WSJ.com – Page One Feature Among the usual paperclips and pencils cluttering the desk of textile-plant engineer Jeff Kivert is a new necessity: 50 pounds of Silly Putty.

Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | Was Hitler human?

It seems to me that demonizing and dehumanizing someone like Hitler is a coping mechanism that allows us, as humans, to go on. How could we go on otherwise, if a person could do what he could? How can we go on if we didn’t stop him?

The danger is that by demonizing someone like Hitler, we help blind ourselves to people like him that come after. We deprive ourselves of the understanding we need to recognize that growing evil in someone.

I have grand plans to flesh out my home network
with, among other things, a box to serve as my main fileserver in order to
hold backups. These plans are stalled by a lack of space and a desire to
save money.

Nevertheless, I am very anxious about the integrity of
my data. I don’t want to loose anything and I dread the thought having to
reinstall an OS and all my applications by hand on one of my existing desktops.

As an interim solution, I was thinking of buying a firewire drive enclosure
and a big IDE drive to go in it, adding a firewire drive to one of my computers
and use it as a source of extra storage & network & local backup.

I realize though that for the same price, I could probably get a cheap used
low end PC and add a big drive. It would be bigger, it wouldn’t be as fast
and it wouldn’t have the dual drives I want in a server, but it would probably
be good enough.

Still, the idea of a firewire drive is compelling. They make enclosures with both Firewire and USB2 support. Such a thing could almost give you a completely portable computing environment, just plug
it into any machine and boot from it. Older machines might require a boot CD with the right drivers/loader, but that wouldn’t be so bad.

Symmantec is on my list! Their anti-virus software breaks Networking on Windows 2000 when it is uninstalled. This must be a known issue, since I found other references to it on the web, and yet they haven’t released an update, even though they update their AntiVirus software continuously.

The long story is that I dowloaded and installed a trial copy of Norton AntiVirus a while back. Once the trial expired, I deferred the decision on whether to purchase it and uninstalled it to get rid of all the annoying popups letting me know that my trial is over.

Upon rebooting my machine, I found that I was unable to access anything over my network connection. My computer has been a bit twitchy about starting its network connections properly the first time, so I disabled and reenabled the connection to no avail. I tried various other things, like removing the network interface from the Windows configuration and rebooting so that it would re-create it, but still nothing.

I tried to force the computer to lease an IP address from the DHCP server on my network, and I got an error so I checked the event log for more errors. There I found that the DHCP service wasn’t started because a service it depended on called SYMTDI wasn’t starting due to a missing file.

Fortunately, I have another computer that Symantec didn’t mess up, so I was able to do a search on SYMTDI on Google. Near the top of the list was a page about someone else with similar problems, and their solution.

So, thanks to Google for finding relevant results, and thanks to Moshe Yudkowsky, for taking the time after fixing his own computer to create a webpage about his own experience with this problem, and how he solved it.

No thanks to Symantec for not fixing this problem (which seems likely to afflict anyone uninstalling this product) in one of their regular updates.

ZOË

“Don’t be put off by the awkwardly phrased manifesto, download it, and try it out.”
— Nicholas Riley, Tuesday, April 23, 2002

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

ZOË is a personal web application, written in Java, that runs on your desktop, connects to your mailserver, and provides a browser based interface for searching and browsing an up-to-date index of your mail.

I don’t think I love it, but it embodies some interesting ideas in the form of running code.

I wish Google would re-index this page.