About

The goal of the Linux-Society (LS, dating back to the mid-90s as a professional club and tech-mentoring group) has been a purely-democratic Information Society; many of the articles are sociological in nature. The LS was merged with Perl/Unix of NY to form multi-layered group that included advocacy, project-oriented learning by talented high school students: textbook constructivism. Linux has severe limitations such that it is useless for any computer that will, say, print or scan. It is primarily used for webservers and embedded devices such as the Android. (Google is high-invested in it).

Technology is problematic. During the heyday of technology (1990s), it seemed it had the democratic direction Lewis Mumford said it should have in his seminal
Technics and Civilization.

Today, we are effectively stuck with Windows as Linux is poor on the desktop and has cultured a maladaptive following. Apple is prohibitive, and all other operating systems lack drivers, including Google's Android, an offshoot of linux.

In the late 90s there was hope for new kernels such as LibOS and ExoOS that would bare their hardware to programs, some of which would be virtual machines such as Java uses. Another important player was the L4 system that is a minor relation to the code underlying the Apple's systems. It was highly scientific but fell into the wrong hangs, apparently, and has suffered from having no progress on the desktop. There is a version, "SE" that is apparently running in many cell phones as specialized telecom chips, but is proprietary. SE's closed nature was only recently revealed, which is important because it is apparently built from publicly-owned code as it is not a "clean room" design it may violate public domain protections, and most certainly violates the widely-accepted social contract.

Recent attempts to enjoin into L4 development as an advocate for "the people" have been as frustrating (and demeaning) as previous attempts with the usual attacks to self-esteem by maladaptive "hacks" being reinforced by "leadership" (now mostly university professors).

In short, this leaves us with Windows, which is quite a reversal if you have read earlier posts here. But, upon Windows, we have free and open software development systems in the forms of GTK+ (the windows usually used on Linux) and the Minimal GNU Windows (MinGW and MSYS) systems. It is very likely this direction that development should go (that is, on Windows) such that s/w can then be ported to a currently-valid microkernel system that includes a driver system that can be adapted by hardware developers to reuse of their windows and apple drivers.

From a brief survey of L4, it appears that the last clean copy was the DROPS system of the early 2010s, was a German effort that used the Unix-like "OS kit" from an American University.

If we are going to be stuck on Windows, then it seems that a high level approach to free and open systems integration, such as creating fully transparent mouse communication between apps so that they can seamlessly work together as a single desktop (rather than deliberately conflicting). This would be very helpful for GIMP and Inkscape, both leading graphics programs that are strong in the special ways, but suffer from an inability to easily interrelate.

Another important issue is the nature, if you can call it that, of the "geek" or "hack." Technology is formed democratically but "harvested" authoritarian-ly --if I can coin a term that Mumford might use. Authority is plutarchy: a combination of aristocracy and oligarchy that is kept alive after all these millennia by using, or maligning, the information society as a part of the civilizing (or law-giving) process that embraces the dialectic as its method. Democratic restoration, that is to put humanity back on an evolutionary (and not de-evolutionary) track, I think, will require the exclusion of the "geek" from decision-making. As is, the free/open s/w culture attempts to give leadership to those who write the most lines of code --irrespective of their comprehension of the real world or relationship with normal users. We need normal people to somehow organize around common sense (rather than oligarchic rationalism) to bring to life useful and cohesive software and communications systems.

Interestingly, the most popular page on this site is about Carl Rogers' humanistic psychology, and has nothing to do with technology.




Thursday, December 31, 2009

Google Docs: No privacy, No free speech

I use Google Docs nearly purely for academic research, usually as a scratch pad or Web formatting tool for work I do in the Wikipedia and Wikiversity.

The work I do is essentially classical in that it develops well-known areas such as economics and psychology and attempts to wrap societal concepts into a single model, such as Einstein attempted to do for physics.

A large proportion of human society is the Information Society--today the Internet, and if you understand human history, the Information Society, and with it information technology, has defined humanity's success for at least many thousands of years.

Recently a page with my citations was flagged as an abuse of Google Docs terms of service, and was "unpublished" as a violation of a rule against spam because it contains URLs that link to sources. The rule specifically says that a document cannot consist "mostly of links," but
there were no links, just URLs. (Later I "self-published" the document, with the links.)

