Watch me get jealous

My friend redDEAD from the Chicago Loco and Ubuntu Mini sent me the following Ubuntu skateboard. WICKED!

Design by Stephen Slaby at Three Media for those interested.

LEGAL STUFF: This board was a one time design, with no commercial intent and cleared Ubuntu Trademarks through Michelle Surtees-Myers at Canonical UK Ltd.

the blogs

Since I dont have much to say about anything lately, I’m just going to link you to a Chinese Santa Claus atop a full grown ostrich.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01205/santa-ostrich_1205982i.jpg

Arguing about Scientology

At the mall today I had a one sided conversation with a group of Scientologist which was very striking to me. It was one sided in the regard that I don’t feel that the people I was arguing with were really informed enough to engage in the conversation at a truly deep, semantic level.

When asked about the OT levels and the higher power Xenu for example, the person quickly denied any such entitity existing, as they had done in previous conversations. Moreover, it was a vehemont and loud denial, meant to be an authorative stance. According to Jim Lewis, who is refrenced and quoted on the Xenu Wikipedia page, this is not the case however. Being one of, if not the most, authorative scholars in Alternative Religions, I find the claim by said Scientologist to be misinformed, if not an outright lie. I would like to err on the side of caution and give them the benefit of the doubt.

The conversation moved on to the influences of the church, where a more senior fellow from Scientology told me about the origins. According to him, L. Rob Hubbard traveled early in his life and learned the rituals and systems of the Easter religions, where the first religions were invented created.

Even later in the conversation, he claimed that Scientology is a technology, an understanding of the world, an ideology, science, and belief system.

Problems I have with this:

Scientology is not a science. I have seen no public works which describe their research methods, falsifiablity, and experiments. Further, a science requires independent study and hard evidence is required, none of which I’ve seen. How are advances in the science made? Moreover, full knowledge and understanding of the ’science’ is requied….

There was a claim by the Scientologist that said:

The information [re: Xenu] is doctored information that was taken and then completely altered to make everything sound spacey….if such a document exists. If there is a document out there claiming this stuff, then they[anyone with knowledge re: Xenu] would not have the acess to talk about copyrighten materials, they just simply would not have access to such files if they existed…. If they did have such documents, they’d be the biggest copyright theif alive.

I have a problem with on several levels. For one, I find the copyright claim to be dubious, although I am not familiar with the copyright law in the 1950’s, I think that the actual documents would be in the public domain. Even if I’m wrong for this one, this is not the point. All religious/scientific texts should be in the public domain. Regardless of the actual understanding of what Scientology is, this should be public. It’s knowledge and understanding of the world which should be reviewable by all.

Second, the claim of ‘largest copyright thief’ is a straw man logical fallacy.

Thirdly, this document regarding Xenu DOES exist. Further, it can be found in L. Rob Hubbard’s own writing on page 236 of the NEW OT3 chapter of The Technical Bulletins of Dianetics and Scientology this page. All of this is in the public domain. Legal issues aside, the inability to control the spreading of this document on the Internet has made this a de facto truth. Later, I was specifically told that Scientology is not about rockets, aliens, or spaceships in any regard. I guess they looked at Hubbbard’s handwriting and rejected it from the official understanding of Scientology?

Another issue I had with this conversation was the question regarding the origins of Scientology. The claim is that L. Ron Hubbard learneed from but was not influenced by the other religions. When I asked about the relationship between Jack Parsons and Hubbard, the Scientologist said that the name was new to him. This is a historical inaccuracy, seeing as Hubbard and Parsons performed ritual magick together, as well as Hubbard marrying (Betty Northup) the half sister of Parsons’ wife, after she had lived with Parsons for some time. Further, Allied Enterprises is a boating company created and owned by Hubbard, Parsons, and Betty Northup in 1946, which means that the 3 at minimum, be easily linked. Either this is a lie, an ignorance, or a mix of the two.

The last statement which caused me confusion and ire was the claim that Dianetics/Scientology can help increase abilities and other such ‘powers’. Specifically I asked him, ‘you mean like Spiderman or Superman’ to which the reply was ‘for some people, yes, that is an option’. Even for a religious person, this was a bold and redicolous statement…

I’ve tried to present this encounter in a fair and balanced manner, but we all know this is impossible. Comments, feedback, etc. are appreciated.

