Some of you out there may have caught the YouTube video by some fundies that call themselves “RealCatholicTV” that was posted last week. I came across it via PZ Myers blog. The video was describing their vision of a catholic dictatorship (their words) which of course included a vision of enforcing all the kinds of oppression that we know from history follow from such dictatorships. They of course realised, by the massive response, that such ideas are not very welcome in a free world that so many people have fought for and died to achieve. As the cowards they are, these fundies, they took down the video. Possibly also due to people reporting it for being overly hateful to for instance gay people, which I myself reported them for. Or maybe also because, I hope, that a large number of Catholics and other Christians reacted to such an outrageous video.
Now they’ve posted a pure whining video as a follow-up to the one taken down. Of course, they are moderating the comment section on YouTube, so don’t even bother commenting there. They seem to only allow cheerleader-comments through the filter. They are after all not too into the whole freedom of speech thing. It’s a bit of a nuisance when you plan to replace the free world with a Catholic theocracy as they’ve toned it down to.
The laughable aspects of this whining video is of course the obvious childish “but so do you” approach. They accuse the free world of being a dictatorship of relativism. Funny that. A democracy tend to reflect the attitude and ideals of the majority of its people. The free world does not want somebody with a superiority-complex (a pope in this case) to decide on behalf of everyone what’s best for them. That was actually a key argument in their original video. The pope knows best, better do what the pope says. The pope speaks to God you see, and the voices tells him what to do. Well, the voices also spoke to Hitler. We do not want such lunatics running our lives.
The video culminates in a smug fire-and-brimstone lecture which is nothing but a pitiful attempt to scare people into submission, not that any sane person would buy into such crap. This sorry excuse for a human being, Michael Voris, is probably looking forward to see us all burn in hell. His divinely inspired love for us spawns of Satan isn’t quite the selling point he think it is, but it is what we’d expect from a faith with its long tradition of corruption, abuse and oppression of other people’s freedom. Not to mention a clergy of less integrity than a school-yard rapist.
Here’s the YouTube-posted drivel in question, enjoy!
Ubuntu decided to drop Sun Java from the latest release of Ubuntu, Lucid Lynx. However for me to get my internet bank to work, I need this package installed. A bit of googling turned up the solution, and here it is:
I have been upgrading my old fileserver today with new hardware and 4 new 2 TB Hitachi disks. I thought I’d set them up in a Raid 5 array. This is a new installation of Ubuntu Server 10.04 running on an Asus Deluxe mainboard with a SIL SATA controller with 6 SATA ports.
This all went well enough, but after a reboot, I got this error when trying to assemble the array:
mdadm: Cannot open /dev/sdb: Device or resource busy
Looking about a bit on the net I find this blogpost which is quite helpful: Righteous Hack: Device or resource busy when using mdadm. However it doesn’t quite solve my problem as I already thought of these options and double-checked them. Some further searching revealed this helpful post on ubuntuforums: Raid stops after restart (SOLVED). That did the trick! Turns out that one of the raid-disks (was random on my server) is attempted assembled during startup when mdadm doesn’t know what raid to assemble from the conf file. The solution is running the command:
Firefox is a great web browser, but it is also insanely frustrating to work with sometimes. For instance will the Page Setup default to US Letter, possibly the two most annoying words you can come across in the world of printers and printing. How many times haven’t you seen some office printer stuck on “Please insert Letter” holding the entire print-queue back? Why the fuck the Americans can’t adapt to international standards however is another rant altogether.
Anyway, the issue in Firefox is that when you try to print a webpage to file, at least under Ubuntu (haven’t tested it elsewhere), the Page Setup tab is greyed out. You actually have to go to the Page Setup menu option to change this. The Page Setup menu option has no shortcut, so if you’re unlucky enough to have a window that is menu-less like in my internet bank when looking at a receipt after paying a bill, you’re basically screwed. There is no way you can change the paper format. Changing it in the main window doesn’t affect the other one, nor does it care about default settings when the print dialogue is called from JavaScript or Ctrl-P.
