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Doug
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Doug
As you can see from today’s new design, I’m back to minimalism. I seem to be engaged in an on-going simplicity kick throughout my life. I can see the beginnings of it some years ago, at about the time I discovered it was much nicer to live a simpler, less emotion-wracked life. Storms of emotion and passion can seem very invigorating at the moment, but it seems there’s always a price to pay - and as I get older, I’m less willing to give up the time to pay that price. There are things more valuable to me these days.
On examination, though, it seems like this simplicity kick keeps growing. I seem really compelled these days to eliminate the extraneous; to pare things down to very simple levels, to eliminate clutter, most particularly of the intellectual sort. I’ve started wondering why this is. What’s driving me to want things so distilled down to basics?
I’ve always been particularly sensitive to background noise. I know a lot of people (like my wife), seem to sleep better, for example, when there’s some sort of white noise in the background. I can’t stand it, and never have been able to. I can’t stand large, noisy crowds for the same reason. I seem utterly unable to “tune out” sounds around me and only focus on a single conversation or sound. I hear it all, and though I seem to have developed an ability to process more than one set of incoming stimuli at a time and make sense of it, there’s a certain point where I overload and nothing will work but to cut down on the overall amount of sound coming in. That point of overload is variable, and depends a lot on how much of my concentration I feel I need to focus on a single conversation or sound I’m listening to. That’s why I’ve never really been able to stand parties, for example. I just can’t reduce the signal-to-noise ratio to something I can deal with unless I partition my attention so much that I can’t really give anyone a decent amount of attention…and for me, if I can’t give something or someone I find interesting a decent amount of attention, it all just seems like a waste of time.
Pretty much the same thing seems to be happening to me these days with all sorts of information inputs, and it seems like that’s what’s driving my need for simplicity. There are things going on that I desperately want to pay attention to, so I feel a need to filter out a lot more. If it isn’t essential to those things I feel a burning need to be involved in, to pay attention to, then I need it gone, or at least reduced in intensity. I have a strong need to be heavily involved with my kids these days - they’re at that age where so much is happening so fast, and I don’t want to miss a second of it. Sometimes, there’s a lot happening at work, and my plans for my future are heavily dependant on the outcomes of those things, so that wants attention, too. Between those two things, I could have a very full plate indeed.
I find, however, that there’s a lot more that I feel a need to pay attention to, things that are screaming for processing time. As I read all my various news sources every day, its becoming obvious to me that something is happening. There’s a very great deal going on in the world in the past year or so; there’s been a huge amount of change. I read things like this and this and this and I wonder what the hell is going on? For awhile, a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and then the birth of the (public) Internet with all its huge potential, it really looked like things were going to get better. Things really seemed to be getting better. It seemed like we had an opportunity to make things better. Now, things seem to be getting worse, again. It feels like someone, a whole lot of someone’s, are trying to steal away this potential. I feel like we’re being sold down the river for a measly $.01 share dividend increase for people who already have so much money they don’t know what to do with it. I feel like my country, which should be a beacon to the world of how things could be, is being sold to the highest bidder, that the politicians running the show (of both parties) are more concerned with their own power, perks, and pockets than they are with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I feel like the corporations are way the hell out of control…and most of my fellow citizens couldn’t give a damn as long as they have their 400 channels of television and Twinkies and nobody bothers them, much.
Maybe it’s always been this way and I’m just now at a point in my life where I’m starting to be really aware of it and worried about it. I’m not naive, though, about the problems we’ve had in the world in the past. I’m of the generation that grew up always having to think about a very real threat of nuclear war. I’m old enough to remember Kent State. The truth is, I’m more worried and anxious about things now that I ever was in the past. I’m bothered, and I’m disturbed. I can’t get my mind around all of it. I can’t understand what’s driving all of it. And so, it demands my attention. I can’t shake the feeling: something is going on. Something more than just George Bush or Microsoft or the RIAA or NAFTA or the Internet bubble bursting or even all of them combined. I’m not saying there’s some shadowy cabal somewhere manipulating something. I never attribute to malice what can be more easily attributed to stupidity. And yet, an awful lot of us seem to have gone really, really stupid, all at the same time. It demands my attention.
