knoppix saved the day again today.

if you haven't played with knoppix before, it's worth a look. in a nutshell, it's a full Debian GNU/Linux system complete with kde 3.1, open office, mozilla and about every other piece of linux software you could imagine. all crammed onto one bootable cd-rom. take the cd and put it in any x86 machine and boot from it and in about a minute or two, you'll be sitting in front of a fully working kde desktop running off a RAM disk (it will also autodetect and use any linux swap partitions it finds on the host machine). all drives are mounted read-only by default so it won't overwrite your windows installation or anything nasty like that.

one of the really sweet things about knoppix is that its hardware detection is fantastic. every machine i've tried it on, old or new, it's picked up and properly configured every piece of strange hardware. seriously, it puts Redhat and the other commercial linux vendors to shame. with no other distribution have i not had to configure anything. for hardware detection knoppix leaves every other distro i've tried and windows in the dust and may even surpass MacOS.

i first burned myself a knoppix disk when i was getting ready to install gentoo on a machine and wanted to make sure i had a good rescue disk in case i screwed something up in the process. sure enough, i screwed things up a few times and knoppix came in quite handy. normal rescue disks just give you a text console and enough utilities to repair messed up partitions, compile a new kernel, etc. knoppix gave me all those utilities plus a full graphical desktop and a network connection, so if i didn't know exactly what i'd done wrong, i could search online forums or use IRC to get some help. (and, if you don't like the idea of being stuck at a text console for the first few days of a gentoo install before you've gotten X-windows and all that stuff compiled, you can install gentoo from knoppix).

i've been told that some road warrior computer consultants now travel without a laptop. they just carry a knoppix cd and a USB compactflash drive or some other USB memory device. then, when they arrive at their client's office they just grab any free machine, boot from the knoppix cd, plug in the CF drive and tell knoppix to use that as their home directory.

since it just mounts drives read-only by default, it's also a great way to demo linux to people who have never played with it before. just pop the cd in and they can immediately start trying out linux without having to go through any disk partitioning and time-consuming installations. since it's running off a compressed disk image on a CD, applications are a little slow to load, but otherwise its performance is quite acceptable.

the second time knoppix really came in handy for me was right after lani moved in. her computer didn't survive the move, but she had some Word docs on a CD that she needed to make some changes to and send back to her previous employer asap. my computer was still only partway through a gentoo install and i didn't have openoffice installed on it yet. since gentoo compiles everything from source, installing openoffice would potentially have taken many hours that she didn't really have. luckily, i remembered that knoppix included openoffice so we just booted that and she was able to edit her documents that way.

it came in useful again a few days later when lani's friend from russia was visiting. she wanted to check her email but couldn't find any computers around that properly supported cyrillic. knoppix has good support for russian and a number of other languages, so the knoppix disk came out again and pretty soon we had a cyrillic desktop up and running for her.

today, a coworker's windows machine crashed hard and refused to reboot. the harddrive was making strange noises and giving off error messages left and right. obviously the drive was failing. naturally, there were very important documents on the drive that hadn't been backed up anywhere else and would be very time-consuming to recreate if they couldn't be recovered. peter and i booted off knoppix. the drive kept generating errors during the boot process and i was doubtful that anything could recover the files at that point. somehow though, knoppix managed to mount it, and peter was able to copy the files off and upload them to an ftp server with no problem.

being easy for newbies to use and a powerful tool for expert users is a rare combination. it's been a long time since i've been as impressed with a piece of software as i have been with knoppix. to actually use as a long term system, i prefer gentoo these days, but from now on i plan to keep a knoppix disk nearby.

everyone do their taxes yet?

since i finally got mine done, i can now be the annoying one and remind everyone else.

lani and i had a productive weekend. on friday night we visited lani’s mom’s friend and her sister and three children. children are entertaining but would be much nicer if they came with an off switch. saturday we walked 5 miles as the beginning of an attempt to actually get ourselves in shape. then we had japanese food in williamsburg with cheryl before she sets off to hike the appalachian trail. sunday we went to JASmart and chinatown and stocked up on asian groceries and health food. we’d planned to get a rice cooker in chinatown but couldn’t find a model with a built in steamer tray so instead we ordered one online. then, if grocery shopping weren’t exciting enough, we did our taxes. looks like i’ll be getting a little bit back this year. woohoo!

