Recent content by spb

I think you're confusing what it means to be a politician and what it means to be a president. Politicians build popular support to gain power. Two term presidents are generally "good" politicians. Considering that Bush won re-election while having a relatively low approval rating suggests...

Part of the present problem in US politics is that the opposition party stinks. What I took from the last presidential debates was that Kerry's campaign slogan was, "I'm not Bush." The few points that stuck out as not being anti-Bush were not so hot -- such as his protectionist economic...

It sounds like the social equivalent of an entropic death. :7) When people talk about the end of the universe (entropic death) I always think of R. Frost's poem Fire and Ice, though there is no direct connection: Some say the world will end in fire; Some say in ice. From what I've...

With age comes wisdom (hopefully). I'm not talking about desire and ability, but the confidence (and I suppose guile) to not become some wench's monkey boy to be used, abused, and discarded. ((Do I sound bitter? It must be my age.))

So very true. :7) As I age (today is my birthday) I'd list this as one of the top five advantages of getting older.

For as often as people talk about T. Blair as a US "lap-dog" I kind of feel that it is the other way around. When the US administration began making a case for war in Iraq I was wary. It was really Blair's speech (does anyone else remember this?) of the and the UK dossier that gave legitimacy...

What made the last UK election odd, is that the Labor party is a very left leaning party almost socialist in some regards. The real option for the UK was to move from the Labor party to the Conservatives (remember M. Thatcher).

It's too bad, but the days of stars like Ingrid Bergman and Katharine Hepburn are gone. I'd complain that the same is true for the male stars as well, except that there are still a few such as Depp and Spacey that are taking quality parts. Hmmm, maybe it isn't the acting, but that the...

Hi, ddclient is a script that checked one's IP address and then updated a registered domain name to match the IP address if it has changed. In Linux is it typically run as a daemon once the script it properly configured. I want to run it as a daemon on my Macmini (running Tiger)...

Hi, I've gotten ddclient to run propertly when I use sudo. I'd not like to have it run as a daemon, monitoring the IP address from my router and updating as necessary. Can you explain to me how to make this work? I understand how to do it in Linux, but I'm not a Macintosh expert...

Hi, There is probably a simple solution to this, but as an amature I'm not finding it... I'm trying to used the ddclient perl script to update my domain name to zoneedit.com. I get the IP address from the router when the script needs to update the site, I get: Can't locate...

Hello, I'm having a similar problem trying to install wget with apt-get (see below). Does anyone know of a solution to this? This system is: pernod:~ scott$ uname -a Darwin pernod 8.7.0 Darwin Kernel Version 8.7.0: Fri May 26 15:20:53 PDT 2006; root:xnu-792.6.76.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power...

I know nothing about the /icons directory, but if the problem is that there are too many files, you can always tar them into a single file and then untar it after the transfer.

Really? Ah, using a slash is doing something very different from using the name in quotations. I avoid programming sh (hurray for PERL) so I didn't think about this difference. You make a good point. The are both effective work arounds for files with annoying spaces in the names. :7)

It's not a superstition, but a matter of aesthetics. If you're programming and can chose to type: vi my\ program.f90 versus vi my_program.f90 or vi myprogram.f90 the first one is deemed ugly. I can see how this "_" naming scheme doesn't work well for viewing files as...