Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Gay's aren't All That Gay

According to this study
(vi) Homosexuality has no statistically significant effects on happiness.

So does that mean that if you're unhappy being straight, you'll still be unhappy being gay?

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The Facebook-volution!

Facebook is a problem. A problem that will eventually sort itself out. I hope.

The biggest problem with Facebook/Myspace is that they both put a face on internet activities. This is a problem because one of the greatest goods the internet offers is the ability to become anyone you want to be. You have the ability to flesh out ideas and test them in a world that is free from most serious reprisals. It's pretty similar to the learning environment in a home.

In your home, you test out thoughts and ideas within your family unit. Inside a healthy family unit, this type of activity provides lots of development opportunities because you can fail and nobody really cares. They'll still be your family, and still love and care for you. The internet used to be populated solely by places similar to this. You could mess up, but as long as you weren't a permanent jerk-head, it wouldn't take long for the memories to fade. Usually about 6-8 hours. And those were rarely connected with the real you. But with the advent of Facebook, what you say and do on the internet (and sometimes real life) is connected to you forever.

And it's usually freely accessible by anyone who cares enough to look. And people freely upload this information in vast quantities. So your employers, neighbors, teachers, and stalkers can find out all sorts of delightfully personal information about you and those you care about. I predict that in the next 5 years (it will take 2-3 for it to start catching, it should be mostly burned out and stabilized in 5 years) we will see a shift from these severely public forums back to anonymous places such as 4chan, slashdot, and other forums. Sure you can make those places public, but the default behavior is set to super-private.

So remember, when you see the shift coming, you saw it here first!

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Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Python for Unix and Linux System Administrators: A Book in Revue

So it's been about 6 months, but I'm finally sitting down to write a review of Python for Unix and Linux System Administrators by Noah Gift and Jeremy M. Jones, available from O'Reilly books. ISBN 978-0-596-51582-9

Disclosure: I am in no way related to Noah or Jeremy. I received this book for free when I attended a class given by Noah at PyArkansas in October of 2008.

Python is a great book for anyone who deals with Linux/Unix on a daily basis, and especially those who preform many repetitive tasks. Written in a clean style with plenty of code examples, if you are a sys admin this is a book that belongs on your shelf.

Broken up into chapters, Python has topics for a wide range of admin activities. From log/text and XML parsing, up to building GUI apps with GTK, to writing a script to tar files with certain extensions and sending you an email, this book is light enough for skimming for a solution, but also allows you to dive deep enough to develop applications to meet your needs.

I was a novice python programmer when I first encountered this book, and since then my progress has made leaps and bounds. Every so often I come back to this book for new material, and if I were a sys admin I'm sure this would be one of, if not the prime resource.

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