No, this post has nothing to do with asking a Carbon Unit out on a date (Star Trek: The Motion Piture anyone?). It’s just that articles like this make me really mad. They treat the theory of evolution like it’s fact, which it is not.
Anyway, half way through browsing the comments on the Slashdot posting, I noticed that some brave Christian (read: person who is calling himself a Christian) had posted a link to this interesting article. It explains very well the flawed system of judging how old and object is to the Scientific community. Have fun reading it, and take this read as an opportunity to learn how to refute someone who tries to push evolution as a scientific fact.
For a long time, I had heard about this obstacle called endianness (big endian vs. little endian) when porting applications to other platforms. For example, this endienness problem may exhibit itself if I write a complex application that runs on Linux on my PC, and I want to make it also work on Mac OS X on my brand new dual G5 (I could only wish). I found this Wikipedia article that explained what endianess was all about (much more than I wanted to know really).
If you’re too lazy to read the article (and if I had someone to explain it to me, I’d be lazy as well), the basic idea is that with Big Endian style processors, they read and write strings of bytes into sequentially increasing memory addresses. In Little Endian, however, strings of bytes are written into sequentially decreasing memory addresses. This is much like the idea that some languages, such as English, German, French, and Spanish, write their text from left to right on a page. Whereas, some other languages, such as Hebrew and Chinese, write their text from right to left.
Anyway, I see this as only being a problem with programs where the programmer was forced to do all of the memory management manually (as opposed to letting the compiler handle it). Now that I have this new understanding, it makes sense why nVidia has never released Linux graphics drivers for the many PowerPC versions of Linux.
Well, I hope everyone reading this (those who care really) now have a basic understanding of the endianness concept.
I found this nice little utility for automating the installation/uninstallation of packages that you download as the source code. It’s called the GNU Source Installer. It even provides a GUI: an ugly TK interface, but still a GUI. Basically it just does the things that one normally would do to compile and install a program from source, but it also keeps track of what files were copied where. So, you can simply hit the uninstall button, and it will remove those file from your system.
Now, someone just needs to write one that will automate the process of building binary packages like Debs or RPMs. I would love that. 
I’ve been thinking about installing CentOS for quite a while, but it hasn’t been until now that I’ve had the hardware to install it. CentOS (which stands for Community Enterprise Operating System) is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Basically, RHEL is not free….that is, you can’t get the binary distrobution unless you pay for it. However, because RHEL is based solely on Open Source Software, much of which is under the GPL, they must release the source code for all their packages. Because many people would like to run RHEL, but they don’t want to pay Red Hat a bunch of money for it, the Linux community started CentOS which is a binary-compatible clone of RHEL; that is, they simply took the source code and recompiled it, making sure to remove any TM’d logos and markings made by Red Hat.
Anyway, I’ll be running this on what used to be my main Window$ box (Athlon 1.0 Ghz, 512 Ram, Geforce2 GTS, SoundBlaster 512). On it, I’ll be experimenting with creating various network servers (DNS, IMAP, POP, SMTP, LDAP, et. al.).
I finally got the last of the components I had ordered in the mail today. And, it took me just over an hour to construct my new system. I’ll be using it for my main Window$ box (gaming, and some video manipulation). Specs:
AMD AthlonXP 2000+ Processor (1.7 Ghz)
ASUS A7V266-E Motherboard (w/ onboard ATA RAID)
512 MB DDR-266 Corsair Memory (Lifetime warranty)
Maxtor 40 GB 7200 RPM Hard Disk (2 MB cache)
LITE-ON 8x Dual-Layer DVD±RW Drive
400 Watt Enlight Power Supply
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 Digital
nVidia GeForce2 GTS (w/ 64 MB vRam)
3Com 3c905B 10/100 Mbit Network Card
At the same time, I purchased a new KVM switch. I’ve been running on a two port unit for a year or two, and I now have a four port unit. Since I bought an older Blue-and-White G3 Mac a few weeks ago, I also got a PS2-USB adapter so that it could work nicely on the same KVM with the rest of my PCs. So, as of now, I have 4 desktop machines and one laptop running at my desk at home. I’ll come down from my power high in a few days.
