autonomous_unit

Hominophobia reminds me of: Haminaphobia - Fear of being rendered speechless

(hopefully someone here remembers the Honeymooners)

I just installed Fedora 8 on my 4 year old thinkpad, and see a nice reduction in power consumption (at idle) which will make the battery last longer. Previously, it idled around 11-12 watts on battery with the LCD backlight at a dim setting. Now, it idles at 8-9 watts.

Also, the efforts in Fedora to address more hardware "quirks" have finally paid off, in that the ACPI behavior seems right out of the box for me, including suspend and hibernate hot-keys. I used to always have to add my own customizations whenever I installed a new Fedora. To be fair, some of these quirks improvements appeared recently in Fedora 7 updates. Only the reduced power consumption is completely new for me.

They've also added the "ath5k" wireless driver, but I find that it doesn't work for me yet with my internal atheros ABG card, at least for my WPA network which is the only way I can test it now. So I still have to use an add-on madwifi driver build.

Unless the original poster's house guests are now planning to launch a mission to expand "western feminism" into Thailand, I don't see how his experience is really any different than any other culture shock moment. People come here and observe that customers would never be treated "that way" by a shopkeeper, or drivers would never be allowed on the road in "that condition" or "with those skills", or doctors would never discourage questions from patients, or children "spoiled like that", etc. All of these are similar surprises in store when you cross cultures, and having some of them be observations from a woman doesn't, in my view, make them suddenly an example of importing feminism. When I read between the lines, I see the original poster coloring some superficial tourists' observations based on his own apparent uneasiness with the changes happening in Thailand, drawing connections where they don't really exist.

I do have a dislike for missionaries of all types, and would agree it is misguided to come here and try to "convert" new feminists, just as I think it is misguided to come here to convert new Christians. But, I don't hold it against Thais to adopt feminism or Christianity if they find that it suits them. I don't think western feminism is being pushed into Thailand, so much as increased communication and economic activity is allowing the Thai culture to change on its own. While the west may play a part in this pot-stirring, it is diplomats and businessmen, not feminist activists, who are to be blamed or commended...

I am happy to see strides by individuals to gain more freedoms and choices in their lives, and the apparent success that Thais in my and my wife's generation (gen X) are having in finding the aspects of "western thought" (and social mobility) which suit them. I think the obvious generational trend is towards a more tolerant society that is capable of allowing lots of different lifestyles without stifling conformity and stereotypes.

I think a number of gender, ethnic, and socio-economic barriers are fading with time, and that is a good thing in my view. In answer to Andrew Hicks's question/observation: as an individualist I'm much happier to see some angst as society finds a new balance than to see individuals subjugated to a smothering role in the name of social cohesion. I agree that it could become disruptive if things change too rapidly, but I see no signs of that occurring here. On the contrary, much of the destructive unrest in Thailand (e.g. the deep South) comes from where these barriers are still too high, allowing a seething resentment to build.

What's the precise make and model? What shows up if you run "lsusb" on the Linux machine after it is attached?

Unfortunately, webcams are even worse than printers when it comes to Linux. You really have to either get lucky or research the hel_l out of it and then still get lucky, because the manufacturers are happy to sell several completely different (chip-level) hardware products with the exact same product name and packaging. Each one will require completely different drivers and may or may not have one for Linux.

I waited a long time and finally bought a Logitech that uses the new USB video class standard (and USB audio class for its microphone), and I had to download a new beta-quality "linux-uvc" driver to make it work. This has the advantage of being a new interoperable standard rather than yet another proprietary driver model, sort of like standard usb-storage drivers for just about any USB disk drive. I'm hoping that the future will be painless like it is now with most disks.

Yes, the problem is this IR device apparently isn't a normal programmable one like most LIRC devices. It only has a fixed set of remote codes it can handle, cooked right into its binary firmware. That's why I said that I ran a script to try using every available code, but none worked to control the UBC dstv box.

The way things are looking, I may just have to scrounge up the parts to make a home brew IR transciever to use with LIRC, or else pick up one of those MCE USB remote blasters on my next trip abroad. It's sure a pain to shop for stuff like this with my extremely limited Thai skills and my wife's disinterest in electronics.

Ah, I have the non-MCE then... the blaster plugs directly into the card. And the drivers support something like 700 different remotes and I left it running to try every one of them forwards and backwards but none were able to make the UBC box change channels...

