chris' random ramblings

Jen, over at “Et tu?”, has written another moving post, this time about her conversion from being pro-choice to being pro-life.

http://et-tu.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-i-became-pro-life.html.

Before becoming Catholic, I’m not sure what I would have said with regards to the abortion debate, I didn’t give it much thought. I probably would have said something along the lines of, “it’s not desirable, but ok in extreme cases.” After my conversion to Catholicism however, things couldn’t be more clear. Human life begins at conception. Intentionally killing an innocent person is wrong. Therefore, killing a child in the womb is wrong. To me, it’s that simple. And I really hope that one day everybody will understand it that way.

Monday marked the 20th year since abortion was decriminalized in Canada. Depending on where you get your news, you may or may not have been aware of this. The three major newspapers here in the GTA had very different coverage that day (on their websites at least – I don’t subscribe to any of them at the moment). The Toronto Star didn’t have any mention if at all. The Globe and Mail had the pro-choice side covered well, but the pro-life side was not represented at all. The National Post seemed to have stories from both sides of the “debate”.

I put “debate” in quotes, since there’s actually very little discussion about this issue in the public arena. Just last week the CBC reported that a pro-life advertisement was pulled from buses in St. John’s. The ad read, “Nine months… the length of time an abortion is allowed in Canada. Abortion. Have we gone too far?” Pretty tame compared to some other pro-life messages out there. A message to spark debate, hopefully? Nope, not allowed, it’s too “misleading”.

I agree with what Michael Coren says in his piece in the National Post, it’s time for the debate to be resurrected.

The linux-kbuild-2.6.24 package was finally available in Debian today. (Small aside: why does it always take a few days after the release of the linux-image packages before the linux-kbuild package is available?) I need to use the proprietary nvidia drivers on my machines, so I have to wait for the kbuild backage before I can compile and install the nvidia driver for the new kernel.

Anyway…after a short ‘sudo m-a a-i -l 2.6.24-1-amd64 nvidia’, I could reboot into the shiny new kernel!

New kernels always seem faster, so I was getting excited after booting up. After logging in though, I couldn’t connect to my wireless network. I had previously been using the bcm43xx driver, and looking through the changelog, I discovered it had been deprecated in favor of the new b43 / b43legacy drivers.

Ok, no problem, just load the new module…wait for network-manager to pick it up…wait for it…wait…wait…Screw it. Edit /etc/network/interfaces, uncomment the stuff for the wireless device, and then ‘ifup eth2′. Kernel oops.

Well that sucks. Back to 2.6.23 I go.

Incidentally, it’s not just this oops in 2.6.24 that has me disappointed. Everything since 2.6.18 has been a bit risky. It used to be that upgrading a kernel within the same major.minor release was a relatively safe thing to do. I actively use two different kernels on my machine at home:
- 2.6.21 since it supports the raw1394 interface that dvgrab requires to download video from my camcorder, but wireless is very flaky
- 2.6.23 since wireless is more robust

I still occasionally get lockups, forcing a hard reboot. Maybe this is my fault, I am running the proprietary nvidia driver, and I do use suspend to ram quite a bit, even though it thinks my hardware isn’t supported.

Maybe too much is changing too fast between kernel releases, not allowing userspace to keep up? Not sure, all I know is I’m doing much more rebooting in my Linux machine than I used to.