Good news, everyone!

Not only have the jackbooted thugs overlooked me, but it appears that I have been hired to be a network administrator at an educational foundation in Maine. Mysteriously, it seems that my responsibilities, while dominated by computer stuff, will also include engineering renewable energy systems at the foundation and helping to build a cold-molded sailboat used for wilderness trips in the summer. I'll be driving back and forth between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Wiscasset, Maine, on a weekly basis. I guess I'll have to get a new car-- I don't think the old one will make it.

Freedom of speech in the United States

I am fortunate in that I live a comfortable life in the United States, where I have heard that we have a government that protects "freedom of speech." As a test, I thought I'd quickly summarize what I think about my government. 1. I do not "support our troops." I do not honor people who are trained to use violence to solve problems, regardless of whether their intent is to promote freedom around the globe or not. 2. I think my president, George W. Bush, is mentally ill. My understanding is that he believes that a nonhuman being ("God") speaks to him, often at night. We'll see whether jackbooted thugs come and arrest me tonight.

And the wireless is working . . .

After bungling around with wireless drivers, the wireless-tools package,
and Google for a few weeks, I had an interesting thought. I knew that a
guy named Carl in California had gotten his wireless working pretty
easily using Slackware, which I had tried earlier with the same error
symptoms as with Ubuntu. In all cases, it sounded like everything was
working correctly, but that my wireless card's radio was turned off. At
one point, someone suggested that the screen brightness switch, labeled
"Mobile - Normal," might also control the wireless card. I thought, "Maybe there is another switch that controls the wireless
card." I looked along the top row of function buttons. Hmm, what's that
little antenna graphic? I pressed F1, and since then the wireless
has worked beautifully. I can even click the wireless on and off, and it
functions seamlessly-- no difficulties bringing the connection back up.

Installing Mediawiki-1.4.4 on Ubuntu Warty

I installed Mediawiki, the software that runs Wikipedia, on an Ubuntu Warty machine yesterday. I issued an sudo -s command at the start so that I didn’t have to type sudo repeatedly.

To get access to all the different package repositories, I uncommented the warty universe lines in /etc/apt/sources.list and added one line so that I had: deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ warty main restricted deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ warty universe deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ warty universe deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian sarge main contrib non-free #

Then I installed a load of software: apt-get install apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-prefork-dev libapache2-mod-php4 php4-dev php4-mysql php4-pear

Untar Mediawiki in the default Apache directory: cd /var/www tar xzvf mediawiki-1.4.4.tar.gz

Ubuntu has a mechanism for Apache configuration that I don’t understand. I used the commands below as a quick hack to relocate Mediawiki so that Apache will find it: mv apache2-default/ apache2-default_orig/ mv mediawiki-1.4.4/ apache2-default

Set the MySQL root password: mysqladmin -u root password 'password'

I realized that I don’t really know how to use mysqladmin, so after a few weak attempts, I figured PHPMyAdmin was a better solution. apt-get install phpmyadmin

I used PHPMyAdmin, which showed up at http:///phpmyadmin. At that address, I was able to log in as “root” with my MySQL root password, set above.

Then the standard steps of the Mediawiki installation: chmod a+w config/ mv LocalSettings.php .. chmod ug-w config/ The wiki I am setting up needs to be able to display equations, which requires the texvc extension to Mediawiki. Texvc parses Tex markup and feeds it to ImageMagick, which generates .png files of the equations. I needed gcc to compile the code. apt-get install gcc ocaml imagemagick gs cjk-latex tetex-extra php4-imagick Compile the code: cd /var/www/apache2-default/math/ make Wikimedia’s site on running Mediawiki on Debian was quite useful.