AlmanackPage

The Almanack has been on hiatus. First, a vacation in the Pacific Northwest offered lots of good notes on lifestyle and geography. That was quickly

sidetracked by a foray into operating systems, which threatened the Almanack's very relationship with the Internet. There were fitful emissions of code, and you can play with the result in the Kuller link. And there was a family loss.

Vacation, in a nutshell:

Seattle is a beautiful city. What it lacks in aged splendor, when compared to the Northeast, it more than compensates in varied topography and spectacular scenery. The architecture is energetic even when it's undistinguished, maybe

because it hasn't succumbed to New York's false choice between Inevitability or Shock and Awe. Seattle offers a sense of livability that the Second City (never mind the First or Third) can't quite comprehend. For its size, it offers a lot

to do and see, but it is a small-ish, provincial urb, so seasons are short and timed to attract the same demographic to each art form in turn.

Portland seemed a little smaller and a bit less vigorous than Seattle. Both towns are so laid back they desperately need the abundant coffeehouses, but Portland offsets all the caffeine with 28 local breweries. The Northwest loves

a fine draught. The great draw for Portland is the neighborhoods: each quadrant of the city is a town in its own right, very individualized, with many self-contained neighborhoods, walkable, sociable places with shopping and

schools and parks that people actually use, and seem to enjoy. And then there's the Peninsula. Olympic National Park is for Serious Hikers,

but there's lots of rain forest and awesome mountains to be experienced around edges of the Park and Lake Crescent. Recommended as an antidote to 'Attractions'.

Kuller speaks for itself, try it if you like.

The OS experience: For no better reason than because-I-can, there's a reformatted disk on my

laptop. It started with Microsoft's Friends-and-Family program for beta-testing Vista. This seems like a very cool thing to do: get the nifty new look-and-feel eight months before the masses, and if we find any obscure bugs,

we have 15 seconds of reflected glory, and we can brag to the guys in pc support about testing all their packages on the new system. So we're in, but we have to stand in line until the Friends-and-Family Beta Ship Date, which is delayed

about as many times as the Production Ship Date. The long-awaited dvd arrives, and haughtily proclaims that a brand-new Presario

with half-a-gig of RAM is an unfit abode for its august splendor. There's a sensible response to this proclamation, and there's the actual response, which involves 20 minutes of online searching, a credit card, and a 3-day wait for

chips. (Vista requires lots of memory, 512 megs, minimum. If you have 'shared video

ram', some megs are reserved from the system to handle your screen, and Vista doesn't fit in what's left. Fair warning.)

Installation is a breeze. There are subtle hints that a 'clean install' is perhaps a wiser choice than an 'upgrade', but the former requires placing all of one's trust in a backup of one's data, and there is the prospect of spending

hours downloading and re-installing Cygwin and Firebird and Picasa and all the other cool stuff one can't live without. So, 'upgrade' it is, and smartly, too. We have an Almanack to update. That was late May.

The screen looks nice, but the jaw is not dropping. Further, the Palm is not talking to its desktop, and Kermit is not talking to the Alpha at the office.

And TurboTax won't start. Oh, yes, we know about those, and we will probably address the Palm and TurboTax issues before Production Release. But VPN, and the gorgeous new look-and-feel you opted in for, are in the Professional or

Ultimate editions, and we can't give out any more of those. But those are the things I do with my computer, how can I test this beautiful

new system if it doesn't do them? And how can I do what I do, now that my computer doesn't do them? Well, that's why most folks do a clean install, after partitioning their disks and re-installing the old OS in the first partition.

(You'd think that a professional programmer would have considered those issues.)

Plan A required resuscitating the old Inspiron that retired to the cabinet under the dsl modem when the Presario came along. Not a tragic turn, since the Presario was purchased specifically for the beta, but a disappointment.

If the Presario running only Vista was crippled, then there was no choice but to salvage some data, trash the disk, and re-install XP. Which offers an

opportunity: if we're reformatting anyway, let's make 3 partitions, so we can run XP for real work, Linux for fun, and we'll figure out what to do with the other one.

(It took a little while to adjust to the idea of putting Vista in its own partition, and treating it as project in its own right; a rather daunting one.)

One of the considerations behind the Presario was its 64-bit AMD Turion processor. Unix and VMS are real 64-bit systems, and Windows will get there

eventually, but Linux is the only practical way to get 64 bits on your laptop. So the plan evolved: partition the disk; put XP in p1; put Vista in p2; get XP

running right so the Inspiron can go back to sleep; fiddle with Vista to make sure it's useless; download 64-bit Linux, Fedora Core 5; find a burner and install it to burn the Fedora iso to a dvd; install Fedora; download some cool

64-bit packages; discover that wireless ethernet chip isn't working on Fedora; search the Web for why; download wireless tools that don't work; download bcm43xx-fwcutter; boot XP to get the driver for the wireless chip; email the

driver; reboot Fedora, fetch the driver, and run it through bcm43xx-fwcutter; start wireless; crash Fedora.

(The plan was to discover that the 64-bit Linux kernel doesn't handle the 32-bit bcm43xx driver very well.)

Since then, bcm43xx has been crammed through every possible keyhole in the filesystem, Gentoo and Ubuntu made it onto fresh-burned cds, Ubuntu replaced Fedora (briefly), and at last 32-bit Fedora has taken over as the OS of choice.

Wireless still isn't working, but the diagnostics are getting less hostile, and the OS doesn't crash.

And finally: Let's look at first principles, the very lowest common denominator: loss of

information is bad, if 'bad' is narrowly defined as 'extremely undesirable', not 'morally reprehensible'.

Testifying to the badness of information loss is history itself; the human inventions of heralds, bards, writing, printing, photography, databases, and funerals. Humans just do not like to lose data. It might be safe to assume

that other species don't like it either, but we can be sure of humans' attitude because of their strenuous efforts at preservation. And it seems to be a guiding principle of the universe itself, assuming the timeline proposed by

astrophysics, with particles organizing themselves into atoms, atoms into molecules, molecules into gaseous bodies, thence to stars, star systems and galaxies. And Earth's self-organization is the ultimate in complex, redundant

data storage, culminating (so far) in the DNA of mammalian life forms. And that's not a moral measurement of the worth of species, just an observation of relative complexity and time to delivery.

Even discounting complexity, not all information is created qualitatively equal. The provenance and usefulness of information is important, and a lot of

information is only marginally useful. At the bottom end, the state of a single subatomic particle is not often very useful to humans, although in aggregate a lot of such states comprise information useful to the universe. At the other

extreme, the burning of a unique library, or loss of a human life, is always tragic, even if only measured by the loss of information to humans, if not to the universe.

The quantity and quality of the information in a library can be measured by trivial means, even if it may require non-trivial effort. But the measure of a

human life is qualitatively different, and cannot be so easily compassed. A prolific diarist and artist might leave a significant body of information to posterity, and still the sum of life's experience, worldview, emotional palette

and intuition are lost when she dies. This is the loss we're trying to avert when we gather for a funeral. The

emotional stuff is the greatest loss, because we don't have a good way to record it, even now. How the deceased touched you is important to me, whether it reinforces or differs from my own experience. Putting it all into words is

critical, because the memories are less volatile once they're encoded and shared. Reciting the words triggers the memories, almost as vividly as seeing a picture.

Gloria Monge, Dec 19, 1921 - Jun 21, 2006. R.I.P.

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