I’ve gone over a year of blogging most weekdays, but I’m running dry. I think my posts are starting to repeat themselves and I think they are generally less interesting. I’m going to put the blog on hiatus for a while, probably a couple of months, and see what seems like the right next step.
Thanks for all the comments. I’ll be back in some form.
I like the system beep on my laptop. I’m used to hearing it for file completion and in emacs. I seem to be the only person who does like the system beep, though, considering how difficult it was to turn it on on a brand new Fedora 9 installation. Previous Fedora installations have not had a system beep after upgrades, but it was easily fixed by forcing a modprobe of the pcspkr module. Unfortunately, that was not sufficient for Fedora 9. After spending about an hour on the issue, and looking at acceptably obscure places like System > Preferences > Hardware > Sound, I discovered the secret. I had to right click on the volume control in the upper right corner, and select “Open Volume Control” (this does not give the same result as Sounds & Video > PulseAudio Volume Control in the main menu, but I discovered later that it is the same as System > Preferences > Hardware > Volume Control). Then in that window I had to select the menu item Edit > Preferences, which gave me a list of “Select tracks to be visible”. There were already items visible, but it turned out that I had to explicitly select “Beep”. That gave me a volume control for “Beep” alongside the volume controls for “Master”, “PCM”, and “Microphone”. The volume was set to zero, and I set it to the maximum. I also had to explicitly click on the “Mute/unmute Beep” button. After doing all that, I finally had my system beep.
I now understand that when people talk about the “Linux desktop” they mean the process of making Linux as baffling as Windows. This may actually be the right thing to do. As a long-time user of computer systems, it is possible that my notion of what is easy to understand and to use is radically different from that of people with a different life experience.
George Friedman has a good short analysis of what happened in South Ossetia from the Russian perspective. He doesn’t have an explanation from the U.S. perspective, and I don’t either. It seems possible that Saakashvili ordered the invasion of South Ossetia without any support from the U.S., and that the U.S. felt obliged to support him after the fact. It would have been very irresponsible for the U.S. to encourage his attack, given that 1) it predictably led directly to a confrontation with Russia, and 2) the U.S. could not militarily support the move even if they wanted to.
Given that the U.S. supported an independence referendum for Kosovo, they should have supported one for South Ossetia as well. I see no principled difference there, just that Georgia is an ally and Serbia is not. With Russia now occupying South Ossetia (and Abkhazia) the chances of a real independence referendum seem low.
The only reason the small war is of any interest to the U.S. is, of course, oil. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline was designed to get oil from the Caspian Sea to the West while avoiding Russia and Iran. It runs through Georgia. This is the pipeline featured in the James Bond film “The World is Not Enough,” though the real one is presumably more prosaic.
Last Thursday we trapped five feral kittens living in our backyard. We took them to the vet on Friday morning, where they were neutered and were vaccinated for rabies. We picked them up on Saturday, and kept them inside. On Sunday we let the two males go. Today we let the three females go. Unfortunately, although we trapped the kittens, we weren’t able to trap the mother, who was too wary to spring the trap. We will try again to catch her next week. This was all a somewhat lengthy and messy procedure, helped greatly by a volunteer from a local organization called Fix Our Ferals. Besides the cats, we also managed to catch a skunk; we released the skunk as quickly as we could, but unfortunately not before the whole area got sprayed.
Did we have the right to do this? Clearly the cats did not want to be trapped, and they were quite agitated about it. While the cats do not have any expectations about having kittens of their own, it is part of their natural life cycle, and we have taken that away from them.
What makes the difference for me is that we had been feeding them, and they were happy to take the food. If we had not been feeding them, I think that trapping them would have been questionable. While cats are obviously not native to the area, we live in a city which is in no way a wilderness. If the cats had been fending for themselves, as the deer, racoons, and skunks do, I don’t think we would have been right to interfere in their lives in this way. A rabies vaccination might have been acceptable, but not neutering.
But since we were feeding them, we were domesticating them in a small way, making them stronger and healthier, and in general taking responsibility for them. We therefore had to take responsibility for their actions, including the kittens they would have. We were within our rights to prevent those kittens.
I believe that we did the right thing, but I admit to not feeling entirely easy about it.
I had an interesting experience this weekend. I bought some Fedora 9 CDs in order to easily upgrade a new laptop. Since I had them, I decided to upgrade one of my desktops from a CD rather than over the net (I usually install over the net, but, sadly but understandably, installing from CD tends to have a fewer glitches). So I pushed the button on my CD-ROM drive to open the holder. I heard a grinding noise, and the holder didn’t come out. I pried it out with a jack-knife, but, predictably, it then wouldn’t go back in. I removed the drive and opened it up, and a couple of pieces fell out. I have no skill with hardware, so my chances of repairing it were zero.
This particular desktop, about four years old, happened to be my newest one. However, I have several other desktops in various states of disrepair, so I figured I would just swap in a new CD-ROM drive. After 90 minutes of unscrewing various computers, I discovered that I now have four broken CD-ROM drives and zero working ones. Three of the CD-ROM drives didn’t open. The fourth one worked well enough to boot Fedora, but failed as soon as I tried to read the whole disk.
This is just another lesson in why computers should have no moving parts. I’ve ordered a refurbished CD-ROM drive for $10, plus $8 shipping. I’ll see whether the cheap approach works.