Stay classy San Diago,

-eddie m.

Overheard in …. the airwaves

“I don’t even know where I’m staying tonight. I might be crashin’ with Jorge Castro, I’m not sure yet. We might even spoon, who knows?!

…

and don’t go bloggin’ this, I’ll kick you off the planet”

-Richard Johnson aka nixternal

“That’s going to happen anyway, there is a policy against offensive content.”
-Eddie Martinez aka posingaspopular aka eddieftw

I know Richard will kill me for this, but this was by far, the funniest thing I’ve heard all day.

Internet meme’s are popular

history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head

125 clear
55 ls
51 ssh
47 sudo
47 exit
40 cd
11 tar
9 man
8 killall
8 cat

As you can see, i use ‘clear’ alot. It’s easier than using ctrl+L because I most of the times that I want to do Ctrl+L, I have to look down at the keyboard, and that is just.not. cool. Does anyone else get bothered if their terminal is completly covered with text?

ls -lash is my preferred command, but ls works just fine.

Wicked,

eddie m.

Reasons and Ideas to get worked up about

I’ve been busy as of alot, so I haven’t much time to quickly and foolishly throw up my ideas regarding the world. Also, I’ve tried to cut back on any blogging that has political conotations because, quite simply, I dont feel this is the best avenue to do so. However, I’m going to skip my own self-checks for this one.

“Plants” with “leaves” no more efficient than today’s solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous “bacteria” could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop – at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.

Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the “gray goo problem.” Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term “gray goo” emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable.

The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.

Reference

Okay, first of all, let’s get all this bullshit out of the way. Are people honestly arguing, that through advances in SCIENCE, humans will create viruses and animals and organisms that will DESTROY the world?!? I use caps in the previous sentence for two reasons. One is to highlight the hysteria and fantasy of people who see such destructive actions as being inevitable. More importantely, I want to show how this is not true. I don’t honestly believe that Darwin is going to get ate by a killer mutant virus in the near future that will destroy the entire Earth. It should be obvious by now, that I am being condensending and dimissive of these claims, because they are as equally irrational as the utopian idea that machines will free humans to a point where work and leisure will be mixed, and there will only be a need for a four hour work day. This last idea was advanced near the Industrial Revolution and it didn’t happen. Science destroying Science? In a micro sense, I can understand the appeal of us vs. them survivalism, but this is not the scope on which the article is talking about, thus speaking about the idea as an inevitable conclusion is reckless at best.

This is the exact same hysteria I see in the present day arguments about global warming. I will not go into the scientific ideas behind global warming, but I will say that I do believe global warming does exist. What I do have a problem with is people running up to me and telling me that my life is in immidiate danger because of global warming. Worst of all, polar bears are drowning! I’ve seen polar bears before. They are big. They can take care of themselves. And if they cant, well then that’s okay too. No, seriously. It’s okay. If any animal is having trouble surviving, that’s not on me. They can adapt, or they can become extinct. I will not rush to defend polar bears because I feel bad about their drownings (read: that is a logical fallacy), and go out of my want to mess with Darwin. That’s illogical. If you accept global warming as real, then you most likely see it as a threat to the ecosystems of the planet. However, most people who talk to me about global warming fail to see that other organisms will step in and fill this void. This is how SCIENCE works. If you think otherwsie (such as the earth being 6000 years old, or global warming being a byproduct of an upcoming alien invasion), then I can’t help you.

There is more to this idea however. Nobody who campaigns against global warming, or is worried about the future robotic overlords, is denying that these technological advancements are inheretly bad. In fact, most if not all (spray on pancakes vs chesse in a can being a good example), of the people out in the world will consider that they are better off now than they were 4 years ago. Of course this is a complicated and loaded question which cant be answered in one sentence and guided by skill sets, the economy, life in general. But technology is a great enabler and offers so many useful and helpful benefits, that it simply pisses me off when I hear simplistic and irrational arguments which fail to see the larger picture of the impact of technology on the world.

-Eddie

Note: the author of the Wired article above is a great fan of technology and hugely important in the development of modern computing, more so than I could ever be. With this consideration in mind, I still disagree with his article.

