unbounded

The Problem Is You

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +1200

I'm sitting here listening to the Sex Pistols' "Never Mind The Bollocks" written in 1977. They talk powerfully about the Berlin Wall and how England's dreaming.

At the same time I'm reading The Orstrayhun at http://theorstrahyun.blogspot.com/ and he's talking about the cage that's being constructed in downtown Sydney for the APEC conference where global leaders descend on downtown Sydney. There's a cage / fence being built throughout downtown Sydney as I type this. It's 5km long and reinforced with concrete barriers. Not pretty.

There was a good line in the movie version of The Handmaid's Tale about fences where Forest Whitaker asks "Are you trying to keep people out or keep people in?"

And IIIIIIIII wannnna baaaaaaaayyyyyy annnnaaaaarrrrrccchhaaayyyyyyyyyyyy!

Unbounded 5.0

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +1200

Welcome to the new unbounded! After 5 years and as many site servers, unbounded is now on SilverStripe.

The current site theme is ported from a theme I had used in Typo on Rails.

The prior unbounded.org was based on the Typo blogging system which itself is based on Ruby on Rails. I've now migrated from Rails to SilverStripe due to a number of technical issues I was having with Rails. Or maybe it was lighttpd. Or Akismet. In the end, it was hard for me tell really what was at fault and the end result was that unbounded was going down for days at a time. I'd spent a looong time configuring Rails/db/webserver/etc. because I so wanted to believe in Rails. It's a good framework, but I really don't want to spend the time to experiment with those kinds of things for my blog.

So now the next chapter -- SilverStripe. I'm up and running in lightning-fast time and my old content came across fine (minus the dates of the comments). Of course I'm biased but it really has been a lot easier to deal with SilverStripe than Rails/Typo.

Aliendustrial

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +1200

The new Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero won't be out until 17 April, but there are some songs available on the official MySpace page http://myspace.com/nin Trent has said that there aren't any radio-friendly songs on the album and from the few on the MySpace page, I'd agree. They have lots of dark other-worldly bleeps and blips and techno-moans and not a lot of melody. Sometimes Trent's voice is the melody, in his spoken-singing manner. Given the teaser trailer and the songs we can hear so far, I'd say that Trent's point is that the world is so messed up that all we can do is look to our alien visitors/overlords/friends to save us, or at least distract us from the garbage being dealt to and on us all. Trent's trying communicate with them on their terms. Aliendustrial.

It IS about the oil

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +1300

I happened to be watching (you may need to look for the title of the video: "Sec. of State Rice at Senate Foreign Relations Hearing on New Iraq Strategy") Condoleeza Rice's testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee and the senators were mostly slamming the Bush administration for lying and evading their queries. Even the Republican senators expressed their unhappiness with the Bush administration. Secretary of State Rice was towing the party line, as to be expected. But what was really interesting was how she handled the topic of the Iraq Oil Law. There was a senator from New Hampshire who asked about the distribution rights for Iraqi oil. He said that he had spoken to senior administration officials who should have been able to provide answers to his questions, but they could not tell him what the distribution portion of the law was about. The only time I saw Rice try to interrupt any senator during this difficult questioning of her was during these questions about the Iraqi Oil Law. She very clearly wanted to stop this line of questioning. Nobody knows for sure exactly what's in the Iraqi Oil Law, but we know some things about it. We know that in the Iraqi constitution (which the Americans "gave" to the Iraqis during Bremer's handover), there's a part that says the Oil Law must be ratified by end of 2006. Not done yet, but close, we're told. We also know that the gist of the Oil Law is to allow foreign investement and access rights to Iraqi oil fields. For 30 years. Her response to questions about distribution rights and the fact that nobody from the administration could give a straight answer to direct questions about the Irai Oil law? "I'll send you a response." Which is a very thinly veiled "I can't say that stuff in public, because, well, you know, so I'll have my people send your people an equally vague response." When you couple this stuff with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's written accounts of maps of Iraqi oil fields pored over in early 2001 by Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al., certain dots get connected that you really wish weren't.

D Programming Language

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +1200

D is the shit. The creator of the Zortech and Symantec C++ compilers has created the language called D. In many ways, this language is what I've been looking for: Speed, speed, and speed. Object orientation when I want it. Garbage collection when I want it. Pointers when I want them. The mind reels!

Check it out:

D language reference

Language shootout where D does pretty well

The drowning ship

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +1200

I've been reading From The Wilderness for years. FTW has always been a voice of reason, speaking out when others were (are) too fearful. I applaud Michael’s decision to leave America and I can empathize with him. I wish him the best of luck and hope he finds what he’s looking for in Venezuela.

Michael Ruppert leaves America

Information location

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +1200

Where do you put stuff? There are different places we put different kinds of information. But if you can't find a place for it, does it get lost? Like if you're holding a jar of pickles and you can't find a place for it on the shelf then you drop it on the floor and forget about it.

Except it's a lot easier to drop information than pickles. Or at least it's less messy.

But we're not supposed to remember everything, right? That's why there's a difference between short and long term memory. So why does Google exist? I think it's because they provide breadth. The problem and really cool part is the depth.

Where do you put stuff? Maybe you put some things where others can see them. That's del.icio.us and livejournal and blogging in general. But what if you want something a little more permanent and definitive and findable, but not in the archival-searchable-Google-WaybackMachine sense?

Is there anything TextMate can't do?

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +1200

Just testing posting to my blog from within TextMate .

Roman DaVinci

Sun, 28 May 2006 00:00:00 +1200

I recently saw The Da Vinci Code and there are 2 points.

1: Tom Hanks is just wrong as the lead for this film. He’s not engaged. The word “plodding” comes to mind.

2. The subject matter is extremely cool, but as a movie it tried to do too much and you don’t have a chance to absorb the ideas being presented. Actually, I think that’s the point. There’s a lot of money to be made by turning the book into a film. DO NOT THINK about any of this. Just watch the film and enjoy the fast pace with Tom Hanks and that chick from Amelie and hey isn’t this a lot like Mission Impossible X but hey whatever I’m thirsty. Let’s get a beer.

Tonight I watched a 1965 Roman Polanski film called Repulsion that freaked me the fuck out. This is a scary movie that puts you in the mind of the psycho who imagines people attacking her. No joke.

So there’s a movie that talks about the biggest questions known to man that’s crap and there’s a movie that talks about common fears that’s strangely enjoyable.

Cute kittens and puppies

Mon, 08 May 2006 00:00:00 +1200

I don't really talk much about 9/11 on this site because, well, it's too big a topic quite frankly. One attempt by me is really a small drop in a bucket.

Here's the firehose:

9/11 Loose Change

Information Subjugation

Sat, 06 May 2006 00:00:00 +1200

Information is not subjugated to me. It does not bow down to my knees. I wish it did. Instead, I am worshipping at its knees.

Money, like software, only has value in that people believe it’s worth something. There’s no intrinsic value in either.

Sofware is created to create work for other people.

6 different lists of things to keep track of.

The Marxist Brothers

Thu, 04 May 2006 00:00:00 +1200

I just got the new NOFX cd, Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing and it’s got killer lyrics and signature NOFX sound. There’s one particular song called “The Marxist Brothers” that goes:

We meet in underground parking lots
And late night in coffee shops
With voices low unless we’re drunk
We’ve got hats and cupped sunglasses
We question all that is wrong
We discuss conspiracy
Are we enemies of the state?
Or idealist bourgeoisie?

I'll get this one, put it on my card
I get frequent flyer mileage
And a booklet of upgrades
So next time I visit the third world
I won’t have to fly second class
The people’s revolution is gonna be a podcast

We took the bus to the anarchist book fair
I left the hybrid at home
I scored an extremely rare signed copy of the communist manifesto
We protested the G8, got maced by female police
In hot black uniforms and boots
I got one’s e-mail address

Still I’m waiting to see if my bid on eBay was enough
To get “Today’s Empires Are Tomorrow’s Ashes” on soviet red vinyl
It’s going on the wall next to “Tubthumper” and “The Battle Of Los Angeles”

These guys live (and write) in San Francisco. I can see lots of San Franciscans who fit the description of the person described in this song. Hell, I was that person. Creepy.

Congrats, Wordpress!

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +1200

Matt from WordPress just announced that WordPress is taking on some VC funding. Normally I would say that’s a Bad Idea for a company like his, but in this case I think it makes sense. He still wants to grow the company organically but now they don’t have to worry as much about keeping servers running and they can hire a bit. Good job, Matt, and I hope you can continue to grow WordPress the way you want to.

Bluebird, Artichoke, MKULTRA

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +1200

The Manchurian Candidate is a film about things that really happened. The American government deliberately brainwashed people for decades. The CIA had programs for this called Bluebird, then Artichoke, then MKULTRA. One fascinating aspect of this is the limited hangout that’s going on with the film. The film came out in 1962 and is so “out there” that most people would think “It’s just a Hollywood film” and be done with it. The benefit to the government is that if anyone ever says “Hey, the Manchurian Candidate is real!” then people who’ve seen the movie say, “That’s just a Hollywood thing. Pure fiction.”

More like pure public relations genius.

Rigorous Intuition has some very good information about Sirhan Sirhan and the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

What I find really interesting about all of this is the timing. These programs got started in the early 1950’s or maybe even the late 1940’s when you consider the planning that had to be done to make the programs “live” sometime in the 1950’s. Wait a second, the CIA has a name, budget, and program for all of this. It’s called Operation Paperclip and the timing of this effort is awfully coincidental considering when the CIA started doing mind control experiments on Americans for the purpose of assassination.

There’s a reason why the USA was sponsoring acid research in the 1950’s and 60’s.

If these things were done 40 or 50 years ago , what’s happening now?

Update: There are 11 boxes of unclassified MKULTRA documents sitting somewhere in Washington D.C.

Colour inside the lines

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +1300

In the late 1960’s the Black Panthers
created a colouring book.
Well, not really, but that’s what the FBI would have you believe. Just so you don’t think I’m making this up, here are some more links:

The Black Panther Coloring Book

Fake Letters and Bad Poetry: Highlights from the FBI’s Secret War on Dissent

And here’s a choice quote from COINTELPRO—Black Nationalist Hate Groups

“Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego. Although no specific counterintelligence action can be credited with contributing to this over-all situation, it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this program. In view of the recent killing of SYLVESTER BELL, a new cartoon is being considered in the hopes that it will assist in the continuance of the rift between BPP and US.” —Fragment of FBI Memorandum, Aug. 20, 1969

Why should we care about some cartoons that are created to stir up controversy? Am I assuming that the current brouhaha
was created and didn’t just happen randomly? According to the Guardian, the Danish newspaper that ran the Mohammed cartoons refused to run cartoons lampooning Jesus.

Ok, so maybe it wasn’t random. Why would anybody do this purposely?

The Clash of Civilizations

When I saw Paul Wolfowitz
speak in San Francisco, he was practically drooling over making Brzenski’s The Grand Chessboard
come to life. These neocons have been literally planning world domination for a long time. It’s no coincidence that Wolfowitz is now head of the World Bank, which is directly responsible for the oppression of hundreds of millions of people globally through egregious and debilitating loans to poor countries which are thinly veiled payoffs to friends who provide things like privatised water to nations.

The Clash of Civilizations is a theme. It’s a book written by a neocon. It’s a technique used by the media to manipulate. and hey, it’s a goddamned TERM YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO GET USED TO, so you know, just accept it. Because there are no more real enemies now. That’s why they have to be invented.

Back to cartoons. Why? Several reasons:

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

It’s one of many mechanisms used worldwide to get Muslims and Christians to hate each other. How much of this crap has been happening in the past year? In France? In Australia? And these new cartoons which are causing so much unrest were from Denmark? 6 months ago?

It’s easy to hide behind cartoons. Matt Groening of the Simpsons does this to good effect by getting his ideas out there in the world via the cartoon. He actually said as much in an interview once. If some entity wanted to capitalise on a cartoon that existed out there, it would be quite easy to point the finger at the cartoon and say “See! They hate you! They’re making fun of you, and worse, your god!”

There’s a quote from a Dead Milkmen song:

You’ve got a Methodist coloring book and you color really well,
But don’t color outside the lines or god will send you to hell.

Indeed.

Firefox beats IE

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +1300

In 1995 or so I interviewed for a job at Netscape. At that time, they were going through a big growth stage and had recently grown to 200 people. They had just leased their second building in Mountain View and there was a lot of excitement in the air at Netscape HQ. At the time Netscape had something like 80% market share for web browsers. Microsoft had yet to “discover” the web and so IE wasn’t really on anybody’s radar. Except for employees of Netscape, that is.

During my interviews (I didn’t get the job), I could sense the excitement in the air, but there was also a sense of fear of Microsoft. Maybe fear isn’t the right word. Maybe “abject terror” is more accurate. They knew where the real competition was going to be coming from. And they were right because they knew that whatever Microsoft would produce would not be technically superior, but that Microsoft would put their massive marketing machine behind whatever browser Microsoft produced.

So it’s January 29, 2006 and I’m glancing at my blog traffic statistics for the month of January. And I see Internet Explorer in the #2 position at 33.5%. Firefox is on top with 33.9%. The last time I remember Internet Explorer not being the most popular browser was in, what, 1997?

It’s nice to see the spirit of Netscape, and maybe some code, live on in Firefox. Here’s to not giving up on your dreams.

:-)

Test-driven goodness

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +1300

In migrating an old app I have from Java to Rails I decided to fully dive in to the Rails Way. As part of that I’m doing Test Driven Development and writing test cases before I write code. A side effect of this which is really good (if slightly embarrassing) is that because of the way Rails wants to work and my CRUD tests, I’m shining a spotlight on my piss-poor database design from a few years ago.

So, after swallowing hard, I decided to refactor the database design. As it turns out, it was a lot less painful than I had imagined. And in the end, I have a nice, clean database model that plays nice with Rails and can be tested very easily with Rails’ fixtures and unit tests.

Nice. And by “nice” I mean “Christ, it’s so easy to code these really cool tests that will shrink the dark cloud of regression testing that hangs over my head because I don’t do them as much as I should but now it’s easy to do what I know will give me less pain when I add whacked-out features that by all rights should reduce my whole code base into a quivering puddle of goo.”

