General

I couldn't find somewhere else to put these posts, so here they go.

One Hour to a Better America

Submitted by Larry on 12 September 2011 - 9:25pm

As people spent the weekend trying to memorialize the 9/11 terrorist attack's 10th anniversary, I was reminded not of 9/11/2001, but of 9/11/2002.

For the first anniversary, a friend of mine asked me to write something for a memorial web site he was putting together. I do not know if that site still exists, so I have replicated it here in its entirety:

FCC soliciting feedback on T-Mobile/AT&T merger

Submitted by Larry on 2 May 2011 - 7:38pm

If you haven't been living under a rock, you know that AT&T is trying to buy T-Mobile. This is a generally bad thing, as we already have far too much consolidation in the wireless carrier market as is, but that doesn't mean it's not still likely to happen. The only blocker is approval from the FCC, who is, per policy, soliciting public feedback. (It's 11-65.)

I would encourage everyone to sign in and voice their opposition. More carrier consolidation is not what we need. I've included my own public comments below for reference. Feel free to borrow liberally.

The documentation problem

Submitted by Larry on 22 April 2007 - 11:36pm

Over on the Planet, someone posted a link to a budding Drupal user who was having the usual first-time-user troubles. "I want to do X, Y, Z, but I can't figure out how and no one will tell me, help!" Been there, done that, I suppose. But how can that be if there's so much Drupal documentation? Simple. The questions most people ask are the hardest to answer, because there isn't just one kind of documentation.

Finally on 5

Submitted by Larry on 15 April 2007 - 5:18pm

Last week this web site developed a completely bizarre bug interacting with the database that affected only blog entries. I blamed the database. My web host insisted the problem was with the PHP code. So I took the opportunity to just upgrade the site to Drupal 5, finally, and see what would happen.

No more trackbacks

Submitted by Larry on 18 March 2007 - 2:11pm

So I finally gave in and disabled trackbacks on this site. So far there have been two real trackbacks and about 50,000 (no joke) spam ones. It's really not worth the effort. I may bring them back if I come up with a decent way to filter them properly, but the spam module just doesn't have a high enough s/n ratio. Suggestions on a better method are welcome. :-)

Emacs wins!

Submitted by Larry on 17 November 2006 - 12:37am

The great question of the day has been solved, and it is Emacs that wins.

Not that I use Emacs, mind you, but I've said for years that sooner or later, GNU/Linux would go away and be replaced by your choice of KDE/Linux (KDE having taken over so much functionality that all it needs is a kernel) and Emacs/Linux (Emacs already being almost an OS, except for missing a text editor). The only question was which would happen first.

A blog reborn

Submitted by Larry on 20 September 2006 - 11:33pm

As both of my avid readers have likely noticed, this blog has not been particularly active of late. That is to say, today is the one year anniversary of the last time it was actually used. :-) So what do I do to celebrate? Rebuild the whole thing from scratch, of course!

Central point of failure: Yahoo in a nutshell

Submitted by Larry on 4 June 2005 - 7:52pm

Like most people on the Net, I make some use of Yahoo! services. It's not easy to avoid it. Hundreds of thousands of people have a Yahoo! email address, just as many use Yahoo! Messenger, and Yahoo! Groups is "the new usenet" for many subjects. That's not even counting Yahoo!'s various other branding efforts.

Before I continue, I'm going to drop the stupid ! in the company name. Yes it should be there for accuracy, but good grief can we be a little less self-important? Thanks. Anyway...

The advantage of one company offering all of those services is that you have only a single sign-on to worry about. One name, one password, one bookmark, and you have all of your services at your fingertips. That's great... right up until you get butterfingers. It's also a single point of failure; one problem can bring down your entire PIM network.