Word on the street (heh) is that somewhere in Maryland, there is a car with the following automotive decoratiosn all displayed--at the same time! + Darwin Fish + Oh Lord Please Protect Me From Your Followers + Don't Pray in My School and I Won't Think in Your Church + Doing My Best to Piss Off the Religious Right + It is Not our Differences That Divide Us -- It is Our Inability to Understand and Celebrate Those Differences. I will pay top dollar for photos of this car. ...

Okay, not really. But check this out. It's got the usual exaggeration for comic effect that we've all come to know and love (or hate) from Ann Coulter, based, as usual, on a solid premise. But I'll let the conclusion speak for itself: "Chuck Schumer could be the last Democrat in the Senate and the new rule would be: Unanimous votes required for all Senate business. But at least we could count on Sens. Lindsey Graham, Mike DeWine, John McCain, John Warner, Olympia Snowe, Susan Colli...

Got into a (very) brief debate with Michael Totten about secular humanism , in the comments on this post . Specifically, we were talking about why some conservatives consider Democracy and Education by John Dewey a "dangerous book". Anyway, it was the first time I'd actually written down my thoughts on secular humanism, so I figured I might as well archive them here, for future reference (and, hopefully, further debate). Below are the relevant bits. Secular humanism proposes ...

I hang out at Democratic Underground . Not all the time! Hardly ever, in fact. But every so often, I drop by to see how the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy looks from the outside. I like to browse the forums, read what these people are saying about all the issues of the day. One thing I've noticed is that the forums often contain predictions of the future. Many of them are incredibly paranoid and cynical. Some of them are amazingly optomistic. I've often considered the idea of publishing...

Okay, so I'm reading Winston Churchill's account of World War 2. As you may already know, Churchill was Prime MInister of Great Britain during almost the entire war (for part of 1939, just after the Nazi aggression began, he was First Lord of the Admiralty--the civilian chief of the British navy). He gives a detailed, comprehensive account, in six volumes, of everything he knew and did, relating to the War. He reproduces official written policy documents on almost every page. Each volum...

SETTING: A bar. CAST: Bartender Patrons Lion BARTENDER: What can I get you? PATRON: Draft beer, please. BARTENDER: Here you go. PATRON pays, takes beer back to table. BARTENDER: What can I get you? LION: Actually, do you mind if I rampage in here a bit? BARTENDER: I dunno... a rampaging lion isn't really what the bar scene is all about. LION: I'll let you loot the bodies of any victims too maimed or dead to resist. BARTENDER: Oh, well. In that case, be my ...

Let's say you had a working Perpetual Motion Machine (PMM)[1]. What are you going to do with it? Work? Sorry, no. Work means overcoming resitance. If there was no resistance, you wouldn't call it work, and it would already be doing itself. The moment you connect that PMM to the drivetrain of your car, or the main winch of that construction crane, or the electric motor at the heart of a power generator, you need to put more energy into the system. Once you give the PMM resistance to ...

MONKEY: Give me one good reason why John Bolton shouldn't be a U.N. Ambassador. PANTS: Well, he can be hard to work with. MONKEY: That's it? No problems with his experience or skill level? PANTS: Not as such, no. But I heard he can be pretty mean to people. MONKEY: So? It's not like North Korea is sending their Expert Hugmaster to negotiate with him. Suddenly the other world leaders can't handle some tough talk? PANTS: It's not that, really. It's more like, Bolton will b...

We'll come back to Unit 11. Unit 12 is shorter, and we can get it done before lunch, says the instructor. Unit 12: Introduction To String Processing + head displays the first 10 lines (default) of a file. + tail displays the last 10 lines (default) of a file. + wc ("word count") counts words, lines, and characters in a file. + sort sorts text to stdout, on a line-by-line basis. + uniq filters successive duplicate lines in a file. You will need to sort a file ...

The class is still interesting. The notes are still boring. Previous installments can be found by searching my JU blog. Don't bother, though. Unit 10: Advanced Topics in Users, Groups, and Permissions User and Group ID Numbers + User names map to UID numbers. + Group names map to GID numbers. + Data is associated with UID and GID, not Username and Group name. + More importantly, two different usernames with two different passwords can have the same UID. In that case...

If you've gotten this far, you should see all the previous installments on the right. Don't bother reading them, though. They're amazingly boring. This installment won't be much better. Unit 6: Users, Groups, and Permissions Oh my! The Linux Security Model + Users, Groups, and Other + root is not a normal User, nor is it Other. root sits above most security features. + Every process has a User and Group association. Processes can only access resources that ar...

The third installment . (http://stutefish.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=75646) Unit 4: The bash Shell Whoohoo! (the bang denotes sincerity) + Backward compatible with the Bourne shell (sh) + Apparently the de facto Linux standard shell Some bash Features + Command line completion: TAB + Command line editing + Command line history: history history has a 1k-command buffer and remembers your previous session(s), too. Use bangs to invoke previous commands by n...

The second installment (http://stutefish.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=75633). Linux File Hierarchy Concepts + Single-rooted, inverted-tree structure + "Root" is represented by a "/" symbol. + Case sensitive element names + Slash-delimited paths (e.g. "/usr/home/asshat") Some Important Directories + Home directories (e.g., "/root", "/home/ ") + Binary directories (e.g., "/bin", "/usr/bin") + System binary directories (e.g., "/sbin", "/usr/sbin", "/usr/local/sbin"...

The first installment (http://stutefish.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=75620) Unit 2 Running Commands + Syntax: command [options] [arguments] + Each syntax item is space-delimited + Options modify the command's behavior (e.g., "ls -l", "ls -a") + Full-word options usually preceded by "--" + Single-letter options usually preceded by "-" (e.g., "-a, -b, -c" or "-abc") + Arguments are additional info like filenames that the command requires (e.g., "ls -l /bin", where "...

Yeah, so I'm in Red Hat training, finally. I've only been supporting a major Linux-based project here at work for over six months now.[1] So here's some notes, taken during class. Unit 1 UNIX History Bla bla bla. UNIX Principles + Everything is a file + Including hardware (!) + Configuration data is stored in text (files) + Small, single-purpose programs + Avoids captive user interfaces (whatever that means) + The ability to chain programs together to per...