“In short, by suppressing generality and universal law, you suppress liberty; and what you have left is nothing but that amorphous impulse surging out of the night which is but a false image of liberty.” – Jacques Maritain

Over the weekend, Vincas and I made a series of breakthroughs that have resulted in a working setup to replace server1. We got xen, ldap, and ocfs2 each to work, and to play nicely with the others. We chose ocfs2 after realizing that gfs does not work in debian etch right now, and probably will not till debian unfreezes and starts to look at new kernels again.

This has been an interesting process, fraught with much trouble. I think we now have all of server1’s content migrated over to the various vhosts that are replacing it, and are finishing up the final few tasks that remain. It remains to be seen how much work it will be to get my family seeing, as nearly as possible, the same mail setup they previously saw.

It is in question because I have chosen to force the use of Maildir for the inbox, while I allowed debian’s default /var/spool/mail/ mbox to remain unchallenged on server1. I believe the version of pine I installed will handle the resulting setup adequately, but, as I said, time will tell.

It also remains to be seen how well this solution scales. The host it is on is significantly beefier than server1, so it should handle the schierer.org load without much trouble, though it might take some tweaking of the various vhosts to get resources allocated appropriately. Vincas and I would like to see it be able to grow significantly beyond schierer.org though, and to take on much of the work our joint boxen are currently hosting. Again, time will tell how well it works.

If all goes well, we will almost certainly make the other box a xen host also.

Hitachi announced^[1] a significant step towards localizers^[2], with tiny little dust-like RFID tags. Next they need to develop tiny little antennas to match, and then little Diamond Age^[3] nanoprocesors.

“Vanity it is, to wish to live long, and to be careless to live well.” – Thomas A Kempis

Lauren will appreciate this quote.

This morning I woke up to a stark contrast. On one hand, a 13 year old girl was ordered by an Italian judge to abort her baby.^[1] On the other, a tiny little baby born only 21 weeks and six days after conception at the end of October is going home, with a hard but hopeful future ahead of her.^[2]

After the length of a trial, how much younger than this little girl could the now dead Italian baby have been? What failure of understanding, of compassion, or of thought prevented that court from seeing that baby as human?

For even now, several months later, little Amillia is only 26 inches long and about 4.5 pounds. Born much shorter and smaller than that, at ten ounces and 9.5 inches long, she was already undoubtedly a human child. For all most babies that premature do not survive (she is, I believe, the first to survive this long), she has had a chance at life, and doctors report that she has an “excellent” prognosis. I will restate this important point: she has an “excellent” chance of having a full life.

But even had she not, even had she died, we would face to day knowing that we, as society, and in a more particular way her doctors, nurses and most importantly her family had done all that we can and could to give her that chance. In Italy there is a tiny baby, most likely denied even a funeral mass, who is now dead, and a young (too young) mother struggling with the grief and depression that comes as the aftermath of an abortion. This because her parents chose to kill their grandchild, and the courts backed them up, instead of protecting human life at every stage.

Do not talk to me about “the right to choose.” The movement to keep abortion legal is about wanting to kill the most vulnerable among us.

“Then the boy’s father cried out, ‘I do believe, help my unbelief!’”^[1]

I see the following questions from a debian developer:^[1]

• How can I make Gaim stop auto-hiding its conversation windows?

You have loaded a plugin to make it do this. The only one that I recall us distributing iconifies the windows when you are away, but others have been written to hide them at other times.

• How can I make Gaim stop auto-toping its dialogs and windows?

Each of the 2.0.0 beta releases of gaim has reduced the number of dialogs and windows that are created without direct user intervention. That being said, gaim still does not make any effort to place new windows at any given level. Users complaining of this problem are almost always Windows or Metacity users. Users of other window managers have a much lower incidence of annoyance by gaim’s window placement, even once you consider the difference in user base. This should tell you something.

• How can I make Gaim stop stealing the focus all the time?

When is it “stealing” your focus? While some versions of gaim have had bugs that cause it to do so, most of not all of these have been resolved. The one exception is related to the previous question. Some window managers give focus by default to newly created windows all the time. We feel that gaim should leave decisions about when gaim gets focus to the window manager. If you dislike your window manager’s decisions in this matter, it is not our fault.

Gaim is one of the very few programs that is graphical and yet responds to network events. One of the few other commonly used examples of such programs are email programs. Because some events are initiated by others, such as new conversations or new mail notifications, gaim is faced with a situation that some window manager developers never consider: how to handle this in the UI. Our decision has been to (slowly) reduce the incidence of dialogs being created without your direct intervention. For that reason the new mail notification and many of the error dialogs have been moved to the buddy list and to the conversation backlogs. For the same reason we introduced extended queueing options, allowing you to queue new conversations to the buddy list, so that they do not “pop up.” I suspect that many if not all of your issues with gaim either have already been solved if you upgrade to 2.0.0 beta6, or would go away if you did not use metacity (gnome’s default window manager), or both.

Entitled “Abstinence Saves Lives,” this^[1] article from the National Catholic Register provides a look at the fight against AIDS in Uganda, the only success story in Africa.

The Wall Street Journal (no link available) reports that scientists are treating wounded Iraqi War veterans with a substance from pigs that seems to resurrect the ability to regenerate organs and other body parts–an ability possessed by fetuses but lost after birth. In this case, the scientists hope to regenerate parts of fingers the soldiers lost. From the story: “Doctors plan to treat them with a fine powder called extracellular matrix, harvested from pig bladders. The material, found in all animals, is the scaffolding that cells latch onto as they divide and grow into tissue and body parts. In the human body, it was long thought to be inert. But scientists have discovered that it appears to activate latent biological processes that spur healing and regenerate tissue.”^[1]

Wow.

This^[1] article has some more details of the reaction to my my previous post by the scientific community, or rather, their reaction to the article I posted about. It also differs on when the research was published, claiming last week instead of late last year. Still, it appears that the research is being received relatively favorably. Hopefully the particle accelerator experiment will bear out the results Dr. Svensmark found.