The rule is obviously bogus with respect to academic work, which is a major use for Google Docs, as the Google advertises it as a collaborative environment. So I can't possibly be the only person with lists of online references. The rule is not a show-stopper, as anyone can easily get a web space and use the HTML editing tool to cut and paste their writing into any web page. The main loss is the use of Google Docs as a collaborative tool, which is primarily why I use Google Docs.

The history of the situation is thus. I had been happily embedding Google Docs text in pages that collect my work to essentially create a mini-site out of a page (and I got straight As for my work). At a certain point, I learned that my citations had been "unpublished" (is that a word?), and I immediately associated this event with web posters on the Care2.com site who had been hostile in the past for writing I had done about the Native America connection to the natural environment.

A poster here in the Google help forum, probably correctly, pointed out that I had violated one of the terms (CLICK), which he immediately added is BS; that I had created a list of links to third-party sites. The rule implies that I am advertising by creating a list of links, and hence I am using Google Docs as a vehicle for spam. But as I wrote above, there were no links, only URLs. And, it seems purely logical, that any page suggesting references--teachers' aids come to my mind as the most common example--will be flagged as abuse, and that the writer will hence be labeled abusive.

The TOS clearly states that "flagged material" will be read by Google employees to determine if there is a violation, and if what Google has had written in the TOS is true, then at least a single person read at least one of my documents. If the writing in the TOS is false, and employees are not reading Doc pages, and this does not happen, then, well, that is another issue... (or maybe it is the same issue on a deeper socio- and psychological level).

Now when I look at my table of contents, I see that many pages have been unpublished that I do not recall publishing. This implies to me that many of my pages are being read because they contain citations, and that there is no reasonable privacy on Google Docs.

Knowing that Google employees are reading my documents creates concern for me that my primary field of discussion, the Information Society, may be targeted by Google employees because there is criticism of their employer, the World's largest information company: Google.

In fact, here is criticism of Google in this very writing. I am very specifically saying that Google is using an unreasonable rule to suppress information that happens to be critical of how society
functions. I am explicitly saying that Google is denying my basic right to free speech as described in the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States, the law of the land, a grave crime. Google may rationalize information suppression in terms of spam, a security issue, but that does not make their suppression of free speech rights valid. In fact there are obviously no security issues associate with scholarly citations.

It can easily be argued here that my writing does not represent a desire on the part of Google to suppress information, but is simply the enforcement of a stupid rule. If that is the case, then it should be simple to request a modification of the rule by Google, but then another problem arises. There is no one to contact to modify the rule. Google employees, and possibly managers, (there is a difference) may or may not read this writing, but I feel certain that the issue will not be addressed. I feel this because Google, as many corporations, has successfully insulated its employees from contact with the people of the outside World, a condition described as a cult by Aaron Beck in his book Prisoners of Hate. (Aaron Beck is the most famous psychologist of all time.) Beck in this book shows information insulation to be the common form of organized abuse, what he calls hate, and a most extreme form of the abuse of information --by the largest Information Society corporation in the World.

Besides critical inquiry of the Information Society, which I tend to publish, there may be writing of a more personal nature, such as psychological work, which I would never publish, that could be damaging if read by others, a complete violation of privacy and trust even in the most liberal sense. My writing, and nearly everybody elses', is simply none of Google's business, and should be left alone, unless there can specifically be shown to be published writing that is either a threat to system security, or egregiously damaging in some way.

This happens to be the law of the land, but because of the economic situation here in the United States and around the World, corporations have become more powerful than nations. If nations are to protect the sovereignty of their protective laws, then nations must move to the next step. You can imagine what that is!

I would like to close this by saying that technologically Google Docs has not been a "seamless" experience for me; I have encountered endless problems. For instance, Google Gears has never worked properly, not even once, even though it is a fairly straight forward technology. Google Docs, as with most WYSIWYG HTML editors, does not make effective use of Object Oriented "objectification." The Spread Sheet system makes it impossible to quickly transfer information between documents (not to mention that spread sheets themselves are obsolete on too many
levels to count). I have been unable to use Google Office as a Microsoft Office replacement. Its only use is as an HTML WYSIWIG and document repository, and only with moderate success, if you discount this particular problem.

Often people and organizations say that they "may not be nice," but that they "are effective." (CIA) That is impossible; if you are not nice, you are lacking the neural constructs necessary for effective collaboration (Darwin, de Waal), and hence the ability to truly self-actualize technologically.

