Scott's Blog

100 Facts and 1 Opinion , an article with referenced facts against the Bush administration. Good if you want to spout intelligent facts to a Bush supporter.

A few months after 9/11 we started seeing Americans asking the question "Why did they do that? Why do these people hate us so much?". The answer, partly, is that the religous and political leaders in these Islamic countries created a propaganda of hate against Americans and the American Way . Shame on them. But wait a minute, isn't that similar to the propaganda that we did for decades against Communism? You remember the Soviet Union was an evil empire, that communism is an threat to the the sanctity of the American Way , and "Better Dead than Red". Shame on us . The fear and hate our governments incited in us against USSR was bad, add misery, hopelessness and that's what we're seeing in these Islamic countries. In the US now, instead of Communism it's Terrorism that is the imminant threat. We must remember the lies or exagerations the government fed us in the past and take a critical eye to what they say today. We must remain aware of the ways i...

I saw these jokes and I just had to save some of on my blog: ----- Buddha walks into a pizza joint and says, "Make me one with everything."Cashier: "That'll be $9.50" Buddha hands him a ten. Waits. Waits. He says, "Where's my change?" Cashier replies, "Change must come from within" ---- Q. Why can't the Buddha vacuum in the corner? A. Because he has no attatchments. ---- Q. Where does George W. Bush keep his army? A. Up his sleevie. ---- Q. How did Darth Vader know what Luke was getting for Christmas? A. He felt his presents. ---- Did you hear about the guy who had to quit his job at the orange juice factory? ...He wasn't able to concentrate. ---- A boat carrying blue paint and a boat carrying red paint collided in the middle of the ocean. What happened to the crew? They were marooned. ---- Q. Someone that knows three languages is trilingual. Someone that knows two languages is bilingual. So what do you cal...

Another powerful and useful tool to learn how to use is wget . This exists in linux and also with cygwin (may be an extra install for this). Like screen it has thousands of switches but basically you type something like: wget http://site.com/filename.zip and it'll download it for you. When I need to get things to install (like rpm files for fedora) I browse for them rpm files on my machine at home, copy the link to the clipboard then on the linux machine type wget and paste in the location of the file to get. It is useful to know that wget can also get a whole site, recursively, or a bunch of files using wildcards. Add wget to your toolset.

The GNU screen program is somewhat of equivalent to having multiple windows open except in one terminal window. The first time you enter your shell type: screen basically it'll give a little message and then go back to the prompt. To open another terminal press Ctrl-A C (C for Create). Now you have two windows open. To go from on window to the next window press Ctrl-A N (N for Next). Now this is nice but here's the real magic. Exit your terminal program and log back in. Now type: screen -d -r you should now be back to your previous screen exactly the way it was before, even with the last messages, etc. Also, if you press Ctrl-A N, you'll go to the next screen and it will be back exactly the way it was before. So, for example, you can login at work, type screen then do some stuff. When it's time to go home exit the terminal (the best way is Ctrl-A D D) and then go home. At home, login type screen -d -r and continue working or check on your long running tas...

If you use cygwin like I do you can optionally install GnuPG (Gnu Privacy Guard). GPG is actually a play on the letters PGP (or Pretty Good Privacy) which is now a privately owned company . GPG is however free and relatively easy to use to encrypt messages or files. I use it to encrypt sensitive files on my USB memory fob. When you read the extensive manual on GPG you'd think the best way to encrypt your files is with a symmetric cypher . I see some problems with the symmetric cypher approach: you need to give the password both when you encrypt and decrypt the file, different files could potentially have a different passwords increasing the chance of forgetting what the password is, someone who gets my file could try and guess the password, if I suspect that someone has learned my password, I need to go an re-crypt all my files with that password. What I discovered is that I can use a public-key cypher to encrypt my files. Normally, you use public-key system...

Dave Winer wrote has an article asking, basically, how much money do you need? I've always felt that I really don't need that much money to be happy. Most of the unhappiness people feel with the amount they have has to do with looking at their friends who have even more. On the other hand, money is a lot like air, when you don't have it it becomes really important. Also, when there's a chance that in the future you'll might be without it, you also get worried about it. I remember a TV show about Bombardier selling some air planes and a Saudi prince was sent by his dad to invest a million dollars a week while he was visiting Canada. And I though, they have so much money that they feel guilty having it do nothing.