RickSpace

Forbes magazine features a cover-story about how blogs are evil and people who participate in the discussions on blogs are an evil lynch-mob… I won’t go into detail, rather I’ll just link to their article… which gets more people reading their information which I’m sure is in part the goal of this whole thing. In brief, I tend to agree with this Warner Crocker post.

So, the reason blogs are evil? People can say bad things about others… these things can be completely unsubstantiated. Could this not happen in the pre-blog world? Yes, it could, and did. I agree that some people misuse the tools at their disposal, but in the ever-popular pro-gun argument, it is not the tool that is evil or kills; it is the ill-guided user of the tool that does damage. I wish there were a way to make an honest call to bloggers, asking them to at least think and maybe even do a small amount of research before you swallow everything you hear hook-line-and-sinker. Does that mean I agree with Forbes? In a way I do… I don’t agree with their handling of the issue or the sensational way they chose to cover it, but I do wish more people would act credibly in the blog world. That does not, however, mean that I think they should be forced to by their providers, which is what Forbes is calling for.

So, in essence, I disagree with Forbes’ main point about needing people like Google to prosecute or at least turn over the names of people who post things that are in disagreement with corporate America. I also think Forbes messed up some of the facts when it said that Google makes a concerted effort to go out and shut down ’splogs’ because they skew page-rank. If you look at any discussions on predictive market analysis gathered from blogs, forums, etc, you will find many complain that Google ignores those ’splogs’ because of the ad-hits that they generate. I think probably there is truth in both sides of this, as in most cases.

I guess in general, I’m disappointed that Forbes actually published an article that condemns the freedoms of speech and press that are provided by the constitution, and upon which Forbes’ main business (magazine production/sales) is based. I don’t think their coverage was 100% incorrect or evil, but I think it was not really a ‘proper’ way to cover it. I am sure there will be many blogs out there calling for blood on this one, but not me. I have another question though…

How does this sort of article affect business based upon blogs, forums, etc and the content generated on them? Infoseek was noted in the article, but there are other companies such as BuzzMetrics and Umbria and I wonder if this is seen as a good or bad occurrence for them. If you take the ‘there is no bad publicity’ approach, then any time that blogs in general spend in the spotlight is good. However, do stories such as these decrease the market’s trust of blogs and perhaps their interest in viewing the trends? Or maybe these sorts of stories heighten the awareness that people ARE out there talking about your products, and maybe you need to tap into that? Interesting times and interesting thoughts make for tired mornings and distracted work.

This is in no way stating that I am in the following position, that I plan to be in the following position or that the following position is in any way shape or form related to me; this is purely a curiosity that has struck me recently.

Let’s say you have three jobs you’re considering. Let’s go so far as to say that you are employed at job #1, and that jobs #2 and #3 are being offered. What should you consider in making your decision and depending upon your current situation (single, married with children, somewhat lame superhero, etc) which job would be the ‘best’?

Job #1 => Very stable. The job offers slightly below-average pay for the industry but the job is stable, there is SOME growth opportunity in the 5+ year range, the benefits are truly the most amazing part of the job. Education benefits, good retirement investments, and an incredibly relaxed environment are all part of the package. The downsides are the average pay and the lack of exciting opportunities.

Job #2 => HUGE corporation. One of the biggest corporations in your field offers the ability to change jobs within the company and a large assortment of incredibly exciting projects upon which you could work. The job could be unstable simply because of large corporation cutbacks and the chance of failure under fire. The upsides would be likely a good benefits package, moderate to good pay, stability if you really work and network (a.k.a. kiss-butt) well, and a variety of interesting things to work on. Downsides would be the possible lack of stability, the much higher-stress work environment, and you still run the possibility of being put into a task group that you don’t enjoy.

Job #3 => Explosively growing startup. Instability is the keyword here. If that factor were taken out of the equation, this would be a no-brainer. A rather high salary, potentially amazing benefits (stock options of Google, anyone?), and lots of innovative, high-energy, very interesting work going on are the upsides. On the downside of things, your job could be gone tomorrow… or next week… or next month… or maybe they’ll sell out to another company and you’ll end up working for the big company anyway, but be treated as a second-class citizen.

So given your particular situation, which would you choose? What other factors am I not considering here? Are there other glaring upsides or downsides to any of the jobs as described? I’m guessing most single people will probably say the startup sounds great. I’m guessing most family-having people would choose one of the other two. Does it change your mind any if I say that the startup has been around for 2-3 years, has already sold its ‘product’ to several Fortune 500’s, and that they’ve been successful enough to inspire a second round of VC investment of nearly $7 million? Does it change anything if job number one is for a private university? Does it change anything if the mega-huge corporation is Microsoft? Does it change anything if you HAVE job #1, but haven’t really even had official offers for either of the other two yet? Just looking for some thoughts here… any help?

