.:: a few thoughts on the subject by rob wright ::.

from Slashdot,

“Speaking to a sold out crowd at the Berkeley Physics Oppenheimer Lecture, Hawking said yesterday that he now believes the universe spontaneously popped into existence from nothing. He said more work is needed to prove this but we have time because ‘Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end.’ There is also a Webcast available (Realplayer or Real Alternative required).”

What and no reference to Genesis 1? Thankfully, this seems to be a growing trend in science. If you have a chance, check out God’s Equation: Einstein, Relativity, and the Expanding Universe.

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did you know the iPhone has an on-off button?

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Jim Gray is a pioneer in the field of computer science. “The Amazon Mechanical Turk team has created a site where there are 40,000 images from the past 2-3 days that volunteers can search and flag images. At mid-day today we are expecting another batch of images from the Canadian space agency, which retasked a satellite to fly over during the past 24 hours.”

(more about Jim Gray)

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I would like to know the ESV guys because it appears that I have much in common with them. It seems very rare that a Biblical translation would have as many geeky features. The latest proof is the social network map of the New Testament. Too, too cool.

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Through a tickler from Jonathan Schwartz’s blog, I notice the Sun - Intel announcement. Looks to be a very good thing for Sun as they work to legitimize the open-sourced Solaris operating system on Intel hardware, but it puts geeks like me in a pinch, Linux or Solaris…tough call.

But what does it cost and can you really get help from Sun? The word from the mavens (Joyent, matt mullenweg) is mixed.

Finally, what does an endorsement from Intel mean? Does Intel endorse Linux? What’s the significance of an Intel endorsement of Java? The marketing (dark) side of me says that it’s got to be good when two CEOs of big companies get together and talk about Java and open source, but the engineer in me wonders how this will make my life easier.

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Jon Udell announced that he’s going to Microsoft. What more can I say? I really like what Udell has to say. He’s always got an intelligent, well-thought perspective on things. So I’m extremely surprised when he heads to Microsoft…how did Google miss him? The nice thing about John’s “reporter position” is that by nature he’s “independent.” I fully expect that he’ll continue to speak, write, and act in the same manner, but now that he’s with Microsoft, can I trust him? Yeah, probably so, and I hope that those with which he’s found affinity will continue to gain power within the machine.

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I lost the URL of the page where I discovered this tip, but nevertheless, I had a corrupt *.tgz archive. When I tried to extract the contents, I kept getting this error:

tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

I found that when I extracted the contents using

gunzip < corrupt_tar.tgz | tar xvf -

I still received the errors, but I was able to read more of the archive then when I used

tar xvfz corrupt_tar.tgz

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I recently had to update the iTunes RSS feed for New Covenant Church. I found this entry in the Podcast technical specification to be very helpful.

<itunes:new-feed-url>

This tag allows you to change the URL where the podcast feed is located. It is added at the level. The feed format is:

<itunes:new-feed-url>http://addr.com/example.rss</itunes:new-feed-url>

After adding the tag to your old feed, you should maintain the old feed for 48 hours before retiring it. At that point, iTunes will have updated the directory with the new feed URL. For more information, please see the “Changing Your Feed URL” section above.

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The announcement is worth repeating on every technical blog. More information at the FAQ (see Why the GPL?) and the Open Source Java Technology website.

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I did the following to get the Cisco VPN Client V4.8 working on SuSE 9.2

1. Download and install the kernel source using YaST2
2. cd /usr/src/linux (or the location of your kernel source)
3. make mrproper
4. make cloneconfig
5. make prepare-all
6. Download and extract the VPN client software
7. Download the source patch for the VPN client (why patch?)
8. cd to the VPN client software directory (e.g. /tmp/vpnclient)
9. copy the patch to the vpnclient directory
10. patch < vpnclient-linux-4.7.00.0640-k9_kernel-2.6.14-1.1637_FC4.patch (you'll see 2 errors)
11. ./vpn_install and use all the defaults
12. Start the service:  /etc/init.d/vpnclient_init start
13. If you have a .pcf file, copy it to /etc/CiscoSystemsVPNClient/Profiles/
14. Connect by doing the following: vpnclient connect (do not include the .pcf extension)

References

• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2006-01/msg00854.html
• http://system.cs.fsu.edu/selfhelp/vpninfo/
• http://system.cs.fsu.edu/selfhelp/vpninfo/linvpn.php

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