Continuing to muddle my way along with Linux, trying to get Apache, MySQL and PHP to play nice with each other and acknowledge me in my guise as a humble mortal and not God. Right now, I don’t seem to be able to up-root myself. I’ve already reinstalled the lot when (I’m using the NuSphere platform) the admin website started telling me it couldn’t find the server I had it installed upon and I couldn’t figure out how to tell it, no, THAT ONE, STUPID. There will come a point when I actually have data in these directories and a reinstall will not be a painless solution any more. Maybe by then I – with my 24-verb vocabulary – will actually have learned enough to be dexterous. The most constructive thing I think I did in the last 3 hours was put an alias into the bashrc file so I didn’t have to type the whole tortuous path name to turn on Apache and MySQL. Poke away until it breaks, reinstall, and then poke away until it breaks in a new and informative way. Meanwhile the rain pelted and the wind blasted – there goes the cherry blossom, just as it reaches its spring fullness.
Useful website of the night, The Linux Tutorial, although when I wandered sideways onto a long article on the need for security, the editorial fingers began to itch to tear it apart and restructure it.
Author Archives: Alison
Taxes (squared)
I delivered some batteries to the recycling recently, say a couple of dozen AAAs and some odd Cs, weighing approximately 1 lb. For shipping to the recycling plant, I paid $2.50. Plus tax of $0.17. So, taxed when I earn the money to buy the batteries, taxed on the purchase of the batteries, and taxed on the money spent recycling the batteries (and, of course, on the money earned to pay for the recycling of the batteries – which causes the equation to start to look distributive, if not out-right quadratic), which works out to about $10 in taxes on my couple of dozen batteries … And then there’s a recent short-hop cross-border airline trip, on which the tax mark-up was 60% from EIGHT different sets of fees and taxes …
One in sixteen
This, in the BMJ was a shocker. One in sixteen women in Africa die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Compared to one in 4 600 in the United Kingdom (which still puts it above a whole bunch of other causes of death that are talked about more). Which means that, taking the UN projection of 819 million for 2000 (which I gather is now considered high, because of AIDS), assuming about half of them are women, still works out to 25 million women by my reckoning. 25 million women.
This, from The Lancet only evoked a sigh of requited pessimism. The Bush administration’s anti-abortion policies may well result in strings being attached to AIDS prevention funding in developing countries that may decrease its accessibility by the very people who need it most. As Marge Piercy puts in in her poem on the Iraq situation “we dote on embryos … but people, who needs them?” It’s not her best poem, too declarative, but contains one striking internal rhyme. I am rereading a fourth or fifth hand (found in a charity store for 50c) copy of her novel Vida, a portrait of an American radical activist after years living underground, wanted for bombings and acts of sabotage against institutions and corporations, a frank and sympathetic portrait of her life, politics, relationships and times; I wonder if it would be published today? For a country that takes freedom speech as a near-religious tenet, America seems oddly unable to find undamaging forms of settling its internal strife. Freedom of speech seems to be freedom to be abusive. Never more evident in the arguments over Iraq.
Linux Newbie
I have installed Linux. This is a rite of passage for a longtime Mac user with a UNIX vocabulary of say, two dozen verbs and assorted modifiers. I doubt I would get on a plane with that, a phrasebook, and blind optimism, but with the help of two pages of instructions from the friends who lent me the CDs, some on-line manuals, various nudges from helpful IT types when I hit the “o-mi-God there’s still WINDOWS on this machine and it won’t do the automatic partition that I was counting on it to do …” impasse, I have installed Linux. There is a lawless streak in me that got a great kick out of doing one of the very things that one learns very early on that One Must Not Even Contemplate: formatting the hard-drive. I privately cherish the knowledge that I could, if I wanted, type rm *.*, and nothing would stop me. Even though I am a great believer in safe design and constraints, it still bugs me to be asked, over and over again, “Are you really sure you want to do that?” That said, I found myself tiptoeing around with exceeding delicacy and trepidation, manual on my lap, when I found myself only able to log in as root, having botched the creation of the user account. Me with my 24-verb vocabulary, working out how to tell it to add me to my own system. And it still refuses to recognize there is a world out there. Nope, says it, your cable company is not a valid domain name. How, says I, do you KNOW the the name of my cable company. I never told you that. You never gave me the chance to tell you it. And all the manuals talk about tools I don’t seem to have installed yet, or edit filenames beginning with dots, which I gather can be a Very Unwise Thing To Do. Still, I am on my way to having a working Linux-box, which I plan to turn into a Bioinformatics workstation, and get down to some consolidation of all the half-digested matter in my Introduction to Bioinformatics course.
CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series
I’m reading my way through the “Foreigner” sequence of books by CJ Cherryh. This is the main character, who functions as an intermediary between a human settlement on an alien planet and the aliens whose planet it is, thinking about the challenges of translation:
The paidhi had to have mathematical ability: it went with the job, and one learned it right along with a language that continually made changes in words according to number and relationship – sometimes you needed algebra just to figure the grammatically correct form of a set-adjective, when the wrong form could be infelicitous and offend the person you were trying to win. You formed sets on the fly in your conversation just to avoid divisible plural forms, like the dual or quad not offset by the triad or monad, and in learning rapid conversation, even with the shortcut concepts the language held, your head hurt – until you got to a degree of familiarity where you could chain-calculate while holding a conversation, and no restaurant ever got away with padding your bill. – CJ Cherryh, Invader
They’re fun books, with an extremely introverted presentation: they are entirely from the point of view of the lone human among aliens, who is obliged constantly to double-check and second-guess himself because not only is assassination common custom and betrayal an art-form, but the powerful bonds between atevi do not arise from liking or love, or anything humans have gut feeling for. Bren is forced into a constant intellectual analysis of everything internal and external, in the manner described by high-functioning autistics, who have to do consciously what the rest of us supposedly do by instinct (um. Maybe that’s why Bren’s ruminations are so entertaining: there but for the grace etc go I, thinks I, in certain highly social situations. Minus assassins. And alkaloid-laden teas). The alkaloid laden teas in question are ones he shares – in the first instance, nearly fatally – with one of the rare marvellous old ladies of SF, his main atevi ally’s grandmother and political rival, a hard-riding, wicked, shrewd old traditionalist who delights in making mischief. She is at various points in the books adversary, ally, and unknown quantity – usually the latter. He is at once very fond of her, and aware that she may well be the death of him, if he crosses her – or simply from a heart attack when she drops into a fraught situation and expects to carry all with sheer force of personality. There was an interesting review of one of the later books on SFSite where the reviewer remarks upon the introverted nature of the book and says that it makes sense if you interpret it (and the whole series) as an example of an atevi classical drama, a manchini play, in which the protagonists’ manchini (loyalty, allegence) is examined. Neat approach to taking the artist’s work entirely on its own terms.