Panic in Level 4 by Richard Preston

Panic in Level 4 by Richard Preston
During high school, we got an extra credit assignment to read Hot Zone, another book by Richard Preston. That book was about Ebola outbreaks. I don't remember many of the details, but I remember being fascinated by his vivid descriptions of the illness, and of the wonderful descriptions of how all of the agencies involved worked. Having these wonderful memories of a book from my youth, when I saw this book in my local library, I decided it would move to the head of my reading list. I was not disapointed.
It was much different than what I was anticipating, however. I had envisioned a high energy story that brought together all of the themes mentioned in the cover. What I found was a series of 4-5 shorter stories with small bits of interconnection.
One of the stories was very interesting to me as a computer programmer as it talked about two mathemeticians who build a supercomputer in their apartment that competes with some of the fastest machines in the world. They use this machine to calculate pi to many, many decimal places.
Much of the book talks about DNA and the mapping of the human genome. It was very interesting to read about the different projects and personalities working on this research. It also talked about some genetic disorders in great detail. Definitely something that makes you realize how lucky most of us are to be free of that type of problem when you're just one marker in your DNA away from having serious problems.
This was a very interesting book. It held my interest throughout, and was a fairly quick read.

Living within your means

Today as I was listening to some talk radio and Rush Limbaugh was talking about what caused this financial mess. He said that many people are blaming people not living within their means, but he went on to say something to the effect that living beyond your means is the American Dream. He said that living beyond your means and the desire to always have something more, something better was what drives the free market.
I think he has a point about the desire for something better being one of the things that drives the free market. My desire to have nice things for my family, and the desire to take care of them in the best way that I can and to give them nice things is what drives me to give my best effort at work and in everything else I do. I totally agree that this is a very healthy motivation to always want to do better.
However, I strongly disagree that living beyond your means is part of the American Dream. The American Dream, to me, has nothing to do with going into debt. The American Dream can be achieved without spending more than you make. This is a basic truth that applies across the board. Each individual needs to evaluate their situation and budget their money to be able to sustain their lifestyle. The drive to have better, nicer things is great. However, it should be achieved by saving, investing and hard work, not by taking out loans that you will never be able to pay back.
Likewise, the government should never be allowed to pass a budget that is not balanced, or to spend more than is coming in. We may need to cut some programs. We have been living in a way that is costing much more than we are earning. If this continues, we are headed for disaster. Soon, our debt will own us. We will all be working only to pay interest on our national debt. Other countries will stop loaning money to us, and we will find ourselves unable to compete in the global market.
I know I'm not perfect, but I strongly encourage each of you to think about this. If each of us can start with our own families, it can spread.

Creating a list of machines on your NIS domain

If you're on a Linux machine that authenticates via NIS, you can very easily generate a list of all the Linux/Unix machines that are using that NIS server to authenticate. The command is:
ypcat hosts
You can also list the users that are authenticating against this server:
ypcat passwd
One situation in which this becomes very useful is if you have a heterogeneous network and people are running different shells. Part of the output of this second command is to tell you what shell people have as their default login shell. If these are set differently, you could be getting different environment settings and behavior.

kwin --replace

Many users at work have been reporting problems with our new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL4) installation when running KDE. The problem manifests itself when they cannot move or resize their windows in their current session. This makes the system very unusable. Luckily, the fix is very easy. Simply type "kwin --replace" into a terminal window in the session that's not responding. This has been effective in resolving this problem in most instances. If I understand correctly, what it does is replace the current window manager with a new instance of the kwin window manager that KDE uses. Hope this is helpful if you run into the same problems that we've had.