Technology and Society

A Modern Wonder

Michael Jennings has a nice photo essay about the new viaduct in France:

The materials from which this bridge has been built are vastly stronger than anything that existed even 20 years ago. I have said this before, but this is in my mind the defining characteristic of modern post materials revolution structural engineering. Structures are then, flimsy. They almost look like spider webs. The defining characteristic of industrial age engineering was bulk. But now we are in this virtuous circle of stronger and lighter materials allowing a much thinner deck, allowing the other parts of the bridge to be lighter and less substantial too, allowing still more economies elsewhere, and a rapidly dropping cost of projects like this.

That will be a characteristic of a space elevator as well, if it’s built.

Space

Visualization

Jack Benny used to say about a fellow comedian that “nobody knew what a cramp looked like until Fred Allen was born.” Well, along those lines, Jeff Foust can now point at a physical instantiation of a budgetary earmark.

Political Commentary

Heap Big Wampum

Apparently, copyright violation, academic fraud, resume padding, and vile mindless leftist rants calling for the overthrow of the US government are healthy activities for one’s bank account, at least if you’re employed by the University of Colorado:

CU’s buyout offer will be in the “$3-$5 million range – possibly higher”

Hmmmm…not a bad payoff for Chief Pants-On-Fire.

If CU is seeing their out-of-state admissions fall now, just wait until the news of this gets out. Not to mention what may happen to alumni donations.

The link also links to a story about a professor who they have managed to release, with no buyout. But that was different–it was apparently because he’s a (presumably untenured) Christian. Can’t have that.

[Update about 12:45 PM EST]

The Pirate Ballerina site seems to be down, for those wondering why the link was dead. But it was a link to a story at the Rockey Mountain News.

War Commentary

Dominoes

A lot of nostalgic lefty anti-war types have been warning us for years that Iraq was going to be just like Vietnam. Claudia Rossett says that they may be right. But they won’t be as happy about it as they think they will.

It kind of reminds me of an old joke that a USC grad told me, back when their football program was in the doldrums in the eighties. He said that his nightly prayer had been that USC would have a basketball program as good as its football program. And he finally got his wish.

Heh.

Administrative

Samba Problems

Is there a Samba expert in the house?

I’ve got a machine running Fedora Core 3, and I can’t get Samba, or Swat to work properly. The Samba server seems to be running, and the machine shows up in my network neighborhood from the Windows client, but when I click on it, I get a “network path not found” message. The smbd and nmbd services seem to be running on the server.

When I try to log in to Swat from the server (even as root), I get a “connection refused” message.

I’m looking at the configuration. According to the troubleshooting guides, the xinetd.conf file should be looking for it in /usr/sbin/swat, but that file doesn’t seem to exist, even though I installed the full Samba package. When I do a “locate swat” the binary doesn’t show up anywhere–only the configuration file of that name in /etc/xinetd.d. The config file right now actually has this line (which I probably inserted as a result of some other troubleshooter):

swat stream tcp nowait.400 root simberg /usr/sbin/tcpd swat

Is that right? There is at least a program “tcpd” with that path.

The troubleshooting guides I’ve found all leave much to be desired. They will tell you to check if something is happening, but no guidance on what to do if it isn’t.

Anyone know what’s going on?

Oh, and yes, before anyone asks, this (among other reasons) is why posting is sparse.

[Update at 12:45 PM EST]

OK, thanks to help from the comments section, I’ve theoretically got swat installed. But still no joy–it refuses the connection. Now what?

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!