Okay, so I thought everything was going great with Red Hat 9, and indeed, for what it did, it was great. But I wanted to use the ndiswrapper package in order to use my Linksys Wireless USB 11 stick. Well, as it turns out, RH9 was using the 2.4.somethinglessthanIneeded kernel. Basically, I was going to have to update the kernel; this is not something I like doing, but not something I’m entirely unfamiliar with. But basically, I didn’t want to nuke the whole install just because my NIC wasn’t working, but I wanted to get it working… so I updated to Fedora Core 3 which took just about as long as a from-scratch install. But anyway, once that was done, I now had a new enough kernel, my XWindows running in full screen, and it boots to prompt (runlevel 3) instead of booting graphically, so I’m happy… sorta.

So I get the Win32 drivers for my NIC, and the ndiswrapper, and after much toiling and trouble with it (mostly my own fault for not reading things completely) I get the NIC installed, using the ndiswrapper, and Linux sees it and there are no real problems… except for the prevaling problem that I STILL cannot get DHCP. So, this gets me thinking because now I’ve had like 4 linux installs with two different network cards not getting DHCP to work. So I check my Windows machines and find that if I reboot with DHCP enabled, they don’t get leases either. GRRRR! You are KIDDING me! So I unplug/restart my router and my dsl modem (just to be thorough) and sure enough when it comes back up, my Windows machine instantly grabs DHCP, I change the wireless NIC on my now FC3 box to use DHCP and oila, I have IP address and internet connectivity. I take the laptop upstairs trimphantly (the battery doesn’t work, so I shut it down, unplug it, take it upstairs, plug it in, boot it up, wlan0 comes up with an ip address, I ping google.com, of course it comes back just fine and I excitedly issue the ’startx’ command. XWindows comes up, gaim autoloads because I told it to, and I get my contact lists and such. Now, I try to open a web-browser to start … browsing the web, of course. Firefox takes forever to even open up (I mean, I get an entry down in the taskbar, but no visual in the screen area… finally it comes up, but can’t get to the webpage… I run a terminal, which sits in the taskbar forever and never actually shows up… Any program I try to run, nothing will open or execute correctly, my gAim shows me as online but I cannot ACTUALLY message anyone, even my wife sitting in the chair next to me… I try to log out of xWindows but it’s not letting me, so I CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE my way out, which shows all kinds of crashing errors, I get to the prompt, try to ping google.com again, and this time, it can’t get there… wtf happened? I tried this 3 times in a row before deciding not to give it any more thought and instead to just sulk about the house the rest of the night feeling defeated.

I WILL get this working, and I don’t want to re-install some other variant of Linux at this point because I think I’m very close… any thoughts on what would cause an ndiswrapper’d wireless NIC to work before entering X but slowly degrade to the point of no longer working?

So I have a Dell Inspiron 4150 laptop that I bought for my semester in Germany back in 2002-2003. I have, I believe, put Linux on this laptop several times, but I always end up removing it because of various frustrations. I have, since the Zend/PHP conference, become a little more convinced that I WILL make it work… I don’t need some crap Alienware pre-fabbed laptop, I can do this on my own. Now, of note are that the pcmcia slots are bent beyond any hope of use by a gravity-induced, floor-terminated trip started by careless placement of the laptop on a table. Also, in a similar accident, the USB port became … ‘wobbly’ I like to call it. So, by this, I intend to let you know that my interface options are somewhat limited.

This laptop has an onboard NIC, so network should not be a problem, an ATI RADEON 7500C 32mb card (rather generic/common) so that should not be a problem, a sound card that I’ve had working in Linux before so we’re good there, and overall just some mid-old age hardware that all should work with Linux… so I’m super-geeked and convinced that this is SOOOO gonna happen (This is Sunday night btw).

First try - Fedora Core 3 :: The OS goes on, though the loading process is somewhat lengthy, but it DOES go on, and by the end, I have a working system (other than the NIC) that boots straight into XWindows… I don’t want it to go straight into XWindows. Also, the system feels VERY slow and cumbersome. I go through the XWindow tools for network management and eventually I get the network card working correctly by assiging it a static IP address, and telling it what nameservers to use. Not the ‘preferred’ method of function, but it’ll do… for a minute. It eats at me for a whole night.

