inamerrata

From this week’s LWN:

Unless the Debian Project changes its social contract to allow the exclusion of packages on moral grounds, tools like hot-babe will find a home there.

Well, gosh, I’m glad that’s settled.

F—, yeah!

Compare

But in letters to US President Geroge Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Mr Allawi, Mr Annan warned that a large-scale attack on Fallujah could undermine efforts to promote stability.

…and contrast

Mosques in Fallujah: 100
Mosques used as Fighting Positions / Weapons Caches: 60
Hospitals Used as Defensive Positions: 3
Improvised Explosive Device (IED) Factories: 11
Slaughter House/Torture Chambers: 3
Number of Major Weapons Storage Areas in the City: 203
Evidence of Foreign Fighter involvement: 2

UPDATE 2004/11/28:

Jason counters. I tried rebutting in detail by email, but Thunderbird hung. Oh well. In brief: 14k civilians certainly weren’t killed in Fallujah alone, nor was the assault on Fallujah about WMDs. There might not have been any pre-invasion links to Al Qaeda, but there were certainly Al Qaeda links to the Fallujah “insurgents”. Likewise, while the Fallujah assault was certainly expensive, in blood as well as treasure, it certainly didn’t cost $105 billion USD. Oh, and 62 journalists weren’t killed in Fallujah alone either.

So for the relevant numbers, here’s some context:

Number of people displaced prior to attack: 300,000
Number of people displaced from Iraq when the US invade and occupy: under 600k of 20M
Number of people displaced from Fallujah when “insurgents” occupy it: around 300k of 300k.
Number of people killed in Fallujah offensive: 2,000
Number of insurgents killed: over 1,200
Number of Iraqi/coalition troops killed: under 100
Number of unarmed insurgents killed on videotape: 1
Number of surrendering insurgents on that videotape: 1
Number of surrendering insurgents killed on that videotape: 0
Number of unvideotaped incidents of insurgents faking death, then opening fire on marines: 1

I’ll also go with:

Number of journalists killed in Iraq: 62
Number of journalists killed in Iraq according to CPJ: 36
Number of journalists killed by US forces: 9
Number of journalists killed by “insurgents”: 19
Number of journalists killed in Algeria in 1995: 24

I’m not sure what the point of saying “links to Al Qaeda: 0” is, when Saddam’s payment to Palestinian suicide bombers wasn’t even a nominal secret, nor what the point of focussing on the “no WMDs” point is given both WMD programs ready to be restarted, and failing sanctions. Or what the point of complaining about missing explosives is, if you’re then going to imply a lack of existing WMDs made Iraq effectively harmless.

For some perspective on the dollar figure, annual US aid to Egypt of on the order of $2B USD, almost 2/3rds of which is military aid, and that’s been going on since 1975, amounting to $50B USD up to now. These compare to Israel receiving around $2.7B USD in aid annually, a little of 3/4ths being military aid. Apparently that’s amounted to $84B USD since 1949. The purpose of both payments is to try to stabilise the Middle East somewhat, by ensuring Israel can defend itself, and by bribing Egypt not to attack Israel (Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979, and began receiving $1.3B USD in military aid from the US in 1979). cf the 1973 Yom Kippur war (in which 23k people died, apparently).

Whether $100B spent in a few years trying to reform Iraq is better than $134B spent over half a century trying to preserve an armed detente will be interesting to see.

I’ll leave playing with body counts to others. I can’t say I’m spectacularly shocked by 14k civilian deaths in a war where one side isn’t willing to follow the Geneva conventions though. (And from what I can tell, Iraqbodycount includes both political assassinations, and civilian deaths due to terrorist activity)

Okay, maybe that wasn’t so brief.

Hiccups suck.

Wow, Google Scholar is awesome. ifupdown even rates a mention.

Here’s a fascinating article tying Hussein’s Iraq to the September 11 attacks. Fortunately there’s no need to read it, since all these issues are already completely settled.