Monaco font in a better terminal

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Here’s a quick tip on how to get any Mac font into GLTerm. GLTerm is a lightning-fast terminal for the Mac that is heaps better than Apple’s Terminal program. Why is it better? It used 3D acceleration to render the fonts. To render the fonts, they must be in .bdf format.

GLTerm comes with a few fonts, but I’m partial to Monaco which is the default in Apple’s Terminal. So, to get Monaco in GLTerm we first need to convert it to .bdf format:

open font book, highlight the Monaco font, then choose File/Export Fonts…

download & install the Mac package Fondu

run “fondu Monaco.dfont” from the dir where you exported Monaco in the first step

copy the resulting .bdf’s to /Applications/GLTerm.app/Contents/fonts

Monaco should now be available in GLTerm’s preferences

Life’s too short for a slow Terminal application.

UPDATE: If you display a text file through cat, less, emacs, etc., any hyperlinks will be underlined, colored differently, and clickable. If you click on the link (mouse cursor will not change, though) your system-default browser will display the page. Very nice! And I don’t know of a way to do this in Apple’s Terminal so there’s another reason to bail on Terminal.

ADD scam

Sun, 11 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +1300

My blog subtitle rotator alters amongst various Attention Deficit Disorder-related statements, all of which reflect my opinion that ADD is a scam perpetrated by Big Pharma and the American Psychiatric community.

There’s an excellent well-documented history of where these drugs come from. What I find chilling is the DSM (the bible of the psychiatric community which describes all the um, conditions) or rather how the DSM gets updated with new entries. Stories of conditions pulled out of thin air while on fishing trips (“self-defeating personality disorder”), the utter lack of any scientific endeavour to determine what goes into DSM, how the DSM is applied, consulted, revered, caressed, etc. Well, maybe not caressed. At least I hope not. From the article:

The DSM is the only way that ADD is diagnosed. Here’s how it’s done. In the DSM, ADD has nine symptoms listed under it. If a child has any six of them, in the opinion of the doctor (or the teacher!) that child may be diagnosed as having ADD. That’s it! Funny thing is, it seems like most of these entries on the list are not symptoms of a mental disorder, but just symptoms of being a kid:

Often fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in seat

Often leaves seat in classroom or in other situations in which remaining seated is expected

Often runs about or climbs excessively in situations in which it its inappropriate

Often has difficulty playing or engaging in leisure activities quietly

Is often on the go or often acts as if driven by a motor

Often talks excessively

Often blurts out answers before questions have been completed

Often has difficulty awaiting turn

Often interrupts or intrudes on others

Sound like anyone you’ve ever known? Some may ask if there are any kids who would not fit six of these criteria. The reader should understand that this is the only “diagnostic” “testing” that exists for determining ADD. Six out of nine. No lab test, no blood tests, no physical examination whatsoever, no standardized batteries of written or verbal psychological testing. Just these nine. And unlike any other disease in history, the diagnosis may be made by anyone in authority, with no medical credentials or training whatsoever: the school nurse, school counselor, a teacher, the principal, a coach.

The DSM is used as a guide by the pharmaceutical companies with agreement from the Psychiatric community to create drugs for made-up conditions. There is so much corruption involved around the DSM and ADD and related conditions you could easily devote an entire website to it.

I’m getting all tense just thinking about this. Now, where’s my Soma™?

Drinking Rails Kool-Aid

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Not only have I been drinking the Rails Kool-Aid lately, I’ve been buying boxes of the little packets and throwing them at passers-by as I yell “Java ate my CPU!” while I tear open 3 packets at a time and coat my mouth in powdery Rails goodness. Sure the kids get scared, but the moms and dads understand. I think.

You learn something new but it doesn’t sink in until you put that knowledge to good use, right? A combination of factors led me to start looking at setting up a wiki using Rails.

MediaWiki does not use Textile markup for adding and editing content. I started using Textile for my Typo-powered blog and I like it a lot. I spent a good amount of time trying to plug Textile into MediaWiki with no luck. The content parsing in MediaWiki is tied very closely to other aspects of MediaWiki so it’s a bit tricky to isolate the parsing enough to plug in Textile. In the end, one markup for blog, and a different markup for wiki. Ugh.

I recently learned MediaWiki is busy doing a lot of PHP object processing to accomplish anything. There’s a lot of work going on to pull off all the MediaWiki functionality which derives from Wikipedia. In a corporate environment it might be worth the hassle, but this wiki is just for personal use and for playing with the technology. I have my own bias against using objects in PHP. My experiences have been that object orientation in PHP 5 is still buggy and bloated. Why? Was C++ this buggy and slow when it first came out? Dunno. At any rate, I was seeing (and now that I think about it have always seen) crappy performance in MediaWiki. Tell me again why my wiki is slow? And why should I have to deal with it?

Pain getting MediaWiki and Postgres working together. This should be getting better soon, but as of now it’s a bit twiddly to get it going.

I stumbled across Instiki and saw that it’s a wiki built on top of Rails. And, it was made by the creator of Rails. After installing it, I noticed that all of the above issues with MediaWiki disappeared. Instiki can use Textile, is speedy, plays nicely with PostgreSQL, and is a first-class Rails application as well. Which means that the little bit I’ve learned so far about my blog software Typo can be applied to the wiki software, too. That’s a big plus for maintaining the software & adding new features.

Now my blog and internal wiki are both Rails applications. The only problem with eating powdered Kool-Aid is that it stains clothing really bad. But that can be solved easily with cherry and lime-coloured clothing.

Here’s proof of more Kool-Aid drinkers from Tim O’Reilly’s blog. He talks about various computer language book sales and notes spikes in sales due to various reasons. Ruby book sales are the fastest rising, while Java book sales are declining, year on year. Good indications of trends, I think. There’s also an interesting discussion in the comments on the same page about people moving to (or away from) various languages. One interesting comment was from an author of a book on Struts who said “RoR is the most productive MVC architecture out there.”

I remember when Java came out and there was a lot of the same breathless excitement about what a great language it is (“everything’s an object,” “speed sucks but will improve,” “more expressive than C++”, etc.) I agreed with the Java hype then, and I agree with the Ruby hype now.

_{Commie Kool-Aid from FoolKiller}

MediaWiki and Postgres

Sun, 04 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +1300

With the recent Oracle purchase of InnoDB I’ve been looking more seriously at PostgreSQL. I’ve also been itching to get a wiki up and running for a household to-do list thing and in general, just to have a play wiki area to get ideas down and try new techie things.

In the past, I’ve set up MediaWiki at work and it was very useful as a project sandbox for us and our clients. Only problem (if you look at it that way) is that the released software only runs on MySQL. Recently though, Postgres support has been added. Currently in a pre-alpha stage we now have Wikipgedia.

Installing this bad boy has been somewhat challenging, for several reasons. For one, I went down some dead-end alleys trying to get things working. Specifically, I’m running Postgres 8.1 on Debian but I noticed my libpq was at 8.0.4. I was having some general PHP-Postgres connectivity problems at one point so I thought I needed to rebuild libpq from 8.1 source. In the end, I think this was completely unnecessary, but hopefully not destructive.

Following are a couple notes about how I got things working in the hopes that it may help someone avoid a bit of aggravation.

Read this: How To Install Wikipgedia. It’s a good general overview of what needs to be done.
I had to change the default schema from ‘mediawiki’ to ‘public’ in $wgDBschema in DefaultSettings.php before running the PHP portion of the install process. I’m not sure if this is really necessary, but it helped me get closer to a working solution.
And here’s the bit where I really got stuck: After installation, whenever I tried to save or search, I would get “could not find tsearch config by locale”. After reading as much doc as I could find, here’s what worked for me. Go into a postgres shell and say:

prompt# show_all; --- look for the lc_ctype value. For me it was en_GB. Use value in the UPDATE below ---
prompt# UPDATE pg_ts_cfg set locale='en_GB' WHERE ts_name = 'default';

After that, everything worked. Now I have a working 1.6 pre-alpha MediaWiki talking to Postgres 8.1 on Debian. Things seem good so far; no problems that I can see. And my server is now MySQL-free. :-)

Goodbye, WordPress

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +1300

It’s been a fun couple of years, but it’s time to say goodbye to WordPress. Awhile ago I migrated from MovableType to WordPress but now I’ve just finished migrating to Typo. Why migrate? Several reasons:

Oracle bought InnoDB, one of the main engines driving MySQL. The future of InnoDB as a component of MySQL is unclear at best. About a year ago I started getting into PostgreSQL quite heavily and it’s so much more grown-up than MySQL it’s not even funny.

WordPress only works with MySQL. I’ve tried porting to PostgreSQL, but it looks like abstracting the DB layer away from WordPress is quite a big job. To my knowledge, nobody’s done it yet.

I’m getting tired of PHP. When you come from the Java world, PHP is a breath of fresh air. For awhile. Then PHP’s loosey-goosey nature starts biting you in the ass.

I wanted to play with Ruby on Rails. Typo is a blog system built with Ruby on Rails. And Typo runs quite happily on PostgreSQL.

I’ve been fortunate enough to meet the WordPress author and he’s a really great guy. I hope he continues to have tons of success with WordPress, but right now Typo’s got my attention.

In all, it took a couple days of work to migrate from WordPress to Typo and that included migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL. The migration bit wasn’t bad at all—the trickiest part was the .htaccess stuff to redirect from WP-stylee to Typo.

The theme for this blog is called Warfare and it’s from simpltry. I very much agree with the author of the theme about shaking up blog design conventions. Simply-styled blogs are quite popular now, so…

Hope you like.

Foo Fighters in Wellington

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Went to see the Foo Fighters show last night at the Events Centre here in Wellington. What an amazing show! The last rock show I saw that was this good was Van Halen in 1984. The Foos were having so much fun on stage and the audience was getting into it, too. It’s quite a sight to see the majority of 5000 people pogo’ing simultaneously. There were many times during the show where seemingly everyone on the floor was bouncing in time to the rhythm.

Early in the show somebody threw his pants on stage. “Fat-ass motherfucker size pants, too!” was the quote from Dave Grohl, I believe. Dave said that was the first time he’s ever had men’s pants thrown at him while he’s on stage.

The Foos played for almost 2 hours, including Dave’s run around the audience. There were several nice touches like that, like when he gave his beer to someone in the crowd or when he genuinely complimented the audience for knowing all the words to pretty much all the songs. At the time, I remember thinking of Spinal Tap on the Simpsons: “We thought they knew how to rock in Shelbyville!” But the Foos didn’t come across like that at all. Dave and band win Honest Rockers of the year award, easily.

The picture here is of the cool lasers which were at eye level for me. So if I develop cataracts, you’ll know why.

Bird Flu Hoax

Sat, 29 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +1300

There it is. I said it. Bird flu hoax. In recent years I’ve discovered that getting a flu shot is one of the worst things you can do for your immune system to be able to fight off the flu. It’s a scam by the manufacturers of the flu shots. This is a 200+ year old scam that originated with the smallpox vaccine.

So now we have this big scary bird flu thing running around and killing millions and causing panic and WHO WILL SAVE THE CHILDREN?! Hold on a sec. If you break it down as Dr. Mercola did you’ll see pretty easily that this is another scam, involving the same fuckers who got rich off of Aspartame. Not to mention that people who actually have expertise in the field of microbiology have been dropping like flies. Hmmm.

Who will save the children? More like “What will save the children?” And I think the answer to that question is: knowledge.

Public Google Sucks, Part 2

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +1200

I keep stumbling across reasons why Public Google Sucks. According to this article, Google has hired “A former Senior Associate at the Carlyle Group” by the name of Dan Senor. You remember the Carlyle Group right? If not, here it is in a nutshell: A group of former government officials and private industry heavyweights who invest money in companies based on their inside knowledge of government and industry, um, plans.

Try a Google search for “carlyle group” wtc to see what I’m talking about. Wonder how long it takes before Google filters queries like that because, well, you know. I mean, anyone who advises Paul Bremer must know a thing or two about communication and the control of it.

Prime Minister Without Paranoid Sycophants

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +1200

I was in Auckland last weekend and stumbled on the VJ parade which ran down Queen Street. Pretty cool to see all the various New Zealand military types walking down the street. Much respect was shown to war veterans. Lots of applause when the veterans walked by. There were several military marching bands, including one made up entirely of Scots playing bagpipes. Dunno if they were military considering they were in full kilt dress. But they were in the VJ parade, so who knows? Side note: I think we’re supposed to say “VJ Day” instead of “Victory over Japan” day, even though that’s what VJ stands for. The scourge that is PC-ism strikes again.

At the end of the parade was Prime Minister Helen Clark. I liked how she was just walking along with the rest of the parade, not any big deal. She had 2 security guys with her. Two. Not two hundred snipers, but two guys walking with her down the street. And I was about 4 meters away from her at the closest point. Of course, I wasn’t thinking enough to take pictures.

No PM-obile where the Prime Minister rides around in a bulletproof glass bubble. No snipers on surrounding rooftops (unless they were showing true Kiwi ingenuity and were well-hidden). Not a big deal to have the Prime Minister walking down the street in a parade.

Sweet as.

iPod mixer

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +1200

This thing rocks. A dual iPod mixer for DJs. Looks like it will be way cool, but how does it sound when you’re “scratching” the song? Does it sound like moving an album across a needle, back and forth? If not, why not? And if so, that’s pretty sick.

Feet on the air, head on the ground

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +1200

Where is my mind? July 4th is coming soon. Growing up in America, this is the celebration of the day of Independence. When I was in the 6th grade, I lost out on a spelling bee because I spelled “independence” as “independents.”

So here I am in New Zealand reading blogs and American news items about the celebration of American independence. If I was in America right now, I think I’d be pissed off. About Iraq, Afghanistan, the fiat money system, PATRIOT Acts, destruction of the middle class, etc. Now I’m just curious about it all.

There’s nothing like having a nice dinner with a couple of Kiwis to remind you of Janet Jackson’s “What Have You Done For Me Lately?” when they describe how America and England have been telling NZ how and where to fight for 100 years, with NZ agreeing and losing many men, then to see the Axis of Good punish NZ for not towing the line with Iraq to really get a good taste of what it means to be independent.

