DrBacchus' Journal

Debian, which held out so much promise, has rather fallen down. I downloaded ISOs. (Oh, you should instead download debian-installer. It is much cooler, but only alpha.) I booted from the CD, and was asked a series of cryptic questions with non-obvious options. After going through that process, it put me back at the beginning of the process, giving me the same options. What do I do now?

Now, I'm sure that if I had a Debian guru here with me, this install would have gone smoothly, but my point is sort of that I should not need to have a distribution-specific guru in order to do an installation.

So, Debian lost out this time.

You know, I have some freebsd CDs somewhere ...

I told Bert I'd journal this, so here it is.

I'm trying to choose a distro for my training machines, so that I can do a rebuild periodicaly. With the following requirements:

* The distro is usable by people not completely familiar with Unix

* The install does not require baby-sitting

* The install does not install a horribly broken Apache distro, as so many of them seem to these days

Personally, I have been using Slackware for some time, and I used BSD before that, so my personal requirements are a little different. But I can't assume that my students know anything about Unix (although, so far, most have) or know how to use Enlightenment. Plus, I want something I can rebuilt in a few minutes of baby-sitting.

I've noticed that my personal email volume has plunged over the last week. Apparently the spammers took the week off as well as the folks that contribute to the various email lists I'm on. I rather expected that spam volume would skyrocket during the Christmas holidays. I really wish I had spam stats from before last week. It would be interesting to compare my perceptions with reality. We'll see what happens in the new year when things get cranked back up.

Presidential Results - Latest

The ECK (Election Commission of Kenya) has officially announced the results, and Mwai Kibaki is the 3rd president if Kenya. The inauguration will be tomorrow.

There's a lot of celebration going on. The losing candidates conceeded very gracefully, and violence has been almost completely avoided. This is a very promising start to things.

President-elect Kibaki has stated that he has no interest in forming a coalition government with Kanu, because he wants a strong opposition to keep him on his toes. I think I am starting to really like this guy.

I heard the term "The Umbrage Industry" used recently, and now I can't recall where that was. If you're not familiar with the term Umbrage, it means, to put it simply, being offended. We, the people of the United States of America, have perfected the art of umbrage. We manage to get offended at anything, and we manage to see offence taken by people who are merely commenting.

I probably should not mention any names. You probably either know who I'm talking about, or you don't. Dude, lighten up. If you can't take a little constructive criticism, then don't post your ideas in public places where the whole world can see them. Nobody is calling you a sh*thead, as you claim. And, unless this is something that is unique to your little corner of things, which, after all, came out of a big organization into a little one, not the other way around, nobody is abandoning trust.

You seem like a nice guy. I enjoyed meeting you, and I enjoyed talking to you, but you've got to quit acting like every issue is a matter of Good vs Evil, with you the sole defender of All That Is Right. It gets a little old. Some things are just matters of opinion, and there's a chance, however slim it might be, that you're not always right. Getting offended every time someone disagrees with you is a great way to get a stomach ulcer, but accomplishes precious little else.

Followups:

The phrase was actually in a piece in Newsweek (or was it Time) that my Dad read to us on Christmas, about the ACLU furur surrounding Christmas. Here are some relevant links:

http://reason.com/0212/fe.tc.e.shtml

http://www.jaycaruso.com/archives/001327.html