Hmm, I actually have a Hauppauge 150 with remote and blasters, but I tried every remote code it supported and none of them seemed to do a thing to affect my UBC dstv set-top box.

Which kind of set-top box do you have, and what remote setting for the Hauppauge did you use that actually allowed the channel to be changed? I had read that it only supported a limited range of remotes, and after trying them all (I think), I had given up hope on making that blaster work...

Thanks for the confirmation... I added another fruitless hour or so myself, so I'm glad to know I'm not just blind...

Has anybody come across a shop at Pantip with media center accessories? I want one of the Microsoft compatible hardware solutions that can send IR signals to other devices. I actually plan to use it with LIRC on Linux, but I've read that they work pretty well...

I saw a Thermaltake receiver with a small display at Jedicool, but it didn't have any IR blaster and that's the only part I actually want. We asked around quite a bit but didn't have any luck. I don't know if it's really uncommon or just known by some other term here.

It's pretty tranquil where we are in Nonthaburi... as the rains ended this year, I was noticing bird calls and children playing as the loudest sounds around, aside from a neighbor who sometimes cranks up his karaoke on weekends and the brooms of the workers who sweep the street every few mornings. You can't quite hear the trees growing, but it does get quiet at times. Still not as quiet as where I grew up, where a dove's call would be heard from 50m away and deer might wander through the tall grass with a rustling sound. Where's the smiley for a guy spaced out on Quaalude's?

However, recently construction noises started again, with a pile-driver being heard off in the distance... not right on the door step, but even with windows closed I hear the steady roar of the engine and the hammer fall every second or so... now I don't hear the birds except when the pile-driver goes idle for a bit.

If your place is anything like mine, i.e. not insulated very well, then I think you're almost surely better off to turn off the air-conditioning when you leave. The only reason to leave it on is for comfort, not for power or equipment savings.

If you turn it off, how quickly does the room warm back up? That gives you an idea of how much heat is pouring into the room, which the air-conditioning is constantly trying to remove again. However, when the room reaches ambient temperature, no more heat pours in! So, it's a bit like running a sump pump continuously against a stream of water, versus letting the basement flood out, and only trying to pump it dry once when you need it... if the amount of water (heat) being pumped out adds up to several room-fulls in an hour, then you're better off just pumping one room-full when you need it.

Also, the rule about computer power saving may not be so accurate these days when people more often have high-powered 3D graphics cards which may burn 100-200 watts as compared to the LCD's less than 50 watts! Unlike laptops, it doesn't seem like desktop graphics cards do much dynamic power saving, i.e. they run hot whether a game is playing or the screen is just showing a static document. Again, just feeling how much heat is pouring out of the vents may give you a good hint as to how much power the devices are consuming.

This is particularly complicated because booting requires the help of the BIOS, and what Grub really needs to know is what the "BIOS drive number" and "disk block location" is for its additional boot files. Many BIOSes will change the disk numbering depending on what devices are plugged in and what boot-order priorities are set in the BIOS config, and the exact layout on disk will be different each time you install the OS, so you cannot have one bootloader work with either internal or external drives unless you do an exact disk-cloning step which will probably cause other problems...

While a typical Linux installer will try to detect this numbering when it installs Grub, it is lost when the numbering changes on a reboot with different disks attached. This is one reason why neither Linux nor Windows really support system installs on USB media very well (if at all).

To make a USB rescue system, I've set the BIOS to make the USB drive the primary boot drive if it exists. Then, I've installed Grub to the USB disk and set it with its own /boot partition and / partition. Then, I've disconnected the USB drive and done the same thing to have a normal OS install on the internal hard drive. Both installs think they are "BIOS drive 0" and so the system boots its internal drive when the USB drive is absent, and it boots the USB drive when it is present. An optional step is to make either system be able to access the other disk once booted... As I recall when I did this several years ago, it took me several steps of installing the systems and running manual Grub commands at the grub shell prompt (to finish tweaking things based on the correct drive-numbering, because the Fedora installer got it wrong w/ the USB drive).

Personally, I found it was more trouble than it was worth, so I just keep a rescue CD around for fixing systems, rather than trying to run a system on an external drive. Now I just use the external disk for backup files etc. and do not keep it bootable.

