January 21 These pages are pretty much being created here and now, so there's not much here yet. Hopefully that will change shortly ;-) However I did notice on slashdot that Alan Cox will not remain at RedHat if AOL/Time Warner buys them out. I hope that such statements will show everyone in RedHat management that the goodwill of the Linux community is contingent upon their good behavior. Obviously, teaming up with Steve Case and a would be entertainment monopoly doesn't constitute good behavior.
January 22 I am now 18! I'm actually not sure why I should be so excited, but I am. I was planning on keeping things low key, but one of my friends visited my 1st period government class with a bunch of balloons and a card for me. So much for anonymity. They even sang. In other news, it appears AOL will not be buying RedHat, at least not yet. Thank god. I have also upgraded my kernel to 2.4.17 from 2.2.14 (RH 6.2). It seems the swap problems I had with 2.4.16 have been ironed out, so I'll stick with this for a bit. Unfortunately, the VMware kernel modules needed for VMware will not recompile with 2.4.17, so I guess I won't be using VMware for a good bit.
January 23 As you may know, I listen regularly to National Public Radio. Today on the program "Fresh Air" I heard some very distressing information about the future of taxes by a NY Times reporter. Essentially, he said there's an alternative income tax, which applies under certain circumstances. It was originally passed to make the top 1% of Americans pay taxes, in the 1960s. Now however, it applies to 4million people with annual incomes from $60k to $200k. There are no personal exemptions, no deductions for medical expenses, and in fact, almost no exemptions at all. Meanwhile, our beloved president continues to drop taxes on the rich. The kicker is that the alternative income tax will probably cover 40million people by 2020. Yikes! I'm beginning to think like a libertarian. Meanwhile, I sent in my voter registration yesterday. California Green Party Member Count++!
January 24 What was supposed to be the day from hell failed to materialize. I finished my last final of the semester (photography) and went to a math lecture which I really didn't understand. On the bright side, I now have 4 of 14 problems done this week's Calculus problem set. On the brighter side, I went to a flute choir meeting half an hour late, because I misremembered the starting time. Oh well. Can't win 'em all. If this rumor about Loki is true, it's a sad day indeed. They were one of the first companies I actually bought a Linux program from, and I still play Civilization: Call To Power on slow days.
January 25 Yup, it looks like Loki is going to be disappearing. So those of you who like Linux and like games, better buy them up quick. I hope that someone steps in to fill the niche they filled, but I'm not holding my breath. I've had the opportunity today to compile gcc 3.0.3 on HP-UX 11.0. Looks like linker problems make compiling with the bundled CC a dicey proposition, so I had to use gcc 2.95.3 to build with. Note, if you want to use make bootstrap to build gcc on HP-UX, you must make sure not to use the HP assembler. HP as embeds timestamps in the .o files, so make bootstrap will always fail, as the .o files from each stage will differ due to the timestamps. GCC really needs a better mechanism for sanity checking than rebuilding itself 3 times, and comparing the .o files. I saw a review of Lindows beta on NewsForge. It sounds more like a pre-alpha release to me) today, and it looks to me as yet another cheap knockoff, which utterly fails to provide any real Windows compatibility, or anything else new, besides a colorful installer. I sure won't be paying $99 for it.
January 26 I really love it when my phone line dies for no reason. Remarkably enough, the problem was not caused by rain, mice, or anything on our end. In fact, the DSL line worked just fine. Still, I can't say I miss the phone in general. and I put the time to good use on studying the Divergence Theorem. Meanwhile, my poor little Kayak is churning away, trying to compile GCC. An interesting fact is that GCC 2.7.2.3 will compile in 6minutes, whereas GCC 3.0.3 takes a good 1hour 45minutes to build. Admittedly, Java took nearly an hour (and GCC 2.7.2.3 obviously lacks Java, although I can't say I missed it. Speaking of Java, I've been using Konqueror for a web browser, without Java support. And the cool thing is, I haven't been to any sites that have needed. Maybe that says something about my browsing habits, but it just goes to show that Java is not (yet) a browsing essential.
