If I made it to the Netherlands..

I would probably go to see the town of Veere. When I was a kinder, my grandfather Pike had me read several of the books of Hendrik W van Loon. Before I was 12, I had read "The Liberation of Mankind", "The Story of Mankind", "The Home of Mankind" and my favorite "Van Loon's Lives". I am currently making my way through this book once more, and while its many characters are spirits of former times coming to spend dinner with van Loon and friends.. the town of Veere is also a character. So if I were to go to the Netherlands, I would love to walk through Veere, the town he wrote in "Van Loon's Lives" so that I could see where he had the spirit of Erasmus live in the town tower, and Tsar Peter sword fight with Swedens Charles, and Napoleon make one last march.

However, the main thing I got from these books was that to be truly a 'Free' person was that I must always question myself and my views. And in questioning those views, I must realize that some (*cough* many *cough*) times I have been wrong and should make amends. Anyway, all this talk of Amsterdam, Europe, and things made me realize that someday if I am ever permitted.. that I would love to spend a day walking that town. Though I doubt I will have food as nice as the good 'Jo' made in that book.

Getting back into Fedora

Well, after a timeout from Fedora, I decided to try it out again. First I got a newish computer from Dell, an Optiplex 360 with XP downgrade. The XP and Vista DVD's get used as testing dual boots and maybe some stuff for OCSng later on.

Now what OS should I run? I had been running CentOS-5 since I am a server admin, but was I brave? was I stalwart? was I human enough to run Fedora? Being brave and stalwart (but not necessarily human) , I went to Fedora 11 Alpha. I must say this is an Alpha was very solid and I did not run into any install bugs which is better than say Red Hat Linux 5.1 from 1998 or so. It installed the custom packages and started up really nice. Accounts were created, and the various Must Have applications (Firefox, OpenOffice, Shihen-Sho) seemed to work on a short checklist. And then the little applet told me it was time to update so I did.... since it was going to update 2.5 gb.. I just let it run for the night and came back in the morning..

to a less than functional box. For some reason glibc had removed itself and that was that. Hmmm wait, what was that thing that mmcgrath, skvidal, and the rest had said.. oh yeah... update rpm and yum first then update the rest. Duh.

So a reinstall of the alpha, and a careful

1. rpm -qa --nodigest --nosignature --qf='%{NAME}\n' | sort > remember_me_stupid.txt
2. yum -y update rpm
3. rpm -qa --nodigest --nosignature --qf='%{NAME}\n' | sort > foo
4. comm -1 -3 remember_me_stupid.txt foo ... ok changes look ok and stuff runs.
5. yum -y update yum
6. repeat test
7. yum -y update
8. get lunch

Rawhide was actually very usable. No children were eaten and I was able to install all of the education and other games I play with my kid. Ok tuxracer works great.. orbit works great.. and nethack worked great. And I was able to watch the Sesame Street YouTube videos so everything was in a normal set.

Oh look an email that rawhide was opening up.. cool lets see what we can do to test.

1. yum update firefox
2. hmmm firefox says that it can't run..
3. ooooh xulrunner should have been updated too. Hmmm ok
4. yum update xulrunner
5. back to Electric Company.

Fast forward to last night, I have 2 GB of updates in Rawhide. yum -y update (hey I feel lucky).

This morning.. open up gnome-terminal. Ok its running. Open a new tab, hmmm where is my typing going? Well the control codes are going ot the top tab, but my keystrokes are going ot the bottom tab. Now that is a cool bug. Hey look keystrokes to GMAIL and Firefox also seem to do the same thing... hmmm I wonder where I should post this one?

Well I have to say that is going to be a fun one to figure out tonight. Doing a bugzilla search on a different computer didn't show a quick match.. so I need to figure out what 'borked'.

How low will the Dow go...

Ok as I watch my retirement savings disappear.. and realize that my state pension is going the same way.. I wonder.. how low will the stock market go. So I went to look at some historical pictures.. some of them were uhm interesting in using semilog charts to show this HUGE 'linear log' growth til now... except the log chart does not look really logarithmic when plugging the numbers into a calculator.. instead they look to have been chosen to show a linearish growth.

So I went to look at Yahoo which shows a different picture. From looking at the 'linear' growth from the 1950's.. the stock market went 'non-linear' in the late 1980's and increasingly so in the late 1990's. If I were to take the 1950's growth, the Dow Jones price would 'correct' itself at 3000. If I were to use the better growth in the 1980's.. then the market would correct to 6500. In either case, most of my retirement funding I put away from 1987 til 2009 is vapor. [For it to equal the crash of 1929, it will need to drop to 1531 as that would be 89% of its peak.] Oh well, I never figured I would retire anyway.. figured I would drop dead watching some archaic computer fail its rollover in 2039.

What does this have to do with Free Software... not much, other than it made me realize that I needed to do something to cheer myself up. I am looking now at 4th grade math stuff. Writing a rogue program to do math sounds fun.