Barnson.org

I have a samsung i-760, and I hate it, it has windows mobile 6 on it with all the vzw lockouts, I was wondering if it is possible to put a linux o/s on it and strip windows off? I figured if anyone knew one of you guys would

thanks

I am alternately roasting and freezing in this building today. The air conditioning to the network operating center is on the fritz, causing the temperature to alternately rise to over ninety degrees, then fall to a frigid fifty a few minutes later. This just exacerbates my mood, already pensive and tight-lipped, just barely restraining the rant I want to cut loose.

A number of years ago, I encountered the term “Cargo Cult“. This refers to a number of new religious movements formed in the wake of World War II on various Pacific islands in response to the departure of military forces:

A cargo cult is [a] religious movement appearing in tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically-advanced, non-native cultures — which focus upon obtaining the material wealth of the advanced culture through magical thinking as well as religious rituals and practices — while believing that the materials were intended for them by their deities and ancestors… Cargo cults maintain that the manufactured goods (“cargo”) of the non-native culture have been created by spiritual means, such as through their deities and ancestors, and are intended for the local indigenous people, but that, unfairly, the foreigners have gained control of these objects through attraction of these material goods to themselves by malice or mistake.

Cargo cults thus focus on efforts to overcome what they perceive as the undue influence of the others attracting the goods, by conducting rituals imitating behavior they have observed among the holders of the desired wealth…

One of the most striking features of cargo cults was their attempt to attract cargo through the use of torch-lighted dirt runways, coconut-shell headphones, intricately-carved handsets made of wood that looked like walkie-talkies, air traffic control towers made of palm trees, and imitation airplanes parked on taxiways, all in an effort to attract the thing they want. By chattering into their fake walkie-talkies, wearing fake headphones, and pretending that some examples of what they wanted were already in their possession, the cargo-cultists hoped to regain their lost prosperity.

Of course, as we all know, form follows function in aviation and war. Imitating the form without the function is completely useless.

This reminds me of the much-ballyhood new-age obfuscatory hogwash people call “the law of attraction” today.

At the time, I thought it was an interesting and useful analogy to various corporate practices. Often, corporate America observes another company following a successful strategy and changes its own strategy to match in order to compete. What they frequently miss, though, is the underpinning cultural and historic reasons for certain processes that grew organically in the company they observed. Far from bringing about the expected changes, often this corporate cargo-cultism results in wasted man-centuries of effort trying to imitate what they don’t understand.

Last week, I delegated a job to a co-worker. It was simple, but would be lengthy and involve a good deal of iterative deployment to get right. Redhat changed the format of their Kickstart file between Redhat Enterprise 4 and Redhat Enterprise 5. While I was trivially able to port the script from 3 to 4, the move from 4 to 5 was more complicated, and I was too short on time to debug it. I asked the co-worker to please take ownership of this job, use two particular systems to test his deployment, and then run with the process for future deployments.

What I received one week later, instead, was my own kickstart setup with five lines modified, a copy of the correct directory from the new distribution, and a polite request that I go test this obviously non-working kickstart setup on the two machines I had delegated for this co-worker to test on.

This was not the first time I’d delegated a job that included a lot of troubleshooting, iterative testing, and problem-solving skills, just to have him hand it back to me because he obviously had no idea what he was doing.

“GGRRRRAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHH!!!” I screamed in disbelief and rage.

My skin split and peeled away, revealing the green mass beneath. My hair turned a deep green, and my eyes a fiery red. Suddenly I was ten times more massive than usual, gained three feet of height, and was filled with an all-consuming hatred of IT and all things technical.

I was lucky. It was lunchtime, and no other co-workers were in the office. I jumped hard, and punched a twenty-foot hole into the ceiling, dislodging an air conditioning compressor unit and displacing thousands of pounds of building material. I went on a rampage in the warehouse district of Salt Lake City, demolishing cars and throwing 18-wheel tractor trailers like gigantic Tinker Toys through plate-glass windows.