Next try - Debian Sarge :: So, I get on Debian’s site and download the floppy-disk install images, write them to disk using winrwwrt, boot up and see an error message.. after several attempts, I realize that the floppy is close to going bad and because of the low-level reading nature required of the ‘boot’ floppy, this will not do. So, I swap the root and boot floppies, rewrite the image and now all is good in the hood. I boot up and I see the ever-so-friendly and very familiar Debian installer. I go through the installer a bit, and eventually get to the point that it’s supposed to hit the Debian mirrors and pull stuff down… I realize I’ve not got DHCP working again, so I reboot, go into the expert install, set the IP address, set the DNS, now I get access to the mirrors and it pulls down the base Debian system, installs it, and reboots. At reboot I now re-enter the Debian installer, again without DHCP address, and this time however, I cannot find ANYWHERE to manually set the network configuration. Because of that, I save the settings and end up with a VERY basic Debian install. I search the internet and hack around in the files until I find the places to manually set up my network card (/etc/network/interfaces or something like that) and where to set the dns server info (in /etc again somewhere). I do so, and now I can ping google… yay! So, I apt-get install x-window-system and BOOM… it works like I remember Debian working… it’s friggin gorgeous… By the way, I haven’t mentioned that when booting into the terminal like I just did, any of the Linux distros always utilize only like the center 40% of my LCD, so I have this tiny box in the middle of my screen with the info on it, but I can see that X is installing. I test the X install afterwards, and it’s working… awesome. Now I apt-get install kde and like 20 minutes later, KDE is downloaded and installed. This is beautiful. I log into X and there’s KDE… however, it’s still only using the small center of my screen… very annoying. So I reboot… Same thing. I figure well, at least DHCP is working now I’m sure, so I use XWindows to reconfigure the NIC for DHCP, do a dhclient, and nothing… reboot… nothing. Furious, I turn the machine off; I give up.

Next Try - Red Hat 9 :: Okay, I love RH9, some systems are just CLASSIC. The system goes on quickly, I choose to hand pick every single thing that is installed and I do so, I ask it to boot into text mode instead of graphical, everything installs, it uses the full screen… so now everything is just absolutely awesome… DHCP still doesn’t work. As a note, at ONE point in time, DHCP DID work because I used this laptop in lotsa different DHCP-only environments. I’m still not sure what’s going on but I’ve decided to do two things.

I’ve decide first of all that I’m going to stick with RH9, I’m going to get the Windows driver for my USB-wireless (hope my USB works happily for a bit) network stick, and get the NDISwrapper and go that route. Hopefully my USB-stick will be able to pull DHCP plus I’ll be able to play wirelessly so I can work from upstairs where my family stays.

Secondly, I am going to dual-boot my computer at work. This may seem unrelated, but I want to try one of the heavier installations (Fedora Core 4 is burning as we speak) and this computer has all the nice new stuff. I have a 3.2ghz, 1gb RAM, 100GB HD, svideo out to a nice monitor, etc… I have not really had a chance to use Linux on a really buff machine ever… I always dedicate yesterday’s trash to Linux. Well, if I can get OpenOffice (um, yea), Firefox/Thunderbird (well duh), Gaim (ya think?), Zend Studio Pro (it works) and Meeting Maker (the only possible challenge) to run on FC4, I will most likely attempt, in a month or two, to format this Windows machine, and go full-out FC4.

I don’t hate Windows honestly, but all the software I use on any regular basis can and does run on Linux, plus I’ve been wanting to learn the ins and outs more for a long time, and I think jumping off the deep-end may be the only way to achieve the competency I want. Plus, I see RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) and perhaps RHCT (RHC Technician) in the future for me possibly and if so, I want to get prepared. Finally, our department is moving towards Linux and the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) stack for development, and I think it would be of great use for me to be more familiar.

So anyway, that’s the update for now… hopefully tonight I’ll get RH9 with the USB wireless going on DHCP, and then maybe tomorrow or sometime later this week I’ll finish burning FC4, and dual-boot my work system and see how that goes.

Intel has unveiled new microprocessor chipsets that will be referred to as “VT” chips; I’m sure they’ve been talking about it for a while, this is just the first chance I’ve had to see it. VT stands for Virtual Technologies. This is a new technology that allows for hardware native support for non-emulated, reboot-free multiple operation installs. This means that if you purchase a system built around an Intel 3.8GHZ VT chip, you will be able to install, using a 3rd party layer like XenSource and some others that are on their way from such vendors as Microsoft and VMWare that will allow you to install a host operating system (with XenSource, Linux works as the host and with the Windows solution undoubtedly some Windows product will have to be used as the host) and multiple other systems as well. The real excitement comes from what is actually going on under the hood which I am certain I’m not totally qualified to discuss in detail but even the generalities make my extremities tingle. The two operating systems are 100% completely independent of each other and in fact, thanks to the hardware from Intel, they are not even aware of each others’ existence. I think there are good points to this as well as bad points but I’m not decided upon whether I think the complete separation is mostly a good or mostly a bad thing.

Good points include the possibility of being able to use one operating system to repair the files on disk of the other operating system in case of corruption causing inability to boot, and the fact that upgrading or getting rid of either operating system should not damage the other installation at all. The bad points that I can think of are limited to questions of shared memory. I would want the ability to transfer my cut and paste / clipboard buffer between the operating systems. This may seem like a small thing, but in function, it would be an exceedingly useful feature. So many times, when working with a dual boot system, two computers, or with a kvm, I have done something on one computer, whether it’s just browse to a website or type a paragraph and found for some reason that the information in my clipboard would much better serve me on the other machine. I’m not certain that this would be a feature ‘required’ by the industry, but it would be nice as a new feature in a later revision if not in the initial release.