Fri 2008-11-07 The spread of computing science's insights has grown most impressively, but we sometimes fail to see this because the number of people in computing has grown even faster (It has been said that Physics alone has produced computing ignoramuses faster than we could educate them!)
From Computing Science: Achievements and Challenges (EWD1284) by Edsger W. Dijkstra.
Tue 2008-11-04 The past few days have been rather grey and damp. Yesterday afternoon, as I was walking home along Craven Road, a kestrel flew over me and then veered off over the Royal Berkshire Hospital. A small flock of pigeons that happened to be going the same direction, turned and flew off in the opposite direction. This morning I caught sight of a kingfisher speeding low along the River Blackwater near Farnborough North, the first one I had seen in several months. Just a few steps further along the path I heard a lot of cawing and looked up to see a large bird, probably an owl, being mobbed by a group of crows. It was larger than the crows but smaller than a grey heron, and had rounded 'fingerless' wings, a bulky body and a blunt head. It flew off at tree-top level before I could get a good look at it.
Mon 2008-11-03 Yesterday I installed Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) on my Thinkpad R50e laptop. This time I decided to do a complete install rather than just an upgrade because I wanted to get rid of several years of accumulated cruft. I did remember to first back up the files I wanted to keep, though. I downloaded the .iso image file from here and following the instructions here, I burnt it to a CD. I then put the CD into the laptop and rebooted. The installation was pretty simple and quick (it took only about an hour or so, whereas I remember upgrades taking several hours). There is a good overview of the installation process here. However, when I booted up the new installation, the wired network connection was not working. I wasn't even able to ping the ADSL modem router.
A bit of googling (from my other computer) revealed that the problem was probably a bug in NetworkManager 0.7, which is a new package in Ubuntu 8.10. A work-around was recommended here. Following this work-around I first disabled NetworkManager from starting up by opening a terminal and entering:
sudo update-rc.d -f NetworkManager remove
I then rebooted the laptop.
Then I opened another terminal and opened the /etc/network/interfaces file in an editor:
sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces
This file already contained the lines:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
To the end of this file I added these lines:
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
I then saved /etc/network/interfaces and exited the editor.
My /etc/resolv.conf file already contained the required line:
nameserver 10.0.0.2
So I rebooted the laptop again and the network connection was working properly: I was able to ping the modem router and connect to the web.
