News You Can Bruise for 1998 January

Hello, and a happy 1998 to you. Although I'd like to know what's so happy about it. What? Oh, I see. Yes, that makes sense. All right, carry on.

     I am now using emacs under Linux to edit my home page. I suggest you do the same. Bow down before its GPLed might! BOW DOWN! Crummy will be making the transition shortly. Note to vi people: bite me. Ha ha, I love holy wars!

I'm trying out doing rubrics on this page. A rubric is that thing up there, except they're usually used to quantify some useful information. None of that for me. I wrote a nifty rubric generator in Perl, but alas, Andy "I Hate Leonard" Schile, master of all things sampo.st.hmc.edu, has once again proved his BOFH-worthiness by denying everyone read access to the cgi-bin directory and refusing to let me have the root password to fix it. I tried some hacks to get around it, but nothing worked; apparantly there's a server misconfiguration somewhere. Oh well. You can get the source here and the data files here and here. That last one's a binary data file generated by strfile so don't try and view it, but you need it if you want to run the program on your own system.

I just redid the IRS page, it's now 100% Microsoft-free. Enjoy it. Buy my tapes, dammit.

Well, whaddaya know. The rubric problem was on my end after all. You can get your rubrics here. And please, send me your ideas for additional rubrics. Eight is not enough.

     I'm gradually going through all the Crummy articles and changing them from evil Microsoft-created files into friendly Linux files. I'm taking the opportunity to do some minor updates and change links. Eventually all the Crummy links will work. Help me out by sending me dead links.

     If you have to send me mail on Saturday, send it to leonardr@sampo.st.hmc.edu. The UCLA mailserver is going down for maintenance on that day, and I won't be able to get mail from leonardr@ucla.edu until Sunday [Sunday Sunday!] or Monday.

It took some doing (what doesn't?) but all the files are converted. I've got an FTP session going right now. Which I just screwed up. Damn. I'll upload the files later.

School starts in... 3 1/2 hours. What class is it, you ask? I don't know, I'll have to get up and look at the schedule on the wall. It is... the ever-popular Math 61 Discrete Structures. Which I hope I don't get kicked out of. You know how opinionated I am about discrete structures. Actually, if you go down to West Hollywood you can get some discrete structures for about $150 an hour.

    But that's not really our story. And I've forgotten what was. So I'm just going to sit here until I think of it. Oh yeah, my mom sent me some penguin stickers. I stuck some on my computer case. Linux Inside! Goddess, I sound like Dave Winer. I bet you wish your mother was as cool as mine.

I didn't mention this in a news thing Saturday, but if you go down to my bio page you can see some additional pages I did about the computers that have graced my life. I also moved the link to my pictures onto the bio page. Now all the stuff on the menu fits nicely into two table rows again. Yes, I'm obsessive-compulsive. How did you know?

    Oh yeah, I uploaded the new improved Crummy pages. Bonk bonk on the head for not realizing why both gzip AND tar are usually employed in compressing multiple files. Hey, there was a minor earthquake here today, apparantly an aftershock from a quake over in China earlier. It was pretty cool. Anyway, that's all the yumminess for now, I gotta go fix some links on the computer pages.

Later...

    This is purely for my reference, but if you were going to eat a human body, where would you start? NO! NO! NO! I mean, this is purely for my reference, but I have HTMLified and uploaded my winter 98 schedule, as is the fashion, and it's an old fashion, and I wish I had an Old Fashioned, as Groucho Marx would say. The masses cry out: "Why don't you just get your schedule from URSA Online if you're on campus and need information about a class but forgot your printout at home?" Well, because the URSA Online schedule only displays the list of classes, and not a time grid, which is the way I visualize my classes. Hmm, this calls for a Perl script.

Still later...

     Woo-hoo! I have a roommate! Unfortunately, he appears to be an evangelical Christian. Oh well, it should be interesting. Anyway, Severino is an evangelical Christian, and he's pretty cool. His [my roommate's] name is James Yoo. I guess I should ask someone else to sing backup on "Swim Free", my tirade against putting Christian fish on the back of cars. Actually he has a car. I wonder if it's got a fish on it.

Oh boy, I'm back from Bakersfield. First up, fresh from the grill, enjoy a rant. The subject: Microsoft. Papa Joe says he's going to link to it. Bring the wife and family, bring the whole... kids, yippee. That's a Bob Dylan reference, by the way. He was a folk singer.

Talkin' End of the World Blues

     In other opinionated news, I got some old books of Christian prophecy at the Goodwill in Bakersfield. They are "The Late Great Planet Earth" by Hal Lindsey, who appears to be a fundie, and "This Apocalyptic Age" by Robert Bergen, who appears to be Catholic. Both published in 1970, both convinced that the Bible is speaking of their time, both bearing certain ever-so-slight resemblances to books of Christian prophecy published today, 28 years later. I'm going to present my analysis of what went wrong. I also got a 45 of Lindsey's "The 1980's: Countdown to Armageddon". He's like a dog with an old sock, that guy. I also also got a more recent book, "Silicon Snake Oil" by Cliff "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Egg" Stoll, which, being about the Internet and published three years ago, I can analyze in much the same light, although a lot of what he says is still a big problem and at least he doesn't put on his pompous hat and march around singing showtunes, so to speak, like the authors of certain other books I got at the Goodwill. But my biggest thrift-shop prizes were several old computer manuals: Atari Basic, Fortran for Business People, and a manual for Visicalc, the first spreadsheet program ever. Now if I only had my homework done.

Man, if ever there were a day for dancing in the streets! Microsoft slapped on the wrist yet again, and Netscape GPLed (or some facsimile thereof)! (Check out the announcement at Netscape's page. I'm gonna be talking about this day to my grandchildren. Admittedly, they probably won't care, but who needs them. Plus, on the way over here there were people giving out Surge!, which is the PalmPC to Mountain Dew's Palm Pilot. Will the joy never end?

I just completed a parody FSF response to the Netscape fiasco, which I am somewhat proud of. Check it out.

I have written a human cloning page. Why? Because while I don't think human cloning will prove incredibly useful, I don't think there's any need to ban it, either. Check it out. Now features my opinion on the vital "headless clones" issue.

At work today, we were coming back from lunch when we ran into Rick Crawford, who used to work with MAP but then moved upstairs to the 5th floor where he now does Unix stuff, lucky stiff. So we were grilling him about his new job as we got in the elevator, and the question came up "What flavor of Unix do you guys use?" and apparantly Rick hadn't heard that term before because he says "What do you mean?" and we're going "Uh, Solaris, Linux, AIX..." and this other guy in the elevator starts saying "SCO, Irix...". It was truly a geek moment.