It also depends on your Linux distribution... Red Hat (I seem to recall) and Fedora (what I use now) have a program /usr/bin/halt which is enabled with pam-console functionality so it automatically allows the local console user to request halt commands, which normally require root permission. This only works when invoking /usr/bin/halt, and not the other one in /sbin/halt. The command "halt -p" is equivalent to "shutdown -h now".

Also, on any recent ACPI-capable machine, /etc/acpi/events/power.conf can be configured to do shutdown using the power button on the computer. You may need to install the "acpid" package if it is not already installed, and make sure it is configured to start on system boot. The following is the content of the relevant file on my Fedora 7 laptop. This tells the system what to do when the power button press is detected...

# ACPID config to power down machine if powerbutton is pressed, but only if
# no gnome-power-manager is running

event=button/power.*
action=/bin/ps awwux | /bin/grep gnome-power-manager | /bin/grep -qv grep || /sbin/shutdown -h now

This pays attention to gnome-power-manager because it provides a GUI method of causing a shutdown, and when it is running it will detect the power button press and prompt the user whether they really want to shutdown... On such a system, you could simplify the action line to just:

action=/sbin/shutdown -h now

If you want the power button to ALWAYS mean shutdown, regardless of the state of the GUI system.

Thai National Mirror/fedora/releases/7 seems to have the ISOs

However, my experience is that the updates are not kept up to date, so I end up going with the rsync servers at mirror.kernel.org to pull down nightly updates. You might want to use the Thai mirror to create your initial updates tree however...

Of course, you can take your chances with the default mirroring behavior, but I find yum unusable if I am not running it off my own local LAN mirror.

Actually, my TOT connection from Nonthaburi seems to have cleaned up its act a bit... ping times to North America destinations have dropped from 600ms+ to around 380ms and my ssh connections seem OK (on standard and unusual port numbers). This is following the many hours outage that TOT users seemed to suffer all over Thailand on Sunday evening.

Not to say there isn't congestion and loss, but it seems reasonable interactivity for low bandwidth TCP connections at least...

I am running a DLink DSL-G604t (since 2004) and using the OpenWRT firmware for the past year or so. It performs better than any stock DLink firmware ever did, but that is talking about LAN-WAN behavior. The wireless is essentially useless with the OpenWRT firmware so I don't even try to include the drivers (you may be able to make it work as a _client_ without WEP or WPA security...). There is a reasonable 'qos-scripts' package which helps manipulate routing priorities and such, but I've never tried to customize it to differentiate certain LAN stations. It is nice for differentiation of bulk, normal, and express traffic into separate queues. Of course, nothing is perfect when you're only doing doing this on one end of the slow link. No firmware is going to fix the ridiculous performance of TOT these days, unfortunately.

I still have to run development branch stuff which I have to checkout from subversion and compile myself, as the TI AR7 platform hasn't made it into a supported release yet. This means you're playing dice with finding yourself a stable revision, and it would help to have multiple devices so you could keep one operational while easily preparing a new one for testing or switchover for real daily use. As it is, I have to allot myself a few hours of downtime to try a new firmware build and make absolutely sure I have older images around to restore, unless I want to try to use my backup GPRS to go searching the Internet for help! Once you start using this stuff, you get very good at using the low-level ADAM2 firmware of the router to load new flash images...

Also, there is no complete web GUI for the development branch of OpenWRT (called "Kamikaze"), so it is purely ssh-based command-line administration for me. But, it's a real Linux 2.6 kernel system with jffs2 flash filesystem and a pretty nice little configuration/scripting system to make many common tasks easier. The X-Wrt project makes a pretty nice web GUI for OpenWRT, but its last stable release is for the older "Whiterussian" release of OpenWRT.

Sorry, couldn't join in yesterday from my flying carpet over the Pacific...

...

I can't imagine why you would want to encourage illogical thinking, and since there is no middle ground between rational and the irrational, not wanting to encourage logical thinking is tantamount to the same. Im pretty sure you would prefer your neighbours to be more rational than less.

So, we're either "with you" or "against you", is that it? Somewhat stark categories. My fuzzy thinking tells me you ought to embrace ambivalence more. I never said I encouraged illogical thinking, but rather that formal symbolic reasoning is not the pinnacle of thought we should strive attain to under all circumstances (to the detriment of other modes). And as I said, I'd want my neighbors to behave rationally, but whether they do this out of fear of upsetting the spaghetti monster or because they've shrewdly determined how it benefits them more on the whole, I do not care.

