The Slamlander

Basically, this says it all.
It’s under a temporary public domain name but I expect to get a permanent domain name before launch. I still have a lot of integration work to do though.

• Front Page main site development.
• SMF for Forum software
• MediaWiki for the Infowiki.
• SquirrelMail for the Webmail system.
• Others to be added later.

On other fronts;

• I leave today for a job interview in Oosterhout, NL. I should be back in three days. It’s a Java Architect position and it’s not too far from where I was born.
• got her employment package today and has spent the morning reading and signing the new job contracts. She’s been squeeing all weekend, in spite of having her normally nasty period pains.
• The new job means that we’ll have to move in the next six months. So, we have to start looking.

That’s it for now. ttfn and see y’all on Thursday. No, I will probably not have access to the Internet until I return.

I have coined a new word-set;

cantinkerous — Adj. — A product or device that, in the mode you want to use it in, requires tinkering, even if its normal mode doesn’t. That device can be described as being cantinkerous.

tinker– V — To adjust, configure, modify, or repair a device or product. The level of skill required increases the tinker-factor; tinkering — the actual act of applying a tinker.

tinker– N — A specific adjustment, modification, or repair to aid a device’s ability to simply function as intended. The number and degree of tinkers required by a device adds towards it’s tinker-factor.

tinkerware — N — A software package, usually open source but may also be commercial, which requires and inordinate amount of tinker-factor to get running. Actually, it isn’t just limited to software. It can mean hardware or even entire product, like the Siemens WLAN Repeater 108 or the 2005 BMW M6. TopGear showed it to be 20 minutes for 0-60mph, 19.5 minutes to set the on-board computer up (to tinker with it or apply tinkers to it) to allow that test.

tinker-factor — N — The measured quantity of tinkering required to get something to do just what it’s supposed to do or to meet normal expectations, like the aforementioned BMW. In that case, you would reasonably expect to just be able to put you foot through the floorboard and get the performance but no, the on-board systems keep the engine detuned and you have to specially configure it for full-power production. This is contrary to expectation and is a PITA (Pain in the Ass). Other examples of high tinker-factor are ‘s LG mobile phone, which is a PITA to do SMS text messaging with, and our digital camera, which is a PITA to take normal snapshots with. The greater degree of tinker-factor in a device or product, the less useful it is or the less likely it will be used.

tinker-free — N — A product or device that requires no tinkering in order to perform its intended function. This is not affected by the fact that it may need tinkering to perform functions other than those intended in its original design.

tinkerable — N — A device or product that lends itself well to tinkering into functions other than those originally intended.

got me started reading Wapsi Square and I recently sat down and read the whole think from the start. The thing is that my books touch on the same thing from a different angle.

1. Those who commit great evil almost never have evil intent.
2. The ultimate in benevolence can still result in acts of great evil.
3. It is possible to commit acts of great good and still be evil. (from Wapsi Square)
4. It is possible to commit acts of great evil and still be good.
5. The judgment of evil verses good is possibly a subjective view of those being acted upon.

In this light:

• It is quite possible that Hitler thought he was doing good while he was committing genocide.
• Polpot never considered the evil he was perpetrating.
• Stalin was advancing the state of man when he executed those 20 million Russians.
• Marx never wrote “The Communist Manifesto” to be evil.
• Machiavelli was a saint.
• The Crusades to free the Holy Land.
• The Bible is not necessarily a book of “good”.
• Religious leaders advocating violence and death may be the exemplar of the good doing evil things.
• Religious leaders advocating violence and death may be evil pretending to be good.
• God might not be as benevolent as we want to think.

Some things to think about. They could all be victims of the laws of unintended consequences and the only judge of that is “History”.

The US Government screws the red man again.

It’s a classic case of governmental neglect.

and the ITER project. it needs support. Not your money, although that probably wouldn’t hurt, but your hearts and minds. We need Fusion Power. No, it’s not threatened, yet. However, with all of our attention on it, maybe it will never be. This has to be watched and understood. It involves nothing less that the future of our techno-culture on this planet. Who knows, it might even allow our civilization, or a part of it, to last long enough to get off this dirt-ball.

Currently, the EU is footing 50% of the project bill, with the US only in for a 20% side-bet. That attitude has to change.

Palestine is becoming a sad case for human stupidity and stubbornness. Also pertinent.
The problem can best be summed up here:

A doctor, called Ali, was calmer. But he said that he was too depressed to return to work.

“I hate life here. I hope to emigrate to anywhere in the world. This is not a life. Our suffering was too much,” he said.

“The main problem is the occupation. If we don’t have a state how can we live, make a future for our children? That is our problem. We are a people without a state.”

