Jon's Notes
Army grants, spam & spews, old computers, and free electricity
I'm looking through federal government
grants. Why is the U.S. Army so interested in
prostate and
ovarian cancer?
MVME187s are annoying me.
OpenBSD keeps dumping core on boot. It can’t find the device it booted from.
School does not charge directly for electricity. I can utilize the mongol hordes approach to problem solving with computer systems.
The web host that my family uses,
Digital Space, is on
spews. Mom’s email is not getting through to some of her friends. I’m annoyed. Its time for a new web host.
Critical iBook Design Flaw: The Power Connecter
My iBook served me well during the fall semester. It handled being tossed into and retrieved from a backpack several times each day. Unfortunately, it has recently been rendered inoperable because of a minor fall. This iBook is the fourth laptop that I have used regularly. My previous laptop, a 17 inch Sony Vaio, withstood a five foot drop with only a bent port cover. Yesterday, the iBook fell off of a mid-tower PC. It landed on the power plug. Now the battery will not charge. I suspect that the jack broke off of the system board. The power jack was one of the stronger ports on my former laptops. How talented of a designer does it take to make what should be a two-lead jack into the most fragile part of a computer? I don’t need a little glowing ring around the power connecter to tell me when the battery is charged. I’ll probably take the thing apart this afternoon to see if I can replace the connecter with a
semi standard one. I wanted a simple and reliable computer. That’s why I bought the iBook. Now I’m looking at a soldering iron to fix a problem of function following form.
Comments on Lessig’s Code
I just finished reading Code.
It would have been much easier to read if the footnotes had been at the bottom of each page.
I think his comments on sovereignty should be taken to their logical conclusion. 1. Sovereignty is the power to rightfully set rules; and 2. Computer code forms the only direct law on the internet. Programmers, by writing code, are the ones who rightfully set the rules. Aren’t they the true, not merely de-facto, sovereigns of what their code governs—the internet?
Reading list for Winter Break 2003
“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynmen!”
Adventures of a Curious Character
By Richard P. Feynman
Code And Other Laws of Cyberspace
By Lawrence Lessig
The Tao of Pooh
By Benjamin Hoff
The Laws of Thought
By George Boole
Compendium Maleficarum
By Francesco Maria Guazzo
The C Programming Language
By Brian W. Kernighan & Dennis M. Ritchie
The Future of Ideas
The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
By Lawrence Lessig
The Malleus Maleficarum
By Heinrich Kramer & James Sprenger
Mathematical Sorcery
Revealing the Secrets of Numbers
By Calvin Clawson
The Elements of Style
By William Strunk Jr.
So far, I have read
Surely You're Joking and
Tao of Pooh. I'm working on
Code right now.