everywhere lookalikes…

lani and i had the <a href=”http://backstage.musicchoice.com/channels/electronica.asp”>electronica</a> digital music cable channel on for background music last night and what did we hear but our own <a href=”http://www.avenued.com/“>Avenue D</a>’s “Do i look like a slut?”

i guess their recent european, west coast, and florida tours are paying off. the Music Choice channels are, as far as i know, nationwide. i don’t listen to the electronica channel that much but the metal channel has always been pretty good at playing bands just before they start getting big and get played on MTV or Much Music.

the amount of press Ave D has been getting is pretty astounding (though deserved) for a band that doesn’t even have an album out yet. i’ve heard from others that their songs are staples in some of the cooler clubs in London and a worldwide fanbase is developing.

i think that when their album finally comes out, it will be exciting times.

somehow, without any major mishaps, lani and i made it from DC to manhattan with a truck full of her belongings this weekend and now she lives with me.

some of the major accomplishments:

• didn't hit any pedestrians, vehicles or stationary objects substantial enough to leave a scratch or dent on the truck.
• managed to locate, stop at, and register to win a vespa at 8 Target stores within easy reach of the highway.
• never really got lost despite doing a lot of off-highway driving around maryland and new jersey looking for Targets.
• gerard miraculously found and secured a parking spot for us right in front of the apartment
• managed to unload the truck in about half an hour
• lani managed to wake me up at 7am so we could drive the truck to the drop-off point in new jersey by 8am.
• survived morning rush-hour traffic in manhattan and got through the lincoln tunnel without incident
• were slightly late returning the truck but didn't get charged any late fees

now, we just have to get lani’s stuff unpacked.

this whole cohabitation thing will be new for me. i’ve only had experience with long distance relationships. even as far back as high school, i’ve never dated someone who lived in the same <em>town</em> as me, let alone the same apartment.

Markov, by the way, has done it again! “signed his ticket, Dumbass” is kind of how I feel. Been doing some long, heavy thinking about this war. I hate how we were snookered into it.. I hate how everyone went along, one sheep after the other, until only recently, nobody said, Hey, wait a minute! This might not be such a good idea! How do you install democracy in a country where all voices of opposition were executed or exiled themselves? After Hussein: what? somebody worse? This has been coming since before W got elected. But I don’t want to take up space and reading time with my reasons for being against the war they are legion but why I find in the last few days that maybe it isn’t such a criminal idea. Common anti-war arguments: 1) Resolve the issues through diplomatic/political and economic means: when confronted with (understandable) resistance from Iraq about weapons-inspections, the UN failed to assert the world community’s “right” (is it a right? Your opinion?) to protection from harm (witness the use of nerve gas against the Kurds which went unpunished); economic sanctions failed: Iraqi children, women and men starved and died of diseases while their government funneled what little money it had into munitions; 2) this is just about oil, and asserting S world hegemony; a glance at this article makes another argument, at least as far as the Prez is concerned, although I don’t deny that the big oil companies are probably licking their chops; 3)non-violent resistance breaks the cycle of violence begetting more violence: yes, eventually, possibly… although Gandhi himself admitted that it would take a very long time and very many dead people before peace prevailed; how many more gassed “Kurds” are we willing to accept? One is haunted by the thought of how many Jews might have been saved if Hitler had never been allowed to continue past 1938. Iraq was in violation of UN resolutions to disarm, certainly in 1998; it has shown utter disregard for human welfare; it has shown a willingness to sacrifice its own people to further its own perceived ends. One of many troubling thoughts, though: Iraq is not the only country to behave this way, and others proceed without a murmur.. that’s our own lop-sided moralism at play. I have a light burning in my window, but it’s a forelorn hope that the light of reason will truly prevail.

