Blog: February 2003 Archives

Really good article on email that got away from a person.

Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet

The email itself is very interesting as its a breathless account of a person who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

While the topic of privacy, and expectations of privacy in communications and especially email is interesting, I found the text of the email far more interesting.

The following assertions were made.

"They all said that at its peak Al Qaeda
had 70,000 members. Only 10% of them were trained in terrorism -- the
rest were military recruits. Of that 7000, they say all but about 200
are dead or in jail."

If this is true, sounds like good news to me. Unfortunately, it goes on to say of course, they really don't know how many more splinter of "franchise" groups exist, or exist as a result of the crackdowns.

"The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year
when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, "Yeah, it's bad, but
recovery is right around the corner". This year "recovery" was a word
never uttered. Fear was palpable -- fear of enormous fiscal hysteria.
The watchwords were "deflation", "long term stagnation" and "collapse of
the dollar". All of this is without war."

I don't like the sounds of this. This kind of stinking economic conditions, combined with any terror attack or widening of wars could prove very difficult to dig out of economically speaking. I would much rather hear the "recovery around the corner bit." Of course, if oil prices cheapen and stabilize, I think the economy will get some legs. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen in the short term unless the Iraq war is very short or isn't pursued. Oil is the lubricant of our economy.

I also don't really like the idea of a ruling class meeting at some relatively closed meeting to decide the fates of the rest of us. While I am not some conspiracy nut, these type of feelings give you the idea that is what is happening.

I also wonder whether this whole email was purposely leaked for publicity or as a stunt of some sort. It seems a smart person, wouldn't send something like that around expecting that no one else would ever see it. Come on, it's just too juicy.

---

Speaking of wanting to know the real story. I still can't help but think about the former CFO of VERITAS, Ken Lonchar. The reason he is no longer at VERITAS, has to do to with resume falsification. The story we have all heard tells of the board recieving an anonymous email. Who sent the email and why is what I want to know. Was it someone hired for the purpose, was it settling some old score, was it an ex, was it some ,extended office politics. I certainly have no idea.

I would also like to know if it was a relief to Ken to not have this lie hanging over him like some sword of Damocles.

If anyone knows the real story, email me. I promise not to post it to the web. (ha, ha, ha).

I notice that no one ever comments on what I have written.

I know that people look at these pages, based on the web server logs. I am wondering why people don't comment?

Please leave a comment and explain why you don't comment

Well, I have to say that I am very impressed with movabletype. Not only is the environment easy to set up and use, it's rather elegant in places. I really like the way the formatting is all css, and can be easily modified with the supplied templates. The admin interface is attractive, reasonably easy to understand, and easy to navigate. I could really see how a person could use it for a CMS an a largeish system and really cut significant costs.

I set up Gentoo on a PC recently. Pretty neat system. I really wanted to update to a newer s/w stack and thought I would give a distro-from-source a try. I have the following comments.

• The documentation is really lacking compared to say RedHat or Mandrake.
  


• I had trouble with portage, and it wouldn't allow me to emerge to a new one. This is problematic to say the least.


• The runlevels, while easy to update seem foreign from other unix systems I have used. On the flip side, it is dead simple to say 'rc-update add portmap default' and have it do all the right things.
  


• i had another problem with no clear cause. For some as yet unknown reason devfsd stopped working, which caused a problem with the inittab, where it sets up the tty's and couldn't find /dev/tty. That took overly long to troubleshoot as it left me in a state where I had to reboot to make config changes.


• Emerge is neat, but there is no telling how long it will take to compile something. If I knew, I might line up a few things to do at night. You can emerge -p package, of course but it's difficult knowing much beyond the number of dependancies.


• I don't have a clear idea of how the compile install options are set. So when you emerge vim, it doesn't make a link to /usr/bin/vi and I don't have a clear reason why. See previous complaint about documentation.


• It's overly difficult to figure out what packagte provides what. I know you can search with 'emerge -S'. But that seems to take forever and a day. It takes less time over the web at rpmfind.


• There's more, but we'll cover it on a different day.

Slashdot had a great link to a paper on one of my favorite web sites, First Monday. Social Science at 190 MPH on Nascar's Biggest SuperSpeedways tells how theories of competition and cooperation are evident in nascar racing. In particular, they spend a lot of time examining drafting behaviours as it requires cooperation at some level between racers, or in some cases race teams. It was written in 2000, before Dale Earnhardt's tragic death, and reflects what might not have been written today about Dale's aggressive driving. It's a good read.

CSS or cascading style sheets have come a long way. It's amazing to me how well these pages can be formatted, with simple changes to style sheets. Now if all browsers had exactly the same bugs, everything would be great.

Writer's Almanac features Billy Collins, Moday, February 25, 2003. This is the only poet that I have spent money on, and felt I would spend more. His poems speak to me, the way others don't. He is modern, but not full of himself. You should check him out.

This is a test of how photos look inline the blog.

How does that look?

As most of you must have figured out by now, the server has been down for several hours. Evidently, there was an electrical problem that wreaked some havoc at the data center.

Seems to be working now.

I am thinking about switching to MovableType for a blog, which would allow for far more flexibility and seems to be under development, whereas greymatter seems a bit stuck.