Author Archives: pauljohn

About pauljohn

Paul E. Johnson is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas. He is an avid Linux User, an adequate system administrator and C programmer, and humility is one of his greatest strengths.

Peters and Welch, “Gradients of Corruption in Perceptions of American Life”

Posted on 2008/01/25 by pauljohn

Definitions. Reviews Gardiner’s arguments Claims study of corruption is held back by definition. I wonder. Probably it is more held back by lack of useful research questions. Anyway.. Corruption is violation of formal norms/legal standards, or includes “norms” or public … Continue reading →

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Gardiner, “Defining Corruption”

Posted on 2008/01/25 by pauljohn

I like the general idea that corruption is diversion of resources from public to private purposes. That’s not enough for Gardiner. Originally published 1993 Look at separate problems (really separate?) 1. Corruption Nye (1967) corruption is deviation from behavior norms … Continue reading →

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N800 list packages in order of installation

Posted on 2008/01/14 by pauljohn

/var/lib/dpkg/info # ls -rt shows list of packages in order of update/installation

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Good Fedora Linux install guide

Posted on 2007/12/11 by pauljohn

This is quite thorough. http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f8.html Also I’ve referred to many times to the “Tips and Tricks” series. This has been up since Fedora 1, I think. http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/f8-tips.php

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Firefox and plugin problems in x86_64

Posted on 2007/12/07 by pauljohn

On x86_64, most plugins don’t work. I tried the wrapper thing and could not watch flash. Don’t want to remove firefox.x86_64, even though that’s what most people seem to do. Then they just run firefox.i386. Don’t want to do that … Continue reading →

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Using gpg to encrypt files. Great web page

Posted on 2007/11/20 by pauljohn

From “http://www.somacon.com/p107.php” Notes for using GPG to encrypt and decrypt backup files GPG allows you to use public-private key encryption to encrypt and decrypt files on Windows and Linux. The benefit of public-private key encryption is that you can keep … Continue reading →

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Chimps choose more rationally than humans

Posted on 2007/10/09 by pauljohn

October 5, 2007 Science. Researchers have demonstrated chimpanzees are more nakedly self interested than humans. I’d say “chimps are more like the textbook selfish rational actors than human players.” UPI report says “Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary … Continue reading →

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Copy Repositories with Rsync

Posted on 2007/10/07 by pauljohn

In fedora-list, Ashley M Kirchner wrote Oct 6 2007 You can use rsync with any of the mirrors to keep a local copy. I have a shell script that I run every so often: ~:> cat rsync.sh echo “Getting Fedora … Continue reading →

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Swap fixups, concerning Read-error on swap device

Posted on 2007/10/04 by pauljohn

Mike Lord wrote 2007-08-29 > Read-error on swap-device (8:0:99814256) … Looks like a bad sector in the swap partition. You can probably repair it by using this sequence of commands: swapoff /dev/sdX /dev/sdX mkswap /dev/sdX swapon /dev/sdX If it recurs … Continue reading →

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Testing the N800 ability to post

Posted on 2007/09/09 by pauljohn

Wondered how WordPy cauld do

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