Helen Clark is independent. She gave the Israelis a big “Fuck you” when they didn’t admit there were Israeli spies trying to steal New Zealand passports.

Independence is taking a moral stand and telling the Last Remaining Superpower&#153 that we don’t want to play their reindeer games.

Way out in the water, see it swimming.

Tiger kicks your ass on Safari

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +1200

Tiger, as a whole, rocks. No doubt about it. But ever since I upgraded, Safari has been not loading images. As in, it shows the question mark in a box where an image should be. A lot.

So now I’m using Camino and loving it. It’s Mozilla, specifically for the Mac. It’s super-fast and is much more Mac-like than Firefox. It renders very well, and in fact, renders better than Safari in that there are things Camino can render where Safari cannot. Like the Wordpress editing interface. Safari can’t render the html editor at all. Camino has no trouble.

I want to like Safari. It’s very pretty when it wants to show a page. But I have stuff to do. And I need a reliable browser. Camino fits the bill. For now.

Apple core

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +1200

Steve Jobs recently gave the commencement address at Stanford University. There are some good stories he told about life, Apple, and his perspective on doing what’s important to you. It’s funny how you can see a lot of the Apple philosophy come through in this one man’s speech. One nice tidbit:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything ? all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Well said.

Apple and Intel

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +1200

Apple announced today that they’ll be moving to Intel processors over the next 2 years. First up will be the consumer machines in 2006, then the “pro” machines like the Power Macs in 2007. The only reasoning I can understand is heat. The IBM-produced PowerPC gives off a lot of heat and is why the Powerbook G5 will never happen with PowerPC. Along with heat, there’s a scalability issue with the processor in general. Intel can scale better because of lower heat per Hz. But, Intel is CISC-based. vs. the RISC-based PowerPC. My assumption was that the Mac OS (BSD now) was better suited to a RISC processor. But evidently, Apple has been building OS X on CISC for 5 years now. Maybe Apple is thinking that even though CISC takes more CPU cycles the overall scalability will be there purely from a volume standpoint, meaning that Intel make a whole bunch more CPUs than IBM does and therefore has more brainpower dedicated to solving problems like heat and scalability.

It’s a trust issue, really. Do I trust that CISC is overall better for Apple than RISC? Considering what Steve Jobs achieved with NextStep (which became OS X) I have to place my bets on CISC if only to trust Steve Jobs. I, for one, welcome our new Intel overlords.

Update: Thanks to Matthew, I’ve been told that my CISC vs. RISC argument is obsolete. After a quick Google search, I stumbled on a really good article which goes into why CISC vs. RISC is no longer applicable. Essentially, the two methodologies have moved closer to each other and the separation is not nearly as definable as it was 10 years ago, when, um, I last thought about this issue. So maybe this Apple – Intel move makes more sense than I originally thought.

Public Google Sucks

Sun, 08 May 2005 00:00:00 +1200

Once Google went public, that was the end. They could no longer do what they wanted because they were now answerable to shareholders. From that point on, Google has been and will become more conservative. According to New Scientist, Google has filed a patent to make the news rankings more mainstream-friendly. Fucking brilliant.

I wonder if Sergey Brin and Larry Page are aware of Operation Mockingbird? From the link above:

Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham “believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice: the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA” (81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA deputy director as saying, “It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from” (82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by “refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictment was announced …for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica”.

That was over a decade ago. There is no reason to think that these activities have diminished in that time. In fact, quite the opposite is true as the mainstream media in America has very clearly become little more than the mouthpiece of the current administration.

So now, Google will be reinforcing mainstream media’s stranglehold on information flow in the States, and around the web. That should make Wall Street very happy.

UPDATE: There’s this article from the Guardian that mentions the issue of Google’s credibility as god of the internets. Zeus didn’t have to answer to a board. But if he did, I bet Kleiner Perkins would be on it.

Which thread to pull?

Sun, 08 May 2005 00:00:00 +1200

“If you want to destroy my sweater, pull this thread as I walk away.”—Weezer

Before the web became popular, secrets were a lot easier to hide. Now we have government scandals, lies, treasonous activities, and more available for dissemination thanks to the web. It’s tricky to determine reliable sources of information sometimes, but it’s tricky in meat-space sometimes, too. Rigorous Intuition has an article about keeping up with the deluge of decreasingly shocking information.

More and more it seems to make sense to hold on to just one thread if you want to destroy a sweater.

WTC 7 as a lynchpin

Sun, 08 May 2005 00:00:00 +1200

Allianz Group is one of the major insurance firms for the World Trade Center complex in New York City. They’re considering whether to pay out their share of the $3.5 billion USD insurance claim on the complex. But one shareholder has filed a shareholder proposal with Allianz saying that they should investigate insurance fraud, particluarly as it relates to the demolition of building WTC 7. That 47-story building was not hit by any plane, and yet it came straight down. Like in a professional demolition. From the article linked below:

In his proposal, shareholder John Leonard, a California native and a publisher of books on 9/11, pointed to reports that building WTC 7 apparently collapsed by demolition, and for no plausible reason related to the 9/11 attacks. Management replied that it relied on official US government reports which made no mention of such evidence.

PR Web has an article with all the details. If you’d like to see a video of the demolition of WTC 7, check out this page. For more general information about WTC 7, see WTC7.net.

Black or White Hat?

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +1200

I came across a really good site rescently called Zone-H. They claim they are not black nor white hat focused; they just report on the hacking, um, gestalt. The site is an excellent roundup of what’s going on with exploits, defacements, and general security issues across a wide variety of OS’s. They also have a Hall of Shame that ranks the number of website defacements by crew. I wonder how many members of the various crews listed think “Hey, I really want us to be listed higher, dammit! #23 sucks. I want to be in the top 5 at least.”

I do think sites like Zone-H serve a useful purpose. They have an interview with the author of nmap, Fyodor, in which he states:

I don’t agree that Nmap is used more by blackhats than white hats, although I have no statistics. In any case, I support full disclosure. Any tool of this nature is subject to use by people on all sides of the fence, and attempts to restrict distribution to only the “good guys” are futile. A huge number of systems administrators without the right connections would be deprived of a tool to help evaluate and secure their systems. Meanwhile, many of the ostensibly whitehat “security professionals” have alternate personas engaged in illicit network activity.

Well put. I agree that a tool like nmap should be out there, and should be open-source. To me, it’s like guns. Some people think that to clean up society, guns should be banned. Well guess who likes that the most? The criminals! Not to mention that gun bans are the trademark maneuvers of dictators (hey, gotta prevent the people from rising up against you!). It’s also like the legislation of morality. When a government starts getting into issues like gay marriage, it’s a Bad Thing. Legislation and morality just don’t mix. Governments really shouldn’t be in the business of forcing moral stances on people.

Hacking tools, guns, gay marriage. That’s right.

Vox Populi

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +1200

April 9, 2005 was the 2-year anniversary of the toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad. The story you won’t find in any American news media is about the protests across Iraq that took place. Thousands of people filled the square where Saddam’s statue came down 2 years ago, but of course, members of British royalty are on honeymoon.

Riverbend gives it to us straight:

BBC and EuroNews were busily covering the wedding between Prince Charles and the dreadful Camilla. CNN was showing the Pope’s funeral. No one bothered with the demonstrations in Baghdad, Mosul, Anbar and the south. There were hundreds of thousands of Shia screaming “No to America. No to terrorism. No to occupation. No to the devil. No to Israel.” The numbers were amazing and a little bit frightening too.

And here are the pictures.

Doesn’t look to me like foreign terrorists are the ones opposed to the occupation. Looks like lots and lots of everyday people pissed off about being occupied. The picture from 2003 shows just how stage-managed that event was. Compared to the picture from 2005, you get a sense for what it is Iraqis really want.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +1200

One thing I’ve noticed about life in Wellington is the transparency of existence here. It’s such a small community that you often run into co-workers or friends whilst running errands. People know each other through 1 or 2 degrees of separation here, not 4 or 5 or ? as in San Francsico. One effect this has is that it keeps you honest. Because there were so many people in SF you could pretty much re-invent a life in the same city if you wanted to. Randomness of social interaction was key, as well as that wonderful San Francisco attitude of live and let live.

But here in Wellington, there are much fewer people and the people who are here have banded together much more so than in SF. Maybe it’s to fight off the wind. Or to make sure New Zealand stays afloat. For whatever reason, kiwis are much more socially active and aware than what I’ve been accustomed to. I enjoy it and had hoped it would be like this before we left San Francisco.

With the advent of Google, we all are now building up our permanent records we were warned about in primary school. Maybe there’s a business model for Google: they charge to “forget” certain aspects of your life which would then become unindexed.

But maybe as a society we could all do with more transparency. Transparency in this sense leads to a more self-correcting system where issues are dealt with quickly and you know you can’t run away if you want to be devious or get away with something. Then again, wasn’t conditioned “goodness” one of the points behind A Clockwork Orange? I think in the case of Google, I really hope they live up to their promise of “Do no evil” or at least put some mechanisms in place such that they don’t become synonymous with “permanent record.” But if you want to be more transparent and be part of a society that rewards goodness, Wellington fits the bill.

Cell phones own chewing gum

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +1200

Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the creator of the PSP game Lumines, posts on his blog about some ways that society changes. In talking about how he believes instincts can change, he gives an example:

About five or six years ago in Japan, all of a sudden, chewing gum lost its popularity. The gum manufactures were wondering why, so they began taking surveys. One cause that they found was that cell phones were taking the place of chewing gum by monopolizing people’s mouths. So when people are bored at the station or wherever, they gradually have been using cell phones more and more and thus have cut back on their idle gum chewing.

His point is that technology can alter people’s instinctual habits. Fun to think about…

Political expression through t-shirts

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +1200

Maybe it’s the lazy person’s way to be political. Or maybe it’s just fun. But lately I’ve been getting into searching for really cool t-shirts. Sure, I’ve done the Cafepress thing with our own design but frankly, the quality of the imaging sucks because it’s just a heat-transfer thing as opposed to real silk screening. I’m always down for a good band t-shirt but even better are shirts that combine blood, Mickey Mouse, and politics. I ordered one today. Could not resist.

Then I remembered something I read on Rigorous Intuition earlier today:

In a July 2001 interview, Bob Dylan said “We are living in a science-fiction world where Disney and Disney’s science-fiction have won. This is the real world. Science-fiction has become the real world, whether we realize it or not.”

Hmmm. Did Walt Disney really win? Perhaps in American culture he did, considering how much of American culture is based on cheap fantasy. If he did win (in America), then his attitudes are at the core of how America is perceived and/or acts. Things start to seriously get interesting when you think about who the real terrorists are.

Pissing off China

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +1300

I saw two items today relating to how the United States is dealing with China and China’s plans to “take back” Taiwan. One of the sources, The Truth Seeker seems to have a lot of articles that you won’t see on mainstream news, at least in the U.S. They have an unnamed contributor for their “Voice of the White House” archive who is supposedly around the White House Press Corps, or a part of it perhaps. I would normally think that an anonymous poster to a website like this is unlikely to be truthful, but there have been enough instances in the past where he or she has written something that turned out to be true. At any rate, the article mentions that President Bush has been warned:

“He was told, again, not asked, that if he did not make a public statement to the effect that the United States believed that the problems between the two entities could be solved between them and wished to remain strictly neutral, they would retaliate against the US. In other worse, if Beijing decided to invade Taiwan, which they are now seriously planning, Bush would have to butt out and stay out. Their threat? Clever. If he keeps up his current nose-thumbing at Beijing, they will repeg their currency and dump all of their US treasury holdings on the market and never again buy any US paper.”

The other other item is from The Independent and talks about the official story of the U.S. position:

“The worry in Washington is that Taiwan will retaliate, perhaps by edging closer to formalising a de facto independence that already includes separate elections, its own constitution and diplomatic relations with some countries. This in turn could be the trigger for a Chinese military move, leading to a showdown between the US and Beijing.”

So we have the official story and the unofficial story, each of which is fucked, but for different reasons. Officially, the U.S. doesn’t want a country to be free and independent and have a constitution, because, you know, the U.S. didn’t force it on them and there might actually be consequences of such freedom, so it can’t be worthwhile. Secondly, if the threat from China is real, and if they do dump their treasury holdings, that will send a clear signal of PANIC! to the rest of the world who owns so much of the U.S. All those other countries dumping their dollars, and guess what? Nail in the coffin for the U.S. dollar.

If China does have serious plans to take Taiwan back, then what would the U.S. do? On one hand, the U.S. would want to defend her interests there, but China is no Afghanistan. Or Iraq. On the other hand, if the U.S. capitulates then Wall Street would see a Chinese takeover of Taiwan as a Very Bad Thing and send stocks tumbling of companies who have interests in Taiwan.

Good job, George. You’re now seeing the fruits of your arrogant labor.

Fire across the street

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Fire across the street tonight, in a building that has seen 3 fires in as many months. I think whomever has the insurance policy on the building (it’s been abandoned for some time) keeps setting the fires, and the insurance company says, “Nope. The fire wasn’t big enough.”

Old school conspiracy theories

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Suppose it’s 1934, and you live in Germany, and last year the Reichstag burned down. Would you think that the Nazis actually set the Reichstag on fire? Of course not. That would be a conspiracy theory, though I bet it wasn’t called that back then. But now we know that the Reichstag was set on fire in order to help Hitler usher in his own control of Germany.

Hamish MacEwan pointed to a Top Ten Conspiracy Theories of 2002 which was published on January 2, 2003. Everything from who actually had a hand in 9-11, to Peak Oil, to Caspian Sea oil pipelines, it’s all covered. But of the top 10 issues mentioned, exactly 0 are conspiracy theories; they are all real. Many people choose not to believe the veracity of these “conspiracy theories,” but then again, lots of people play Lotto. Wait a sec, that’s not fair to the Lotto people. But you get the point.

I wonder how many people would look at that article today and conclude that all 10 of the points mentioned are indeed true? How many people still believe the Reichstag fire was a Communist plot?

Wordpress upgrade

Sat, 05 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +1300

I’m in the middle of an upgrade to Wordpress 1.5 and I’m redoing the layout and theme of the blog, too. The old one was just too dark for my tastes. Things should be cleaned up in a day or so.