Google, as has been well-predicted, has, along with Microsoft, become so powerful that it can violate nearly any accepted social contract of the Information Society, and is impervious to reasonable rights laws. I will update this writing .

I will attempt to find a suitable web forum for extending this exceedingly serious discussion and I will update this writing with the URL.

I will also very likely contact a US congressman with whom I have worked in the past on information issues, and I will bring this issue to the attention of the New York State governor, who has become a personal associate of mine on various rights issues.

Monday, December 07, 2009

Photographs at Brazen Betty's

Bessa's Photographs at Brazen Betty's Boutique and Gallery, Torrington CT

John Bessa


Having experienced much of my political and philosophical inspiration here in the mountains of Northwest Connecticut, or the Southern Berkshires, I am very happy to present for you photographs taken in the region that will be exhibited in Litchfield County's biggest city, Torrington Connecticut at Brazen Betty's

With time, the photos there will be replaced with photographic constructions that leverage back lighting in a way that resembles Joseph Cornell's Boxes. See them here: Windows and roots (click)


My photography is the art of photojournalism. What I see, and how I feel when I take a picture what I want to convey to the viewer truthfully. I photographed many crows in Poughkeepsie and many landscapes of Poughkeepsie's many artifacts, but rarely did a good crow shot appear within the perfect landscape. So I made this, my only composite from a picture of a crow landing on construction equipment, and typical Poughkeepsie roof-scape under a hanging cloud. The scene and the feeling it conveys is genuine however: the smart, social and often maligned crows over this old and beautiful, yet often troubled, city.

Window in Rain

The Window is an unplanned theme in my art, a happy accident. Many pictures that look good on a computer may not work in print, in fact, some dramatic pictures of clouds have come out muddy. Back lighting solved this problem, and I used glass panes from an old door for my first light box. Since then windows have become important, and this window is in the stairway where I live in Torrington.

Roll of tape
1/8 s, f/2.8, 8 mm
This roll was found in the abandoned lot of a long-closed factory in Poughkeepsie. It is old and useless, but iridescent. It is part of my series memorializing America's closed factories and discarded workers that hopes to help revive American manufacturing.

Warm Window in Torrington

Another in my window series, this one gives a warm feeling of the house within.

Late commute through the Poughkeepsie rain

Taken near the Poughkeepsie factory that gave me so many scenes, it is the trip home in the rain, snug and warm in the car with a pleasant, if cold, drizzle outside. Power-lines provide strong symbolism for photography. They are beautiful and imposing, and represent the power of our society, and also bring us back to the early days of modern America, the rural electrification of the 30s. The 30s were also a Rennasaince for photojournalism, especially during the continual crises in Europe photographed by the amazing photojournalists of the time.

Mythology on Birch Bark Parchment





Birch bark has significant meaning to the Native culture here, one of the most important documents of our continent, the Anishabe Prophecy that predicts a joining of all the World's people in peace through stages called "fires."

I was searching for the perfect representation of birch bark as an symbol of knowledge, and I found also a quill, and then mythological beast with in the span of the same roll of film, near Music Mountain.

The Anishinabie Prophecy has been maintained on birch bark since the mid-1700s, as European colonialists began the Native decimation. Today the Great Medicine Lodge, or the Midewiwin, maintains the prophecy only having stepped forward in the 1970s. Today the Mediwinin elders hold social science PhDs.

Julia Sloan, as Brazen Betty, Super heroine, has a fine jewelery, clothes, and art store that seeks only the efforts of desingers and artists in the Litchfield, or Southern Berkshire area of Connecticut. The clothes she features come from as far away as New York City, but the inspiration is purely local.

Julia Sloan, as Brazen Betty
http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/object2/1764/51/n204456115580_7568.jpg

Friday, November 20, 2009

Zwik's Defiance: "Nazi, Soviet, Zionist, same thing."

Note: I wrote this retro-review for Rob Kall's Opednews.com, and he published it--but not without "political cleansing." He removed this, the most significant line, and because he did, I know that it is telling. At a key point in the movie, one of the heroic Bielski brothers makes this observation, which is psycho- and sociologically accurate. Please learn about the Bielskis.Daniel Craig has failed so miserably as 007, that I decided to give him another chance when his film Defiance appeared in my local "Red Box" for only a dollar.

