In an ideal world I’d find out that the word wiki came from the old song called “Jam On It”. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. Wikis, however, are just about the coolest things going right now, and if you don’t know what they are then you need to get so that you do - immediately.

A Wiki is fundamentally a collection of information, but its distinguishing characteristic is that it can be edited by (usually) anyone. This means that the body of knowledge within the collection is able to grow very quickly, and can also be updated or added to on a regular basis. The largest out there, and for all intents and purposes the wiki that you should get up to speed on, is called Wikipedia.

This living, breathing archive of information is everything that Encyclopedia Brittanica wishes it was - and much more. In the old stodgy tomes, for example, it wasn’t possible to look up Hip-Hop Slang, or Tool in quite the same way - if at all.

If you value information in any way, shape, or form, make it a point to get familiar with both the concept of a wiki and Wikipedia.

Here’s a recent quote from a /. post that I find rather interesting:

“I work for NASA; almost everyone in our group has Mac OS X on our desktops and Linux in the server room.”

OS X on the desktop and Linux on the servers… Ah, what a nice place that must be to work. Luckily, in the very near future, there will be far more environments with this type of setup. I personally belive it’s going to be Linux with OS X-type functionality on the desktop, but this difference is unimportant. The point is it’ll be open-source driven OSs on both the client and server side. It’s coming.

Here’s a very interesting debate about hardware vs. software RAID. Based on the arguments put forth I think I am going to go with software RAID for my next storage system rather than hardware. A nice Ubuntu box perhaps…

This is what would have happened if the Japanese had created HTML themselves.

Well, because of the idiots at “Free Online Poker”, I now have to disable comments on my blog. These worthless piles of dung continue to lower the quality of the Internet, and I think there should be government sanctioned death-squads hired to find and kill them.

Below is a list of three articles/stories that every single geek absolutely must be aware of and be willing to discuss at a moments notice. This is a bare minimum creme of the crop: I’ll be compiling a more comprehensive list in the future - one that includes more of the classics. The links below are the higher-level, thinking pieces - good for the geeks among the geeks. Trust me, you’ll love them.

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1. First off (recognizing that ordering these was not easy) we have “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us”, by Bill Joy. This discusses the pitfalls that humanity must watch out for during our quest to embrace technology. *Note: It’s 2^50 times cooler than I made it sound.

2. Next we have “God Is The Machine”. This is an extrordinarily awesome piece on what many top scientists are just starting to believe may be the key to the grand unified theory. The key will suprise you.

3. Finally, we have “The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect”. This is one of the coolest sci-fi stories you will ever read - period.

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Let me just reiterate; make time and read these. Do it soon. Your life will be richer as a result.

According to this Slashdot piece, the future as seen by Bill Joy is not all that far off - or, at least the beginnings of it. I have always been a big believer in his “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us” piece, and if you haven’t read it yet you need to do so immediately (or sooner).

Well, it seems the spammers (or at least their minions) have found the the glory that is this blog. My friends over at “Free Online Poker” have been leaving messages for me here recently, and I don’t really see an end in sight. It’s really quite sickening. I guess my options are to either shutdown the ability for anyone to register and comment, or to make a habit of deleting a ton of spam here on the blog every day.

This, by the way, has spawned an interesting idea for a reality T.V. show. You have real life sys admins and real life spammers together fighting to the death each week. Here’s the kicker though - the admins get real weapons and the spammers get nerf weapons. So basically each week we could sit down and watch a professional spammer getting tore up from the floor up. Some may ask why the spammers would even sign up for such a show, but the answer is simple - money. Nothing ranks higher, evidently, than income for these idiot bastards, so I am sure an offering of 25K for some pummelage would bring them in droves.

This Slashdot piece discusses the theory of one Professor Hannu H. Kari, a PhD that belives that the Internet will collapse in 2006.

I find it difficult to grasp how it is that someone so bright, and with so much time on their hands could come up with such a theory. It seems utterly obvious to me that the Internet at this point is as much a part of our life as our highway system is. If either of these two systems were to become unusable to any major degree a very simple thing would happen:

We would fix it.

The moment the Internet fell over dead from spam and viruses (the basic gist of the argument), there would be a single, deafening roar heard around the world. Billions of dollars would be lost. To think that measures could not be taken that would make the glitch nothing more than …. a glitch, is just proposterous.

Anyway, let me know what you guys think.

Evidently, /dev is something that Gentoo thinks quite fondly of. It turns out that when it won’t load the box doesn’t make it out of the bootup process. No worreis - been wanting to reinstall for a while now anyway. :)

Thank goodness for tar and scp - without these I’d be missing a ton of email and the .fetchmailrc and .procmailrc files I’ve worked so hard on. So, just for the record, I’m going to refrain from isolating out every single root directory into a separate partition for a while. /home being on its own disk is enough for me in that regard.

Alrighty then…onto another Gentoo install…

Edit: (10.22.04) Don’t ever forward all your mail to procmail when it’s not installed yet.