Paul Dix Explains Nothing

The End of Faith

I started reading The End of Faith by Sam Harris.  I'm only about half way through it at this point but I have to say that I'm very impressed.  I recommend it to anyone who will take the time to read it and give it thought.  The first ten pages of the book are available here.

With stuff like faith based initiatives and many leaders openly using religious platforms for politics, I think the book is timely and appropriate.  I'd like to write a more thorough review of the book, but at the moment I can only think of one point that it makes.  One resounding point that I must agree with fully.

Religious people are crazy.

What does that statement mean?  How would you define crazy?  Well if you were talking to somebody and they said that they believed Bob Barker was the son of God and would soon lead us to heaven, would you say this person is crazy?  I think that most people, religious or otherwise, would say yes.  But does this person have any less proof that Bob Barker is the son of God than a Christian has about Jesus?  No.  So on its face, either argument is just as sane.  The only difference being how many people believe each.

I'm curious what religious people think of this book and would like to hear intelligent arguments from their side.  I'm sure that they're not happy being characterized as insane, but if the shoe fits...

Mandrake 10.1 as a VMWare guest OS

My adventures in linux begin!  I was able to get Mandrake 10.1 Community Edition running as a guest os on VMWare 4.5, but not without a little effort.  The two main issues I encountered were the following:

• The GUI is messed up if using the VMWare Virtual Video card in Mandrake.
• The VMWare tools install was not straightforward and required some additional steps to get running.

First the GUI issue.  When I first ran through the Mandrake install and configured the graphics display, I chose the VMWare Virtual Video card.  I also had it set to start my window manager of choice, in this case Gnome, automatically.  When I tried to boot up I got a screen that looked like this:

Note: this is someone else's screenshot of the same issue since I didn't take one of mine at the time.  To take care of this problem I had to boot back into linux-nonfb mode so that it wouldn't load up gnome automatically.  I then used XFdrake to change the display settings and selected the "vesa" card under "xorg".  That seemed to fix the display problem.

The next issue was with the VMWare tools install.  This took a bit of research since it seemed that there were many things at work here.  I found that I needed to do the following things to get it to work:

I needed to make sure that I had the development package installed (which I did since that's what I'm going to be using this for).  I also had to install two other packages using the following commands:

urpmi pciutils
urpmi kernel-source-2.6

At that point I unpacked the vmware install into the /tmp directory but had to change the install script since it would fail on this version (Mandrake 10.1) without modification.  Here's the change I made:

Open vmware-tools-distrib/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl and find line:

$xversionAll = direct_command(shell_string(xserver4()) . ' -version 2>&1') =~
/XFree86 Version (\d+\.\d+\.?\d*)/ ? $1: '0.0.0';

Change to:

$xversionAll = direct_command(shell_string(xserver4()) . ' -version 2>&1') =~
/XFree86 Version (\d+\.\d+\.?\d*)/ ? $1: '4.4.0';

I was then able to run the install and take all the default options.  I'm sure for someone with more linux knowledge this wouldn't have been that big of a deal, but for a newb like me it was a bit daunting.  Oh, and for some reason the vmware tools install hosed up my graphics settings again so I needed to go back and change it once more.

I was only able to get through all this with the help of google, the mandrake users board, and the vmware forums.  If anyone else hits these problems, maybe this post will be of some help.  Now I'm going to start looking into writing some Python code.  I've become spoiled with the Visual Studio 2003 IDE and would like something as fully featured to write code with in linux.  It's been suggested to me to use Eclipse.  At first glance it seems like a decent choice and will keep me in this whole open source vein that this project is following.

Now if I can just focus some time on Python instead of the Visual Studio 2005 Beta.

Let's play with Linux

I wrote earlier about wanting to check out Python and now I'm making a commitment to doing so, but there's a catch:  I want to do it all in Linux.  Because my work has always required me to work in Windows, my exposure to Linux is minimal at best.  I've wanted to get familiar with and use Linux for years but gaming and work always were Windows centric for me.  Well now that I'm embarking on a personal project I can use whatever I want and this gives me the perfect excuse to try something new.

The first thing I had to figure out was what distro to use.  I've no clue about these things but I've previously run RedHat and Mandrake without too much effort.  I read stuff on-line and of course looked at Slashdot for advice.  Rather than get to deep into the "which distro" holy war I just decided to go with Mandrake.  I figured I could always check out other distros later and I figured it would be easy, painless, fun, and delicious (well maybe not the last two).  Unfortunately, I found that the first two were not in the cards either.  This was  a direct result of my configuration (running it as a guest OS in VMWare 4.5).  I'll post tomorrow with all the details and how I was able to get everything up.

damnit, damnit, damnit!!!

ok, I've been meaning to make more posts on this damn thing but I've been lazy.  So here it is, my commitment to posting here at least once every three days.  I want to mainly post nerd stuff but right now I have another post in mind: political outrage.  Post to follow...