philisha.net

FreeBSD is not ready for the desktop…. I’m not entirely sure that people are saying it is, but I learned recently that it’s not. Ports is a great way to manage programs in some ways, but not practical for people with slow machines…. sigh. The package system is nice…. but how primitive compared with Debian! (I’m spoiled.) It also just seemed a lot less responsive, but I think that may have something to do with the fact that one of my DIMMS was loose….

So, it’s back to Debian for me. Things are running so much more smoothly. Woo hoo.

As I was doing the shift back to Debian, I decided to go all out with my music and get everything I have on CD on to my hard drive and backed up on mp3 CD. So that took like all week, but now I have 9 full mp3 CDs and a nifty fully-stocked Gnump3d streaming server (available on Biola’s network only.)

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That’s an ILL Mitch reference, BTW.


Last week I got my first real webmastering job. (ie non-volunteer) I’m doing the site http://www.theacademysite.org for The Academy, a classical-education style summer program for gifted highschoolers. It is based on the Torrey Honors Program at Biola University.

Anyway, I’ve been working on a prototype hosted here on Biola’s student server getting stuff laid out and redone. The old site was a mess of ASP and Javascript, so I’m redoing it in PHP, MySQL, and CSS. Should be a lot more streamlined and faster to load than the old one. It’s not fun dealing with messy code. (Although it’s not half as bad as johnmarkreynolds.com, another project I am doing, was.) It’s a good incentive for me to write good code that is easy to read and maintain. (I love CSS.)

In closing, listen to the wise words of ILL Mitch:
I have two sides, one happy, one anger.
You can ask a stranger, my board is fast and danger!

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I learned something about my subconsciousness today. At my job I do a lot of data entry, and on certain fields it can complete what you’re about to type if it’s known in a list (like all the cities in California or something like that). Anyway, when I’m typing the name of a city, I noticed that I somehow know exactly when I have enough letters for it to know which city I am typing. I don’t even have to look before pressing enter. It only works for those that I’ve already typed manually, though. And it doesn’t work when I try to do it or when I actually think about doing it. So my guess is that I know it subconsciously.

I end up doing a lot of things automatically without thinking at my job….

“The bane of my existence is doing things I know a computer could do for me.”

-Dan Connolly, The XML Revolution

I think this is the general feeling of anyone involved in computers. Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad I have a job, and I’ll do it because we don’t have the technology to scan papers in very well yet…. But the hope of technology is that people will only do jobs that machines can never do. Hypothetically a machine could do my job much much better than I could. And I’d be glad if one such machine did so, because then I’d be freed up to do a job that the machine couldn’t do: think.

I tend not to be very sympathetic towards those who complain over losing their jobs to machines. If you are doing a job that a machine could do better at, then you could instead be doing a job that is uniquely human. It would be more fulfilling anyway. (Of course, life is rarely that simple, so in that I do sympathize—jobs aren’t the easiest thing to find.) But I think that is the vision of the technologist: humans freed to think. According to Aristotle, intellect is our highest capacity, and therefore use of it is where our highest happiness resides. Perhaps in some way technology frees us to be more human.

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Jon just virus scanned his computer and found a load of spyware,
viruses, and trojans. He’s going to have to spend a lot of time cleaning
them off or lose a lot of data. I thought to myself that I was quite
glad I didn’t have to deal with that, but then thought that ironic
because I do end up spending more time getting my systems to work right.

After thinking about it, it made a little more sense though. There are
two reasons this is appropriate. For one, I want to get used to fixing
machines like mine, and don’t mind spending time tinkering with it to
get it perfect. It’s the field I intend to go into professionally.

The other reason is more interesting. When I spend time tinkering with
my system, it’s because I have to be very precise with what I do. The
machine does exactly what I tell it to with a maniacal accuracy, so I
have to make sure I tell it to do the right things. In his case though,
he’s being forced to make up for the shortcomings of his own machine. It
failed to function properly by letting undesirable programs control his
system. His time is spend fixing the problems, not instructing the
system.