Billed as a violent thriller, the defiance enemy soldiers by loyal brothers, it delivers as advertised, and more, taking off right from the opening credits with the killing of family, family vengeance, and all-out world war.
But as it happens, Defiance is much more. Not advertised is that Defiance is the true story of the Jewish Bielski brothers who operated extremely effectively as anti-Nazi partisans (historically true), and saved many Jews as Schindler did, not as refugees--as surviving natives of the forest they hid, and thrived, in.

The plot is simple: Tuvia (Daniel Craig) arrives home to find that collaborating police have killed his parents. He and his brothers move into the forest they know very well and accidentally create a community of Jews who, rather than being victims, become an effective if tiny combat force. There are many levels of drama in the movie, but the most significant is between Tuvia and his brother, Zus (
Liev Schreiber), whose love/hate relationship makes them nearly as combative with each other as they are with the Nazi enemy.



I’ll kiss it and make it better: Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber in Defiance.
Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber

The brothers fight each other one last time, and Zus, the more hawkish of the two, takes the best soldiers of the community to join a Soviet guerrilla force. Tuvia, a brilliant tactician, remains to lead and protect the community against insurmountable odds with minimal causalities. With the arrival of a major Nazi force, the Soviets retreat (cowards!), and the community is attacked and forced into a swamp that is compared (quite sentimentally) to the Red Sea. Zus and his fighters rejoin the community just in time--to the extreme relief of both the community and the audience!

Defiance

I don't mean this as a spoiler, but as an in-road into the history of WWII: the just, if complicated war. I, as a pacifist, believe WWII was necessary.

Defiance also shows the military strategy that so has effectively defeated invaders through history, and especially in Vietnam: digging into the woods and living, literally, underground.
But most important, Defiance brings up the major ironies of the Second World War, and shows us how this irony still influences our lives today. Zus, when rejoining his brother after fighting with the Soviets, states it flatly: "Nazi, Soviet, Zionist, same thing."


While exposing us to the irony of this war, Defiance unintentionally makes us look at the issues surrounding the endless pogroms that occurred in Europe, not only to Jews, but an endless number of groups. The
Bielski brothers were in fact traitors of a sort.

Completely based on reality, with minimal flights of cinematic fantasy, the family, according to the Wikipedia, fought
the Nazis by with the Soviets who had invaded their region as part of an invasion of Poland. Not only did a few of the brothers fight for the Soviets, the family worked as low-level administrators for the Soviet occupiers. The Jews of the region, in fact, wholly supported the Soviet invasion, which resulted in the extermination of the Polish intelligentsia by Soviet partisans in the Katyn Forest with the full approval of the Soviet Politburo. The Bielskis have been accused of complicity with the Soviet invasion of Poland--and in fact, the movie is set in the Katyn forest.

The Bielskis brothers are unquestionably heros of the first order, making the sacrifices necessary not only to survive, but to thrive. But the holes created by the historical expediences taken by movie's maker, Edward Zwick, (and perhaps the story's author, Nechama Tec) are actually heightened by many of the characters statements, especially Zus' comparison of Zionism, Nazism, and Sovietism. The Bielskis never sought credit for their efforts, but then maybe there is a reason for this--their necessary but regrettable cooperation with the predatory Soviets.

From the military perspective, I writhed in frustration at some of the Bielski's strategic missteps. But as it happens, these were cinematic fantasy; in reality both brothers were experienced fighters, and adapted perfectly to the needs of forest survival. And they survived immigration to the US to found a trucking firm!

Get and enjoy this movie, know that it is often violently tragic (and a little long) but that it ends happily. Take it to the Net--learn about how it REALLY goes down in war and in war's aftermath!

Further reading:


More Defiance!: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defiance,_Ohio_(band)

Edward Zwick (right) directs Daniel Craig and Alexa Davalos on the set of Defiance. (Photo: Karen Ballard)


Edward Zwick (right)
 
 

Friday, October 02, 2009

The Art Roots

The "art roots" are sculpture made from roots systems found in the forest that I have "brought in" and preserved with varnish. They are not meant as stand-alone sculptures, but to help create an environment for other art. Together they can be a conceptual or environmental piece. For instance, there is a yellow chick combined with the roots in the photographs that is an antique toy and life-sized; I added it to create the feeling of a forest.



The roots themselves are very powerful abstract "expressions." They are mono-color, and made from a single material, wood, and are purely abstract, yet show all the artistic power of nature, or mother Earth.

One of them is fairly big, about four feet tall, and was supposed to be exhibited in a gallery in NYC, but the varnish did not dry in time for the opening. (It is dry now.)

