCD with a graphic interface so friendly Aunt Flo could use it and never know she wasn't running Windows. It's a wonderful idea - for faster hardware and a faster CD drive. But it could be installed to hard drive, which would bypass the slow CD drive and let me create a proper user account. This was slow going as it was several seconds from key-press to response due to the slow CD drive I have. But I did get it installed, eventually.

BeatrIX is a Debian/Ubuntu derivative with pretty much everything not needed for the graphic desktop stripped out. A couple things bugged me. First, the wonderful autodetection found my serial trackball and lit up the LED in it.. for a moment, and then decided that the pointing device was an unused (and disabled in the BIOS) PS/2 port. Second, the window manager was gnome - and even on the hard drive it was slow. Fine, I'm willing to blame my ancient hardware there - but it shouldn't slow down the console response in another virtual terminal, at least not so as I notice it.

After the HDD install, the network had to be brought up manually. And I wanted to edit something. Console editor, what's a console editor? The thing, so help me, didn't even have vi ! I'm no fan of vi but its one redeeming feature is that it's always there - until BeatrIX, evidently. I tried other editor possibilities and had just as little luck. After more struggling to tell it about the network and the outside world, apt-get was finally working. And then I tried to look something up with man and it wasn't there. It's not that the man page I sought wasn't there, man itself was missing! Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. No console editor and no man ? What else does it not have? I've decided I don't care. I'm not wasting any more time fiddling with a deplorably incomplete distribution.



Addendum: Excluding vi isn't a problem by itself. Not having an editor is a problem. It would be really nice if trying to invoke vi (which is the nearly universal fallback editor) would run a simple script to tell the operator what the installed editor is. It shouldn't start the other editor, just tell a person about it.

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vakkotaur: Centaur holding bow - cartoon (Default)
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