I can’t say I’m surprised to find most of the alternative MUAs to Apple’s Mail.app are shareware. What I am surprised is to find that they’re not terribly functional — and some aren’t even pretty! Mail.app’s threading support is pretty basic: it’ll collect related messages together, highlight related messages, and let you collapse a thread into a single line. Fine, fair enough, it’s free and came with the OS. But apparently that’s actually some of the better support for threading available in the Mac world! And meanwhile, other clients don’t even support IMAP. Geez, I’d say join the 21st century already, but it’s not like you could even write programs for Mac OS X prior to that. What are these things? Is there going to be some apocalyptic global war with spambots that will decimate MacOS X mail readers, leaving barely a few survivors, scarred, crippled and lame, to be sent back in time to try to save the future?

I’m not impressed. And I’m quite sure that porting mutt to Quartz isn’t an option.

Oh well, let’s try *gulp* downloading Thunderbird and reading my email in a web browser.

(Addendum: Thunderbird’s great. Only feature I miss is automatic underlining of misspelt words. It does threading, GPG signing and verifying, it’s pretty, and it supports IMAP reasonably well. It doesn’t even seem too unpleasantly web-based, at least once you actually uncheck the option to say you want to send HTML email. Its handling of word wrapping still isn’t perfect, but it’s better than Mail.app’s.)

Unlike some I’m a bit ambivalent about movie reviews — I tend to have a pretty low bar for finding them entertaining (Starsky and Hutch? AvP? Independence Day? Hollywood Homicide? Sure! Liked ’em all!), and a pretty high bar for finding them great. Which generally stops me from panning or lauding them, and if you’re not going to do one or the other (or both!) where’s the fun in doing a review?

Anyway, I’m not going to be as harsh as Kirk Honeycutt, but I can easily see where he’s coming from. The Final Cut ain’t no Eternal Sunshine, and it’s not even a Paycheck, but it’s not a bad way to kill an hour and a half.

Hrm. Spoilers below the fold.

The plot’s a bit disappointing from a sf perspective, though at least the setup’s fairly respectable: a fair chunk of people get “chips” put in their head before they’re born that record everything they see and hear for their entire life, that then gets edited and played at their funerals. In good sf tradition, the movie covers some implications from that.

And there are plenty — do you act differently when you’re on camera, and what does that mean if you’re on camera for your entire life? What gets dropped on the cutting room floor, who decides what’s worth remembering and what’s not? What does this mean for everyone else, knowing there’s a perfect record of everything you say or do to this person that’ll come out eventually? You could really draw that out if you wanted — what if someone on death row had one, and after he was executed, it was discovered he really was innocent after all? How would you cope if you were on the convicting jury? If someone with one was murdered, wouldn’t that make it a lot easier to catch the killer generally, so wouldn’t people want to get them as a deterrent? Would police want to mandate that everyone gets one so their job is easier? Wouldn’t it make an interesting addition to politicians’ biographies — sure we know what he said, but here’s what actually happened in the back rooms. Imagine a politician accused of shady dealings, corruption and kickbacks by his opponents, and the possibility that he can only regain his good name after his death, when his life’s record can be examined directly by the public. How about a politician who’s more successful after his death instead of an artist?

Unfortunately the movie chooses a pretty trivial path. It just uses it as a high-tech way of doing a funeral oration, and even ignores the obvious possibilities of implementing Orson Scott Card’s concept of a Speaker for the Dead presenting the facts of a person’s life without fear or favour. Instead it invents a priesthood dedicated to airbrushing everything bad from the deceased’s life. Why bother? For all the time the cutter’s put in, couldn’t you just hire some out of work actors to recreate some favourite episodes from the deceased’s life instead? And the rebellious youth who’re offended by the concept react by getting tattoos, protesting, and killing themselves. Thrilling. Apparently no one is game to live the life they choose, and then just voluntarily let everyone see it in its entirety: the tragedies as well as the triumphs. Maybe that would’ve been plausible before the age of reality TV, but it seems pretty naive now.

That’s not to mention various flaws in the movie’s execution — the implant’s undetectable, but easily extractable after death? Alan’s parents not only didn’t tell him, but didn’t mention it in their will either, and neither Alan nor their executor noticed the loan in their papers? And sure, we’ve had pre-natal brain implants for over 60 years, but highly paid, highly respected technologists can’t afford a fridge more modern than mid 20th century? I suppose I shouldn’t even mention backups or VCRs.

