Last night I spent some time downloading the beta version of Ubuntu 6.06. As it suggested that you use a Bittorrent client to download the 684 MB file, I dutifully complied in order to strain the Ubuntu servers as little as possible. Unfortunately, I hadn’t looked properly at how the bittorrent protocol actually works. It [...]
Well, today I’m taking what feels like a plunge, though I guess that’s mostly in my mind. I’ve just sent this mail to the Ubuntu Sounder mailing list: Hello all Ubunteros, My name is Andreas Lloyd and I am a graduate student at the department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Having used [...]
Having been ill for a couple of days this week has left me completely zonked. This resulted in a rather bizarre case of insomnia which brought me through Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 last night. Uh, Spoiler alert! Babel-17 reminds me a lot of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Both books use the idea of languages that function [...]
In order to develop my limited knowledge of the Unix and Linux way of doing things, I borrowed Jon “Maddog” Hall‘s Linux for Dummies. The version I got is the first edition from 1997, back when Linux really wasn’t for dummies (ie. ordinary end-users) at all. It has since been completely rewritten with the desktop [...]
The Internet is full of self-referential folk-lore, stories and jokes on how people have found in the Internet a whole new way of expressing themselves. Or, at least, expressing their frustration at not being able to work their computers as they would have liked to. There are anecdotes from the frontlines of tech support, struggling [...]
So, after a fortnight-long hiatus, away from the intense life of the blogging scene, I return having visited a lot of people, hung out and drunk some excellent beer (not the Maribo kind, mind), generally just having a good ol’ time. Thanks for kind hospitality to the many people involved over the past two weeks, [...]
I am currently left in a state of technical impotency. This, of course, is partly my own fault as I did choose to solely use Linux on my laptop. Linux is the computer equivalent of Doing It Yourself, even though the various distributions do try to make it a lot easier on the user, and [...]
Having read “The God of Small Things”, I decided to give some of Arundhati Roy’s essays a try. I found a neat little book called The Cost of Living containing two essays: One on the massive dam-building projects in India, and one on the nuclear bombs that both India and Pakistan now have in their [...]