I have restored marble bases for the roots to give them a classic "feel," to draw attention to the sophistication of nature's own creative power in its simplest forms. One of the marble bases is table-sized.

I had originally hoped to be able to rent them out for displays of nature-based jewelry, but I think that the continually failing economy has hurt the natural jewelery economy.

I have attached pictures below, but I have a gallery of the pictures which may be easier to view:

http://thinman.com/galleries/roots_promotion/

My main photography gallery is:

http://thinman.com/photography
























Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Who killed Christ ?? Newsflash !!

According to the Gospel of Judas, a genuine document of the gospel period--the 2nd Century--Judas did not betray Christ, but was asked by Christ to bring the Romans, perhaps to have a "show down."  (If so, this certainly changes the meaning of the "kiss of death," as an anti-empathic construct.)

Christ was charged with sedition or treachery, which he could not have been guilty of because of his pacifism.  The Roman leader, Pontius Pilate, did not want to kill Christ and may have passed the case to a man named Herod, who likewise did not want to kill Christ.

So who killed Christ?  It seems the mob may have, in the sense of the chaos of the French Revolution--Jeruselum of Christ's time was purely chaotic.  Christ  may have been lynched by the types of moral defectives who did the lynching in our American history.  The Christian Jews seem to say in their documents that Christ may not have died on the cross, and instead was taken down, possibly with the help of Roman Centurions, and brought to a cave to be nursed back to health by Mary Magdalen.  Christ may have been protected by the centurions on his way to Calvary, and then saved by them after the Crucifixion, allowing him to return, and then ascend into Heaven.



Roman Centurions helped Christianity as more Gentiles joined Christ.  James, Christ's brother, liberalized Jewish law on their behalf so that they could more easily be Christian.  For instance, he removed the requirement of circumcision.  This enraged the more orthodox Jewish Christians who then attacked the early Gentile Christians.  The centurions then stepped in to protect the Gentile Christians, often called Paulists.  Perhaps the centurions were rewarding the Christians for Christ's forgiveness of their actions against him: Christ's power of forgiveness.

Centurions were soldiers and not cops.  This is significant to me as I have always had good relations with American soldiers where I have met them, often in party environments, yet my relationships with policemen have nearly always been frightening, especially in party environments.  It may be that the cops of the time were from the local government, which was not Roman but Jewish. During Christ's time, Judaism was still thriving under Roman colonial rule: the period of Hillel, a true empathist.  It was not until much later in the first Century that the Jewish rebellions resulted in their final suppression under Roman rule.  This happened long after the initial Christians had passed on--an interesting us of the term for death, especially considering Christ's eternal status.

All this information is derived from the Wikipedia.








Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Open letter to L4 developers

Frankly, I am wondering why all of you are working so hard to create virtualization for Linux, when this has been done in so many ways ranging from IBM mainframes to PC emulation, and especially on L4.

Linux suffers from being a monolithic kernel, making it very difficult to support by hardware and peripheral manufacturers, which has kept it from being a mainstream OS allowing it to be a true alternative to Microsoft, and also Apple, of the benefit of the vast majority of humanity.

This fault goes back nearly two decades to the debate Linus had with Andrew Tannenbaum. Time has shown Linus to have been very, very wrong, as every other popular OS is a microkernel OS.

The social implication is that society can determine democratically what kind of intelligent devices it wants in its future. So far, all these decisions have been made by corporate executives, including decisions for Linux: IBM. When we saw the Linux culture drop support for legacy hardware, which especially hurts the third world, we knew that there was a problem in the initial social model, perhaps better defined as a scheme with hindsight. Further inquiry shows fault in Linus' initial thinking, and that the popular support he received leading to the success of the Linux kernel was at best a successful social phenomena, as it failed as a beneficial and purely democratic implementation of technology in our present phase of the Information Society.

What we need in the world with respect to communication is free communication, which implies IP communication, the only free packet transport that is available. All politicians have worked to make IP communication proprietary, claiming that they seek to "stimulate" economies, but in fact have simply been handing over valuable resources to the most selfish people. Al Gore, the supposedly-liberal politician from the United States is the most guilty of this. When he said "I invented the Internet" what he really meant was "I took the Internet away from the people, and gave it to the most greedy, the corporate executives and board members."