Paycheck suffered from similar flaws, although not as badly. The original story was really quite cool: the protagonist wasn’t a superstar, just an ordinary guy, who happened to be a little sneakier than your average joe. The trinkets weren’t snuck out; they were a legitimate contractual alternative — so the company got “defeated” in the tragic tradition: through their own hubris. There wasn’t even the silly movie ending, with the hero being able to deal with knowing the future, but everyone else risking a biblical apocalypse if the technology wasn’t destroyed forevermore. And the company wasn’t even your random evil corporate empire, but instead a family business trying to make a stand against a ruthless authoritarian government.

But hey, much easier to just do a “technology can be bad” schtick, and add some guns, sex and special effects, right?

Admittedly, I get a bad impression of Windows software because the only time I ever touch it is when it’s already causing problems for someone. But gag.

The latest wonderful bit of nonsense is thanks to Symantec, in particular their “Norton Internet Security” product. Its wonderful new activation feature is broken on Windows XP, so naturally, when you buy a copy of Internet Security, it automatically disables itself, and tells you to phone someone who calls you a pirate and, in a fit of self-righteous indignation, then refuses to help you at all. Heck, even the web pages do it:

customer support [sic]

We cannot provide further information about this product.

You may have been the victim of software piracy and could be in possession of counterfeit software. If you believe that this is possible, please send an email to piracy@symantec.com and let us know which product you purchased, your activation/product key, and how and where you bought the product. Any contact information you provide will be kept confidential.

If you would like to purchase a new copy of the product, click here.

Thanks a bundle, Suck-antic.

The recommendations on a different part of the website, when you try downloading the update that you apparently need and it fails (which you only find out about thanks to talking to someone who actually gives a damn about their customers — ie, your local retailer, not Some-anal-tic — who tells you other folks have had the same problem and point you in the right direction) tell you to run LiveUpdate a few times and hope. But by this time the product’s decided to disable itself, lest the filthy hands of a copyright violator dare attempt to caress the pale flesh of its heaving bosom, and hence refuses to give you any information on your subscription status, or let you do updates to half the program. The recommendations then tell you to do the usual “oh, remove it then reinstall it” dance, with the added bonus that you have to delete some hidden files by hand. Naturally, on a brand new laptop, this process takes half an hour, with the hard drive mostly idle.

Three hours later, and we’ve reinstalled. Trying to run LiveUpdate to get the bug fix patch does the download, then tells me I “chose” not to install “any of the 1 available update(s)”. (You know, “any of the 1” isn’t grammatical, whether you pluralise update or not, morons) Naturally, I did no such thing, but I have to reboot anyway. Upon rebooting, trying to get back into LiveUpdate results in “LU1840: Automatic LiveUpdate is already running in the background. Please wait for this LiveUpdate session to finish before running LiveUpdate again.” Trying the “LiveUpdate” icon in Control Panel just results in the same error. Randomly killing crap from Task Manager, otoh, works fine. Unfortunately, whatever option window lets me stop LiveUpdate from running automatically is disabled. Helpful.

And, of course, the piece of crap still doesn’t work.

Best part? After deciding the product key is unacceptable, calling me a pirate, and refusing to say anything more, when I tell it to “Activate Later”, its immediate thought is still to pop up a little window saying “You have chosen to skip activation. Successful activation should take less than a minute. Your product will not work until you activate it.”

Would I like to activate now? No, I’d like a refund and some anti-virus software from a company that’s not full of incompetent, customer-hating cretins.

Continuing my transition to Mac OS X as desktop of choice, I’ve been trying to get my email to work. Getting GPG working was happily easy — just a matter of downloading some stuff, and having AppleMail suddenly support signing email. It seems reasonable functional.

Harder is dealing with the couple of hundred megs of “personal” mail I’ve saved over the past decade or so, filed in a few thousand different mailboxes; and the stupid number of lists I’m subscribed to. Currently I’m using mutt, and a couple of different directories to manage it all: “inbox” is a Maildir for personal mail, “lists/” contains a different Maildir for each list I’m subscribed to, and “links/” contains a different Maildir for everyone I’ve corresponded with. When I hit “s” to save a message, it’ll look at the From: and choose a Maildir to save to; when I send a message to someone, it looks at the To: and copies the outgoing mail to the same directory. Which isn’t perfect, but is okay.