News, CLC, School, etc.

I don’t usually (read: ever) start my blogs with a link, but today will be different.

Matthew Helmke’s latest blog post on Planet Ubuntu got me thinking about some recent news.

Our leader of the Ubuntu Chicago Team, Richard Johnson, is stepping down . This is important on several fronts:

Richard is good at what he does. Regardless of how many jokes I make about him.

Richard is a good friend who taught me tons about Linux and introduced me into many people in the Open Source world.

Richard nominated myself, along with Jim Campbell J1mc to help replace him.

So where does this put me? Well I want to help out and I’ve been doing lots of agenda setting, Wiki editing, meeting scheduling, etc. So sure, I would be a logical candidate for leadership. However, I am simply uncomfortable with the tag ‘leader’ since we are a TEAM. I don’t want to overshadow anyone with my own thoughts, ideas, projects, or sex appeal. LOLAMRITE?!? ;p

We as a team are working on a project at Christian Life College, in Mt. Prospect, IL. We are migrating their broken and essentially useless Windows 2003 server to an Ubuntu server and setting up their network that is worthy of being called ‘geek friendly’. Even if the school is not the most technologically advanced, it is still exciting, imho.

Wiki Page

And on a personal front, I passed all my classes. Exciting! I think so anyway.

-Eddie M.

“Good” computing

I’ve been thinking about what makes an end user good or skilled at using a computer, and how to compare computing habits. There are a few that are obvious:

The user should never give out personal information.

I don’t care who you are; saving passwords and logging information or refusing/forgetting to encrypt non arbitrary information is just bad style. My friend argued with me that you never when you are going to need logs of your information. I disagree. You never know when the authorities are going to ask for logs of your information, which is why it’s better not to in the first place. This extends to people who run WEP encryption on their network, etc.

Memory is not expendable.

At my work, we have 3 main computers. Lots of people bring in their personal laptops to work. But i hear ths all the time, “This computer is too slow. I think it needs more memory.” Well realistically how fast do you expect this computer to go? Memory is what to use after the CPU is overworked, after you run OUT of computing power. Not before. So it seems backwards to upgrade the memory when there are simpler fixes.

Proper uses of computing power.

Don’t use 2 firefox windows when a tab will work just as well, but with less resources. There’s no need to run htop unless you are checking something on your system. Furthermore, all our computers are accessing a main NTFS file system. There is absolutely no need to run a Windows machine for a file system. This is backwards.
I can’t think of any more off the top of my head, but those a  few.

-Eddie M.

Follow up

In my Wrong Source entry aka my Last blog post, I went on for a bit about the lyrics to ‘Neva antiquated’ by Jedi Mind Tricks. It has been pointed out to me that the lyrics are to the 2003 re-release of the Psycho-Social, Chemical, Biological & Electric Magnetic Manipulation of Human Consciousness album, originally released in 1997. Thus, all the lyrics I found were 1997, and not the 2003 release which I wanted.

Excellent! Thanks spaz for pointing this one out!

-Eddie

Wrong Source Software

Excuse the title, but I had a question. What happens when everything you read and find on the Internet is a direct contradiction to what you feel to be true? Even wiki’s and googles won’t help you in this case. Example:

My Jedi Mind Tricks will break your molecular structure down.
(Return of the Jedi)
My Jedi Mind Tricks will break your molecular structure to pieces.
(Return of the Jedi)

These are the lyrics I found for ‘Neva Antiquated’ from Jedi Mind Tricks’ The Psycho-Social, Chemical, Biological & Electro-Magnetic Manipulation Of Human Consciousness (1997) release. Except the version I have has the chorus:

I am the beginning and ending of what is war
(and I am the beginning and ending of what is raw)
X3

Now Jedi Mind Tricks did re-release this CD from 1997 in 2006 if I recall correctly. So I check the lyrics from Neva Antiquated (Dark Jedi remix) and…. the same result!

So either I have a super rare version of this one particular song from JMT or the whole world is wrong.

What does one do in the Open Source, wiki world when this happens to them? Where is the line between giving up and being adamant that the information you have is correct.

-Eddie