The solution to this is to change the default printing option in the config because you can’t change it under preferences either. Type about:config into the address bar, and change the setting named print.postscript.paper_size from “letter” to “a4″. That fixes this annoying issue once and for all. Of course this should be detected from the OS regional options, but as user friendly as Firefox is, it isn’t that user friendly.
This summer I have been working for my old employer for nearly 5 weeks. The local council offices at my hometown. In the server room 3 new HP ProLiant rack servers were in boxes. I have set up a new domain controller for a subdomain, a new Exchange 2010 and DC server to replace the old Exchange/DC, and last but not least, a System Center Essentials 2010 server to monitor license usage and to push updates (which WSUS does for free anyway).
First step in the process was installing Windows 2008R2 server on the box. Plain sailing with HP’s SmartStart CD which gives you the option to easily configure the disk arrays and then push the OS installation onto the disks with drivers and everything going along with it. I set up 2 disk arrays, 2 146 GB Raid 1 mirror sets. One for the OS and one for the System Center Essentials (SCE) installation.
System Center Essentials 2010 is a stripped down version of the large and more expensive System Center tool. SCE is for smaller organizations up to 500 clients and 50 servers. We have about 20 servers and 200 clients, not counting school student computers. SCE is quite affordable, especially on our Volume License. The SCE software package itself is about a 5 GB download which I grabbed at our MS Volume License account. There is a good set of guides at Microsofts Technet website here. There isn’t much to say about the installation process itself as it went rather smoothly. Except that it took quite a while to complete. SCE can run on Windows 2003 servers, but to get the virtualization bit to work properly, Windows 2008 is needed. SCE uses a MSSQL server as storage, but it is bundled with a MSSQl server that can be used instead if you don’t have a full MSSQL server in your organization. We have 3, but I decided to leave them alone and installed the bundled MSSQL locally.
When everything got up an running, I got to have a look through the management interface. I pushed out the client installation to the primary domain, which during the summer only has about 20-30 computers up and running. A nice test environment. I also set up the WSUS service to push updates via group Policy, and now after a few days, it seems to run smoothly. I have not yet enforced installation deadlines on the clients but that is an option as I seem to remember it is in the WSUS tool as well.
What I liked the most about SCE is the ability to monitor resource status on computers. It checks hardware, manufacturer/model, disk usage and capacity, RAM, CPU and generally all you otherwise would manually punch into a asset database or those good old spreadsheets we used when I first started in IT in 1999. SCE also scans all installed software and versions thereof. Giving you a highly detailed and somewhat messy output. However the summary screen gives you a nice overview of operating systems in the organization. Today we run a tool I coded many years ago in VB6.0 which runs an inventory of resources (disk and RAM) and versions of a specified list of software. This is imported into a MySQL database and cross referenced with the computer inventory table. This works quite well actually, but is regularly in need of updates as things change in Windows and applications.
The virtualization part of SCE I have not tested yet, it is the main new feature of this release though. We do have a few VmWare servers running, so I might get around to it soon. SCE also has a nifty report generation tool that will generate reports from a long list of predefined reports. SCE also have a software package deployment tool which is next on my list to test out. I hope I can set it up to push out software like Firefox and other non-MS tools we use, as well as Office 2007/2010.
So I decided to buy a proper lens for my Canon EOS400 digital camera. I have been using the original lens since I bought the camera back in 2007 (I think). I was a bit sceptical at first since it goes from 18mm all the way to 250mm. But reading a few reviews, like this one for example, eased my mind. Sure, a lens with that wide a range has to have a few limitations. Sigma produced a 18-200mm one before this one, which wasn’t all that good according to reviews. Somehow they’ve managed to improve whatever the hell it is they do inside those, and this one is much better. The lens is not that expensive, and suits my budget fine. I paid in the order of €500 for it. You generally get what you pay for, and a professional lens cost at least twice that an up. It is the prefect all-round lens to replace the original lens on these cameras. It is kindof heavy, but not troublesome to carry around.