Updated: Basically done, and it was simpler than I thought it would be.

About-old

Sat, 05 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Life is all about stretching your perceptions. Figuring out where the limiting boundaries are, then breaking through them. This blog is about unbounded things I come across. Or bounded things. So that pretty much includes any possible thought or experience or object I perceive. Oh, and kumquats. Lots of information about kumquats.

The theme for this blog is based on Minima Plus and it’s running on Wordpress 1.5.

Wired magazine doesn’t print the “Drugs used to get this issue out” since they got bought by Conde Nast. I miss their list of substances used and probably abused during the course of publishing each issue. Here’s my own list of

Drugs used to get this blog out:

Screaming Turtle coffee
Bombay Sapphire and tonic
Advil
Any album by NOFX or Rancid
piracetam
Vitafit Excell IQ dietary supplements
an unhealthy fondness for Apple products

Good reason to call in sick

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Doom3 is coming to the Mac. According to the benchmarks, it should play ok on beefy Macs.

Back in the day, Doom with its 2-floppy installation (!) rocked my world. I think the resolution was 320x240 or something. Really horrible by today’s standards, but way back then in the mid-90’s it was a thing of beauty.

Can’t wait for this to be released. Then I’ll have the best excuse for calling in sick since Quake III came out.

Powerbook surgery

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Yesterday I performed Powerbook surgery. My hard drive died rather quickly and violently in my 15” Powerbook, so it was time to put in a new drive.

It wasn’t really that bad, because I followed these instructions which helped a lot. The only real problem was that after taking apart the machine and getting to the very last screw (of about 20) to remove, I stripped it. I was using these cheap philips screwdrivers when combined with the cheap philips screws used in the hard drive retaining bar, the end result was serious screw strippage. The solution? Like many other times in life, brute force was the answer. I managed to bend the retaining bar just enough so I didn’t have to take out the last screw. It’s a bit nerve-wracking applying that much force inside a Powerbook, but in the end, it all worked out and I have a shiny, fast, 7200 RPM drive to boot. ;-)

Terrorists try to disrupt elections in Vietnam

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +1300

There’s an article at Snopes about how “U.S. encouraged by Vietnam vote…” Said article was written in 1967 and eerily mirrors what the U.S. is saying now about the vote in Iraq. Kinda makes you think about the real purpose of these American efforts, doesn’t it? Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, WWII, etc. And those are the big ones. That doesn’t include thing like Panama, Iran-Contra, or the recent U.S.-driven coup in Haiti.

What's beyond comment spam?

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +1300

You know, I have to tip my hat to the spammers. These asshats started figuring out that comments were being locked down on blogs, so what’s next? Trackback! I got swarmed today with dozens of trackback spams. About the only thing I could do was disable trackbacks and pingbacks by executing the following SQL:

update wp_posts set ping_status = 'closed';

So how far away is this from just posting some plaintext as .html? Well, comments are still good, but no trackbacks/pingbacks seriously cuts into the power of blogs. Ouch.

The author of Wordpress, Matt, has some good comments about the issue.

Update: The Register has a good interview with a real-life blog comment spammer. He lives in England and makes 7 figures.

Stopping comment spam dead in its tracks

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Comments are now back on, and unmoderated. One technique to fight comment spam is to have the human user who wants to make a legitimate comment type a few characters that are easy for humans to read but hard for the bots that inject comment spam.

So here are instructions for installing Trencaspammers which has stopped my comment spam, at least for the time being. Very cool.

Hubbub

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Apple’s Mac mini is about to rock the living room, hard. This thing can be a firewall, router, digital music player, hell, a digital music server, and on and on. For $500 USD.

Right now, I’m using Apple’s Airport Express to be a digital music player, and I’m using an old iBook to be the server. Here’s a picture:

The Mac mini could replace both the ibook (huxley) and the airport express (in the pic it looks like an airport base station). Well, almost. The problem in this case is that there’s a reason why the media server and the player are in different rooms. I don’t want the big hard drive and the printer in the living room. And I need digital audio output from the media player to plug into the stereo, over a short distance—0.5 meters.

So, yes the new Mac mini rocks, but in this case, it doesn’t quite fit because the usage model is such that much of what this thing to do I want hidden. Hmmm. That’s an interesting side effect. In my case, I need the Airport Express which is working quite well. And I need an audio server which is just a cheap Mac with a big hard drive, which is what I’ve got now.

RSS growing at 1% a day

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Cool analysis of trends in the RSS world. RSS has made my information-gathering much more efficient than when browsing websites. In fact, I rarely use browser bookmarks now and I spend most of my web browsing time inside of NetNewsWire. This is a big shift and time saver for me because I used to feel lucky to hit each of the sites I read once a day. Now I can be much more selective and check more sites more often by dealing purely at a headline basis.

Burning Questions – The Official FeedBurner Weblog: RSS Market Share

January 10, 2005

RSS Market Share

There has been much discussion and lively debate in the blogosphere and other spheres of note lately regarding RSS traffic and aggregator market share. Since our job is to help publishers understand how their feed is being consumed in as accurate a way possible, we’ve decided to make our own understanding of traffic patterns and market share public. As with any micro-report like this, there will be much gnashing of teeth and waving of hands, and in the end, this is just as likely to confuse as many people as it helps. Transparency can only assist the discussion, however, so here we go.

...

Of the feeds that we currently manage, in aggregate, RSS circulation is growing by about 1% every weekday.

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +1300

Democracy in America officially died on January 6, 2005. That’s the day that serious questions about vote fraud were shut down in the Senate 74-1. That one who stood up to the stolen Bush election of 2004 was Barbara Boxer. Remember the scene in the movie Fahrenheit 911 that showed Al Gore presiding over the House procedure for recognising the electoral votes? Many House representatives brought objections, accurately noting the extreme voter fraud in Florida, only to have Al Gore dismiss their objections because there was no senator to agree with the objections.

Fast forward 4 years, and this time, there was official Senate objection to the authorisation of Ohio’s electoral votes. At that point, there was a little bit of talking, then the vote came down, 74-1 against agreeing to the objection. 74 senators said there was no fraud. One (woman) had the balls to stand up and say “Enough.”

And where was John Kerry? In Iraq. If I had voted for Kerry, I’d be triply pissed-off. First, he “lost.” Second, he conceded before all the votes were counted. And third, he’s not even interested enough to show his face and vote in the single biggest test of democracy since the civil war.

Why did so many senators vote against the objection? One reason is they are afraid that it might open up scrutiny to their own elections. And Tom DeLay had the gall to say that the “Democrat party” (a term of derision by not correctly saying “Democratic Party”) was crying wolf and “what would happen if there really was vote fraud in the future?” Hmmm. I’m not sure, Tom. Say, what did you have in mind?

From the Geto Boys’ song “Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta” (written in 1999):

And now, a word from the president!

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta

Gettin voted into the white house
Everything lookin good to the people of the world

But the mafia family is my boss

So every now and then I owe a favor gettin’ down

Like lettin’ a big drug shipment through

And send ’em to the poor community

So we can bust you know who

So voters of the world keep supportin’ me

And I promise to take you very far

Other leaders better not upset me

Or I’ll send a million troops to die at war

To all you republicans, that helped me win

I sincerely like to thank you

Cuz now I got the world swingin’ from my nuts

And damn it feels good to be a gangsta

Bulls on Parade

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +1300

AxisOfLogic has a good status page of the CounterInaugural Demonstration Permits. If you’ve seen Fahrenheit 9/11, you know that during the first inauguration, George W. Bush’s limousine was pelted with eggs. But this time around, friends of Bush are ponying up big bucks to have a ringside seat to the inauguration parade. I wonder if they’ll get pelted with eggs, too.

IPv6 and identity

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +1300

China is making news with their IPv6 network. What would the net-world be like with that much address space? Would NAT disappear? I don’t think NAT is going anywhere soon because of the halfway decent security it provides. In my view, what’s really cool about IPv6 is that it will allow for all electronic devices on the planet to be able to communicate with each other.

What if all electronic devices had a web client and a web server on board? Using various wireless technologies like Bluetooth for close-range devices and 802.11g for in-the-household devices, there’s no reason why every single electronic device on the planet couldn’t communicate with at least some other devices. And each electronic device would have its own unique IP address.

Look at the network interface MAC address. That’s unique, globally, and allows for all kinds of cool IP stuff to happen at higher layers of abstraction. But the uniqueness of the MAC address is the lynchpin. IPv6 allows for every conceivable physical thing to have a unique IP address. Once the “thing” has an identity, you can talk to it. You might not want to, but you can.

Update: Slashdot reports on Smart Car-to-Car Navigation Network in Japan which is a good example of how to get a bunch of devices to talk amongst themselves and provide benefit to humans.

IP and GDP

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +1300

What percentage of the non-food things you buy are made in China? 20%? 40%? 95%? I just started noticing that the vast majority of things I buy are made in China. The keyboard I’m typing on is made in the USA and I’m pleasantly surprised by that. U-S-A! Woo-hoo! Here’s to the last American company to actually make something. Apart from my keyboard, my computer, table, clothes, sofa, kitchen gear, all this stuff that I’ve bought recently, is made in China.

China is rapidly becoming (if they aren’t already) the global economic leader because they make stuff. Seriously. If you make stuff, you get to control all kinds of things. It’s only by inertia that America thinks it’s running the show. That shit’s gonna change real soon.

So why is China kicking so much global butt? My theory is this: lack of intellectual property laws. As far as I can tell, intellectual property laws don’t really exist, or at least are not enforced the way they are in, say, the United States. People in China are not so strung out over legally protecting what they’re creating. They’re too busy making stuff. I’ve always thought the last dying gasp of a company is when they try to survive off of patent litigation or other legal manoeuvres. It’s kind of like a car running on fumes at that point—surviving on the remnants of what was there.

From a high tech industry standpoint, China is really going to kick into high gear and dominate as they’ve
alredy indicated.

Hoppy New Beer!

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +1300

It’s a fresh, new 2005 in the southern hemisphere and another shot at New Year’s resolutions. Happy New Year to you, and don’t forget to give love.

Dedicated

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +1300

Why would somebody work for free for a large multi-national corporation and endure all manner of hardship? Well, if the corporation happens to be Apple, and if you believe strongly enough in what you’re doing, you just may end up with one of the best tech stories I’ve ever heard.

RIP P2P? MPAA et al.?

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +1300

According to Slashdot:

TorrentBits.org and SuprNova.org Go Dark: “Numerous people wrote in with similar stories: ‘Without providing a reason, both of these sites have shut down: SuprNova.org and TorrentBits.org.’ We mentioned a few days ago that the MPAA was going after Bittorrent sites.”

And there was this bit from The Register:

The BitTorrent P2P file-sharing system: “Detailed measurement study” which is a fairly detailed performance analysis of P2P.

Who would have thought that torrent sites would stay up this long? Certainly not me. But the question I have is this: If the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) can get two of the biggest torrent players to close up shop, what does that say about other organisations’ ability to shut other websites down? Isn’t this kind of like the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) suing college kids for hosting MP3 swap/ftp/download sites? So the bullies who own the big red balls used for dodgeball are beating up kids who want to play with newfangled what, jacks? Or better, GameBoys?

If the bullies were smart, they’d be cutting deals with the distributors of the content. This is how the software and illicit drug industries work. Both have users and dealers, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

So why the hell is the MPAA following in RIAA’s footsteps? Are they both too stupid and scared of losing their dodgeball profits that they’re missing out on the GameBoy profits? Yes.

The Register article mentioned above gives some indication about commercial viability of the torrent protocol and the practical capabilities and limitations of such. If the bullies were smart, they’d figure a way to distribute high quality content for a fee such that consumers would pay for it. In a sense, this is what Apple has done with iTunes. But why should the MPAA wait for some 3rd party to reap all the benefits of selling digitised content to consumers? Seems to me that he MPAA should be taking the lead in coordinating efforts among the studios to stay on top of this new torrent wave and ride it. So to speak.

Mark Pesce speaks up: “You should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you could have found a way to manage the disruptive change that’s already well underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording industry, chapter and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom.”

Indeed.

It won't happen here

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +1300

There’s a niggling question that’s been snapping my synapses for a few years now. Is America becoming a police state? I was raised, as an American, to believe in the amber waves of grain, the fruited plains, and an unlimited future based solely on my own ambition.

These ideas served me well for about 35 years. I believed these precepts down to the core of my being. And I believe that I was fortunate enough to take advantage of much of what America has to offer.

Now PATRIOT acts I and II have passed and most of Congress didn’t read them before voting to ratify them. The most diligent web sites are still digging through these bills to expose what’s hiding under the rocks because if they don’t, well, who will? Certainly not our representatives in government.

So today I come across an article by at U.S. Representative Ron Paul where he gives an insider’s view on the current police state in the United States of America. He sums up what I believe quite nicely.

There was a band called Consolidated that had an album called Friendly Fascism from about 13 years ago. This album basically said through industrial beats and intelligent lyrics that the new form of fascism was not the Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler type of fascism that our parents and grandparents knew. Today’s fascism is well-scrubbed, quite palatable, and available in bite-size-chunks. Slow and steady it seeps into American culture and politics such that it’s not even noticeable.

Like a frog in hot water, the slow erosion of constitutional rights due to the War on Drugs, 9/11, the War on Terror, the Real War on Afghanistan, and its sequel, the War on Iraq, and to complete the triptych, the War on Iran, and pretty much the War on Anything-To-Induce-Fear are all designed to keep people down and afraid and subservient.

One quote springs to mind, from the movie Network: “There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, ITT, AT&T, DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon.”

New Friendlyland

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +1300

Well, I’ve been in Wellington, New Zealand for a few weeks now and all I can say is Wow. There are a number of things that are really cool here, and a few not so cool. But just a few. So, in no particular order, here are the cool things about New Zealand:

Food is cheap and varied here. The grocery stores have an extremely wide variety of food and in some ways more varied than in the U.S. Like a dozen different kinds of feta cheese. And all kinds of German bread that Sibylle digs.

People are very friendly here. Many people will ask you how your day is going. And they expect a real response. Seriously.

