Barkerburgh

Okay, it wasn’t really you, it was me. My fault.

I didn’t like “The Golden Globe”. I slogged through it and finished it more out of a sense of loyalty (for “Titan”, “Wizard”, and “Demon”, which I loved), but I thought the damn book would never end.

I thought that “Steel Beach” kicked the shizzle - or whatever the kids are saying nowadays - and so I’ve been meaning to take a new look at “The Golden Globe”, which takes place in the same universe.

In the meantime, I’m reading “Red Thunder”. It (and he) have been called Heinleiny, or words to that effect.

It rocks. It’s about some kids, an ex-astronaut, his genius cousin, and a lost official American mission to Mars (to try to beat the Chinese expedition). They basically build a spaceship in their backyard and take off to Mars themselves.

I’m at the bit now where they’ve taken off, Earth has dwindled to a pale blue marble, and they’re about to be interviewed by CNN.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I yowled with glee as the story progressed. Plain goddamn wish-it-was-me, keep-it-coming, they’re-really-gonna-do-it, jeezes-I-really-wish-it-was-me glee.

I definitely owe “The Golden Globe” another try.

Boingboing review of Red Thunder

Two things, actually.

I’ve been trying to get my Ubuntu machine set up with Apache, php and MySQL so that I can try to learn them in their ‘native’ environment. So far no lucking fuck. (Oh, that didn’t work…)

I can install them all but I can’t fiddle the .conf files (or whatever) to get them to talk to each other. Apache works fine, but it’s just a basic webserver without bells and whistles if I can’t get the other two to cooperate. It’s not impossible; I just can’t figure out how to change the right lines in the .conf files. There’s no errors if I change the wrong ones, she just don’t work. As is proving to be typical, the examples are dense and obscure, the help doesn’t and doing it exactly doesn’t do anything.

What I have managed to do is to get the same trio working on my Windows 2000 machine. It didn’t at first, and I had the same problems as on Ubuntu. However, while searching for some comprehensive Apache/php/MySQL package for Ubuntu, I found a Windows based setup called WAMP that installs all three and basically configures them all for me. Again, that didn’t work the first time I tried it, but I cleaned up the registry, tried again and again and again and last night, I got my php test script (which basically just calls “‘phpinfo()”) to work.

There are also php and MySQL admin pages which worked fine, including allowing me to create a test database in MySQL.

So then, I installed a php/MySQL dependent wiki program from Sourceforge that I’ve been hoping to get going for a while and, after some more fiddling, that worked too.

TV, last night, was a bust, however because it was an embarrassment of riches with new episodes of good shows in the same time slots, all evening. Very difficult night for me in that regard, ameliorated to some degree by my success with the web server suite.

I will survive.

Anybody have a copy of 1976’s ‘Network‘?

Its gestalt looms large in the opening episode of my favourite new show, Aaron Sorkin’s ‘Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip‘.

I haven’t seen the movie in years, but am of the opinion that modern networks and programming executives have tacitly agreed that their secret goal has been, for a generation, to deliberately produce and broadcast television that will eventually make sensible people stick their heads out their windows and shout “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” because it sells more commercials for the plebs, the hoi polloi, and the ravening underclass sub-omegaloids.

It was this past Tuesday, September 19th, and I forgot all about it.

So here you are.

One day, while sailing the seven seas, a look-out spotted a pirate ship, and the crew became frantic.

One thing I have learned about Ubuntu, besides ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’, is that, like Microsoft, when the documentation gives a specific example, and you follow it exactly, exactly, exactly, double and triple-checking your spelling and spacing and case, it doesn’t work.

Then you change something essentially arbitrarily, and it works.

Plus c’est la meme chose.

The strange fate of Alistair Cooke’s body….

Please check out my latest spider name poll. ‘Some Crazy Stripper Name’ won the first one.

‘Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip‘ debuted on CTV on Sunday night. It’s great. Can’t say enough. Please watch.

MI5 was on A&E on Saturday; I don’t know which season or episode. I was very disappointed. It seems that as the Americans have been learning from the Brits about TV crime drama and improving, the Brits have been picking up the Yanks’ bad production habits.

But the jury (and by jury, I mean Me) is still out.

Discovered alien. Couldn’t run it as me, because I’m not root. Couldn’t log in as root, neither from any app/point/terminal locally nor via ssh from my W2K machine.

Discovered ssh. Couldn’t telnet. Couldn’t ssh from W2k until I installed it from the Ubuntu gui.

Discovered nano. Why would anybody use vi? Or even vim? Taliban geeks, that’s who.

Disovered sudo and gksudo. Thank you, geek gods! Why can’t I log in as root from the initial log in gui?

Discovered chmod, chown, a couple of others. Couldn’t modify config files because I’m not root. Couldn’t log in as root

Discovered the Root Terminal. Finally! I nearly cried, I swear to Christ.

Discovered info.

Disovered .conf files.

Discovered I actually like digging around in the man files and about 20 different Linux pdfs and chms.

Discovered alien Apache works and alien PHP will install, but they ain’t talking yet.

Knowledge is Power!

(I feel like the kid in the SciFi story who finds the ancient computer left over by a lost civilization and he has to learn how to use it to save his people, but there’s a deadline looming and he’s really only a peasant farmer. Story ends badly.)

I’m thinking of entering NaNoWriMo again.

Write 50,000 words of an original novel during the month of November, local time. Easy.

Encourage me! That is not a request.

I entered in 2002, but didn’t finish within the month. I did finish it by about May 2003, I think, at about 70,000 words or so.

It’s a fantasy called “The Word in the Box” and it’s still a first draft, but if you want to read it, just ask.

Have y’all heard about the E. coli tainted spinach epidemic in the US that’s killed at least one person?

Well, as of about 9:30 this morning, according to CNN, it’s been traced to a California company called Earthbound Farm, an apparent subsidiary of, and I kid you not, Natural Selection Foods.

Spinach is supposed to be full of irony, right?