zzz Chatter | bitpost.com/news

“VMWare saved my life!”

Stuck in Windoze cubeville? Pair up the VMWare Workstation 4 beta and RedHat 8.0, and you will be living in the fast lane! Install a FUN and EXCITING OS right on top of that boring old one, right in the middle of the cube farm! You can shut it down and hide it away from those prying corporate IS eyes with one click of the mouse. And there’s no need to wait – you can still run your Venereal Studio compile while Linux 8.0 installs in the background! An abtracted hardware layer that “works like magic”, including full network access with VMWare’s “bridged” ethernet layer, shiny new Gnome and KDE desktops, and best of all, no more dishpan hands! ‘Thanks, Marge!!!’:>

UPDATE: here’s a freaky thing – a snapshot of my Windows XP desktop running VMWare hosting Redhat 8 displaying gedit while XP runs Hummingbird and I am ssh’ing with Putty from XP to the VMWare-hosted RH8 and displaying gedit in XP via ssh X packets from RH8 over Putty.

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Comments | Thursday, February 27, 2003

Sci Fi round two (or three or…)

Over the years I’ve at times been into modern sci-fi ala William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. If you can suspend your disbelief at the protagonist hacking out code to save the world from some evil virus or whatever, it can often be entertaining. Jim Brown, our sysadmin at ABB, just pointed me to a book by Corey Doctorow that’s got the goods. It’s been published for free electronic global distribution – the guy is down with it all, read his blog for more…

For the really hardcore, you can max out on those truly painful embarrasment pangs that come from realizing how corny it can get with this short story of his… I have to admit I do truly love the Justesenisms tho (e.g. calling Palo Alto “Shallow Alto” – ask Ken for a full list of the Chicago ‘burbs some time: Rolling Meadows = Rolling Ghettos; Downer’s Grove = Downer’s Grave…)

Comments | Thursday, January 16, 2003

NSA Director statement to Congressional Committees on Intelligence

Sounds like the NSA is still kicking butt, in this recent address to Congress by the director.

Most interesting paragraph:

Shortly after September 11 th , I had a meeting of my senior leaders. I asked them the following question: Is there any part of our transformation roadmap that we should change as a result of the
attacks? Unanimously, they responded, Ã¢â‚¬Å“No, but we need to accelerate these changes.Ã¢â‚¬Â With the money the President has requested and Congress has provided, we have done just that. We still have much to do but these committees know better than most the performance of NSA in the current war. I know in my heart that this level of sustained excellence would not have been possible without the business process, organizational, personnel, and operational changes we have set in place and you have supported.

Comments | Wednesday, November 27, 2002

Nerds To See Light of Day

Some interesting monthly in-the-flesh meetups of global geek communities happening in Raleigh, NC:

Slashdot

4th Thursday of every month, go to the site to vote on where. I know this one really happens because Zac is the host, wahoo!

2600 magazine meetup in Raleigh, at the Crabtree Valley Mall food court in front of the McDonald’s. All meetings take place on the first Friday of the month. 5pm ~ 8pm. I don’t know if anyone shows up for this, but if nothing else you can get some fries.

Comments | Sunday, October 27, 2002

The Practical Freenet

I have been following Freenet development for years now, and it is still very much a work-in-progress.

I decided to give the latest Windows snapshot of Freenet 0.5rc1, “the first ‘stable’ release in far too long”, a ride around the block.

Well, it takes about one NY minute to realize that the main problem with USING Freenet is actually FINDING STUFF on Freenet. I will need to set up an index of my local node some time, with the perl script from here (and here’s a sample of what it can do), if I get inspired, and can get my head fully behind the concept that (“censorship is evil” && “copyright is bad” && etc. etc.).