You could make the analogy of learning how to drive a car. It takes a
lot of time to get yourself familiar with the demanding, precise
controls of a Ferrari, and it takes a lot of time to upkeep a pickup
that’s falling apart. I care about that sort of thing, so I’d rather
drive a Ferrari. I think most people are ok driving pickups because
most of them don’t break down every week. It’s not worth getting used to
finely tuned, precise controls if you just need to drive to the grocery
store and the post office every week.

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I love
used bookstores

Just wait till I get to Moe’s: the Torrey Mecca….

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Meta-blogging: the act of blogging about blogging.

I used to hate meta-blogging. Most meta-blogging happens in the form of some kid saying ‘Wow, I haven’t updated in a while….’ or something to that extent. News flash: if you haven’t updated in a while then either (A) I didn’t notice and don’t care or (B) I am an avid reader of your blog and am greatly irked by the fact that you haven’t posted in a while. In that case I would rather you post something interesting and worth reading, not restate the obvious. Yes, your posts are timestamped…. if I wanted to know, I could check how long it was since your last post.

Yes, attentive reader, you point out that I’ve been guilty of this a few times. ‘Look world, I just coded a better content-management system!’ I’m the only one who remotely cares/notices. Or the obvious ‘Hey, now there are themes’…. Yes, anybody could look around the site and see that.

But there’s an interesting side of metablogging that I am beginning to appreciate. That is the more generalized metablogging. Andrew Sullivan has a piece on why blogging is important: it’s the Napster of journalism, the ultimate peer-to-peer idea-sharing. Still more interesting to me is Hossein Derakhshan’s post about the creation of a specific blogging community. He outlines what such a community needs to start.

I’ve thought a bit about this myself. There are loads of Biola students who blog, and they sort of loosely have mutual readership, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be helpful to have a centralized place where the Biola web community could come together. Centralized linkage would help bring people together too; there’s no one place where you can find them all. There also could be some interesting discussions on different blogging software or sites that help. Who knows….

Just another of my crazy thoughts. I have many of them, most of which amount to nothing.

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I think I finally get Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet

That was pretentious. Let me try again: I finally think I understand something about Out of the Silent Planet.

Much better. Most of this excellent book was lost on me when I read it in high school, but I’ve really enjoyed it my second time through. At first my impression was that it is a science-fiction book about science-fiction. His jabs at H.G. Wells and the general ‘tentacled-monster’ mood of early 20th century sci-fi led me to believe this. He asks why our imaginations bring forth hideous beasts and malicious creatures when we picture the inhabitants of the skies. It seems to be a critique of the dominant style of contemporary science fiction.

As the book progressed, however, I realized that the scope was broader. Lewis writes not only about science fiction, but about our whole cosmology. His background in Medi346val studies (see The Discarded Image) led him to question the prevailing materialist cosmology of naturalism in which any life out in the reaches of space would likely be hostile.

Lewis saw the heavens as a glorious place and Earth as a pocket of rebellion and corruption amidst the grand Field of Arbol. The heavens revolve in perfect harmony, and the intelligences set to govern each planet approach human greed and petty quarrels with a fitting innocence and naieve wonder that any creature could be so ‘bent.’ In the second book Perelandra the mere idea of wanting something in excess was foreign and exceedingly difficult to explain.

Maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong places, but it seems to me that our current culture lacks a strong coherent cosmology. A good cosmology would be scientifically sound, yet allow for the world to be the intricately designed system that it is. Naturalism fails to explain the inherent harmony and order (albiet subject to decay and entropy) present in the cosmos. The Med346val worldview is beautiful in its internal consistency, but things like geocentricism conflict with our observations. Without a cohesive cosmology, there seems to be a barrier between science and the Primum Mobile. Lewis tries to cross that barrier.

I think I get it. I get something, anyway.

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It’s too late for America, but maybe Europe can curtail the madness before it begins.
I can only hope. What a mess.

Ceterum censeo software-patents esse delendam…

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