My main interest in photography is nature photography. Especially in the summer when I am back in my hometown where the woods are just outside the door and there is wildlife around the house. I have not yet managed to get the much wanted snapshot of the buck that’s been grassing on the other side of the road all summer as it has been hiding in the heavy rain. I hope I’ll get a chance to get it before I leave. Instead I made a few test snapshots and close-ups of flowers in my parents garden. I’ll post a couple here. Click on them to get the large version.
Woken Furies is the third book in the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy by the British science fiction author Richard Morgan. I reviewed the first book, Altered Carbon, in September 2009 (here). The second book I never reviewed on its own. It’s called Broken Angels in any case. Each of the books stand on their own, and there is little dependency on the previous one to read the next. Actually I don’t think it matter much which order you read them in at all.
In the first book, Altered Carbon, Kovacs is on earth, some time in the future, when we have colonized the nearby solar systems. He is investigating a murder, and you have your classical private detective story in a curious futuristic and pretty bleak setting. Added to this is Richard Morgan’s rough touch. His characters and settings are pretty hardcore. Violence and sex is frequent, yet suits the story very well.
In the second book, Broken Angels, Kovacs is investigating an alien planet where a corporation is trying to secure an alien portal in the middle of a war zone. The aliens, the Martians as they’re referred to, is an alien race that once inhabited Mars and a number of other planets about a million years ago. They left technology and ruins, and a lot of mysteries. The interest of this portal causes violent fights between corporations, and our “hero” is in the middle of it.
In this third and last book, Woken Furies, we meet Kovacs back on the planet where he once were born. In this version of our future, the human consciousness is stored in a chip implanted in your spine, so you are able to change body if you should die or just want an upgrade. Also, as a means of punishment, you may be put in storage for decades or even centuries. Kovacs reappear after being in storage for a long time, finding a planet not much like the one he grew up on. This book is about politics and is centred around a revolutionary character from the early days of the settlement of the planet. Old revolutionaries which have spent the better part of the last couple of centuries in a small surfer town, is called to arms and the revolution is back on. This is yet another fascinating and imaginative book that keeps you interested from page one. Maybe the best one of the three in my opinion. Yet I wouldn’t want to miss any of them.
SciFi’s new Science Fiction show, Caprica, which started in January this year (although the pilot aired in April 2009) is a follow up show, or actually a prequel, to Battlestar Galactica (the new version). It takes place on Caprica and covers the backstory of how the Cylons first came to be. We see Bill Adama as a young boy, and we follow his family and the Graystone family through the first half season of the series.
There are much similar between Battlestar Galactica and Caprica. They are both Sci-Fi/Drama, but Caprica is less about politics and religion although these are of course in the background. Caprica is more of a family drama, and it works well in this futuristic and slightly alien setting without becoming to remote from the world we live in. Much is familiar, the main difference is a few levels up in technology, though this is not overplayed as they do in more traditional Sci-Fi like Star Trek. A lot like Battlestar Galactica really, except Caprica takes place on the ground and not in space. The Cylon side of the story greatly reminds me of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which also was an excellent show I might add.
Caprica is a show well worth watching if you like Sci-Fi and Drama alike. Especially if you enjoyed Battlestar Galactica in its first seasons. I’ll be looking forward to the second half of season one which unfortunately isn’t scheduled to start until January 2011.
Sam Harris has made an excellent albeit a bit short TED talk about science and moral questions:
He naturally got a lot of negative critique for this talk. He is not claiming that science can dictate morals exactly, what he is saying is that there are moral truths to be known. The fact that science has no complete explanation for reality, does not prevent the existence of scientific truths, as does not the lack of a scientific model for morals prevent there from being any moral truths.