And so, I crave simplicity, to gain the space to try and process what this all means. There seem to be thousands shouting at me with their own, individual answers to what it’s all about, but I’ve never been one to just accept what I’m being told. That simplification, that particular abdication of self, of responsibility, of making sense out of complexity, has always seemed to me to be the ultimate betrayal.
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Doug
When I first started making regular posts to Erehwon Notebook, the original concept was that of a parsonal journal, and the original layout was somewhat that of an actual notebook. Later, the layout went through a whole series of new designs, and the content moved somewhat more towards that of a web log. There’s always been an element of a personal journal here, and I tend to annotate web links a bit more than a pure web log would, but that’s been the general direction over the past year or so.
These days, I’m finding that I don’t have time throughout the day to make a series of posts about interesting sites. When I do post, the posts tend to be longer, more of a personal nature, and the links aren’t necessarily the main point of what I’m writing about. Thinking about it over the past week or so, it appears to me that I’ve more or less returned to what the original idea behind the Notebook was: a personal journal and online notebook.
So, as you might have noticed, I’ve made some changes here (again). Aside from cosmetic differences, I’ve changed how the posts display. Rather than showing a series of posts from the last week, the main page now shows only the posts from a single day - the most recent day I wrote. You can navigate the posts not only by clicking the post titles or going through the archive, but can read back a day at a time using the links at the bottom of the page. My intent in the next week or so is to do a bit more database work and add some keywords to each post, so that you can view posts as a group of similarly themed ideas.
I suspect, as has been the case in the past few weeks, that I’ll be posting less frequently, but in more depth. Hopefully, I’ll have something interesting to say!
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Doug
I haven’t felt much like writing in the past few weeks, probably least of all this week. There’s a lot of stuff swirling around in my head (and a lot of stuff going on, period), but none of it has coalesced yet to the point of being able to put it down here. It hasn’t just been writing, either; I haven’t been visiting my usual sites as often lately either. I guess I have a case of web-burn.
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Doug
I ordered a new computer this week from Pogo Linux this week. The new baby is a 1.3Ghz Athlon, with 256Mb of RAM, a GeForce2 MX graphics board, a 30Gb 7200 RPM IBM hard drive, a 52X CD and a Sony CD-RW, to quote a few of the specs. It’s being built right now; I can hardly wait until it arrives.
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Doug
As you can see in the new screenshot, Ximian GNOME 1.4 is finally available. There was such a huge demand for it when the packages were first released that it took me a couple of days to get it downloaded and installed on my systems both here and at work, but it was well worth the wait.
Ximian and the GNOME developers are clearly pulling out all the stops in working toward a GNOME desktop accessible by a broader range of users; one that makes Linux/BSD/*nix usable as a corporate of home productivty OS and not solely a developer’s and server OS as it tends to be now. GNOME 1.4 is intended as primarily an interim release before GNOME 2.0, but it boasts, particularly in the Ximian distribution, a host of UI and functionality improvements over 1.2. In the case of Ximian GNOME, these include Doorman, essentially a simplified set-up wizard that assists new users with configuring their desktop for the first time, a simplified and cleaned-up menu structure, and MonkeyTalk, a simple, dedicated IRC client that connects users directly to online technical support folks from Ximian as well as other GNOME users for solving technical issues with the desktop environment and applications.
The biggest, and certainly most controversial, new addition to Ximian GNOME 1.4 is the inclusion of Eazel’s Nautilus as the default file manager in place of GMC. Nautilus is certainly an excellent file manager, designed by some of the same people who did the original Macintosh interface for Apple, and it definitely shows. Nautilus is very user friendly and quite attractive. Unfortunately the 1.0 version has some performance issues, particularly on lower end systems. Probably more galling to many of the traditional Linux crowd is the fact that Nautilus is so very user-friendly, and tries to do so much in a single application. For the CLI crowd, Nautilus represents many of the things they don’t like about other operating systems, and it has their blood up.