Doing the same with AppleMail would suck — while it at least uses mbox format for its storage, it surrounds it with a bunch of random cache files. So that seems to mean using a local IMAP server to manage my email. It’s been more of a struggle than I expected to get an IMAP server; fink doesn’t have any precompiled debs for Panther, and doesn’t have the server I wanted anyway (namely Courier IMAPD which supports Maildir format), and then that didn’t compile out of the box (gcc seems to think “extern struct foo bar; struct foo bar;” doesn’t define the structure, but is quite happy with “extern struct foo bar; struct foo bar = {0};“), and didn’t configure out of the box either (since PAM on Mac OS X is somewhat different to whatever it expected).

And then, once I’d gotten that far and started poking at my mail, I get a kernel panic. Lovely. Sending my first email resulted in a reasonable success, albeit with some bodgy word wrapping. At least there was too much word wrapping rather than too little. And at least it actually ended up as plain text!

So things are looking okay so far. Yet to try importing all my archived mail or deal with my mailing lists yet. Or setup the funky BSMTP stuff I use to get mail from there to here and back.

UPDATE 2004/11/09:

Erk, when you’re editing AppleMail wraps at the window size, which is 80 characters by default when you switch to the default fixed width font; but then switches to wrapping at 72 characters when you actually send the mail. And that’s a hard wrap if you’ve got an 80 character “word”, it gets broken after 72 characters. Eww. And it looks like it’s not something you can change at all. It’s also not something that only affects the text you type — it affects the entire message, including .sig and quoted text. Yay.

Following the brilliant weekend at Mt Buller last year, we went back again in August this year to see if history wouldn’t mind repeating; this time bringing along my step-borther and his kids. Happily, things turned out even better: similar amounts of snow, even nicer accommodation, and way better weather.

We tried rearranging our trip to get the most skiing time in: we flew to Melbourne in the afternoon, then drove to Bonnydoon, where we enjoyed a cold, but nevertheless tranquil, evening in little motel resort place. Next morning we headed on to the mountain and checked in — the aim was to get a full day skiing in when we arrived, but we only actually managed to get our skis and lift passes organised by a little after lunch. Oh well, worth a shot.

There were enough people at the mountain over the weekend that when we arrived on Sunday, we had to park on the side of the road rather than at one of the resort carparks; then we got one of the 4WD snow taxis to cart us and our luggage up the resort. We got dropped off behind the lodge, and it took a bit to actually work out where we were meant to be, so naturally a snowball fight developed.

When we eventually worked out where we were meant to be, one of the owners/staff of the lodge was showing us where our unit was and how to get back out onto the slopes, and helping with our luggage. As was the cute little girl you can see in the photo to the left, with Alisa Camplin, underneath the signed racing vest. There was another jersey signed by Zali Steggall and Jacqui Cooper. How goddamn classy is that?

Oh yes, this time there’s a movie too. It’s way cool! It’s also Quicktime only. Damn Apple!

* aj continues waiting impatiently for his ibook
* Rukh continues waiting impatiently for Bush to be booted out
<blender> rukh: a week to go
<aj> Rukh: true, i suppose i could be happy that my wait will be a lot shorter than others’
<Rukh> heheh
<Rukh> aj: so you’re getting your ibook in a lot less than one weeks time? :)

As it turns out, I did get my iBook in less than a week’s time — it arrived midday last Monday. We’ll refrain from reflecting too heavily on how much shorter a wait that was than Rukh’s continues to be…

Anyway, like I suggested, it looks like I’m going to stick with running MacOS X on it instead of just installing Debian (or Ubuntu) like I did on my last. The ability to reliably suspend and use the inbuilt modem and wireless aren’t things I’m willing to give up, and it’s nice to have the little extras like having Expose just work, being able to play with iTunes, iMovie, and Command & Conquer, having QuickTime work natively, and generally just having a desktop that doesn’t treat me like some genius hacker for which nothing is too hard, is a pleasant change too. Shark, Apple’s profiler, sounds pretty nice too, so hopefully there are more things to look forward to.

The real irritation switching from Debian to MacOS is the crazy complications involved in installing third party software. Apple’s software updates with an “updater”; Unixy software gets installed with fink, either by apt-get, or using the “fink” tool, or the “darwin ports” system. Third party software gets installed by downloading a disk image, opening whatever the vendor wants — the installer for my printer driver from HP insisted on closing all my open programs, including my terminals, eg. Nice. I’ve had to google and separately install, hrm, Camino, Blapp, GnuPG, GPGKeys, GPG-AppleMail, SubEthaEdit, RealPlayer, X11, XCode, and my aforementioned printer driver. And so far I still haven’t gotten to the point where I can collect my mail or code comfortably.

