Guimp is the world’s smallest website

Meanwhile, TinyApps.org has added a section of tiny apps for Palms.

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Massport, the state agency that runs Logan Airport, is going to spend $1.5M wifi-ing three terminals of the airport. From the article in the Globe, it sounds like this will be pay-per-hour for airport passengers. (I read the article quickly so I may have gotten this wrong.)

Why does it cost so much to do wifi the terminals?

Glenn “Where’s the Wire” Fleishman answers the question.

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$499 for a Dell desktop with a 2.2gh processor, 40gb hard drive, 256mb RAM, operating system and starter software pack, video, sound, 10/100 network, and a 15″ flat panel display.

It’s been a while since I checked PC prices. They’ve entered the color tv range. Wow. It’s soon not going to take much money to cross the digital divide in this country.

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Like everyone else who’s been on the Net for more than a year, I have in effect lost virtually all my emails, at least in terms of an operational definition: I need a search engine to find anything that came in more than three hours ago.

I’ve been quite happy with Find, a fast seach engine that also indexes your desktop files. I’ve been using it since it was in beta and have watched the product team sand down the rough edges.

A new version is now coming out. I haven’t tried it because I’m still being extremely cautious about what I load onto to my fragile PC, but I will as soon as a week or so has gone by without a major system crash.

For reasons that surpasseth understanding, Find at find.com has been renamed to X1 (as in the plane that first broke the sound barrier) at www.x1.com I can only assume the company was sued.

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Linux boosters (and aren’t we all?) should be slightly cheered to know that my rebuilt basement PC failed to install Windows 2000 in the same way it failed to install Linux. Looking very much like a hw issue. I’ve just the flashed the BIOS, but now we’re leaving for the 4th so I won’t know if it worked for a few days.

Good. I could stand the break. Damn computers. Damn Intermenet!

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Gill on Dean

Jock Gill – who is definitely not non-partisan on this topic – writes well about why the Dean campaign is different. (I’ve lightly edited it.)

1] READ THE COMMENTS from the [Dean] blog visitors! This is the best way to understand that the campaign represents a new politics: Connected, Open and Participatory. We are now all becoming PRODUCERS, not merely passive consumers.

2] Dean’s campaign shows the smart mobs, hive minds, have more benefits, power, energy, vitality and adapability than the single mind of any political advisor — Karl Rove comes to mind.

3] As evidenced by the front page story in the NY Times this AM, most folks simply do NOT GET IT! The Dean campaign is the announcement that we are at The End of Broadcast Politics with its base of passive consumers. The NY Times item is all from the point of view of broadcast politics: its about counting money. No! It’s about counting donors. It’s about energized hope, passion, citizens from around the the country who believe in America…<\P>

The Dean campaign is being real smart about the Net and for the right reasons, I believe: they’re viewing the Internet not as a cheap way to reach the masses but as a way to let us talk together. And self-organize. Plus, I love the real voices of the staffers who write the campaign blog.

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Continuing from last night’s humiliating defeat….

I booted from the floppy this morning and rooted around, so to speak, just to see what I could see. It seems like something is installed on the hard drive, but I can’t tell if the kernel is.

What I used to know of unix is coming back to me. It’s just like riding a bicycle: if you don’t do it for a long enough period, you get too stupid, fat and old to be able to do it again.

I’m reinstalling now, using the “noprobe” parameter, although I think the problem is in my hw. Sigh. I’m telling the RedHat installer to install only the GUI desktop packages, hoping to get through an install without something blowing up…

It got through the installation but now warns me that no kernel packages were installed on my system so my boot loader won’t be updated. I don’t know if that means that no new kernel packages were loaded or that I’m truly a boy without a kernel. I guess I’ll find out in a minute when I reboot.

Nope. Booting from the hard drive still causes the system to hang: black screen with a flashing underscore cursor. I’ve got to go. I’ll try again later…

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Sen. Charles Schumer of NY is proposing a 6-part anti-spam bill. I have deeply mixed feelings about such legislation if only because it’s so non-end-to-end. Among other features, Schumer’s bill would require spammers to preface their subject line with “ADV”.

So here’s my question: I assume Senator Schumer uses his franking privileges to send out postal mail to his constituents. When he does the equivalent via email in order to save some trees, is he going to label it “ADV”?

(Reminder: I’m on The Connection on NPR this morning at 10 EST talking about spam’s effect on us.)