Personally, I think this is a tempest in a teacup, and an example of zealotry over rational thought. Nothing at all forces you to use, or even install Nautilus. GNOME 1.4 still includes GMS for those who prefer it, although development stopped on the application itself quite some time ago, and it’s beginning to show its age. You don’t have to download the packages if you don’t want them. You can, as I frequently do, use the command line for file management tasks rather than any file manager. For that matter, there are several alternative file managers available for Linux in general, and even GNOME in particular. All are free and readily located from all the standard web sites. This is a very, very different situation than what users of other operating systems are presented with, where the file manager is so integrated into the operating system you have to have it installed, even if you don’t use it. The fact remains that there are an increasing number of new Linux users, many of them not developers and so plan to use their systems more as a general purpose machine than has been the case in the past who will want or need the ease-of-use Nautilus provides, at least for awhile. Unfortunately, there seem to be more than a few people out there who don’t seem to grasp the philosophy behind GNU/Linux and Open Source software, and feel compelled to go into flame mode if any software distibution doesn’t come configured exactly as they believe it should as the default.
Ximian GNOME 1.4 also comes with a host of included applications. This list includes the AbiWord word processor, GNOME PIM, Gnapster, XMMS, the Grip CD Player/Ripper, the GnuCash financial management program, Gphoto, a digital camera application, GAIM, an AIM client, GnomeICU, an ICQ client, Gnumeric, a spreadsheet, Dia, a flowcharting application, GIMP, the Ximian Red Carpet software maintenance program for automated downloading and installation of new software packages, and the Mozilla web browser, mail client, and kitchen sink internat application, as well as a host of games and other minor applications and utilities. Clearly, this is a substantial amout of software, and many of these applications are on-par or nearly so with equivalent commercial applications for other operating systems.
Ximian GNOME 1.4 is definitely a step forward in providing a useful, friendly desktop for a *nix operating systems. Bewteen Ximian GNOME and KDE, I think it’s safe to say that *nix desktop computing has entered a stage where it’s accessible to the growing base of experienced computer users who need a general purpose system, but want more power, stability, and configurability than is available from most of the commercial operating systems. Linux can still occasionally be difficult to set up, but most distributions aren’t any more difficult to install these days than Windows is, and often a lot easier. Given the increasing number of vendors offering Linux as a pre-installed option on new computers, this traditional objection to using Linux on the desktop doesn’t hold as much water these days. Combine that with a desktop that is nearing the functionality of commercial operating systems, and you have something that I suspect is going to be more and more appealling to the newer generation of computer users who grew up with these things and hence have experience and are looking for alternatives.
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Doug
Being originally from the Dayton area, The Miami Valley Rail Authority site cracked me up. It’ll be much funnier when you realize that Dayton most definitely doe not have a subway system.
Via Memepool
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Doug
This kind of stuff is just about as cool as it gets in my book. I grabbed the source for this and am going to play with it in Emacs.
Remembrance Agents are a set of applications that watch over a user’s shoulder and suggest information relevant to the current situation. While query-based memory aids help with direct recall, remembrance agents are an augmented associative memory. For example, the word-processor version of the RA continuously updates a list of documents relevant to what’s being typed or read in an emacs buffer. These suggested documents can be any text files that might be relevant to what you are currently writing or reading. They might be old emails related to the mail you are currently reading, or abstracts from papers and newspaper articles that discuss the topic of your writing.
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Doug
As I spend more time with my developer’s hat on these days, I find myself more and more reverting to simpler, more straightforward tools. As an example, a couple of weeks ago, after much protesting on my part, my co-workers pulled me kicking and screaming into using Emacs, the (in-)famous *nix text editor for writing code. I had been using Glimmer, a nice GNOME code editor, but the way it handled tabs and spaces versus the way Emacs handled them kept making hash out of their careful indentation every time I’d edit a file. So, being the magnanimous sort that I am, (and frankly getting tired of spending twenty minutes every time I opened a file “fixing” the indentation so it looked right in Glimmer, only to have them spend twenty minutes fixing it so it looked right in Emacs) I bit the bullet, fired up Emacs, and started teaching myself to use it.
I love it!
I’m no Emacs pro yet by a long shot, but I’m enjoying how powerful it is, and how I can do so much without taking my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. I love how configurable it is. I love how, just like Linux itself, it’s light and fast and powerful as you want it to be - though it can do an inconceivable number of things, has a bit of a learning curve, and can grow as huge as you want it to be. In many ways, it’s the joy of discovering Linux all over again. I’m so pleased with it I’m using it to write this right now, and have been using it increasingly for all my writing. I find I’m increasingly coming around to the idea that, for me at least, word processors are a waste of time and tend to get in the way more than they help.
