Unmemorable Memories

It seems the only acceptable time to play religious music on the radio is at Christmas time.

In a previous post I wrote about making a pilgrimage out of my business travels by visiting Apple Stores. Well, this time I’ve done what Apple fans dream of doing: visiting the Apple headquarters in Cupertino.

Now I can say, “been there… done that… got a T-Shirt that say’s ‘I visited the mothership’.”

Here’s a trick to inject environment variables to a Unix login session.

1. become root
2. set the environment variables you would like to inject
3. kill the inetd daemon
4. restart the inetd daemon

What happens is that inetd inherits all of the environment variables that are set when it starts up. When it spawns other services like telnet, these environment variables are inherited by those services. In the case of telnet, it sets these for the user’s shell.

The user will wonder where did these variables come from? It’s not in the user’s .cshrc, .login or .profile files. It’s not from any shell initialization files in the home directory or in /etc.

Of course this only affects daemons started by inetd. If you’d like to set these for ssh users, make ssh start from inetd as well. Unless of course sshd cleans up its environment before invoking login.

This works on Solaris 9. I have not tried it on any other Solaris versions,or any Linux for that matter.

This was discovered by accident when I could not figure out why I had some environment variables set upon login using telnet, when I could not find where they were being set.

This is probably a bug in inetd. Inetd should clean up the environment prior to exec’ing the requested service.

I do not advocate using television to babysit children. Children should learn interactively, not by watching. Television stunts the imagination. However, used properly, the TV can be a tool to aid in a child’s learning. TV should never be used to simply keep the child occuppied so that the parents can do other things. TV should only be used as a supplement to teaching, and as a visual aid. The TV should not be the main teacher, the parent should be, and the TV used as a tool, similar to how pen and paper are used. Used properly the TV can be a good learning tool not only for the child but also for the parent.

I was watching an episode of Sesame Street last night and noticed something. Something different from all the other kids’ learning shows I’ve seen: not only does it teach the children, it also teaches the parents how to teach their children.

The episode was about Big Bird trying to teach Baby Bear the alphabet. Normally you would think that the whole point of the show was to teach the children watching the alphabet. But if you watch closely, Big Bird employs methods that teach parents how to teach. He also says things that teach parents how to manage frustration in the part of the child when they have difficulties learning. He also shows ways to encourage the child. Now if only parents would clue in…

Many parents turn on the TV to teach and let the TV teach their children, while they go off doing something else. In my opinion this is not a good way to teach children. Parents should be around when their children are watching learning shows on TV and try and learn from the teaching methods employed, and use them as they teach their children. (Side note: young kids should only be allowed to watch learning shows, all other shows that are simply to entertain the child should not be watched)

I have not seen any other children’s show, aside from Sesame Street, that attempts to teach parents while teaching the children. Most kids’ learning shows just teach the children. I believe parents are doing their children a disservice by using those shows to teach their children, since they are using them as “parent replacement tools”. There is no substitute for parents teaching their kids. But if you must use the TV, use it as a supplement, be there as well, and try and learn from it too.

I have nothing to blog about.

Rabbit! Rabbit!