On the upside, I’ve got something like 4GB of freshly ripped music, and made up a fun little ski movie.

But I hate to think of the security implications; there are just too many different sources of software that can all have problems, and for which I’m never going to hear about updates. Oh well; here’s to defense in depth.

But hey, if you ignore that detail, what you get is pretty cool. The slot loading DVD/CDRW drive is much snazzier than trays, and the hardware is generally really nice — even the keyboard is quite a step up from my previous iBook. Specs are heaps better (11Mbps to 54Mbps, 20GB to 80GB, 128MB to 256MB, 500MHz G3 to 1.2GHz G4, USB1 to USB2), and the software’s pretty pleasant overall. I’m not even sure I’m bothered by the lack of focus-follows-mouse.

I was amused when Steve Langasek invoked the Powerpuff Girls in response to the US election, with a beautifully crafted reference to episode 1.10. But my amusement soon turned to something deeper when David found this rather profound analysis via OpinionJournal’s Best of the Web:

Mojo Jojo speaks English with a Japanese accent. He has a bad habit of repeating, reiterating, and re-phrasing the same sentences over and over, continuously. He gets this speech pattern from a humorous interpretation of dialogue that is dubbed, probably from Japanese into English. It takes a longer time to say certain things in Japanese than in English. When dubbing, one wants to keep the English speaker’s mouth moving for as long as the Japanese actor’s mouth is moving. This can most easily be done by repeating phrases, again and again, and again. Thus a character in a Japanese movie seems to be repeating himself when listened to by English-speaking audiences.

David adds:

Personally, I think the comparison is a little weak but, hey, the Bush twins may be a functional substitute for the Powerpuff Girls…

Now, two datapoints might just be a coincidence, but three certainly means something. In confusing times like these, I think there’s something we could all learn from the Powerpuff girls cast list.

The Mayor, the bumbling, incoherent fool that he is, and President Bush are clearly a perfect match. We can add in the Bush twins as party girls Bubbles and Buttercup, and perhaps draft Mary Cheney as Blossom. Ms Sara Bellum, red headed temptress and power behind the throne, is probably best played by the always delightful Condi Rice — although clearly some effort will be needed in makeup. Dick Cheney, with his fingers in everything, but seemingly never actually present in person is certainly the Narrator. And Professor Utonium, the inventive genius ultimately, but rarely directly, responsible for all the heroics is equally clearly the nom de guerre of the amazing strategist Karl Rove. Rounding out the team, ex-teacher and First Lady, Laura Bush seems a natural fit for Pokey Oakes Kindergarten’s overachieving Miss Keane, at least in her younger days.

That takes care of most of the good guys, but what of the rest of the cast? The eerie parallels between Mojo Jojo, the villain notable for his complicated plans and his inability to speak clearly and simply, and Senator Kerry have already been made plain, but there’s a large supporting cast of evil to be accounted for too. The far scarier Him, who manages to be simultaneously almost all powerful, yet also unable to have any influence except through convincing others to harm themselves, could be Osama’s twin. Fitting Michael Moore into the role of Fuzzy Lumkins and having Hillary Clinton play Sedusa are fairly plausible casting decisions, though the part of obnoxious rich girl Princess Morebucks might well be a toss up between any number of wealthy Hollywood actresses.

So these days you can’t even get away from politics on Cartoon Network. Who’d’ve thought? And the sheer bias in their portrayals of the parties is astounding — the ABC has nothing on these guys’ bias!

Finally, Best of the Web asks: “But does he have a plan?” Does he ever! Take this review in Monkey See, Doggy Two, for example:

Mojo: Now, pay attention! I then commanded the dogs to steal! (The dogs scatter; we see the three attack dogs dumping their plunder onto the floor.) Which they did. Very well, I might add.

Mojo: This plan ROCKED!

(On TV, the beam is fired from the telescope, engulfing the world.)

Mojo: Check it out. This plan was so big, it was affecting the whole world! (The French lovers are hit.) Paris! (The Eskimo is next.) Eskimo-land! (The Japanese man gets it.) Japan!

