…as reviewed by one of its greatest fans (in multiple meanings of the word): Lileks. Possibly spoilers, but not a lot of plot reveals, so perhaps safe for those who haven’t seen (I haven’t).
Category Archives: Technology and Society
SSHFS Problems
I’ve been using sshfs to do remote editing on my web server. I create a directory with the server name as a mount point, owned by me in my home directory. I then mount with
$ sshfs -p <portnumber> <servername>: <mountpoint>
I also have the keys set up so it does so without a password prompt. It seems to work, but I only have read-only access — when I try to write a file it tells me that I don’t have permission. Also, I notice that when the file system is mounted, I get an owner and group of “1009” for the mount point. Is this normal? Does anyone have any idea what’s going on?
[Tuesday morning update]
D’oh! I just noticed that my line command wasn’t displaying properly before. It’s fixed now.
Faster, Please
A potential new treatment for the prevention of aortic aneurysms. My maternal uncle died of one about ten years ago (it sure doesn’t seem like that long ago). This might have saved him, though probably something else might have gotten him by now.
[Sorry, link is fixed now]
Why Space?
With yet another national commission on the subject being formed, Dennis Wingo has some thoughts.
Lost Technologies
Jonathan Last has a piece at The Weekly Standard on the subject, with a quote from yours truly.
Ethanol Versus Electricity
An interesting discussion of the transportation tradeoffs of biofuels.
Gaia Versus Medea
Two alternate metaphors for the planet. I disagree with Lovelock that there are too many people, or that there is some magical “right” number of them. It’s all a function of technology level. And I disagree with Ward, too:
In his view, the costs and distances involved in moving outward from the solar system – or even terraforming the moon or Mars – just don’t seem worth the effort.
Obviously they don’t now. Technology advances will change that.
Firefox Problem
Occasionally, Firefox will crash (on my Fedora Core 10 box) without warning. I click on a link, and it just dies. Has anyone else experienced this?
[Thursday morning update]
Well, it just did it again, and completely out of the blue. I was just reading a page, not even clicking on anything, when it vanished without a trace.
Also, has anyone else noticed that, on startup, it runs like molasses and saturates the CPU, until one kills off npviewer?
[Bumped]
Windows Problems
Some readers may recall that my W2K machine died a couple months ago after an update (actually, it’s been over three months now). Well, a few days ago I finally found my install disk. Unfortunately, when I tried to use it to repair, it said it couldn’t find a Windows installation, so apparently the drive really got munged. I know all the data is there, because I mounted the drive on a Linux box and pulled it off, so I’m guessing that the boot sector is screwed up. Unfortunately, it’s a complicated situation, because it was actually set up to boot from Drive D (Drive C was a legacy 98 system, and both drives are partitions on a single drive). And of course, I don’t have a rescue disk, that I know of, for the current configuration.
So is it possible to go in and look at the boot sector in another machine and repair it manually? Anyone have any suggestions?
Gun Porn
Here ya go. Cutting down a tree with a gun. It’s pretty amazing to see the brass waterfalling out of that thing. I want to be a mythbuster.
The first known instance of this took a lot longer. At the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, the hot lead was so unremitting and thick that it cut down an oak tree of a foot-and-a-half diameter over the hours-long duration of the battle. The stump is now in the American Museum of History. It was probably the most intense battle of the war up to that point, and it’s hard to contemplate the hell it must have been for the combatants.