tapman.net

The Wall Street Journal has an essay on today's opinion page, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123111967642552909.html, that's critical of the recount process going on in Minnesota. After reading the piece the two things that come to mind are the Republican bias of the WSJ's opinion page (otherwise it's a great newspaper), and the waste of resources in Minnesota. Let me clear this up for everyone, if a few hundred thousand people vote, or perhaps a few million, and the results are tied to within a few hundred votes, it doesn't matter who wins.

Download: x86 DVD ISO image using the torrent link on fedoraproject.org.
VMware Config: Standard 6.5 installation with a 10GB virtual disk allocated to this install.
Installation Media Location: DVD ISO over an 802.11n network

Notes: The installation took quite a while because of the wireless network and some limits on the SAN technology I'm using, but was otherwise fine. I added the update and development repositories during the installation process and VMware's network interface was detected by the installer after a short wait.

Fixed Width: The site is set for 970 pixels. On a small screen this forces a horizontal scroll bar in the browser. On a larger screen this results in wasted space to the right of the 940 pixel content area. Minimum width makes some sense to preserve a semblance of formatting, a fixed width is just screwing with people for the sake of some graphic artist's desires. This is supposed to be a news reporting website, let the content speak for itself.

On a run yesterday I got to thinking about those times in my life when I've confidently run the wrong way down a one way street, figuratively speaking. It's more common than I'd like to admit but at the same time it's usually a rewarding experience because I learn something and I sometimes even get other people to reconsider why they are going the other way.

There's a lot of talk these days (alright, for at least the last 20 years) about the rising costs of health care in America. It's an obvious problem for virtually everyone because we all end up paying for health-related stuff at one point or another. A less prominent aspect of the situation is the government's stated desire to reduce costs through direct action.

This article, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200811/airport-security, on airport security continues the long expose on stupid American security protocols. Yet another example of why we need better schools.

As with so many things in life, web hosting is a more complicated problem than at first appears. I particularly notice this now as I'm involved with several websites, each with different objectives. One of the most interesting problems is finding the right balance of security.

A bug in Fedora 9 when installed as a guest OS in VMware causes the mouse pointer to be offset by a variable amount. This makes it virtually impossible to use the mouse.

One of the reasons I don't like the Emergency Economic Act of 2008 is that we are, to at least some degree, doing this to prevent stories about people losing everything. While it's understandable to want to help other people avoid economic hardship, and even morally required to assist in some way, it's not a good reason to save the institutions that are failing.

I took a bit of time today to read the proposed legislation, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, and see for myself what our elected leaders are trying to do. Unfortunately, it took a while because I kept stumbling on pieces of insanity like this...