I got my components from various places, including the IT Hardware Sale at my workplace, Newegg.com, TigerDirect, and eBay. Some of the components I already had on hand (or scavenged from another one of my systems).
P.S.–I’ll be running Folding@Home on the three PCs (plus, I have it on my parent’s slightly older machines, but every little bit helps).
Well, I had just gotten to work this morning, and I went into the hardware cage to see what they had for sale. I found that they were selling all drives under 20 Gigs. So, I saw a nice looking Maxtor DiamondMax drive sitting there. It was an HP spare part labeled as an 18 GB drive. So, I asked the person working there (careful not to mention names), how much the price is for it. He said a buck or two. Now, being the fair soul that I am, I offered him $5. He agreed and I bought it. Later on, I went back and bought another drive (this one only 10 GB) for another $5, just because I thought I had gotten such a good deal this morning.
So, I took the new drive home, and I looked up the model number on the internet. I could not find one single page that mentioned a 18 GB drive with that model number. All the information I found was that these drives were 40 GB. I did, however, find a few pages describing how HP/Compaq many times replaces hard drives under warranty with bigger drives, then messes with the Firmware to make them appear smaller (to basically every tool I could find). I had heard of this tactic before, but I had never run into it personally.
So, I set out to find a tool that would let me use the entire 40 GB that the drive really had. I searched for the original Firmware for the device, but I only found a page that had one for download, at a crawling 0.6 K/s. So, after doing much more Googling, I found this page which has a nice utility for modifying settings (and locking/unlocking passwords) on hard drives.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I found an option in the program to reset the drive to the defaults. That did it, and I was able to format the entire 40 GB (well, 38 because of the 1000/1024 discrepency). So, I got a better deal than I thought I was getting. Always be looking out for a good deal when building a new computer.
Here’s an interesting article about writing firewall rules using IPTables. Now, I started reading this article, and realized that I know nothing about writing rules in IP Tables at all. Then I noticed the screenshots about half way down the page. They are of a GUI application known as Firestarter. Basically, it’s just a front-end to a few well-known Linux/UNIX command line applications. I like front-ends.
The moral of the story (well, article really) is why use command line interfaces when viable GUIs exist. 
OK, so here’s the scheme:
1. You click this link, and sign up.
2. You complete one of the offers that are listed after signing up.
3. You refer 10 friends to do the same.
4. You get a Mac Mini for FREE!
OK, but be kind about where you post links, as many people spam many a blog across the internet with thier own sign-up links, and it really makes people irritated. Anyway, any of you that would like to click my referal link, that’s alright with me.
I, myself, will only be posting this link here, and emailing it to a few select people that I know won’t mind (and most of those few won’t mind NOT clicking the linke 
). And, just incase you were wondering, I signed up for the Rhapsody Music service for a month (only $0.99 for the first month), and they give me 5 free downloads. Anway, that looked like the most reasonable choice on the list.
Have fun.
It’s finally here . . . almost. An article over at PC World reveals that Google is preparing to release it’s famous Google Toolbar for Firefox. In the past, it has only been available on Internet Explorer for Windows. If you wanted it that badly, there was an open source clone available called the Googlebar. However, this version lacked some of the features that the official toolbar had (PageRank, AutoFill, etc.). The linked article above says that the new official Firefox version will be available today at Noon (EST), however, as of this writing (2:11, PM, EST) nothing is there, save a link to the opensource Googlebar.
EDIT: It is finally here. You can find it here. As an added bonus, Google has also created two other extentions for Firefox: an extension that allows you to SMS a webpage to your cell phone, and an extension that adds the Google Suggest feature to your Firefox Search bar. You can find both of those, as well as the Google Toolbar for Firefox, here.
According to an article on Slashdot, an astrologist is attempting to sue NASA for it’s recent ‘Deep Impact‘ mission. Deep Impact was a mission where NASA launched a probe with the intention of smashing it into an asteroid and studying the resulting debris. Apparently, this astrologer wants to capitolize on this, and is sueing NASA, with the claim that this will ‘deform her horoscope.’ This is absolutely laughable, for two reasons:
1. Astrology is a stupid concept!
2. Hitting an asteroid with a washing machine sized probe is not going to alter it’s course that much!
Suddenly, my head hurts. . .