People honk their horns only to say hi to each other. Only once have I seen someone honk their horn for another reason, and that was to legitimately warn someone that they were about to do something dangerous.

You can walk anywhere. Ok, this is something that’s particular to Wellington (and maybe a few other places, I dunno).

“Good on ya.” I like this phrase. It means “good job.” But it’s more like the person who says it wishes you to be smothered in good.

Culture of responsibility. It’s actually assumed here that you are an adult and can tie your shoes. Case in point: no personal injury lawsuits. The government (well, your taxes) pays for injuries and downtime from work. But the secret about the taxes is that they are not higher than in the U.S. when you consider the U.S. has state taxes and Social Security and …

GST, or Goods and Services Tax. It’s the sales tax of 12.5% that is added to everything, pretty much, so it’s effectively hidden from you. When you buy something, you pay the price on the tag, you walk out the door. Done.

No tipping unless you really mean it! If you pay for a $3 beer at a bar, you pay the bartender $3. After you finish your beer, you can get up and walk out. And they won’t chase you down the sidewalk for not tipping. When I just got off the boat in Tauranga we went to a bar that evening. The waiter came round, took our order, then came back a few minutes later with our drinks. I gave him $10 for our $9 order and said “That’s okay.” He came back a minute later with our $1 change.

San Francisco seems like it’s a long way away…

Bye-bye baby!

Thu, 07 Oct 2004 00:00:00 +1300

Unbounded is going on hiatus for a couple months. I’ll be back with plenty of thoughts and pictures for buzzing noise some time in late November or so. By then, I hope to have a fresh perspective on a number of things. Until then, comments will be moderated to avoid comment spam. If you’d like to be notified when we’re back live, send an email to unbrand at unbounded dot org and we’ll let you know. Don’t worry, we won’t use your email address for anything else.

They don't gotta burn the books, they just remove 'em

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 00:00:00 +1200

Book burning. The concept brings up images of Nazi Germany, McCarthyism, and for the more imaginative, the Salem witch trials. Of course, in 2004 America we don’t do those things. No. We’re friendlier and more enlightened than that. We don’t resort to mob rule and we certainly couldn’t be accused of burning books. That’s so, um, ah, primitive. Maybe that’s why the recent news item about Attorney General John Ashcroft ordering the removal of certain documents from libraries hasn’t caused much of a fuss.

From the original document: “The Department of Justice has asked the Superintendent of Documents to instruct depository libraries to destroy all copies of the materials listed below. Please withdraw these materials immediately and destroy them by any means to prevent disclosure of their contents.”

Here’s the interesting page:

So what are the nasty, mean books that need to be removed? They’re government documents relating to how to get your property back when the government seizes it. The federal government’s seizure of your property, including houses, cars, boats, etc. happens quite a bit in America. They also call it “property forfeiture.” Remember in Animal Farm when the pigs kept re-writing the rules that all the animals were to live by? After the rules were changed, the pigs denied that the rules were ever any different.

“No, you’ve never been able to retrieve your property after the government has seized it. Why, if you could, there would be rules about that process, right? And there are no such rules! Check your library! So you can see that you have no recourse. Next!”

Here’s a good discussion of the issue.

The lovers, the dreamers, and me

Sat, 26 Jun 2004 00:00:00 +1200

Just back from the San Francisco WordPress Meetup where Sibylle and I had a very good time with Matt, the author of WordPress. Jason was there as well, and we all discussed WordPress past, present, and future.

The biggest thing I walked away with is just how, um, nice Matt is. Not nice in a hold-the-door-open-for-you way, although I’m sure he would, but more of a I’m-genuinely-interested-in-what-you-have-to-say way. The only common thread I’ve found among people I admire is that they have this niceness about them. That’s really not a good enough word: nice. I don’t think english has the word I’m looking for. Hmmm. You could always say “cool.” That’s the word to use when you can’t think of a better one, right? Ok. Matt’s cool.

WarPorn II

Wed, 09 Jun 2004 00:00:00 +1200

This is an update to my prior WarPorn article. In today’s Washington Post, there’s an article that talks about direct White House interest in the events occurring at Abu Ghraib prison. The article mentions a Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, “an Army reservist who took control of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center on Sept. 17, 2003.” From the article:

The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by “White House staff,” according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post.

In a March 9 report on the abuse scandal, [Army investigator] Taguba listed Jordan as one of four military intelligence officers he suspected were “directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.” He also said Jordan had “failed to ensure that soldiers under his direct control were properly trained” in interrogation techniques and were aware of Geneva Conventions human rights protections for detainees.

So let’s see if we have this straight. The White House is directly requesting information about the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. And one of the people in charge of the abuses knew very well about the White House involvement. At best, this is sick. The White House has denied American involvement in torture and when the photos came out, claimed it was the work of “a few” who would be “dealt with.”

Maybe the President wasn’t getting enough porn from the Pentagon and wanted to go, you know, directly to the source? Cut out the middleman? The Bush family certainly has enough experience in such matters.

The Washington Monthly has a good discussion of the administration’s various memos and positions regarding torture.

ecto and Wordpress not happy

Sun, 23 May 2004 00:00:00 +1200

Trying to get ecto 1.1.5 to work with Wordpress 1.2. Still not getting any recent entries in ecto. Oy. I’ve got the API set to Movable Type and I’ve told ecto to only retrieve titles and summaries of articles. Hmmmm. You know what? It ain’t worth the hassle. Maybe ecto or xmlrpc.php will be better soon, but for now, time to edit inside the Wordpress interface, which isn’t bad really. The big thing I miss is syntax highlighting.

Migrated from Movable Type 2.661 to WordPress 1.2 rc1

Wed, 19 May 2004 00:00:00 +1200

Done! Mostly. Still a few rough edges like layout, and auto-pinging of various sites, but a painless process overall. Here are some very terse and messy notes in case anyone may find them interesting:

+ install mysql
+ 4.0.15
+ /usr/bin/mysqld_safe & (should be os user mysql when doing this from shell)
+ remove anonymous users
+ set root passwords via
shell> mysql -u root
mysql> UPDATE mysql.user SET Password = PASSWORD WHERE User = ‘root’;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
+ create database wordpress
+ table prefix for unbounded is ‘ub_’

+ move css (assumption is I’m using MT’s css straight, not WP’s css)
- move templates
– wp: index.php (mainindex.tmpl)
+ keep wp’s head
+ dereference my header.tmpl and paste in
+ translate main body with equiv wp fnality
+ dereference my rightcol.tmpl and paste in
– verify content of against what was in MT
+ move content using instructions http://carthik.net/wpdocs/importmt.html

+ If you need to re-import to pick up new content, no problem. Just run the import-mt.php again. It will skip articles that have already been brought over.
+ If you want to just pick up new comments/trackbacks, you'll need to first delete the article from within the new wordpress admin interface, then re-run the import-mt.php.

- redirection
PROBLEM—the above conflicts with the mod-rewrite stuff for nice URLs
SOLUTION—make sure old MT archive stuff resolves to a different URI. In my case, change Wordpress’s Permalink structure to point to unbounded.org/archive, while leaving old MT stuff at unbounded.org/archives
old: archives
new: archive
– note that you must get this naming right before you rebuild the MT archives or else you have to edit the mt – html redirect html files individually

Step 1: To create permanent article links that look like http://unbounded.org/archives/2004/05/16/goodbye-movable-type/
- go into wordpress admin interface, options/permalinks
- copy "/archives/year/monthnum/day/postname/" into the first text box labeled "Use the template tags above to create a virtual site structure:" 
- click "Update Permalink Structure" 
- copy the resulting text in the textbox below 
- click the "edit it through your template interface" 
- paste the text in the template interface for .htaccess
    - if it's not there, just create an empty file in the wp root directory
- click "update file" 
- done!

Step 2: 
Redirection instructions from WordPress    
+ add .htaccess

- for me, copy MT's blog/archives dir to wpblog
    - this will be the old MT stuff that redirects 301 to new stuff.

- finish templates
– wp: wp-comments.php (comment_listing.tmpl)
– wp: wp-comments-popup.php (comment_listing.tmpl ?)
- modify mt migration script to put i witness bits straight in proper place in db
- set up blog pings (see bookmars folder)
– must add functions

—ignore this pingback test: test

Goodbye, Movable Type

Sun, 16 May 2004 00:00:00 +1200

It’s been a fun couple of years, but it’s time to move on. Why?

The recent licensing announcement came out of nowhere and is overly restrictive. I, like many others, don’t mind paying for good software. I recently dropped $500 for a mail server (CommuniGate Pro) and I’m glad I did. Well, I thought I was spending that much, but Mandrakesoft charged my credit card $49,900 and I have no idea why the purchase was approved, but that’s another story.

MT 3.0 is not a major upgrade. It’s a bugfix, and in a bad one at that. In order to fix the rebuilding performance, which they sorely needed to do, they changed the behavior of MTEntries, the basic unit of functionality in their code. I don’t even want to think about the changes I’d have to make to my 3 blogs as a result of that one. Mena’s blog entry describes Six Apart’s stance on the new release.

The one major new feature, comment registration via TypeKey is a Bad Idea. This concept of centralized user registration across sites has been tried several times before. Firefly tried this with Passport. That failed. Microsoft bought the company and kept Passport. Microsoft is the only company on the planet who could possibly make Passport “work” and that’s only because they force it down people’s throats. You want to download a free set of utilities from Microsoft? Gotta log in to your Passport account. The reason why these efforts fail, and I’ve heard this from multiple site publishers, is that the publishers don’t want to give up that data. In a way, it’s proprietary to the site. How would site X, which has an implicit contract with its visitors to provide good service, trust a centralized login authority to provide quality service? Yes it’s a control issue. And a justified one at that.

When Six Apart announced several months ago that they were going to stick with Perl as the underlying language of MT, I looked the other way. Like when the teacher looks the other way when the normally good student pulls a prank. Or something. Anyway, in 2004, we have fast databases, fast OS’s, cheap memory and disk space. Of course, I’m generalizing to make a point, but that point is that Perl’s notions of conservation of resources at the expense of flexibility in the web application space just don’t apply anymore. PHP has rightly taken the web app world by storm. I held off on using it for a long time because I thought it was a toy. Well, I don’t think that anymore. Sure, you probably have to dig a bit more to get at things that are more on the surface with, say, Java, but damn, it’s easy as hell to create and modify things like blogging software if it’s written in PHP.

I had hoped Six Apart would pull a rabbit out of a hat and make their Perl-based system perform wonderful, mystical feats of bloggy goodness for MT 3.0. Instead, 3.0 gives us patches to address performance, overzealous licensing because they have employees now, and a pissed-off blog community who feels betrayed. By the way, I honestly do wish Six Apart success. But I’m pretty sure that once the money people came in, they took over and decided that they knew best how to price Movable Type. I hope this past weekend’s storm of negativity about the 3.0 announcement will give Mena and Ben some more ammunition when dealing with the money types.

Rebuilding. If you are ABCNews.com, you will want to have some of your content be static and served up quickly by your web server. That’s what they do using Tea (a lightweight opensource templating language that provides a thin layer on top of servlets. Very nice.). But god dammit, there is no reason to have a concept of rebuilding your web pages for the vast majority of sites and blogs out there. The flexibility the developer/webmaster/hobbyist gains by pulling bits in dynamically far outweighs any possible greater good achieved by building static pages for your site. Run-time building of pages is simpler and more intuitive and most important possible now that computing resources are commodified for all but the largest sites out there.

So, what to do? Bitch and whine about Six Apart? No. Time to look at alternatives. I’ve spent a fair amount of time these past few days reviewing the features and limitations of different products in the search for a Movable Type replacement.

I need to manage 3 blogs across 2 domains. I’m renting a dedicated Linux box at a colo facility, so I have complete control over the box. I can control the version of Apache, the database server, .htaccess files, etc., so there are no real ISP limitations on what I might need to do to get any of these alternatives up and running.

The main limitation is my time. For example, Drupal looks like a good system, but it’s much bigger than what I need and I don’t want to spend a lot of time tweaking it to behave like a blog. I’m looking for something that has a lot of the outward Movable Type functionality, but with a sane foundation on which it’s built.

I do need to customize the templates or the system itself to get the functionality I want. Specifically, I need a customized notion of “blog entry” to mean somthing like “a main part, an extended part, and an excerpt, though those pieces might not contain blog text.” I need a flexible notion of entry for the photoblogging site. On that note, Textpattern has the best answer. “Image” is a first-class object in Textpattern, just like entry. Very smart. Tweaking Movable Type to treat a picture like an entry is possible, but not very clean.

So what am I going to use? Wordpress. It’s the most MT-like for my needs, and the clincher was its notion of “post metadata.” New in version 1.2, this is the ability to attach arbitrary name-value pairs to a particular post. You can do things like attach a “thumbnail” key to an entry with a value of “http://mysite.foo/images/thumb_01.jpg” Then, using PHP, you can read that key/value pair whenever you want. While this is not as conceptually clean as Textpattern’s native notion of what an image is, it does provide a very nice way to attach any bits of data you like to an entry for processing later. This is a powerful feature that I’m sure many plugin developers will use.

And Wordpress is licensed under GPL, which prevents it from suffering the current fate of Movable Type. For an excellent read on that point, check out DiveIntoMark’s take on the issue.

Update: Alan’s Ramblings has a good discussion of the 6 Apart stance and also has a comment from a 6 Apart employee.

Update 2: I updated the chart a bit to reflect more current info; development on these tools moves fast! Some folks mentioned other blog tools like s9y and pMachine Pro which could be good as well. As of now, I’m quite happy with Wordpress 1.2 now that I’ve migrated. Glad to see so many decent alternatives to Movable Type out there.