on this planet can eat shit.

my friend prasanth has been doing his rotations for medical school for the last year and will be doing them for another year or so. about a year ago, he foolishly went out and bought a custom made dual 1GHz pentium machine without thinking that he would be travelling to a different city every 6 weeks for a long time to come and having a big desktop machine wouldn’t be very convenient. unsurprisingly, it’s remained in storage almost since he bought it.

so this weekend i bought it off him for cheap. this works pretty well for both of us. by the time he would get to use the machine it would be way obsolete so instead he got to convert it to a bit of cash that he can put towards a laptop which will travel better. my old computer is a 400MHz celeron that i bought in 1999. i run linux and don’t really play video games so i don’t feel a strong need to have the fastest machine on the planet. still, 400MHz is feeling slower and slower every day as everyone else around me upgrades (although realistically, with all the performance improvements that have been made to the linux kernel, my 400MHz machine has actually been getting faster and more responsive since i bought it). moving up to a dual 1GHz machine is a pretty significant improvement for me.

so <a href=”http://www.gentoo.org/“>gentoo</a> is installed on it and kde is compiling while i’m at work.

This is a bit of practice as well as a post. Excuse me… ahem. Did anyone else sign up with true majority to flood the White House and Senate office buildings with emails and faxes? I guess it shut down the systems for a couple days. tee hee. Also, a friend in Maine suggests making snow bombs out of all that snow they have there; he figures Iraqi kids have probably not seen much snow and they sure don’t need all that much up there.

this is a reprint from over at <a href=”http://www.superultramega.com”>superultramega</a>, but I thought it might spark some conversation.

so apparently a whole bunch of fucktards are going to <a href=”http://www.heartlight.org/fast/“>not eat for our President</a>, Dubyah “daddy’s ‘lil monkey” Bush. someone explain to me how this came to be?

see, what they don’t know is a megaphone from the belfry of their church makes a nice booming voice from the heavens. another two weeks of this and hopefully I’ll starve the GOP right outta existence.

which I would love. seriously, the USA sucks. I mean fucking sucks. call me an anti-patriot, and tell me I’m taking my civil freedoms for granted (I don’t), but you cannot ignore the fact that we’re <a href=”http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2825575.stm”>killing POW’s</a>, shipping other prisoners to countries that practice torture for interrogation, we’re flipped off the world once with the Kyoto protocol, we’re trying to buy out the countries that don’t bow before our global conquest (Russia, Turkey, etc), and we’re basically showing the entire U.N., NATO, and global community that we’ll do whatever we please, fuck you very much.

this is rotten like a syphilitic corpse’s groin.

seriously, listen to Dubyah talk about Saddam. “A tyrant, who possesses weapons of mass destruction, and will not hesistate to use them on the world to disrupt peace, and bring terror” etc blah blah. close your eyes, and think: he could be talking about himself. seriously, we’ve got this fucking money sitting on the biggest red button in the world, content to ignore all warnings about sustainable development, natural resources, political balance, human rights, and future threats to our country and the entire world. he’s got the weapons, the sanctions, the muscle and the carelesness to fuck with whomever he wants. he is a tyrant. he’s our own private Saddam.

but it kills me that rather than trying to put out a fire that’s already been started, he’s going to throw gas on it. does it occur to anyone else that Islamic militants wouldn’t hate us so much if we hadn’t intentionally overthrown every country in the middle east at least once in the past 50 years? so instead of working to attain stability without perterbing the political/social environment (i.e. letting the northern Iraqis establish their own democracy, as they’ve desired), we’re going to fuck it all up again (all this talk of the U.S. occupation and installation of our own little puppet). how many terrorists is this going to create? answer: all of them.

oh yeah, and N. Korea. why are we even bugging Saddam?

anyhow kids, the moral of the story is we’re maiming a living thing, and keeping it alive and in extreme pain to bleed it slowly to death of the blood that we crave: oil. buy Citgo (from Texas, not Saudi Arabia) gas, and for chrissakes let’s try to not fuck up the next election.