January 27 Looks like I need a larger disk. My overnight GCC build died because of a lack of disk space. The combined source and partly built compiler totaled over 600MB. The weather in Half Moon Bay (CA, 94019, aka home) has been hovering nicely in the 50s-60s (Farenheit). I'm beginning to think Mark Twain had it right: "The coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco." You get the idea. It's not so much that it's cold, it's that it's cold and most houses here lack any sort of central heating. I was pleasantly surprised this afternoon to discover phone service has returned. Admittedly telemarketers outnumber more welcome callers by about 2:1, but I guess I can put up with the inconvenience. I've done some significant webpage work too. I tried to figure out how to create a favicon.ico, but it seems that there aren't any tools to convert.jpg to .ico, and gimp insists upon converting .icos to grayscale upon export. Tomorrow, back to the grind, although I think I'll continue to make progress on these pages.
January 28 It appears that snow has come to our little part of the world. I was lounging around at break at school when someone launched a snowball at me. I was quite surprised. Seems as if hail, sleet, and even snow were the order of last night and this morning. I'm beginning to think that moving south wouldn't have been a bad idea. Too late though, I've already been accepted to Stanford, so the weather won't be changing much anytime soon. The world appears to be moving along nicely with Apple announcing new dual 1GHZ PowerMacs. I've always had a soft spot for Macs (I started out on a Mac Quadra 700 in 1995), so it's nice to hear they're alive in kicking. Fortunately the same goes for the phone too, so life is back to normal.
January 29 Another almost frozen day. Why do I alwaus end up with the nasty parts in English class drama readings. Now we're doing Ibsen's "A Doll's House" and I get to be Nils (the nasty lawyer who blackmails the main character in order to retain his secretarial job). After some hoop jumping, I am hopefully going to be officially enrolled in the flute choir at Canada College (a local community college). It's a bit ironic that while we discuss bureaucracy in government class, I deal with just such mindless stuff. Word to the wise: it's a lot easier to enroll as a college student than as a high school student taking a few college courses. Ah well, that's done with now. I did have the opportunity to listen to our president's "State of the Union" address, and I'll be posting more opinions soon. Suffice it to say for now that I think Mr. Bush should really stay away from foreign policy, he just doesn't know what he's doing. "Axis of evil" is a quaint term, but I don't think it's going to fix any problems, least of all ours.
January 30 In the light of the morning, I've come to the conclusion that George Bush is an awful lot like John Kennedy. He won a presidentialelection by a hairsbreadth, with a lot of high-toned rhetoric. But just like Kennedy, he's hardly a self-made man with a realistic view of the world. I just hope that Bush shows more sense than Kennedy did during the ramp-up to Vietnam. We have a great opportunity to turn the rest of the world against the U.S., if we'll just continue on the imperialist path of propping up puppet regimes, knocking down those who aren't our puppets. And a bit of information to our president about terrorism: what Menachem Begin did to achieve Israeli independence was almost as extreme as the techniques used by Hamas. Hezbollah (another of his international "threats") devoted itself to ridding Lebanon of an Israeli military occupation. In fact, Hezbollah has made no major attacks since Israel withdrew last year. Enough ranting... Oh and happy birthday to Mo who is now 19 and can legally go into bars in both Urbana and Champagne (Illinois)!
January 31 Damn it's been a cold week. I checked the weather on Yahoo, and it's been warmer in New York City than over here. Makes me wonder about "sunny California." An updated pi program has made its appearance: QuickPi 2.0. Aside from being a Windows program without available source, it haven't got anything negative to say about it. It's small, fast, and configurable. Although it can't calculate as many digits as the current PC record holder, PiFast 4.1, it's quite a bit faster. Time for me to get on the ball, and start updating my pi page (well, more like rewrite it, but same difference).