Here’s a chart of where I ended up…
<!~~-more~~->

	Drupal	b2evolution	pmachine expression engine	Wordpress	textpattern	typo3
Rank (1-10)	5	7	6	8	6	0
Postgres?	yes	maybe	no	maybe, with a little work	maybe, with a little work
Import from MT?	no	yes	yes	yes, uses import.txt	yes, connects to mysql
Multiple blogs?	yes	yes	yes	yes, via mult. Installation & table prefix	yes, via mult. Installation & table prefix	not really
Language?	PHP	PHP	PHP	PHP	PHP	PHP
Entry/ext/excerpt				y/n/y, use post metadata	y/n/y, image is a native object
Ecto support?	yes	hard to tell	no	yes	no, but v. good web interface	no
Trackback?	yes	yes	yes	yes	no, but “mentions” coming soon	no
Sub-cats?	yes	yes	yes	yes but must have unique names	yes	prolly
Cost	GPL	GPL	$149	GPL	BSD	GPL
Notes	lots of switchers from MT to Drupal – very techie & time-consuming	kind of toy-ish w/smilies, nice admin	designed by mac heads	very MT-like (in a good way). Has multiple answers for old MT link resolution. MT-Blacklist has been ported. Single cat/post. Puts MT extended in post w/”more” tag. Can post by email.	rabid fanbase! Trackback not so important now b/c of Technorati tracking links. Answers abt link resol. work here too. Also has “image” assoc. w/entry. Image is its own table. Sections have own CSS. Puts MT extended in post.	complex, beautiful, but really a CMS

WarPorn

Mon, 10 May 2004 00:00:00 +1200

Wargasm. What a great word. I remember hearing the song by L7 when it came out. But given the events at Abu Ghraib prison, with the release of the horrifying pictures and our government’s problem with the pictures being released (not with the actual abuses involved), the term Wargasm takes on a new clarity.

Porn and drugs and most things that can be abused are abused in America because they are hidden from view and not talked about. Something hidden becomes attractive, like a secret that only you and a select few know. The fact that every country on the planet has mainstream media that are showing more of the war in Iraq than the mainstream American media does is part of how we keep things out of view. Shhhhh. Keep it hidden.

Here’s one example. Why doesn’t American media address footage from an Apache helicopter where we shoot unarmed Iraqi civilians? Yes, a couple networks gave it a quick mention. But this should be analyzed and discussed seriously because we are most likely looking at war crimes here. Shhhhh. Keep quiet.

George Bush doesn’t have to go to 7-11 to buy his porn. He has a big 5-pointed building full of people ready and willing to give him all the porn he could possibly want.

Lyrics to L7’s song “Wargasm” from the album Bricks Are Heavy

Wargasm, wargasm one, two, three

Tie a yellow ribbon around the amputee

Masturbate watch it on tv

Crocodile tears for the refugee

Wargasm, wargasm one, two, three

Smutty, bloody pictures, ecstasy

Blue balls waiting impatiently

From alcatraz to lady liberty

Body bags and dropping bombs

The pentagon knows how to turn us on

Wargasm, wargasm one, two, three

People, people, ecstasy

Wave those flags high in the air

As long as it takes place over there

Wargasm

Wargasm

Wargasm

Wargasm

Body bags and dropping bombs

The pentagon knows how to turn us on

Turn us on

Wargasm

Turn us on

Wargasm

Heimatseeker has a nice bit about the current Reagan-Fest goings on.

Per-blog search in Movable Type

Mon, 10 May 2004 00:00:00 +1200

It looks like blog-specific search in Movable Type is slightly broken out of the box, at least on the search results page. Let’s say you put some search code on your blog like this:


&lt;div class=&quot;sidetitle&quot;&gt; 
Search 
&lt;/div&gt; 
&lt;div class=&quot;side&quot;&gt; 
&lt;form method=&quot;get&quot; action=&quot;&lt;$MTCGIPath$&gt;&lt;$MTSearchScript$&gt;&quot;&gt; 
&lt;input type=&quot;hidden&quot; name=&quot;IncludeBlogs&quot; value=&quot;&lt;$MTBlogID$&gt;&quot; /&gt; 
&lt;label for=&quot;search&quot; accesskey=&quot;4&quot;&gt;Search this site:&lt;/label&gt;&lt;br /&gt; 
&lt;input id=&quot;search&quot; name=&quot;search&quot; size=&quot;20&quot; /&gt;&lt;br /&gt; 
&lt;input type=&quot;submit&quot; value=&quot;Search&quot; /&gt; 
&lt;/form&gt; 
&lt;/div&gt;

It works great, and is blog-specific because of the <$MTBlogID$> bit above. You can even use this on an Apache-level 404 ErrorDocument if you just replace the 3 Movable Type variables above with the values you care about. An easy way to figure those out are to do a View Source on the MT-rendered page.

So what’s the problem? The search results page itself has a search widget that does not include the <$MTBlogID$> bit. So that means if you do any searches at that point, MT will search all the blogs on your site. And MT may not grab the css you want it to when the results are rendered. To fix this, go to your (MT cgi-bin-dir)/search_templates directory. In there is a file called default.tmpl. Just add the line:

  
&lt;input type=&quot;hidden&quot; name=&quot;IncludeBlogs&quot; value=&quot;&lt;$MTBlogID$&gt;&quot; /&gt;

above the line

  
&lt;input type=&quot;text&quot; size=&quot;30&quot; name=&quot;search&quot; value=&quot;&lt;$MTSearchString$&gt;&quot; /&gt; &lt;input type=&quot;submit&quot; value=&quot;Search&quot; /&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br /&gt;

and you’ll be all set.

Related: Elise has a good thread on options for escaping markup text.

The return of push (sort of)

Tue, 04 May 2004 00:00:00 +1200

Wired Magazine has an article in their most recent issue about the return of push. This was a web content distribution technology that was big in the mid-late 90’s and Wired happened to hype the hell out of it. There are a couple of points about this.

1. Most of what was considered push was actually “smart pull.” Push isn’t a product or even a technology. It is a perceived methodology. Back in the day, I created a plugin to BackWeb, a competitor to PointCast. I remember being struck by how the industry considered this dissemination-of-information-thing to be “push.” Hey, it was 1996, the beginning of the REALLY BIG HYPE.

2. When a technology does not take the world by storm and give a 20x return to the Venture Capitalists, it’s considered a failure. This is a real problem in technology. Many great products need time to gestate. Back in the 1980’s there was a much-hyped technology that had the acronym of CASE for Computer Aided Software Engineering. I worked at 2 different companies, developing CASE products. As the vendors merged, the term CASE disappeared. Then came “client-server development tools.” Then it was “rapid prototyping.” Now it’s all about refactoring. Hmmm. Refactoring to me sounds like “doing my job,” but that’s another point. What I’m getting at is that these products/tools evolve. Sure, nobody got rich off CASE. So what? I think CASE did a lot for the evolution of software development, and we are seeing development now splinter and branch off into many different directions, and it’s all good. Good because we can all pick and choose what works best for a given project, constraints, etc.

3. Yet again, Wired magazine is prescient, and they have the arrows in their backs from having the guts to make bold predictions. They proclaimed loudly that push would be king, back in 1997, leading to the destruction of the browser. That didn’t happen, directly, but look at RSS. How many more tweaks will the Atom folks come up with before this starts looking like push again?

I remember the derision some people directed my way when I would tell them that I had created a small piece of push technology. The thing was, I knew it wasn’t push, but that was the term people had become familiar with. When the push bubble popped, all of a sudden there was a disdain for anyone or anything associated with it. The industry and the pundits and the cooler-than-thou had moved on to bigger and better things. Indeed.

Updated: Scot Hacker over at birdhouse.org has a good blog entry called rss is push? that touches on this issue, too.

Welcome to unbounded 2.0!

Mon, 26 Apr 2004 00:00:00 +1200

In the absence of a blog description or an about page, here’s what this blog is about: It’s about expanding borders. Well, not the virtual border expansion that the U.S. is currently engaged in in the cradle of civilization. Oh wait, this blog is about that, too. A bit.

There are lies that are fed to us (by “us,” I mainly mean Americans) to keep us from changing things in any meaningful way. One example is the willful destruction of the middle class in America. I hope to discuss a number of lies and shine a bit of light on them.

There are also wonderful, beautiful, mysterious cultural things that I dig and I want to tell others about. Things like the song “Lost Souls in the Supermarket” from the London Booted mash-up.

Life is all about stretching your perceptions. Figuring out where the limiting boundaries are, then breaking through them.

So, welcome to unbounded 2.0! Comments, suggestions, and constructive criticism are always welcome. Email me at unbrand @ unbounded . org if you like.

Finally, a quote from A Fish Called Wanda :

Otto: “Apes don’t read philosophy.”
Wanda: “Yes they do. They just don’t understand it.”

Who are the apes?

What am I eating?

Tue, 24 Feb 2004 00:00:00 +1300

There are some lyrics from the excellent NOFX album, The War on Errorism in the song “Franco Un-American” that go:

I never looked around, never second-guessed
Then I read some Howard Zinn now I’m always depressed
And now I can’t sleep from years of apathy
All because I read a little Noam Chomsky

I’m eating vegetation, ‘cause of Fast Food Nation
I wear uncomfortable shoes ‘cause of globalization
I’m watching Michael Moore expose “The Awful Truth”
I’m listening to Public Enemy and Reagan Youth

So let’s talk about food. Sure, we’ve read Fast Food Nation, and that turned us off to Burger King and McDonald’s, but I read something recently that’s quite a bit more insidious than what goes on at fast food companies.

Growing up in the U. S. of A. as a normal kid who drank a lot of soda, I would read the can when I was bored. I remember that “High Fructose Corn Syrup” was the first ingredient listed on any can of soda. And I remember it was the first ingredient listed on lots of stuff I ate. Hell, it was the age of food convenience! Things could be packaged and stored for longer periods of time. I was vaguely aware of this as a kid, but I’m not sure why. It was probably because my mom, like lots of moms, was way into the convenience of not having to worry about food going bad. And hey, this stuff tasted good. All manner of junk food, soda, whatever. I loved it.

When I was a bit older, still reading the soda cans, I figured that High Fructose Corn Syrup was just a fancy way of saying “sugar.” Like how today we have “design patterns” for software development, but I remember when it was called “doing your job.” Anyway, whatever. Who cares what they call sugar on a can of Coke right? At least I’m not drinking Diet Coke with Aspartame that was put on the market by the demon-spawn himself.

So then I read a great Harper’s article that Sibylle wrote up nicely in her Oil Is Food Is Politics. In the article it details where high fructose corn syrup comes from. Basically, we (Americans in particular) are harvesting large amounts of corn, much of it being Genetically Modified, not so we can eat the corn, but so the corn can be further processed into high fructose corn syrup. Let’s forget for a second the amount of oil involved to drive the machines to plant, harvest, etc. Of course that’s a BIG thing to ignore, but ok. Let’s just look at the end product in question. High fructose corn syrup.

The San Francisco Chronicle published a very good summary of the health issues of high fructose corn syrup in the article entitled We’re drowning in high fructose corn syrup. Bottom line, it was something created in the past 35 years that you can’t process very well—your body essentially turns it into fat. Hmmm. This sounds a bit like Olestra. And Aspartame.

So what to do? Well, I’ve decided to cut high fructose corn syrup out of my life. Yes, it’s in lots of foods. And frozen juices. Funny thing is, if you actually buy healthy, natural foods like locally grown fruits and vegetables, you eat healthier and it’s cheaper. And you feel better.

High fructose corn syrup. Typical.

Updated: More on the politics of corn and oil.

A working junk buster

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 00:00:00 +1300

Last week my mail application, Apple’s Mail, would not start. I had already done the suggested fix, deleting the junk file at ~/Library/Mail/LSMMap2 about 6 times over the past few months. I think the problem is related to a particular junk message arriving in the inbox, namely one with no text. For some reason this junk message completely hoses Mail.

So I start looking for an alternate mail solution. Turns out that BareBones’ Mailsmith cannot handle IMAP message stores, which I use. That was really about the only mail solution I’d consider using because no way in hell am I going to use the bloated Microsuck Entourage. I did notice, though, that Mailsmith comes with SpamSieve. Grudgingly, I went back to using Apple’s Mail hoping that the problems were strictly related to Mail’s inability to deal with certain junk mail.

Installing SpamSieve was a breeze, and it’s been running for a couple days now. How’s it doing? According to its own statistics, it’s been 96.2% accurate. It has found 626 spam messages, 28 good messages, 7 false positives (messages that weren’t spam but it thought was spam) and 18 false negatives (messages that really were spam but it didn’t catch). Pretty good.

I’ll leave SpamSieve going for now as it seems to be doing its job. Oh yeah, it’s free for 30 days, then to continue using it you have to pay $25. I think it’s worth it.

What I don’t get is why Apple hasn’t patched Mail to address this issue yet. There are lots of folks on the Apple Support mail forum who have mentioned this problem. Mail is not some random app that people play with for fun on their machines. Email is critically important to many if not most Mac users that I just can’t figure out why Apple has allowed these problems to persist. Ah well. Like a lot of included-with-the-OS apps, you often need to go to 3rd parties to get what you really need.

A president walks into a diner...

Sat, 24 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +1300

...and says, “I need some ribs”. While he waits for the order, he patronizes some journalists. Then he takes off without leaving a tip.

Not funny? I certainly thought first that I had landed on whitehouse.org instead of the real thing. It must be difficult writing political satire these days—how do you top this stuff?

Meat And You: Partners in Freedom

Sat, 03 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +1300

As a footnote to the angst theme, the Mirror (British, of course) sadly was right on with its January 1st headline:

And speaking of New Year’s Day headlines, here is one that made me laugh and cringe at the same time:

So what if we blocked all beef imports from Canada last year when a case of mad cow disease was detected there. That was, uhm, different. Our beef is safe for them. We say so. If you don’t buy our beef you really must hate America and our freedom.

...and a big slice of Fear for dessert.

Wed, 31 Dec 2003 00:00:00 +1300

I think I’m starting to understand now. It was the following the headline on today’s SFGate that did it:

U.S. to celebrate New Year’s with unprecedented security

And then from the article:

In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the city was well-protected. “Sadly, terrorism is something that we have to live with,” he said. “Leave the worrying to the professionals.”

“U.S. to celebrate New Year’s with unprecedented security “

It’s all making sense now. If you replace the word “security” with the word “fear” in media headlines, the situation really comes into focus. This little trick also works any time the government uses the word “security.”

