it’s good to have goals
Let’s just sum up last week by saying that I sat down Monday afternoon
at work to rewrite my TODO list, and I finally finished said rewrite
Sunday evening, at home. Boy, oh boy, whadda week — but I survived my
first period as solo frontline Linux admin at work without destroying
any hardware or any users, so I’m marking it down as a success.
Turkey Day was fun, good friends, good food, good time; hope yours was
the same — not much more to say about that because it already seems
so long ago… The long weekend was nice in that I got a few minor
longstanding pesky things taken care of: the webcam might be showing
up soon (once I get scp working to move the captures to the server),
and I finally switched to ext3 (lemme hear the geeks say ‘w00t w00t!’
Um, anyway…)
While I’m blathering about personal meta stuff, I’ll also pass along
that at work today, I attended a class given by Mark Jason Dominus, a
name that should be familiar to the Perlers in the audience. Good
stuff — I’m looking forward to the next two days, which feature two
more classes and probably some face time with MJD. Meta question for
the bloggers in the house — in such a situation, do you mention your
weblog, or not? Mail me with
your opinions.
flame tree
There’s a tree in the parking lot of my apartment complex, right next
to a globe-style street light. All the leaves are off the tree, except
right around the globe of the light — I guess that extra illumination
is keeping the leaves around just a bit longer. Anyway, the leaves
have turned, and it looks pretty cool at night — like a little flame
ball hanging in the tree. Here’s a couple of cruddy pictures — I
couldn’t really get the flash right, but you can at least sort of see
what I’m talking about:
blog-rolling
Looks like Bruce Sterling’s weblog cum online zine Infinite Matrix is back on
the air.
he will, he will, HOST YOU
Here’s a big shout out to
Cornerhost, the sort-of new hosting
company being run by Michal “Sabren”
Wallace. Cornerhost is home to genehack.com and genehack.net, which will have all sorts
of fabulous content one day real soon now. Michal’s been great with
getting everything set up, and I recommend him highly if you’re
looking for some hosting.
attack of the clones
Medium level flap over human “cloning” yesterday — here’s the
company’s press
release, as well as a news
story that gives a bit more context. Near as I can tell, this is
just the application of techniques that are known to work with other
mammalian oocytes to human eggs — not exactly ground-breaking
visionary stuff. It also sounds like they don’t have all that
much. Finally, I think people might be mis-understanding “embryo” —
that’s an extremely early stage after fertilization. This is still a
long, long way from producing anything that even has a calculable
chance of possibly turning into a human being.
you can’t trust what you can’t see
Here’s an interesting
article about a bioinformatics researcher that has a condition in
his employment contract that allows (not requires, mind,
allows) him to release software he writes as Open
Source. It’s very encouraging to see people standing up and pointing
out that unless you can review the source, you can’t be sure something
is algorithmically correct — and in scientific software, that’s a
pretty damn important thing to be able to tell. I’ve been saying this
for a number of years now, and I usually get “huh?” looks in response. Maybe
that’ll get better now.
If you feel the same way about the importance of making sure publicly
funded scientific software remains open, make sure to sign this
petition over at OpenInformatics.
walking the walk
Linus Torvalds filed a
bug report against the
development version of KDE the other day — he gives pretty good bug
report, I’d say.
in the on deck circle…
If I can continue to manage my schedule such that I actually have the
time to do it, I’ve got several book reviews that really want to be
written — and I’ve still got one or two links in the queue as
well. I’d really like to not feel guilty about describing this site as
“daily”, just for a change… I guess we’ll see what happens. Thanks
for reading.
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