“Cargo-Cult System Administration!” I yelled at the top of my lungs as I picked up a BMW and folded it into a steel taco. “Incompetent baboons playing at UNIX! Windows admins pretending to know what they know nothing about! Programmers believing sysadmins are nothing but programmers who skipped their classes! Grargh!”

I plunged my hands deep into the pavement below me, ripping up a huge chunk of asphalt and hurling it with all my might toward the data center. I might have been big, at this point, but I was no more coordinated than usual. The pavement chunk skidded to a stop a few feet shy of my Honda Insight.

Filled with remorse at almost destroying my most-favorite car ever, I shrunk back into the six-foot-tall, overweight computer geek that I am. Lucky I had a change of clothes in the back of my car.

I sheepishly called my boss and described to him the problems I’d had attempting to delegate responsibility as he had asked. He was understanding and considerate, agreeing to speak with our counterparts overseas to attempt to get some more-skilled help. For the moment, I was mollified.

Anyway, that’s why the air conditioning isn’t working right today. I think. They sure fixed that gigantic hole in the ceiling quickly, though.

OK, the first rant is that I can’t type today. I mis-spelled “rant” as “ranr”, “rand”, and “ranf” before I finally got it right.

Rant #35,636: Why do people believe other people so much?

OK, news flash: people who habitually lie can tell the truth. People who habitually tell the truth can lie. Just because I’m doing one doesn’t preclude me from doing the other.

Today at my cube, a co-worker mentioned that the ‘movie’, “What The Bleep Do We Know”, claimed that it’s really impossible for two people to be touching because the spaces between and inside atoms are very large. Even if you feel like you are touching, you’re not, really.

OK. Point taken. Truth: atoms are mostly composed of nothingness. Any solid object is actually composed of mostly empty space. No problem. Truth.

Then the same co-worker suggests that, perhaps because that is true, that some of the other things these Ramtha-followers suggested is true. Like that you create reality by observing it.

Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! Plot complication ahead!

Here I will refer you to H.G. Frankfurt’s work that I’ve referred to before: On B.S.

Back to the original point: people can lie about just certain things while being mostly truthful, or people can be selling you oceanfront property in Arizona and tell you truthfully that the “view is magnificent”.

“What The Bleep Do We Know” is a propaganda piece for a bizarre religious cult. Just because they are willing to spice their hogwash with a few truths doesn’t make the whole thing true. Their goal is to get you to subscribe to their hokey religion, and if a few things they say happen to be true along the way to that glorious goal of gaining a new, money-paying convert, so much the better.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1818197,00.html

I’m not big on churches, but as far as churches go, that’s pretty darn cool.

Quote of the day from What Women Know:

We distrust separate-but-equal rhetoric; anyone who is regularly reminded that she is “equally important” is probably not. Partnership is illusory without equal decision-making power.

hey guys.. the second trailer for the flick (directed by l’il ole me) is ready to be seen and hear your feedback!! Or rather I want feedback. the trailer has no feelings.

http://youtube.com/nvzmovie

I have, literally, nothing else to say except this one word.

Awkward.

http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-4-26jun08-en.htm

ICANN yesterday agreed to start in 2009 with letting any word replace the ubiquitous ‘.com’ tag in internet addresses. Some articles stated that it will start a scramble for top-level domains with a preexisting high-attraction factor, ultimately causing businesses to buy thousands of domains to protect their internet turf.

What do you guys think? Do you really think a whole new frenzy will result?

The general public currently recognizes domain names around entity status (for profit, non-profit) and geography (country of origin). This is obviously shattered as now a host of new categorical structures will be applied with the new domain pairings. For example, www.hotsex.barnson is a sure winner in the new open domain name age.

Without putting too much thought into this, my feeling is that most people with a personal website won’t move to change or protect their internet position. I’m sure that some businesses will want to expand their digital territory to protect their https. New ventures will certainly want to take up interesting pairings to enhance notoriety.

Thoughts?

I really, really hope Matt’s days are like this: http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/

My $.02 Weed

Do you guys think oil prices will ever peak? Or is it just going to keep going up till nobody can afford to drive?