Regarding intuition, I reject your straw man about local versus global charity, in order to get to my point more directly. Using intuition (or as I said, getstalt perceptions) is not illogical, but rather is an acceptance that we have access to less than perfect information and less than perfect proof-building capacity. Consider how each derivation in a long logical "calculation" can add error when the inputs are imprecise. The more directly we can reach a conclusion from our possibly erroneous premises, the less likely we are to wander off into the logical dark forest of our minds. Our intuition and gestalt perceptual capabilities are, in my opinion, a valuable tool for weighing one imperfect "fact" or sense against others and deciding how to act.

Of course, with the luxury of time we can try to investigate our premises to reduce the unknowns and we can validate our thinking with more elaborate analysis. But, we should take care to consider the bigger picture wherin our premises are wrong... The less time we have to make a decision, the more critical it can be to have an intuitive process we can trust. Thus, we train as athletes or combatants to process information in real-time, rather than to stop and work out physics calculations in "long hand" before making our next move! There is an entire spectrum of reasoning situations from these concrete training/conditioning tasks to the most abstract life-altering philosophical debates. That is my epistomological creed.

In a deparate attempt to return to topic, I would summarize that this intuitive reasoning ability is also something we learn and refine by practice. While some people develop it into being "believers" in the sense of the original poster, I don't think this is a necessary conclusion. It all depends on how we train the ability, when we decide it is reaching erroneous conclusions, etc. And, this reflective process is itself grounded in culture and emotion. Did it hurt us or ostracize us to follow our intuitions? If so, we probably will adjust them more (for next time) than if the outcome was satisfactory or comforting. Just as in evolution in general, the guiding pressure is not "optimization" but "'avoidance of disaster"... there's a great middle ground where different approaches are all good enough to survive in the same ecology, whether it is an ecology of organisms or one of minds.

... Although it can leave some things difficult to palate such as that concepts may well be innate and learning is technically impossible.

Personally, I haven't found anything in computation that would lead necessarily to determinism. Not to imply choice or free will in any real opposition, either...

... Because, what ultimately is our goal- to encourage logical thinking or not?

That's clearly your goal but I am not sure it is mine nor everyone else's here! I'm neither a teacher nor a missionary, so until I have kids of my own, I cannot be sure how much logical thinking I will want to impart versus all other modes of cognition. I've personally been aware of my own intuition and gestalt perceptions since a young age, and see logic as just another tool for the shed... Now, logical behavior I think we can talk about as a basic civic necessity, but I'm less concerned by what means people manage their own behaviors...

.. And those who did not obtain the education in question and claim to be able to sense the extra-sensual are... misguided or gifted? And are they more likely to be female or male? And is that just because Males have had more opporunity to gain education, and so therefore are you saying Males are simply better educated than females? Sorry- just redirecting some heat! Enjoyed your breath of fresh air.

Just to side-step your redirected heat, I am merely referring to a well-known gender imbalance in the student population of my field. I never claimed my education was "better" since the most I can do is admit my bias as belonging to the population that shows the bias. It's one of those ironies of life that I know my views may not be easily digested by those with a different education (and vice versa), while I simultaneously realize that my own views shaped my education to date so that even some of my closest classmates did not really receive "my education" per se.

(To finish on that note while resuming an earlier thread in this discussion, I don't think the "right" to free speech or personal beliefs in any way implies a right to be heard nor respected... it is merely a right not to be obstructed by the powers wielded through government. Everyone has a right to speak or hold their opinions, and I have the right to plug my ears or mock them as I see fit!)

Oxford Will, I understand the philosophical tenets you keep asserting over and over here, but I wonder at their relevance. I am personally skeptical of your (rather old-fashioned, from my point of view) statement that we are all logical unless insane. For me, my basic knowledge of contemporary physiological and psychological study and my above-average knowledge of computational theory and related engineering disciplines (consider that "applied logic" ) make it clear that we are far from logical machines. We are fuzzy thinkers, and I do not mean to imply a formal fuzzy logic either. We "compute" decisions in a dizzying array of parallel and redundant biological components, swimming in a flood of noisy signals and biases which somehow comes out with statistically significant results that are barely understood by contemporary science and certainly not by contemporary engineering. To say our minds are logical, merely because they produce results that are often not inconsistent with a logical analysis of reality, is as strange an assertion as to say water is mathematical, merely because it seems to compute volumetric sums when we pour it.

