Mostly Harmless

Mostly about my amusement

Archives (page 56 of 97)

September 26, 2008

Don’t you worry, the government is on the job

With the House Republicans apparently (it is a closed door negotiation) walking out of the talks, it makes me wonder who exactly wants to do the $700 B bailout?  The White House does, but are the Senate and the House acting only because they don’t want to appear ineffective and out of touch?

That alone would be a lousy reason to make a deal.  If it’s to stop a massive recession, great. If it’s for politics as usual… that would be one expensive photo op.

Last night JP Morgan Chase made out well picking at WaMu’s bones.  It’s Friday and no deal is being publicly touted and the financial companies are still here for now.  Even if a bailout does occur in some form, the NYC area is going to lose jobs and feel the impact, so it’s hard for me to take Washington seriously.

Maybe tonight’s debate town hall election event will be enlightening.

September 24, 2008

He’s nuts, no way around it

Well, this is a Maverick move.  Or maybe Senator McCain is just nuts.

“We haven’t heard hide nor hair of Sen. McCain in these negotiations,” said Schumer, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. “He has not been involved except for an occasional, unhelpful statement, sort of thrown from far away, and the last thing we need in these delicate negotiations is an injection of presidential politics.”

McCain suspends campaign, Obama plans to continue

If Senator McCain was so entrenched in dealing with this corporate welfare bailout, then maybe.  But he has not been involved and Senator Obama is right.  Voters need a president who can deal with multiple problems at once. This is just another “Why do they hate America?” stunt.

September 23, 2008

Good thing Bill Clinton is on our side

Open mouth and insert foot HERE.

Earlier Monday, Clinton suggested his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton, would have been a better political choice for the Democratic VP spot than Joe Biden.

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive – Bill Clinton says Dems shouldn’t attack Palin.

Isn’t Bill’s mouth a large part of why his wife did not win the primary? Why not just come out and say “I’m not president anymore and I don’t want any other Democrat to be president”.

He’s right in that Senator Obama’s campaign needs to focus on Senator McCain’s “4 more years of the same” but President Clinton needs to keep quite and let the grown ups speak.

September 22, 2008

Just trust us, our track record is good

Why would anyone hesitate to give the Bush administration more cash…?

The proposal “does not include the necessary safeguards,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. She called for “independent oversight, protections for homeowners and constraints on excessive executive compensation.”

Paulson urges quick action on $700 billion bailout.

This might be a “Good Thing” and since it’s election time, it will pass without any examination.  But geez, is it too much to ask that the government setup some sort of monitoring?

September 21, 2008

Upgrade of VPS from Ubuntu 6.06 LTS to 8.04 LTS

My upgrade from Ubuntu 6.06 LTS = FAIL.

Last week I created a VPS on Slicehost.  I’ve been using Tektonic for a while now and have no complaints.  The support is very good and I can backup my VPS for when I need to.

I’m using Slicehost because I don’t want both of my domain DNS servers on the same provider. They offer Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, runs on top of Xen, and provide console access via an Ajax web front end.  You need to pay extra for a backup option. Aside from that one little point, using Slicehost is ridiculously easy and very manageable. They eat their own dog food and it shows.

On my Tektonic VPS it’s running on top of Virtuozzo.  No console just ssh but I do get to make a backup of my VPS and re-installing is a breeze. My only complaint is that it’s running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS which is a little dated.  For example the subversion client is 1.3.2 and I’d like to see more current versions such as 1.5.x.  On Ubuntu 8.04 LTS I just added the backports repository and I get current versions of packages.

Switching to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS should be simple. As root I ran these commands:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install update-manager-core
do-release-upgrade

This is a seamless process and aside from asking me some questions, I had no issues.  The only issue I had is when I rebooted my VPS, it left the VPS un-bootable.  The support tech that I chatted with had not seen that before.  My VPS would not even start and I had to re-install it.

I’m now restoring the VPS to the backup I made yesterday, so it’s not all a total wash.  Most likely I’ll work with Tektonic to get 8.04 LTS on that slice provided they offer it.  Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is still supported so aside from consistency across servers, this is not a big deal for me.

September 17, 2008

Portal’s Still Alive song

Found this while wasting time on reddit.com.  You’d really have to play Valve’s Portal to understand why this music video is very cool. Sung by the computer GLaDOS in one of her more stable moments.

My PC is working so I may play some Portal myself tonight.

September 16, 2008

Vista is consumer crap

So I booted my PC today when I got home today. I had intended to check e-mail before running out.

The damn thing won’t boot.  I’m typing this on the kitchen laptop.  It says the registry file is corrupted and I should boot off of my Vista DVD and select the repair option.  Except my PC has 4 GB of RAM in it, and the DVD I have won’t boot. That particular image will only boot with 2 GB of RAM or less.

Tomorrow I’ll pop out the RAM, pop in the old 2 GB that I have laying around and fix my PC.  How could Microsoft release such a unsupportable mess?  This is why I need to have a dual boot option and install Ubuntu Linux.  If I had an issue with Linux, I could fix it in no time at all.

Nuts.

September 14, 2008

What will happen tomorrow morning?

It’s past 9 PM and it looks like Lehman will not have any help from the other financial companies.  Merrill Lynch seems to be approaching a deal with BoA which makes me laugh. Friday it looked like BoA might help out Lehman.

I know people in both Lehman and Merrill Lynch.  Stock value aside (ask me about my Citi stock sometime), the uncertainty of all this has got to suck.

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Jan Dembowski

Jan Dembowski

I am a software enthusiast who is easily amused and definitely mostly harmless.

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