A June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.

Did you know pink and blue implying gender is relatively new, and all babies used to just wear white dresses?

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scatted light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be disolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

From A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.

Linux for the Masses

Uncategorized

It’s not there yet. I’m being totally unfair, because comparing Windows or OS X to the Linux distribution I’m using (Gentoo) is like apples and oranges. Gentoo is meant for people who are comfortable with the command-line and want to experiment. (It’d be fairer to compare Windows to Suse.) But I just want to bridge a connection between an ethernet card and a wireless USB device. Is that too much to ask? When I did this in Windows I just highlighted the two connections, right-clicked, and chose “Bridge Connections.” It spun for a little bit and then it was done. End of story.

The work started yesterday, when I figured out that the reason nothing would emerge is that there were bad GCC flags in my make.conf file. How they got there, I’ll never know. Bad ebuild I guess. So I got that fixed, synced, and updated world. 85 packages! The next day I compiled a new kernel (2.6.7-rc2) but forgot to load the Tulip module required for my ethernet card. Recompile, reboot. Runs great, and I tell myself everything is running faster. Right now I’m bridging my desk LAN to the main router through the Windows desktop, and since I just moved the linux box on a new UPS I’d like to move the wireless connection there too. I was feeling lucky, so I tried just plugging it in to see what happened. dmesg, device not recognized. Search search search the excellent Gentoo forums, find out that to get my MA101 working I shouldn’t use the drivers from Sourceforge, but rather the at76c503a Atmel drivers for wireless USB devices. Download, compile against current kernel sources, install. Reboot. Don’t have any wireless tools. emerge wireless-utilities. Twiddle for 45 minutes to see why it won’t see any networks. Forgot to enable “Wireless radio (non-HAM)” support in the kernel. Recompile. Reboot. iwscan shows my network, iwconfig wlan0 works as expected. The instructions that tell me to put in ad-hoc mode are wrong. (Hour later.) Put it in Managed mode. Cycle the device and run dhcpd wlan0. Ping Yahoo. Online! Track down documentation on bridging. Emerge bridging program. Appears to run fine, but gives a funky error and doesn’t seem to do anything. Add “802.11d bridging” support to kernel. Recompile. Remount /boot. Copy kernel. Reboot… Computer loads everything through Gnome, then mouse and keyboard freezes. Switch back to laptop, write blog entry to let off steam. Reboot again, just to see if it’ll work. Loads, run brctl.So far so good. brctl addbr mattlan returns br_add_bridge: Package not installed, which seems to indicate that the proper kernel module isn’t installed. Would check the .config, but the computer just froze again.

I need some rest.

GBase and Wikipedia

Asides, Google, Wikipedia

I’ve seen a lot of people suggest with Google Base they’re competing with Craig’s List and eBay, but I see it much more as a play against Wikipedia. When I chatted with Jimmy Wales he said one of their biggest problems was for things that are relatively structured like the wiki dictionary or quotes having hte data in a totally unstructured wiki format makes it hard to work with. He suggested they would go the direction of mediawiki templates and microformats, which is great to hear. Google has come at it from the other direction, giving you a free-form DB to pour your heart into. I guess the question is, will people become as passionate about distribution (what Google promises) rather than working for the greater good of humanity through the Wikipedia.

Thanksgiving Travel Tip

Asides

Just a tip for people traveling this week: get there early! I got there when I normally would (45-60 minutes before) and didn’t make it, thanks mostly to standing in the wrong line twice. Airports are in need of a usability designer far more than any software I’ve used in the past year. I generally fly a few times a month, so I’m not exactly a novice, but this is the first time I’ve been in the middle of the Thanksgiving rush.