These ideas can easily be extended into an extremely well-supported argument showing nearly sociopathic control over technology, and most of the Information Society back to the beginnings of civilization (Mumford: Technics and Civilization), by the operators of our society who are guilty of such much more, such as endless environmental and social exploitation, not to mention a perennial tendency to genocide. (We had hoped that Obama would be an exception, but, again, with hindsight, that was unrealistically hopeful.)

All in all, it is time to dump the corporate-centric paradigm, which if you understand that the capital model that we have inherited nearly intact from Rome (Durant, Mumford, others) comes with a semi-democratic political system actually called Fascism. Sixty years ago we had to defeat Fascism in an exceedingly violent world war, but back then we failed to recognize that our own semi-democracy is built upon the same Roman political, financial, and hence information model. I am not proposing a world war (I never would, I am a pacifist) but something has to be done; there is an extreme need for radical change in the technical aspects of the Information Society (I am a realist.)

I strongly support your efforts to create the "hooks" necessary to start building computation and communication libraries and modules, which can then be absorbed into an independent and unified data manipulation paradigm, available to all devices small and large, to replace the "server centric" model that has only served to increase corporate control. Or as in the case of Linux, some other yet-undefined (and apparently unsuccessful) "open systems control" scheme.

Monday, August 31, 2009

No virtue in virtualization: VMWare, Qemu, VirtualBox

When I moved my laptop to another domain, and then back again, I found that none of the emulators, VirtualBox, VMWare, and Qemu, were talking to the laptop, and only VirtualBox was talking to the outside world. My immediate conclusion is that there was no virtue in virtualization, at least the way things stand right now.

I was working with two "JEOSs," (yet another stupid computer acronym pronounced "juice"), Ubuntu and rPath. A JEOS is just a stripped-down Linux installation for appliance and other small server use, and to it's credit, rPath predates this acronym. All small Linux operating system distributions do as well, such as "Damn Small Linux" which has been around a long time and has its own complaints about Linux (you get the tone, I suppose).

Seeing that VirtualBox was still talking to the outside world, I went with it, and since it has the Ubuntu in it, I searched using the words "jeos ubuntu virutalbox resolve.conf" to get some clues--I found a blog, kefakya7obi, supporting Wordpress in an emulator. For the /etc/networks/interfaces file , the author (thanks!) suggests the following configuration:
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.5
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.254
You might notice the "auto" line in the file which refers to the boot-up process. Without it you have to use the "if-up eth0" command.

And reminded not to forget resolve.conf. The network information for the Vista laptop connection is in the icon in the interfaces section of the Vista networking windows, and I figured I would have to adjust things, but I didn't. I also ran the Vista text window commands ipconfig for IP information and nslookup, for DNS information which produced similar information, but much more quickly.

Update: Things stopped working again, so I went back to the default configuration in /etc/networks/interfaces, and it worked. It should be noted that with all this fiddling, I have not actually gotten to where I can actually work "wget" the digitalus and Zend software! (We do indeed live in a hell--technology--within a heaven--Nature.)

Final Update (I hope): This is a funny way to write a how-to page. I started to familiarize myself with the different virtual network concepts through Qemu docs, and then looked into the VirtualBox PDF. The paper explained how nothing works for everything and how NAT was the best for Internet access, but "local host only" was best for communication between guest and host.

Then I realized that Virtualbox allows for a few interfaces as emulated NIC cards, and reasoned that I might try running both modes on different interfaces. I tested eth0 and eth1 for both NAT and host-only configurations on VirtualBox, and then tried them together. Trying them together failed initially, but when I started host-only first (on eth1), and then added NAT (on eth2) I got an open Internet connection with domain name service, and also a good performance for a complex X11 client, Xemacs.

The host-only interface (eth0) in the JeOS /etc/networks config file is this:

iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.5
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.254

Still... it may not work in practice, and I will be testing it. But for the moment (at nearly 2am) this looks like a good solution. I checked to see if this was an orgininal suggestion by google searching using the words"virtualbox two interfaces nat host only" and found only trouble tickets and purely hypothetical examples. Seems I am the first offering this as a way to create a WWW development environment, which really seems odd to me knowing that Linux stands purely as a server, and that the only practical desktop solution (for me and most people) is still Windozer.

With time... it is working pretty well. There was one instance that it did not come up right, but the Windows components are still probably a work in progress, and things have to be just right for it to configure properly, and hence a possible need for a couple of reboots.