As you've mentioned, logic is merely a system for inferring truth values from a set of premises. We could apply logic to study the behavior of a system, or even attempt to model a simple system and see if the model appears to be logically sound, but isn't it naive to think we can reduce the organic complexity of the mind to a system of facts and a logic, i.e. separate premises and inference rules? None of us have the luxury of knowing whether our real-life operating premises are even logically consistent, much less having the time to exhaustively search the inference space for proofs of interesting derived truth. I think it is unquestionable that our minds take many short cuts to find relevant inferences in real life, and this process is inseparable from our memories/neural-training and emotional/endocrine systems which help guide us to reasonably relevant decisions in the moment when decision matters. We do not just learn new facts/premises, but new inference rules and contextual rules for when they are appropriately applied. And, we do this day in and day out whether we have ever attempted to reflect on our own decision-making or not. If anything, I'd say that an attempt to reflect and interpose formal symbolic reasoning will lead most people to reduce their practical decision-making capacities. (Not to discount the value of learning logical reasoning skills, but I think our innate intuitive decision-making is just as important in everyday life...)

To the original topic: in practice, I think the boundaries between theories, knowledge, belief, and wisdom are also fuzzy. We draw distinctions based on "how strongly" we trust the information, how deeply it is embedded into our cultural landscape, how catastrophic it would be to rip out the "fact" and all its derived truths, etc. Often these boundaries are abused and their separateness exagerated for rhetorical effect. Finally, I think there are strong cultural norms affecting what information we will allow ourselves to learn and absorb to a certain strength or depth of belief. Some of these norms are gender-based, I would agree, though I choose to remain a skeptic as far as thinking there are also sexual biases as to what we will learn.

I don't think it is my "maleness" that makes me believe in a cold, uncaring (but still wonder-filled) reductionist universe. But, I am not foolish enough to think my education was not enabled by the cultural environment from which I came, nor that my being raised with conventional expectations to "act like a boy/man" had no influence on how I trained myself to think. My own skepticism regarding spirits, souls, psychic phenomena, etc. has to do with the views I've developed on perception and its illusory nature. I think we, in general, perceive things more vividly and clearly than we've actually sensed them, i.e. we "recover" information from our noisy senses, often without a clear awareness of where the senses end and the imagination begins. My trade/expertise makes me painfully aware that one cannot "recover" more information than was present in the sense data, and this knowledge is what forces me to disregard fanciful explanations where a simpler answer of "faulty signal processing" would do... my gender merely made it easier for me to obtain this education.

Are your uploads revisions of earlier datasets?

If so, you really ought to look into rsync. It can easily perform an upload that "recovers" from partial transfer but even better, it can very efficiently upload just the differences between the source and a reference version on the destination. Look at the --compare-dest or --link-dest options, which are frequently used to do incremental backups. It is convenient to tunnel rsync over ssh, and through a typical ADSL link from Thailand, you will not see any performance effect, as the CPU can easily do the encryption (and compression) faster than your network link.

As a techie w/ a similar problem, I have found that rsync is my most indispensable tool here, along with a US-based Linux server where I have lots of disk space and can therefore setup any sort of transfer I need by logging in remotely, setting up temporary reference data, transferring, etc...

Assuming you can run MS Word and also have access to a Linux machine (or cygwin), you can install just about any Postscript printer driver on Windows (choose a color printer with "level 3" Postscript support, e.g. one of the larger HP bsiness printers, etc.). Then, set the printer driver device connection to print "to file", and print the document from MS Word. Go into the advanced settings and properties and find the "PS" or "postscript" section and adjust some settings: optimize for portability, download truetype as softfonts, and download as native truetype.

You will have a file now, such as "myfile.prn" and this is actually a Postscript file so you can copy it to a Linux box and rename it to myfile.ps and view it with ghostview or any other postscript viewer as a sanity check. Then, use the ps2pdf converter that is included with ghostscript. I usually use "ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 myfile.ps" and it will create myfile.pdf

This has always worked for me, even with tricky files that absolutely confuse OpenOffice. The "pdftk" tool on Linux is also great though it has its own very arcane command-line syntax, in case you need to do more complex manipulation of PDF files such as to split or merge pages from multiple files.

