If you were kind enough to argue with me on economics from my previous posts, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/keynes has a great piece on Keyne’s system, and how it applies to our current situation. Great read, and echos my previous blog posts in a more eloquent way.
Archive for September, 2009
Economics
Sep 24
Ohio Linux Fest
Sep 24
I will be at Ohio Linux Fest all day Saturday, hope to see a lot of Ubuntu people there!
I am looking forward to “Python for Linux System Administration”, “Linux Boot Process”, “Introduction to GNOME 3.0″, “The Ubuntu Kernel”, “Understanding Debian” and “Building a Community Around Your Project”.
Should be a good time, official schedule is: http://www.ohiolinux.org/schedule.html
If you need to update your installation to work with Intel graphics, there is an RPM you can install that will likely resolve your issues:
Install that, then run Sax or edit xorg.conf, and make sure to pick the i810 driver. (This post is in response to the number of forum posts on this subject offering no solutions)
I was playing with ubuntu-kvm-builder, and used apt-cacher for the mirror, and the build time is right around 2:30 which is pretty impressive. Using recordmydesktop I made a quick video of it, wanted to test the embedded video:
If you can’t see the video directly above this, you are not running a web browser that supports embedded videos (or you are seeing this on a planet).
Encrypted Swap
Sep 16
This post was spawned from my own misconception that my swap partition contained no sensitive data on systems with a lot of ram.
All of my systems I work with have atleast 4GB of ram, so my swap usage is usually under 2 megabytes. Why should I worry what’s in my swap partition?
Instead of going into it, just try it yourself. My swap partition is /dev/sda5. Run the command:
$ sudo strings /dev/sda5 | more
What came up was a ton of interesting data, from files I had looked at, print jobs, and bash scripts. So yes, even if you have enough ram, your swap is still very vulnerable to storing a lot of data about you.
Good news is Ubuntu 9.10 / Karmic will have the option to encrypt swap, which is on the wiki.
Manpages
Sep 15
Its almost the end of 2009, and I read on Planet Debian today a entry on writing man pages.
So man pages… where do we start? We have HTML / CSS / XML / RST which are all generally globally accepted formats of communication. Unfortunately, man pages do not use those.
And quite frankly, I am a fairly busy person, and have quite enough things to accomplish in a day. Why would I learn yet another formatting language? What justifies these files being in their own little world, when the whole world as a courtesy is supposed to provide them with their packages?
There really needs to be a movement to kill man pages in their current form, and bring them up to speed. A dialect for the sake of having a dialect really isn’t worth it when we have abundant alternatives.
Healthcare in the US
Sep 8
I am pretty sure nobody who reads my blog is against Obama’s healthcare plan, but if you are, we need to talk. (I know people outside the US might not understand to the extent at which this is a dividing issue here). Who would have though so much controversy would come from someone trying to provide everyone with healthcare? Not to mention someone who campaigned on the idea, and got elected in part because of it.
Lets get this real straight: This plan will save money. If you are against it, turn off Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, take down your confederate flag, and use your brain.
Today, anyone, healthcare or not, citizen or not, can walk into any hospital in the country and get treatment. Many people do. And the ones that don’t have healthcare? You and I pay for them, through our insurance, who receives inflated charges from the hospital because of the additional burden of these uninsured. Do you really think that having the government run healthcare is going to make us pay for everyone else more than we currently do? (For a point of reference every month I pay over $700 to insurance just for my daughter and I)
Having country-wide heathcare would allow us to formalize this process, and make sure that those who were previously going to the hospital and getting free care (ie defaulting on their payments) are now taxed for it. You can get out of hospital bills, but getting out of taxes is a million times harder. For people here illegally, that is a issue that is mutually exclusive from this, as their coverage wouldn’t change with this plan.
As for the idea of death panels? They exist already. Insurance companies drop people, and their personal savings run out. Sending a loved one to a nursing home or hospice is already deciding their fate. Before “ObamaCare” your fate was decided by money. After it, you will still be able to have to decided by money. That doesn’t change.
You can call it socialist, and I can call you a fool, because as I said already, we already care for everyone, they just default on their bills.
Go ahead and use the Post Office as a case study of why government shouldn’t run things. Show me one small business that can deliver mail to any address in the US for < 50 cents. It isn’t possible. What they do is phenomenal given their budget and scope. If I lived in rural Idaho, no commercial interest would ever drive a letter out to me for that price. And the benefits? Increased communication, resulting in increased national commerce. Driven anywhere? Yeah the government runs the roads so well I can do that.
Bring on your ignorance in the comments.