They are not a people without a state. Israel gave a part of its territory so that Palestine can have a state, they are living in it now and it’s not bad land. Why can’t they settle for that? No, they would rather commit genocide themselves than allow Israel to continue to exist. I feel extremely sad for the Palestinian people but they chose their stupid leadership, they chose to believe that Israel has no right to exist, and they chose to not accept the state that they already have. They would rather give up everything, including their lives, so that they can take what Israel has and kill all the Israelis. What they want is not acceptable and they are too stupid to realize that. Israel is a legitimate government and a legitimate state. It is not going away, no matter what Hamas does.

This strike was one of many to try and stop the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel, that happen every day.

Israel says that its continual military pressure on Gaza is an effort to stop militants here firing rockets every day into nearby Israeli towns and villages.

Both the Hamas and Islamic Jihad organisations claimed to have launched the deadly strike.

Israel has stated often that when the rockets stop, they will stop. The rockets don’t stop. They have been launched everyday for at least the past five years. That’s many thousands of rocket fired to target innocent Israeli civilians.

According to the campaign group Human Rights Watch, Israel has fired up to 15,000 artillery shells into Gaza since September 2005.

In the same period Palestinians have fired 1,700 homemade rockets into Israel.

That’s an act of terrorism and is truly defined as a war-crime and is, in fact, globally recognized as an Act of War. In contrast, Israeli attacks are targeted at launch sites but they occasionally miss. It is the intent here that matters; Israel is after only the launchers and tries to avoid hitting civilians whereas Hamas doesn’t care who or what they hit, as long as the rockets hit. The Palestinian people can’t seem to realize that Hamas is the problem.

The US is correct, no civilized country should have to tolerate its people being constantly targeted by anyone, not even terrorists. If the Palestinian government won’t even try to stop the attacks than Israel has the right to do it for themselves. The Palestinian people themselves voted Hamas into power and it was with full knowledge of Hamas’ agenda. It is therefore a legitimate conclusion that the Palestinian people support everything Hamas does and they should accept the legitimate consequences, in this case, attacks on Palestinian Territory. It is Hamas that continues waging war on Israel and not the other way around.

The message is clear, stop the acts of war, now. Hamas and the Palestinian people refuse to listen. In this case, democratically, the Palestinian people have chosen to support Hamas and its continuous attacks on Israel. They now have to bear the burden of that support. It is sad but they chose this when they chose Hamas. It’s not like they didn’t know.

The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper.

               -- Thomas Jefferson

CO2 Rise since Peistocene Current data of Holocene CO2 levels since Pleistocene Era.

This is what the current Global Warming nuts DON’T show you. They show you only the tag-end and then claim it is due to our civilization. It isn’t. This has been going on since the last Ice Age. For those who aren’t aware, we are in the Holocene Era, geologically.

Yes, I’ve been running across another spate of “Beware the Global Warming!” news postings.

Most of you know that and I are on ADSL dynamic IP off BlueWin.CH. Okay, that’s good. You also should recall that I have two middling servers running things here, both running Win2Kas and IIS5. Neither of them are robust enough to run a Wiki. However, they serve FrontPage sites just fine

Anyways … I am now in a position that I cannot test from here. I have the usual port forwarding to my main web server and I am redirecting two streams to my workstation. I have DNSAlias.net names for both of them but they implement http redirect two different ways. Both of them work here, inside the NAT wall. What I need is to know if either or neither of them work from, outside the NAT wall.

The baseline is here. Be patient, it should be dog slow but it should also work. It also exhibits why I am futzing with redirects. That is on Eagle.NE.Caselle-Net, a K6-200 with only 128MB of RAM and a 30GB HDD. The Wiki hits and goes to almost 300MB of virtual RAM (No, I can’t find 256MB PC100 DIMM RAM sticks anywhere and Yes, the MySQL DBMS is on yet another host). If this works then that site too, will join the other wikis. Please record how long it takes to raise the main page. It should be less than a minute. If you get a DNS error then wait 20 minutes and try again. BlueWin changes my IP address often and it takes 12 minutes before DynDNS finds out about it. If it still doesn’t hit then write down the time and timezone, send it here, and don’t bother with the rest of the test.

Then hit Site1. This should show a main page which has two words, in large Earth font.Cut them and paste them into a message sent here, along with the time it takes for the time to come up.

Then go to Site2. This should show a main page which has two words, in large Earth font.Cut them and paste them into a message sent here, along with the time it takes for the time to come up.

Please feel free to browse either site, if you want.

These two come courtesy of the Los Angele Times

Election 2006- House Races
Election 2006- Senate Races