Today, I installed the latest build of Evolution, the new groupware product from Ximian. As periodically happens, since Evolution is very much still in development as it runs up to a 1.0 release, the new packages broke a host of stuff on my system, to the extent that I had a choice between a flaky system and a functioning mailer. I had decided to install the new packages because it appeared they finally had Palm Pilot integration working, which would have allowed me to use Evolution for my calendar and address book as well as a mailer. Unfortunately, the new pilot-link stuff was the most severely hammered part of the install, and I finally had to resort to ripping it all out.
So now, I was without a functional mail program. I suspect that the guys at Ximian will have packages out probably as soon as tomorrow that correct the problems I ran into, but I needed a mailer now, and, in keeping with my going-retro-simplify-things trend of thought, I was getting a little tired of all the resources Evolution uses. Don’t get me wrong, Evolution is an excellent piece of software, and the 1.0 version promises to bring functionality equal to or better than Outlook to the Linux desktop, something the average user sorely needs. The question was, did I need all of what Evolution provides, along with all of the overhead, particularly on my rather under-powered work system?
I decided I really didn’t, at least not right now. My decision may have been colored a little by the fact that we have a ton of development work we need to do over the next several weeks, and a stable, fast, completely dependable system has a lot of value in those circumstances. Briefly, I considered going all the way to the retro end of the scale and just using Pine, but I’m not quite ready to go that far. After ruminating over the various GNOME mail agents, I decided that Balsa was my best bet. For calendar, address book, and Pilot integration, I went with the dependable JPilot, which is more or less a *nix clone of Palm’s own Palm Desktop.
After messing with Balsa for a bit at work, I was happy enough with it to install it here at home, as well. It isn’t as slick looking as Evolution, and it has no aspirations to be a groupware suite. It handles POP and IMAP, but doesn’t do HTML mail, which I’ve actually come to consider a positive. It’s faster than Evolution, works better than Netscape or Mozilla mail, and has some pretty strong mail handling features. It’s a nice compromise between Evolution on the one extreme and Pine on the other.
I have no idea how long this phase will last, and I suspect I’ll feel compelled to give Evolution a spin when it finally hits 1.0. Until then, however, I’m enjoying this simpler, leaner style of computing. I noticed today that I’ve hardly even opened a file manager in the last couple of weeks, being more content to use the command line (even though Nautilus is quite nice and getting faster and more stable by the day). Being able to choose to work like this is really the entire point of Free Software.
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Doug
Robert Wright does a pretty effective job of demolishing the so-called “Intelligent Design” movement’s “theories” in this article in Slate. His series of well-constructed arguments and citations pretty much proves that “Intelligent Design” is essentailly the same old mumblings of the Creationists, dressed up in some pseudo-academic language, but complete with their total lack of understanding of modern evolutionary biology.
Unfortunately, this article can’t do much good. It certainly won’t change anyone’s viewpoint; you either already agree with and understand his points, anre already a Creationist, or just don’t care and wish the entire thing would just go away. The main problem with articles like these is that there’s an assumption that well-reasoned argument can make some difference in changing the minds of people leaning toward the “Intelligent Design” view point. Which, of course, it can’t, because these folks have demonstrated again and again that logic and science have no real place in their world view, except in those cases where they can pervert it and twist it to try and befuddle people who do take a rationalist view.
Make no mistake about this: this isn’t a scientific argument, it’s a political one. That’s where I have a problem with all of this, because this is about people who are trying to corrupt the scientific method, rational discourse, and nearly anything else they can get their minds around in an effort to create a higher level of control over the minds of the public, in order to advance their own agendas. Mostly, these agendas concern themselves with making sure they and their friends continue in power and can increase their wealth. This is a fight about control, not in the least about science, or even, for that matter, religion and spirituality. The actions of the academics involved in the “Intelligent Design” movement are very much akin to the actions of Soviet biologists of the Stalinist era, who wholly embraced Lemarkian evolution because it best suited the political goals of the regime they served.
Of course, rational discourse is one of the few weapons we have in this fight, so of course we’ll use it. Scientist are compelled to argue the facts of the proposition, despite the fact that they’re mostly preaching to the choir, and probably, given the anti-intellectual bent of most Americans, doing their cause more harm than good. Beyond rational discourse, however, we’d probably be well served to visibly start displaying the Darwin Fish everywhere we can.
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