Virtualization Performance
VMWare is reputed to be the best of the best, but a table of benchmarks by a Linux gamer shows that these three emulation systems are the same within a single factor in every category.
                     VirtualBox   Qemu   VMware-player
CPU:
DhryStone ALU (MDIPS) 5,716 5,988 5,711
WhetStone FPU (MWIPS) 4,189 4,649 4,401
(thx2 http://www.linux-gamers.net/smartsection.item.56/virtualbox-vs-qemu.html :)

I installed the X11 window server, Xming, and allowed for access from all hosts in the "launch" window (not a necessarily a secure way to go, but there was no granular configuration in the launch window to specify hostnames), and I was very happy to see an rxvt window generated from the Linux living in the emulator. I was also excited to be able to cut+paste text between Windows and Linux's rxvt. You have to "export DISPLAY=192.168.56.1:0.0" from the ipconfig command on the laptop to direct the windowing instructions from the Linux in emulation to the Xserver on the laptop.

Then I tried an Xwindows editor: Xemacs. This started but failed to perform after starting, so I won't be running any fancy IDEs, such as Eclipse, for instance, at least with this arrangement. Perhaps I am short on memory (though all this GNU/Linux confligeration came back to me quickly ;) ). I have a gigabyte coming in the mail: ebay for $3.00 + shipping.

Perhaps WWW-based program editing tools, if they exist in a usable format, will satisfy though they usually don't (such as this one on blogspot doesn't).

Why virtualization is important to me
I am tyring to create an environment on my laptop that will allow me to access Linux from Vista, the system I am stuck with because of the laptop builder, SONY. My strategy is to run a LAMP and Zend framework appliance in an emulator (a more realistic word for what is called virutualization), and connect to it with X windows.

Connection to the Laptop
The connection to the laptop is important so as to have a decent window to work in, or possibly to use with editors such Emacs or an IDE such as ZEND Studio. I have found that there are a lot of problems with Windows LAMP installations such as WAMP; it seems like it is a matter of learning how to run virtualization on Windows, or de-bugging WAMP. Building in a Linux environment is helpful because nearly all web servers are Linux and I have found that migration from windows to linux is difficult enough to take up someone's time full-time.

So what is the problem?
Since the problem is with the virtual "network" within the laptop, Qemu seems to be the best choice, or perhaps path, because Qemu seems to have the most network control. It is unfortunate that the free software community has not resolved and documented solutions for this obvious issue for the two open emulators, Qemu and VirtualBox, or that community members are not sharing the details of the solutions. They just give hints that the problem can be solved but no actual script code. Perhaps they feel that you should suffer as they have; I actually study this phenomena about the open community as part of my work on the Information Society.

Other alternatives
The other path is simply to work on Linux full-time or in a dual boot machine. The problem here is that more time has to be invested into making Wifi work on Linux, as the Linux community as made hardware support nearly impossible for the manufacturing "community" by adhereing to a monolithic model rather than migrating to a micro-kernel. If you remember, Linux was born as a debate between Linus and a professor named Andrew Tannenbaum. Tannenbaum's system, Linux, was (or is) microkernel, as is every other major system: all of Microsoft since Win95, Apple's OSX, and of course the up-coming L4 micro-kernel foundation.

L4 Microkernel as a virtualization solution, and as a solution period
On the topic of L4, the approach is run machines on top of the L4 microkernel, rather than emulate PCs as processes, which if you think about it, is a pretty lame way to do things.

As of a few years ago, L4 ran Linux on top of its microkernel factors faster than linux runs as an independent monolith, which implies that not only Windows sucks, but Linux as well. So much for Linus' fame!

The obvious thing to do is of course look at the needs of the world of systems users, something like 6 billion members of the Information Society, and design a system that suits it as a aggregation of individuals, families, and communities.

Thinman is a model I created nearly a decade ago (before my whole industry got shipped to Bhopol, India !?!?) where I applied knowledge gleaned from the Perl CPAN distribution system with my experiences managing large networks as if each of these network systems, and their supporting network servers, had Perl VMs that received by both data and code instruction to implement the data, or to collect data and form it into a generic complex structure binary format (and not deliberately crippled XML). The Perl community was supposedly building a VM, and it was the most brilliant design imaginable, and it was to be the basis of my Thinman design, but it never came to fruition. I attempted to explain the underlying problem in my article here "Linux and Perl, Both Hands Tied."