La Salle Debain

I have read 13 of the books on the list that Clint mentioned.

I had begun to write about all the ones which I expected to be there but weren't and then realized I might as well make my own list. So here it is in alphabetical order not in any particular rank. Some entries are actually series.

• 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke (But the sequels get progressively worse.)

• Alice In Wonderland/Alice Through The Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

• Baroque Cycle: Neal Stephenson

• Behold The Man: Michael Moorcock

• Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut

• Dictionary Of The Khazars, Milorad Pavic

• Earthsea Trilogy: Ursula Le Guin

• Gloriana or The Unfullfill'd Queen, Michael Moorcock

• Gormenghast Trilogy, Mervyn Peake

• Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke

• Lord Of The Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

• Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

• Ringworld, Larry Niven

• The Computer Connection, Alfred Bester

• The Dune Encyclopedia, Willis E. McNelly (The real backstory to Dune. Brian Herbert should be fed to Shai-Hulud.)

• The Futurological Congress, Stanislaw Lem

• The Island Of The Day Before: Umberto Eco

• The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein

• Ulysses, James Joyce

All pretty damn geeky I think if not stereotypically so.

While most of New Jersey has been rather blasé about todays giant douche versus turd sandwich contest, some kind of news must have filtered down to the four year old set because all the way home my daughter Shailaja was screaming "Vote for John Kerry. I like John Kerry. Vote for John Kerry."

I went to Perl Monks again for the first time in a week and discovered they've changed the XP system. So I'm no longer a saint but a curate.

Ah Diwali. That magical time of the year when Diwali Dilip comes down from Mt. Meru on his sled pulled by eight flying bullocks to deliver presents (dictionaries and socks) to all the good Hindu boys and girls.

Or something like that. Happy Diwali and best wishes to all my readers for a wonderful 2062.

Branden has authorized funds to cover my travel expenses and I've booked a ticket so it's official. I will be attending foss.in

Once again it is November, National Novel Writing Month participants have one month to write a 50,000+ word novel. I was going to take part last year but didn't follow through. I had a good excuse though, we were having a baby at that time. This year I am going to try again. The genre is science fiction again and the plot is the same: time travel, telepathic dogs, deep philosophical ruminations on the nature of humanity, and new for this year, robot yogis.

So Ubuntu and Kubuntu 5.10, codenamed "Breezy Badger" was released today. About a month ago I switched my laptop from Debian sarge to a pre-release of Breezy. (The Kubuntu version.)

No Debian is not dying. I'm still using Debian on my server, my other desktop PC and everywhere else I possibly can. My reason for changing was quite simple: Like many people I wanted newer version of packages (scribus, openoffice.org2, and KDE) than Debians stable version could provide, yet with a greater degree of stability than Debians' unstable version. I could have achieved the same effect with a couple of extra apt sources and backports but I thought it would be nice to have everything available from one official source. Since then in the process of customizing things, I've been adding stuff from Sid and elsewhere to the extent that 20% of the 1614 installed packages on my system are not from the official Ubuntu archive. So I guess I basically don't have a good excuse for switching after all. Nevertheless I'm going to stick with it for a while. Apart from the new packages and faster release schedule, aspects of the Ubuntu community and development process intrigue me. I think I shall try to maintin my Debian packages over there too. Now that almost everything is in version control, it shouldn't be too hard.

Supposedly Ubuntu is much easier to use than Debian. On this point I'd have to give it a solid meh. The installation experience is the same as it uses the same installer as sarge. This laptop has no cdrom drive so I had use TFTP. It is somewhat better at detecting devices but I assume that is more to do with having a newer kernel. ACPI was set up correctly which I wasn't able to get working under sarge but again that is probably due to the kernel. On the other hand I still haven't got the hostap drivers set up for my Prism2 wireless chipset. (Ubuntu set up orinoco drivers and they work fine but don't support kismet.) There are a lot of rough edges in various packages that have been smoothed over. I can see how a newbie or someone who didn't want to spend a lot of time tinkering would like that. However it's nothing you couldn't do with Debian if you put some time and effort into it. To conclude, Ubuntu is an interesting experiment which is worth following. One needn't worry about it eclipsing Debian or even stealing its thunder. (Most Ubuntu users come from a different constituency than Debian.) It would be nice if there were greater cooperation at the development level but who's to say that won't happen?

I noticed you already focus a little on multiple org*as*ms and provide information on it, I cannot stress this enough. Please, please, please, post important information on debian-devel-announce or include it in the developers reference. There is too much going on in Debian to keep track of!

Apologies for flooding. (Why didn't the President call me?) Let's see if this works better.

I mean how silly can you get?. So GWB is playing the guitar while a natural disaster happens. What did you expect him to do, scoop out water from the Mississippi with his cowboy hat?

Let me explain something to those people who are still confused about what Americans are looking in a president. Not a messiah, not a superhero but someone who will just a) look out for American interests (not foreign interests, not some abstract ideological interests but American interests.) b) look out for American interests c) ...that's it.

The sad thing is that Bush is and always has been vulnerable on this topic. Unfortunately instead of pressing the issue and presenting a more compelling vision of how to serve American interests, the opposition has mostly come up with "nyuck nyuck, Bush is dumb because he can't pronounce nuclear" or "Waah! Bush doesn't care about the stupid utopianism I picked up in college." Neither of which the American voter really cares about.

As far as this hurricane goes all he needs to do is sign a few cheques then he can go back to playing guitar and leave the "caring" to local aid workers who can actually do something to help.

[ The views expressed above probably explain this: ]