Round Rock Library

I just got my library card for Round Rock Public Library; I'm amazed at how many resources are available through this library. I had really thought to join to get access to inter-library loan programs with UT, but there's a lot of really cool stuff I can get access to from the RRPL itself. They have lot of ebooks I can access for some of the Platonic studies I want to read. This is one of the best things I've done in some time ....

First Christmas ...

Isabella's first Christmas is tomorrow!!! I'm beyond excited. She didn't like her first visit with Santa this week, but hard to not adore the emotional honesty. :-)

Closed academic communities ...

I've been reading a lot of Kierkegaard again lately. Right now, I'm particularly interested in the relationship between Hegel, Kierkegaard and how Kierkegaard understands Hegel. I went searching Google to see what was online, and it quickly became clear that very few communities are as closed as academic communities. I kind of knew this already from my grad school days, but was surprised things haven't changed. If any knowledge and/or scholarly contribution desires to be free, it's philosophical contributions. But I could quickly become poor if I started buying all the articles I wanted to read on Kierkegaard. Typically, these articles go for $30 or $40 a pop. I could join a good library and get free access to many of these articles, but that would generally require being physically present in the library itself (ie Perry Castenada Library). In the academic communities themselves, most of the "free" philosophy online is quackery (and it's certainly true, most of the "free" stuff online is abysmally bad) and so to offer something free online probably smells of desparation.

tracker needs some serious love ...

I remember reading a lot of posts/emails etc from the author of tracker awhile back that was badmouthing beagle and extolling the virtues of tracker. I've been using tracker on one of my fedora 12 boxes for a week now, and all it does is chew cpu and ignore my preference settings (and crash all day long). Just now, I had the setting which says to pause indexing when the computer is busy, and trackerd was using 99% of one of my cores. I decided to strace this to see what it was doing:

strace -p -o /tmp/trackerd_strace.out

I let it run for about 30 seconds, and then go to /tmp to try and tail -f the file a bit. However, when I get there, there are 81,000 files from this afternoon matching the pattern tracker-evolution-module-* all from this afternoon. Yikes. I kill trackerd and vim the trackerd_strace.out file, and what does it contain? It contains 2,500,000 lines of this:

poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}, {fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=6, events=POLLIN}, {fd=9, events=POLLIN}, {fd=7, events=POLLIN}], 5, 0) = 0 (Timeout)

I used to be a big beagle fan, but it looks like it's basically unmaintained right now, so I switched over to tracker. Since I've done that I get about 20 - 30 trackerd crashes a day (per abrt) and this constant cpu usage. I think I'm going to have disable tracker and go back to beagle, or start using google desktop again.

Don't go to Italy ....

OK, I'd read several accounts of the Knox case, and while I obviously don't know what really happened, I'd also read a book on a very famous crime in Italy (don't have the link now), written by an American who lived there for several years that said there's a 0% chance that Amanda Knox was guilty, but, because of the absurd way the Italian legal system works, a huge chance she'd be convicted anyway. And she was. I'm never going to Italy.

Need to dig up the aforementioned book (it was about the famous serial killer in Italy); it describes in great detail how many innocent people were stalked by Italian prosecutors not with the goal of reaching the truth, but to further their own careers. Certainly that goes on here, but usually those prosecutions have to at least wear the guise of attempting to reach the truth, so that it's hard to tell the difference. From the description in the book I read, it's not clear that "truth" is even a value that many in the Italian criminal system even recognize.