Hmm, reading the replies so far I am not sure if your problem is being addressed... I assume that you mean there is a router in the building supporting multiple users and using the subnet 192.168.1.0/24 (most likely with the router using 192.168.1.1 as its own address and providing DHCP to allocate addresses for users in the building).

Your neighbor should just configure his own router to use DHCP on the WAN port to get an address from the building router, or else coordinate with the operator of the building router to set a static address which is outside the DHCP allocation range for the building router. Otherwise, yes, there is a risk that his chosen static address could conflict with DHCP assignments being given to other users. The configuration of the building router would have to be viewed to be certain of the situation... usually there is a simple DHCP server configuration section which gives an address range or "pool" to dynamically allocate.

I know on my own routers, the default usually starts with, e.g., 192.168.1.2 and goes up to 192.168.1.64 or something like that. It is not necessary to use the entire subnet for automatic allocation unless you really have 254 users etc.

Once he gets a non-conflicting address for the WAN port of his router, it shouldn't matter how many devices he puts behind it, as they will all share the single address via his own router's NAT function. He would probably need to configure his own router's LAN subnet to a different address, e.g. 192.168.2.0/24 to avoid problems, as some NAT implementations might not cope well with the same subnet address being used on both LAN and WAN interfaces.

Yooyung, I cannot say I am very Buddhist in my inclinations, but it strikes me that if you want to study mindfulness and use your dreaming as a tool, you should be focusing more on how and why you think the way you do in dreams. For example, you described earlier a dream where you became angry at your dream situation, but do not know why. This seems like a more useful question to consider than dozens of other experiments about what happens when you walk through walls etc.

In short, lucid dreaming is just another venue for fantasy, in my opinion. What value is there in fantasy or escapism? To be self-aware, you have to look into the layers of thoughts and reactions which make you who you are, rather than diving into ever more elaborate (dreamed or real) experiences. The only real benefit of the dream state, I think, is that you have the luxury to focus on this inward study without any negative consequences, whereas in waking life you risk becoming inattentive to those demands around you (assuming you are not sequestered for meditation).

I don't know about Windows, but I use software RAID 5 on Linux and have had a few unexpected background rebuilds after an unclean shutdown. This is nerve wracking but required no intervention on my part, and the SMART diagnostics do not show any problems with the drives. The only real problem I've had was with a disk that was actually giving read errors and reallocated blocks, and it seems to me that the problem was related to the power supply in the computer. I went through two drives before I moved everything to a new case and power supply and have had no problems since. (I went with a new case because I wasn't sure if it was power or heat related, but the drives don't actually report much cooler temperatures in spite of the increased air flow.)

I use APC brand UPSs and with the USB monitoring cable my OS is able to do a clean shutdown if it detects the UPS battery charge getting too low.

It has been an eye opener to see the frequent switches to battery power being reported in my system logs. I never would have guessed that the mains power was this flaky just by observing lights and appliances. In fact, I resolved a repeated problem with an ethernet switch by powering it via UPS. It turns out that problems I had guessed were overheating were really frequent and extended brownout conditions in the evening.

Are these events happening when you've rebooted or had a system crash?

Many (most?) RAID systems do not actually verify checksums during normal operation, so the only event that would trigger a degradation event would be an I/O error (block read or write failure) on a disk or some logic in the management layer that detects an inconsistency, for example if the array were shutdown improperly and the disks are not in a consistent state with each other.

Did you check the SMART data for the drive(s) that were getting ejected from the array? Were there "pending" or "reallocated" blocks?

Is it possible that your power supply is inadequate for the number of disks drawing power? This could lead to I/O errors. Do you have a proper UPS and does it pass a self test?

At my house, we see frequent brownouts that my UPSs report, even when most appliances and lights do not flicker. I see the power dip as low as 170 volts quite frequently in evenings. I've turned my UPSs up to "high" sensitivity level so that they will cut over to battery power sooner before letting the mains level drop for the computer. In the last 10 days of uptime on one computer, the UPS shows 21 transitions to battery for a total of 56 seconds on battery! I don't think we've observed any blackouts during this time.