For example:

“U.S. to celebrate New Year’s with unprecedented fear”
Transportation Fear Administration
Department of Homeland Fear

What is it with America and fear? I mean, roughly 70 years ago, an American president gave a speech that was meant to be uplifting to people in the sense of telling them not to fear anything except fear itself. So it’s possible to have a leader in America who doesn’t want people to be afraid all the time. Unfortunately, on the last day of 2003, we as Americans are not hearing uplifting messages from our government.

Security = Fear. This bit of Doublespeak is the message we’re getting. Oh yeah, and we’re supposed to shop. And be vigilant, whatever that means.

“Leave the worrying to the professionals.”

String pulling, American-style

Sun, 25 May 2003 00:00:00 +1200

I used to work with a woman who had family members working in the federal government. She was a San Francisco leftie-liberal, but even she was so horrified by what her family members would tell her about what really goes on that I could tell that she felt she had gotten too close for comfort to The Truth. Do any of us really want to know about all of what creeps out from underneath the rock when we lift it up? What about some of the nasty things? Is that still too much?

It is deplorable that many of Iraq’s treasures from museums have recently been looted. Many people believe that this region was the birthplace of civilization and the artifacts stolen go back thousands of years. Who did the looting? Was it poor Iraqis trying to get something for themselves as a reminder of their newly liberated status? It looks like there was some kind of liberation going on, for sure:

US accused of plans to loot Iraqi antiques

From the article:

It has emerged that a coalition of antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), met with US defence and state department officials prior to the start of military action [in Iraq] to offer its assistance in preserving the country’s invaluable archaeological collections.

The group is known to consist of a number of influential dealers who favour a relaxation of Iraq’s tight restrictions on the ownership and export of antiquities. Its treasurer, William Pearlstein, has described Iraq’s laws as ‘retentionist’ and has said he would support a post-war government that would make it easier to have antiquities dispersed to the US.

So what actually happened when the museums were raided?

The Disappering Treasure of Iraq

“They’re not going to try to get this stuff out of the country right away. I think they’re going to sit on it until some of the pressure dies down,” said Robert Wittman, an FBI agent who has worked on several cases of art and antiquities theft and is headed to Iraq next week.

“But it will move eventually,” he said. “There are always collectors out there who want to have something that no one else can have, and they’re willing to pay to get it.”

Expert Thieves Took Artifacts, UNESCO Says

Museum officials in Baghdad told UNESCO that one group of thieves had keys to an underground vault where the most valuable artifacts were stored. The thefts were probably the work of international gangs who hired Iraqis for the job, and who have been active in recent years doing illegal excavations at Iraqi archaeological digs, according to archaeological experts working with UNESCO.

Matsuura said top museum officials tried to protect the institution, but the thieves may have succeeded in paying off guards or other low-ranking personnel. He said he doesn’t blame the U.S. military, even though UNESCO had urged the U.S. government before the war to safeguard it and other cultural sites.

FBI: Looted Iraqi antiquities surfacing

The sheer scale of the thefts has sparked unprecedented publicity that is already helping law enforcement officials investigate the case, Chaffinch said. The fact that the items date to civilization’s earliest times has led to worldwide interest in the case, she added.

“That’s the cradle of civilization,” she said. “It isn’t just Iraqi cultural heritage – it’s the world’s cultural heritage.”

So if the above is true, why would America allow it to happen? Easy.

Friends of the government get paid
Decimation of the conquered’s past pushes them down further (remember Animal Farm when history kept getting rewritten by the ruling pigs?)
History is written by the winners. For a great book on how much of this issue plays out in our American educational system, check out History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past

Spread the word. Liberation’s not just for people anymore. It’s for historical artifacts, and non-American cultural identity, too.

Rap-ture, be pure.

Sat, 29 Mar 2003 00:00:00 +1200

Our troops in Iraq have been given pamphlets which ask them to pray for President Bush. I am not making this up:

US soldiers in Iraq asked to pray for Bush

From the article:

Thousands of marines have been given a pamphlet called “A Christian’s Duty,” a mini prayer book which includes a tear-out section to be mailed to the White House pledging the soldier who sends it in has been praying for Bush.

“I have committed to pray for you, your family, your staff and our troops during this time of uncertainty and tumult. May God’s peace be your guide,” says the pledge, according to a journalist embedded with coalition forces.

Also:

Sunday’s is “Pray that the President and his advisers will seek God and his wisdom daily and not rely on their own understanding”.

Monday’s reads “Pray that the President and his advisers will be strong and courageous to do what is right regardless of critics”.

The people who made this pamphlet are In Touch Ministries. They’re a southern baptist church with tv/radio programs that reach “every major market” in the U.S. They also have a “presence” in every nation on earth.

Why would Bush want to have troops pray for him? Multiple reasons:

He wants to maintain the god connection between the troops and christianity while the soldiers are away from their churches
He wants to reinforce the Bush-god connection that he’s been pushing recently on TV and in speeches. Bush wants everybody convinced that he is god’s right-hand man.
Bush actually wants non-Christians to find out about this and become enraged.

Now, I am not religious, in the traditional sense. I believe in basic things, like the golden rule, and karma. For a long time now, I have believed that the Bible is a book of stories, of metaphor, not be taken literally. Unfortunately, some folks are taking this book a little too seriously.

The above list of prayer reasons ties into Bush and his fundamentalist Christian cronies wanting, hoping, and actually planning the Rapture, or End of Times.

One of the more upsetting aspects of this is that putting those pamphlets out there, Bush has now upped the validity that this will, in fact, be a Holy War. Did our soldiers ask to be a part of a Holy War? I thought we were getting rid of Weapons of Mass Destruction. No, wait, we’re liberating the Iraqis. No, wait, we’re doing BushGod’s work.

How long will it be before people say to themselves, “Oh shit, we are now at war with over a billion people”?

Do you think these events aren’t planned, designed, and then executed according to an over-arching strategy?

Rap-ture. Be pure.

There’s a lot more great background info on this topic at Bushwatch.com.
<!~~-more~~->
More about the pamphlet:

In the “Prayer Reminder Card” portion of the pamphlet, there’s a place where the soldier can fill in the day(s) on which he or she is fasting. Soldiers in the desert fasting for BushGod does not exactly fill me with confidence in any number of important efforts the U.S. is currently undertaking.

There was recently a bill that just went through Congress about setting aside a day for prayer and fasting. Congress has not done something like this since the Civil War.

Interesting that that bill and the pamphlet story are hitting at about the same time.

A Protest Playlist

Sat, 22 Mar 2003 00:00:00 +1200

Because I’m fortunate enough to live in San Francisco, I’ve gone to several large and inspiring anti-war protests here in the “Baghdad By the Bay.” Of course, that term can now mean any number of things, but that’s a different point entirely.

So I’m thinking about all that’s going on in the protests and getting pumped up, frustrated, and generally anxious at the prospect of PeaceWar and regime change in the U.S., but then I’m left with the feeling of “What can I do?” I can talk to people who may only believe what corporate media tell them. I can (well, mostly, Sibylle can) take pictures, I can distribute homemade flyers, I can attend rallies. I can read and post on websites like Democratic Underground and WhatReallyHappened. I can have some t-shirts and stickers printed up.

I can create a protest playlist. I use iTunes/AAC to listen to music, so unfortunately, I don’t have this info in .pls format, but I’ve exported the playlist into xml:

iTunes XML version of playlist

In college, I’d make mix tapes for parties. It was a lot of fun, and you could get really creative with content themes, lame-ass attempts at beat-matching, putting George Carlin quotes in between songs, etc. For this playlist, though, there was only 1 criteria: songs about protest. These songs are all songs that I’ve liked for various reasons in the past, but in the context of what’s going on now in the world, these songs have taken on new meaning. They cut to the bone of American democracy/capitalism, foreign policy, minority culture, war, TV, and all kinds of other truths that you simply cannot easily get elsewhere.

War (16) and Peace (18)

Fri, 07 Mar 2003 00:00:00 +1300

Number of times Bush used the following words during yesterday’s press conference :

Disarm/disarmament: 48
Iraq/Iraqi: 44
Saddam: 40
Weapons: 29
Terror/terrorist(s)/terrorism: 26
Threat (to our nation, to this country, by the Iraqi regime)/threaten: 22
Peace/peace-loving/peaceful: 18
Hope 16
War: 16 (thereof, war on/against terror: 4)
Attack: 11
Mass destruction: 10
Pray/prayer: 9
September 11: 8
Protect (innocent lives, the American people, the constitution, America): 8
Dictator: 7
Risk: 7
Al Qaeda: 5

Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam

Fri, 07 Mar 2003 00:00:00 +1300

“And therefore I believe that Carthage must be destroyed.”

This sentence, studied in Latin class ca. 1983 for its various examples of grammar usage (the details of which I have mostly forgotten), has been popping up in my mind a lot recently. This is the story.

The quote is by Marcus Porcius Cato who lived 234-149 BC, during a glorious, powerful time in the Roman Empire. Rome’s military dominance was overwhelming. The empire had expanded across the entire Mediterranean region – from Syria to Greece to southern France, and its army kept on conquering with no end in sight. Rome was a real super power, and Cato, a poor farm boy turned career politician, was its chief ideologist.

Carthage, an ancient city near what today is Tunis, had been controlling most of the western Mediterranean since around 300 BC, but soon had been challenged by Rome, which was expanding west and didn’t want another strong power in the area. Rome launched two wars, in which Carthage lost its possessions outside of Africa as well as its war ships, but despite that and the sanctions and conditions imposed by Rome, the city quickly recovered and regained prosperity and thus continued to play an important role in the region. In particular, it owned a lot of fertile land and successfully grew olives, grapes, grain, and other agricultural products. Carthage’s economic recovery put it in direct competition with Rome and interfered with the latter’s mercantile interests.

The Romans didn’t like that a bit, and no one liked it less than Cato. His conviction that Carthage still posed a military threat to Rome quickly became an obsession. The reason why his line about destroying Carthage became so famous is because he just kept hammering it into the minds of the people, true to the motto, if something gets said often enough, it just has to be true. No matter whether Cato was talking about tax policies, agriculture, trade issues, or expanding the sewer system of Rome – he always ended his speeches (and he is said to have been a very powerful orator) with the same sentence: “And therefore I believe that Carthage must be destroyed”.

It would go something like this:
Why are so many reluctant to think the threat by Carthage is so real and imminent that we need war?
Carthage is a threat to Rome. It must be destroyed.

A lot of people think Rome is the bigger threat to peace – why?
Carthage is a threat to Rome. It must be destroyed.

How would you answer your critics who think this is a personal fixation, that this is about Scipio?
Carthage is a threat to Rome. It must be destroyed.

Why do so many not only disagree with you very strongly, but see Rome as an arrogant power?
Carthage is a threat to Rome. It must be destroyed.

Do you ever worry that this could lead to more violence, more anti-Roman sentiment, more instability in the Mediterranean region?
Carthage is a threat to Rome. It must be destroyed.

It’s easy to see why this technique of repeating something ad nauseam until everybody takes it for a fact has remained ever-popular. It’s simple, and it doesn’t even take a speaker of Cato’s caliber to use it effectively.

For Cato, it definitely worked. At his urging, the government eventually imposed an impossible ultimatum upon Carthage, and the Senate decreed that Carthage had violated a treaty, which in 146 led to the 3rd Punic War and the destruction of the city. After three years of brutal fighting against fierce resistance, Rome emerged victorious, burning and razing the city and taking the few remaining survivors to Rome as slaves.

It would be another few centuries before the Roman Empire begun to crumble, and eventually fall.

Meaningless words of the day

Wed, 05 Mar 2003 00:00:00 +1300

“None of us wants to live in a world where facts are defeated by deceit, where the words of the Security Council mean nothing.”

Colin Powell said that today, and no, he wasn’t talking about his own government but about – what else – Iraq. Meanwhile, Ari Fleischer announced that the approval of a new resolution that would authorize a war was “desirable, but not mandatory”. Guess we need to leave that back door open in case the words of the Security Council are not what we’d like them to be. Speaking of a world where facts are defeated by deceit…

just testing pingback

Make Love Not War

Sun, 02 Mar 2003 00:00:00 +1300

As seen in the neighborhood: Earlier this week, the O'Farrell Theatre replaced its standard American flags with peace flags. Right on!

Our own protest sign

Sat, 15 Feb 2003 00:00:00 +1300

This is what we’ll carry at tomorrow’s anti-war protest in SF. (Click for a bigger version.)

We also had t-shirts made.

25th Hour

Mon, 10 Feb 2003 00:00:00 +1300

We went to see 25th Hour yesterday and it’s been on my mind ever since. There are plenty of reviews, comments, and synopses out there, so there’s no need to repeat any of them here. What stuck in my mind was a very emotional (but never cheesy) story about choices, and a declaration of love for America with all its contradictions and beauty and opportunities and pain. And as usual, a great performance by Ed Norton.

Recently, on Nob Hill

Sun, 02 Feb 2003 00:00:00 +1300

I want

Sat, 09 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +1300

What to write in a week in that American politics made an almost complete shift to the right, getting us ready for decades of conservative agenda-pushing? Since Tuesday’s election, the disappointment has turned into disgust, and I’m trying hard to not be too scared of the oily wars and undermining of the constitution to come ‘cause of course that’s exactly what I’m supposed to be.

Even here in San Francisco where we think of ourselves as progressive and surely enlightened, voters decided to cut the cash payments for single homeless people—from $320-395 per month to $59. The difference is supposed be provided as services, such as housing or meals—except that there are far too few of those services available, and a second proposition under which the city would create new housing and drug treatment programs didn’t make it. This is in a city with one of of the highest costs of living index in the nation, and where the average single family home costs 4.25 as much as the national average.

Care not Cash, as the initiative is titled, claims it “will save lives by fundamentally reforming how we provide care to the homeless”, but it’s really more about removing those unpleasant smelly people from the streets where they scare tourists, shoppers, and other people with money who think it’s their right to only look at pretty things. A sentiment that’s expressed in an ad campaign on billboards all over town called “We Want Change”, supported by the Hotel Council of San Francisco and other business interest groups such as several merchants and restaurant associations, in other words, those who cater to the tourists, shoppers, and other people with money. In the campaign, yuppies hold up cardboards with hand-written slogans such as “I want to be able to walk down the street without being asked for money”, or “I don’t want to have to hold my breath every time I pass an alley.” There are more and I don’t remember every one but they all start out with “I want.” The yuppies all look very concerned and serious, or maybe the fact that they are holding up a cardboard just gives them the creeps even though it’s a clean one and it’s only for a photoshoot.