That’s right — it’s even a global plan, and I doubt the reference to Paris was accidental. What’s the bet Mojo got that marvellous skull cap of his from Cambodia?

Another note for future reference on the Iraq situation. Today’s big ABC news story is Commit troops or delay Iraq election, Govt warned:

The Federal Government is being warned against promoting a January election in Iraq unless it is willing to commit more troops.

Australian National University Professor William Maley, who has just returned from overseeing the election in Afghanistan, says an Iraqi poll early next year could lead to a “bloodbath”.

“One shouldn’t underestimate the risk of that,” he said.

Indeed. One shouldn’t overestimate it either, though. Here’s his recommendation:

Professor Maley says Governments, including Australia’s, should step back from the current plan and delay the election by some months.

For comparison, here’s a SMH article Prof Maley penned in July, mainly focussed on Iraq:

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the situation is equally dire. Presidential elections are due on October 9, but forces to provide the security which Afghan voters desperately need are thin on the ground.

[…]

Australia pulled its troops from Afghanistan some time ago, and shows no sign of returning, even though the Afghan Government has requested ongoing support. In this respect, Australia’s priorities have slavishly mirrored those of the Bush Administration, which made the mistake of heading for Iraq well before the Afghanistan task was finished.

As analagous as that is, he actually offers a better rebuttal to his present concerns in the July column:

The immediate focus of these needs is the process of holding elections in Iraq, where the support of the UN is vital, and which is central to the plan for political transition to which the Howard Government is formally committed. Elections are notable for being complex to run, and easy to attack.

[…]

The need for contributions is becoming acute. On June 17, the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, said he was “very worried” at the security situation in Iraq, adding that circumstances did not permit a return of the UN. If this continues, the timetable for the holding of elections will inevitably slip, creating a combustible situation as Shiite groups, keen for elections to occur as soon as possible, react with frustration and anger.

One month allowing any slippage at all will create a “combustible situation”, a few months later not deliberately delaying the election for months “could lead to a bloodbath”. Isn’t that the logic of someone who doesn’t have any idea what they’re talking about, or at least isn’t thinking seriously about the topic?

Final note:

“If we’re not prepared actually to commit troops to the process of protecting the authorities, then we have only ourselves to blame if the election turns into a shambles,” Professor Maley said.

Somehow I suspect Prof Maley and the ABC won’t expect us to be so quick to blame ourselves if Iraq follows Afghanistan’s lead on elections.

Hrmph. Since my laptop keeps dying on the other post I’m trying to make, I might blog about James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds instead. Here’s a section from p187 about small group dynamics:

Talkativeness may seem like a curious thing to worry about, but in fact talkativeness has a major impact on the kinds of decisions small groups reach. If you talk a lot in a group, people will tend to think of you as influential almost by default. Talkative people are not necessarily well liked by other members of the group, but they are listened to. And talkativeness feeds on itself. Studies of group dynamics almost always show that the more someone talks, the more they are talked to by others in the group. So people at the center of the group tend to become more important over the course of a discussion.

This might be okay if people only spoke when they had expertise in a particular matter. And in may cases, if someone’s talking a lot, it’s a good sign that they have something valuable to add. But the truth is that there is no clear correlation between talkativeness and expertise. In fact, as the military-flier studies suggest, people who imagine themselves as leaders will often overestimate their own knowledge and project an air of confidence and expertise that is unjustified. And since, as political scientists Brock Blomberg and Joseph Harrington suggest, extremists tend to be more rigid and more convinced of their own rightness than moderates, discussion tends to pull groups away from the middle. Of course, sometimes truth lies at the extreme. And if the people who spoke first and most often were consistently the people with the best information or the keenest analysis, then polarization might not be much of a problem. But it is.

And unlike other recent contributions it’s a serious enough endeavour that it actually proposes solutions to the problems it identifies, and looks at the problems those solutions create.

Top book, highly recommended.

UPDATE 2004/10/27:

Wow. At least to me, those excerpted paragraphs read completely differently on the web versus on paper. The paper version seems calm, collected, and to be building up a point in a measured, albeit anecdotal, way. The web version feels staccato and amateurish. Amazing the differences texture, brightness and font can make.