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It started off well. I dragged an old computer up from the basement, put in a brand new hard drive, and started to install RedHat 9 fresh out of the box.

Actually, it wasn’t quite that simple. The BIOS is from 1999 and it doesn’t know how to boot from a CD. But the Norton Ghost floppy I’d made boots into PC DOS which then recognizes the CD, and we were off and running.

But RedHat reported that the second CD was corrupt, which I find unlikely since it’s fresh out of the sleeve and has no obvious scratches. But, well, what the heck. I’ll just reboot and start again. Heck, it’s just like installing Windows after all!

But Linux has killed my hard drive. My system tries to boot from it but hangs. The BIOS is old enough that I can’t force it to boot from the floppy. [Note: Ok, so I just found where in the BIOS it lets me boot from the CD. I’m not as screwed as I’d thought.]

I was so excited as the first CD was chugging away. Now I’m a bitter, cynical old man who is forever going to chase children off his lawn.

LATER: Booting from the CD. Let’s see how well RedHat recovers from its maybe bogus problem with the second CD. I’m excited again.

LATER: Before the first disk finished its re-install from scratch, my system went back to terminal (non-graphical) mode and told me that install has terminated abnormally, right after X server started succfessfully. It’s unmounted a bunch of filesystems and is telling me I may safely reboot my system. So, I don’t know if it’s broken or not…

It’s not booting from the hard disk. I’ll move on to attempt #3.

I just ran linux rescue. It seemed to work, or at least it didn’t complain. But I can’t see that it did me any good. I’m rebooting and starting to reinstall.

This time I’ve told RedHat that it’s an upgrade, not a reinstall. It’s at least asking me about boot loaders. Maybe this time the hard drive will learn how to boot itself rather than going into the terminal twitches. Hmm, now it tells me that “No kernel packages were installed on your system. Your boot loader configuration will not be changed.”

Ooh! Ooh! It’s asking me if I want to make a boot diskette! The massive oak door of Linux is about to swing open. I’m about to be given the key! It’s also further than I’ve gotten so far in this multi-try installation. In fact, RedHat is announcing that the installation is complete. I must be missing a heck of a lot of packages, though, since I only made it through Disk 1.

Damn. It’s still not booting from the hard drive. And with the bios set to boot from the CD first, the system is hanging if the CD is empty. I’ll switch the boot order and try booting from my spiffy new Linux floppy.

Booted from the floppy. It’s now noticing (for the first time?) my mouse and USB ports. Progress, I assume. Damn, now it’s asking for localhost login, but I never gave it a user name or pwd and I don’t know what the defaults are. Googling it on my Windows machines takes me to redhat.com where it almost explains it: If I didn’t create a user account during the installation (which I didn’t because installation terminated abnormally), I can log in as root and use the pwd I created for the system. Ok, but it’s not real clear how to log in as root. So, I’ll do the obvious thing and type “root.” And it works. It doesn’t even ask me for a pwd. But, now what? I’m at a command prompt and about all I remember from Unix is that “ls” lists files and “rm *.*” probably isn’t a good idea, and it would be an even worse idea if I remembered the parameter that makes it recursive.

My nephew, Greg LinuxMan Cavanagh, who administers Linux clusters for a place where you need special clearance, suggests that I try telling the bios that my disk is smaller than it is since Linux just needs to install a loader and will figure out the actual size once it loads, which is pretty cool. But, unfortunately, changing the disk size has no effect.

Onto my 4th attempt to install it. This time I’m telling it to switch from the GRUB boot loader, hoping that this will force it to load a frigging boot loader. Also, I’m telling it I want to configure which packages should be installed, again hoping that this will force the RedHat installer out of its complacency. I’ve just told it to install all 4.5 gig of packages, figuring that if I pick and choose, I am guaranteed to fail to pick the ones I need. It’s chugging along. I’ll try to stay up long enough to see if it rejects the second CD again, but it’s getting late and I have to get up early tomorrow…

Disk 2 is in and this time it’s working. (So far.) I think I’ll head off to bed.

One more quick check…and it seems to have frozen while installed “evolution.” I’m not going to blame Linux for this. Could be a hardware problem. Nope, still not booting from the hard drive.

Good night.

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I’m going to be on the first hour of The Connection on Thursday morning, talking about spam. The show was prompted in part by a commentary by Adam Hanft – who is also going to be on the show – on Marketplace, which you can listen to here. I disagree with it a lot, although I am firmly uncommitted on its main call for action: whether spam should be legislated against or left to the market to handle.

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