« September 2007 | Main | November 2007 »
October 31, 2007
On Holiness
As I began to include the following quote, an odd Christian family appeared at the door to bring me Halloween candy that is emblazoned with their Megachurch logo.
"There's no one in the world more obnoxious than someone really Holy"
Father Lester Bundy
Professor of Religious Studies
Regis University
An Orthodox Priest teaching Buddhism at a Jesuit College
Posted by james at 06:48 PM | Comments (0)
October 29, 2007
Another from the Quote Book
Game Theory researchers long ago pointed out that it is impossible to devise a strategy for successfully interacting with someone making random choices"
-James Kennedy, et. al
Swarm Intelligence
Posted by james at 07:28 AM | Comments (0)
October 27, 2007
A Lesson for Modern Diplomats?
If your holiness should inflict such a humiliation on the Order, then the is no way I can guarantee that then thousand Jesuits will not pick up their pens to attack this bull in a manner that is certain to prove detrimental to the prestige of the Holy See
Claudio Aquaviva, Superior General of the Society of Jesus to Pope Sixtus V
Posted by james at 11:04 PM | Comments (0)
Firefox Doesn't Function
Interestingly, when I boot Ubuntu from the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCD">LiveDisk Firefox functions fine. When I installed the system, though, Firefox just didn't connect to anything. After some troubleshooting, I figured out that it must be Firefox itself, as other network functionality worked (installing off the web, ping, etc). I also installed KDE (officially making my computer "Kubuntu," I suppose) which comes with the wonderful Konqueror browser. Konqueror worked fine.
I searched on many strings and got no response and after digging, finally found a solution.
Searched:
ubuntu firefox nonfunctional
ubuntu firefox not functional
ubuntu firefox not working
ubuntu gutsy firefox not working
firefox broken ubunto
firefox doesn't connect
firefox does not connect
ubuntu firefox can't locate pages
the one that finally worked:
ubuntu gutsy firefox unable to connect
This led to a forum in which Freebird54 proposed the following solution:
If it worked OK off the live CD, then it might just be the ipv6 problem - even on Dapper. You might want to try entering this in your terminal window (Applications->Accessories-
You could also enter an address of about:config into Firefox, search for 'network', then double click on network.dns.disableipv6 to enable this option. SHOULD get you going if you haven't changed too much else!
He literally means type "about:config" into the url bar (where you would type www.whatever.com). This brings up some configurations. There is a "filter" filed on the page, into which you can enter "network.dns". This will list only the options that start with that string. Double-click on the one named "network.dns.disableipv6", which will change it to "true".
After this, Firefox works normally.
Thanks Freebird!
Jargon learned: "the ipv6 problem"
Posted by james at 09:33 AM | Comments (0)
Ubuntu
After years of running straight Debian on my desktop without features such as sound or a working mouse scroll-wheel, I decided to give Ubuntu a try.
Ubuntu is based on Debian. In practical terms this means that nearly everything I learned running Debian still applies.
One cool feature of Ubuntu is the distribution of a so-called LiveDisk. This is a CD image you can download, burn onto disk, and use to start your computer. All you need to do is set your computer to boot from the CDROM drive, throw in the Ubuntu disk, and fire it up. For me, everything (sound, peripherals, etc) has worked well on several different computers, both desk, and laptop.
Getting everything working perfectly, though, has taken a bit of time. Most of that time has been spent searching through forums, looking for instructions to fix my particular problems. This is always hairy business because most of these errors have their own jargon. If you know the jargon, it's trivial to find solutions to the problems, but if you don't, it's hard to find what you're looking for.
I'm making a new category of this blog called Jargobuntu to post solutions to my problems along with both "official" jargon and my original search terms. Hopefully, this will allow a person or two to save the effort I've already made.
First entry follows.
Posted by james at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)