Talk

Spring

In my hut this spring, there is nothing -- there is everything!

Ah, the beauty of haiku - nothing is said but nothing is left unsaid.

Art

Modern art touches a sore spot, or several sore spots, in the ordinary citizen of which he is totally unaware. The more irritated he becomes at modern art the more he betrays the fact that he himself, and his civilization, are implicated in what the artist shows him.

William Barrett
--Irrational Man

Life

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

Elias Canetti
--The Secret Heart of the Clock

Quotes

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

Salmon Rushdie
--Guardian, 10/02/90

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

-Jorge Luis Borges, writer (1899-1986)

Creativity

A Shorter Line

One day Akbar drew a line with his royal hand on the floor of the open court and told his wise men that if they wanted to keep heir jobs they must make the line shorter without touching any part of it.

Wise man after wise man approached and stood staring at the puzzle, but they were unable to solve the problem.

Finally Birbal stepped forward and drew a longer line next to the first one, without touching the first line.

Everyone in the court look at it and agreed. The first line was definitely shorter.

Koans

Learning

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.

Certitude

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.

Cardinal Bellarmine
--Attributed (said during the trial of Galileo)

Purpose of Philosophy

Philosophy poses the question: What should we do to have the best possible lives? I'm afraid we haven't made much progress in arriving at an answer to this question.

Setting up telnetd

PROTOR Redhat : Installing TELNET server on Redhat

By default the RedHat 7.2 installation will not allow a remote user to connect to the system using TELNET for security reasons. It is probably safest to leave the system like this and use an encrypted connect facility such as SSH. However if you do wish to allow TELNET access then you need to do the following.

Install the telnet-server RPM from the RedHat installation disk #1 either using a suitable package manager to use the following command line:

rpm --install --replacefiles --nodeps
/mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS/telnet-server-*.i386.rpm

This installation creates a file telnet in the directory /etc/xinetd.d . Edit this file and change the line

disable = yes
to
disable = no

Restart xinetd by the command

xinetd restart

Causality

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Opinions

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others

Marcus Aurelius
--Meditations