As annoying as the campaign is, I have to admit it’s very effective. I mean, how can you possibly disagree with its statements? I don’t like the smell of urine in my street either, and of course I don’t want to be bugged for change. But that’s just a description of a problem. It could be addressed in all kinds of ways. The insidious part is when you imply that people who care about an issue have to all agree on how to deal with it. Moreover, those who disagree are accused of supporting the exact opposite. If you don’t support Care not Cash you want people to die in the streets from overdoses. If you don’t want to get the homeless off the streets you support homelessness. If you are not with us, you are with the terrorists.

Breeding the Fear Culture -- TV

Sun, 27 Oct 2002 00:00:00 +1300

The fear culture is thriving on TV and has been for some time. Have you noticed how the “Movie of the Week” on the various networks is basically the same on all the channels? This is glorified victimization that has been finely honed and crafted for decades. Forget human struggle and the heroic will to overcome trauma. Forget the classic man vs. man or man vs. nature narrative archetypes. What we have is victimaztion as the focal point for two hours. Invariably, the heroine (90% of the time the victim is a woman) struggles for custody/survival at the hands of her lover/husband/”oppressive other.” Granted, struggle (or rather, conflict) is key in telling a story, especially on television. But when these shows plumb the depths of inhumanity, week after week, on every major network and some cable channels, it becomes important to take notice of what’s going on in the larger sense.

The idea is simple: Get the viewer in a “low” state, to where the viewer is so appalled and aghast at what is on the tube that the viewer is emotionally vulnerable. That’s the lead-in for the advertisers. When the viewer is in such a low state, he or she is more open to influence. The primary goal of advertising is to influence. A perfect fit.

The same concept of getting the viewer in a low state applies to other aspects of television as well. The nightly news is increasingly running stories of violence and murder, even though crime overall is down: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Apart from the further desensitization to violence this causes, it puts viewers in an emotionally vulnerable state so the advertisers can come in and insert their product-selling message deep into the psyche.

At the recent San Francisco protest march against war in Iraq, a network news photographer was overheard on his cell phone yelling at his boss to convince him to “Let me stay! I know there’s something big that’s going to happen here!” Nevermind that the march was very peaceful the entire day. This guy wanted his pictures of violence. He even went so far as to taunt some of the protestors in the hopes of getting them to have some kind of confrontation with the police.

For advertising reasons alone, the television media want to keep us fearful. But hey, we have enough other reasons to be afraid, right? Maybe those other reasons will keep enough of us away from the Movie of the Week. After all, why should we limit ourselves to this one form of fear when there are so many others readily available?

We are not alone

Sun, 27 Oct 2002 00:00:00 +1300

Yesterday we went to the anti war demonstration in San Francisco, one of the two main events in the US (the other one was in Washington DC) of an international day of protest against the government’s campaign for a war in Iraq.

Man, there was LARGE crowd! The official number given was 42,000 people, although I have seen estimates twice as high. It was very moving to see so many people expressing their disagreement with the Bush administration and their policies behind which we do NOT stand united, no matter what the powers that be would like us to believe. The crowd was very diverse and certainly not only “young punk rockers with mohawks, aging hippies and middle-aged couples with children”, like an earlier AP wire article idiotically tried to dumb it down. Police were present, even fencing off a few buildings in riot gear (the California State building, the Federal Building, and, yes, I’m not making this up, the GAP. Phew, wouldn’t want those punk rockers to scare yuppies shopping for low-rise stretch jeans and sherpa duffle coats), but they seemed relaxed enough and everything was peaceful. Overall, a very powerful and positive experience.

Carlyle Group set to go on a spending spree

Mon, 14 Oct 2002 00:00:00 +1300

The Carlyle Group, the investment group run by Reagan/Bush folks (including former Secretarty of State James Baker, former Secretarty of Defense Frank Carlucci, former UK Prime Minsister John Major, and George H. W. Bush) which invests in global and domestic “interests,” recently announced a $600 million fund. What does this mean?

The Carlyle Group just raised $600 million from pension fund managers, institutional investors, and high-net-worth individuals so they can invest it and return profit for the investors. All this at a time when our economy is in the toilet. During the dot-com boom, you would hear about high-flying Silicon Valley venture capital firms raising that kind of money, but the economy isn’t what is was then, and the Carlyle group is much more interested in more conservative ventures. When a country is at war, or about to be at war, what kinds of investments do well? Some domestic investments might do well under those circumstances, but there is far more money to be made from international investmensts.

Other investors in the Carlyle Group include members of the bin Laden family. They pulled out when things got too hot. See Red Herring article below or do a search for “bin laden carlyle group” on Google.

The Red Herring has a good overview of the Carlyle Group. There are many more articles on the net about the Carlyle Group, and the Bush family’s involvement in funding nefarious interests around the globe. In the past couple of years, mainstream media has published artlicles about this connection, including slate.com and The Boston Globe. It is well documented that our current presindent’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, was investing in, and helped industrialize the Nazi regime. In fact, the federal government had to invoke the “Trading with the Enemy Act” in order to get Prescott Bush to divest from the Nazis.

So where does that leave us? Well, I’m not sure, but there’s an awful lot of precedent here for some scary profit-making from the blood of war. Of course, it will be difficult to trace exactly where that $600 million will go, but it looks like there are some time-honored Bush family traditions to be upheld.

Falling in love again

Fri, 11 Oct 2002 00:00:00 +1300

Speaking of Blue Angels: I still associate the words “Blue Angel” first and foremost with Marlene Dietrich and Berlin in 1930. But then, sitting at my desk today, working, or trying to, the realities of San Francisco, 2002, quickly forced me back into a more current reality, and not in a good way. Do we really need planes flying over downtown, low and at frighteningly high speeds? Yeah, I guess it looks really cool ‘n’ stuff if you are into Top Gun and such but Jesus, it’s fucking creepy and has anyone here heard of Rammstein and when did jets diving towards skyscrapers become fashionable again did I miss something here? And what was that connection to Berlin in 1930 again?

Goodbye, Constitution

Fri, 11 Oct 2002 00:00:00 +1300

Here’s a letter I emailed to Senator Diane Feinstein after I found out she voted on October 10, 2002 for the resolution to allow Bush unprecedented power to pre-emptively attack Iraq. I am one of Senator Feinstein’s constituents and as such, I had to say something. If you have an opinion on this historic vote, I strongly encourage you to write your represententatives in Congress. To write to Senator Feinstein, here’s the link.

Oct. 11, ‘02 – To Senator Feinstein

I am a registered San Francisco Democrat. As I sit here and listen to the Blue Angels fly overhead, I’m filled with pride and a sinking feeling bordering on panic. I love San Francisco and California. I know Sen. Feinstein initiated the Blue Angels Fleet Week program here in 1981. I am proud to be an American and I am panicked by the figurative reminder the jet rumble makes—it’s quite a frightening metaphor for what just happened in Congress.

Here’s what I see:

- The Congress has just abrogated the Constitution, which they are sworn to uphold. I have never even heard of Congress willfully giving so much power to a President, thus bypassing the balance of power this country was founded upon.

- Senator Feinstein states on her website, in the explanation of her yes vote on the Iraq resolution yesterday (10/10) that she’s “encouraged” by Bush’s speech at the UN on Sept. 12. Please help me to understand something: why is it that on Sept. 25, Sen. Feinstein told the Senate that she was very concerned about the “politicization” of the war on Iraq? I was proud of Sen. Feinstein for being so outspoken and in my view, correct. Why, then, the about-face in the Oct. 10 vote explanation? What am I missing here?

- I called your San Francisco office a few minutes ago to state the above. The phone rang for about 2 minutes, then a friendly voice answered. As soon as I mentioned the words “registered Democrat” and “Iraq” she very quickly tried to get me off the phone. She asked my zip code, then a quick “Thanks. Goodbye.” I don’t blame her for being curt, I bet she’s swamped with similar such calls today.

- Just as an FYI, there’s a lot of protest going on here in SF. The Federal Building, just a few blocks from where I sit writing this, was effectively shut down by protesters today. There are graffiti’d web site addresses (in various places around the city) of sites that claim to be uncovering a lot about 9/11, the Iraq resolution vote, and the Bush family history. The 10/10 vote in the Senate only made that sinking feeling worse.

- I’m quite disappointed in Sen. Feinstein. Again, perhaps I’m missing something, but if I am, I truly would like to be enlightened. Maybe then the sinking feeling will go away.
<!~~-more~~->
Additional text:

If you’ve ever seen the movie Network, then you know the point where the main character, Howard Beale, has his moment of epiphany when he’s given a spanking by Ned Beatty’s character. That’s where you get the famous line: “There is no America, there is no democracy. There is only IBM, ITT, AT&T, DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon.”

This speech from Ned Beatty’s character (a big corporate CEO) is designed to influence our Howard Beale, a prominent newscaster. Point being that Howard was getting too popular with his anti-corporate exhortations. Howard even had the audacity to tell people to go to their windows, open them, and scream out “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

So big corporate CEO tells newscaster (when the movie was made, in 1976, those two entities weren’t completely in bed with each other) Howard that Howard needs to “see the light,” and he does such a good job that Howard’s convinced. Howard then goes on his news program on TV and guess what? His ratings drop. But that’s what the big corporate CEO wanted all along. Why? Howard was threatening the CEO’s way of existence.

Is it possible that multiple Democratic senators in 2002 have “seen the light” the same way that Howard Beale did? Why else would they so publicly and so swiftly change their minds about an issue that dealt with upholding the Constitution, the single most important job they have? I’m referring specifically to Democratic Senators Daschle, Feinstein, Kerry, Lieberman, Edwards, Biden et. al. who voted to undermine our Constitution and give the President far more power than is allowed in our Constitution.

Particularly, Senators Byrd, Daschle, and Feinstein, all spoke out on the floor of the Senate against the President’s rushed and unmitigated power grab on the Iraq issue. Senator Byrd gave a moving speech to the Senate about giving too much power to the president. Not a single other senator joined him in trying to stop the president’s resolution. Why? The day of the vote, October 10, he gave another moving speech, this time, of capitulation.

Senator Feinstein spoke out about the same thing. Yet she, just 2 weeks later, changed her mind. Why?

The only possible reason why the Democratic senators switched positions is that they had a Howard Beale moment in which they “saw the light.” These are the people that we elected to office. If anybody has a better explanation for what has happened here, I’d love to hear it.

Das Experiment

Sun, 06 Oct 2002 00:00:00 +1200

It’s needless to spell out why, for a German filmmaker, it’s still pretty gutsy to create a movie that shows how easily regular citizens can turn into accomplices of an authoritarian environment who not only quickly buy into preserving this structure, but start enjoying their newly gained power and using/abusing it when pressure seems to justify it. Of course, this is an over-simplified summary of the excellent film Das Experiment, which finally made it to the US 1 1/2 years after its original release.

The premise of the story is a psychological study at the University of Cologne, where 20 men volunteer to participate in a mock-prison situation for two weeks, in exchange for about $2,000. They are randomly assigned roles as guards or prisoners and receive otherwise little instruction except that the guards’ goal is to keep up the order without using violence, while the prisoners must obey and follow a number of rules. The researchers, hoping to gain insight into human nature and behavior under extreme situations, observe the experiment through surveillance cameras. I’m not giving away too much by saying that the participants quickly identify with their assigned roles to point where the line between simulation and reality get blurry.

Although the film is based on a book titled “Black Box”, the real origin of the story (and the basis for Black Box) is an experiment that was conducted at Stanford University in 1971. The official website gives a chilling insight into the study whose purpose was to find out “What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?” Interestingly, the Stanford Prison Experiment showed that not only those who took on the roles as guards or prisoners became, and not just played, their parts, but that even the researchers got absorbed in their own staged scenario to a point where they weren’t just scientific, neutral observers, but “thinking like a prison superintendent rather than a research psychologist.”

Growing up in Germany in the 70s and 80s, “never again” was an always-present motto, and much of my formal education was dedicated to teaching how the political system of post-war Germany was designed to prevent dictatorship and fascism from ever happening again. Important as this is, the more disturbing issues of human potential for creating and supporting such a system were not brought up. It seemed as if both those who taught us, and we ourselves, didn’t consider the possibility that well educated, middle-class kids, happy consumers in a capitalist democracy (or is it the other way round?) could be susceptible to the dynamics of an authoritarian system. Or maybe it was not so much naivete but fear to acknowledge the dark side of all human beings that left these things unspoken (I hesitate to use the word “evil” in this context since it’s been trivialized by the government and used ad nauseam to label anything un-american, whetever the fuck that is supposed to be.)

Das Experiment is ulitmately addressing those bigger questions, What is identity? What makes us human? Can circumstances influence or even radically change what our selves are? And then, what is the true, real self? Kudos to the makers of the film for not trying to provide simple answers, but telling a story that’s disturbing, intense, and provokes you to come up with answers for yourself.

Never thought I'd say Yay to Gray...

Sat, 05 Oct 2002 00:00:00 +1200

It doesn’t happen a lot in these war-horny times that you browse the news and you come across a piece that makes you pause and think, “damn!”, and in a good way.

Actually, this article is already several weeks old, but somehow it’s not surprising that it would have gotten lost in the big standstill of early September. California’s Governor signed four new laws seriously improving women’s rights to choose by increasing protection for staff and patients at women’s health clinics, adding abortion training to the required curriculum of med schools, and guaranteeing free abortion drugs and emergency contraceptives to the victims of sexual abuse. AND, California will continue to support abortion even if (or should I say when) the federal government, maybe on the occasion of a break between wars, finally gets around to overthrowing Roe vs. Wade. Right on, California, for acknowledging that we are all better off when we are healthy and able to take charge of our lives.

Scary, beautiful time in the Sierras

Fri, 04 Oct 2002 00:00:00 +1200

Sibylle and I just got back from a backpacking trip in the Sequoia National Park. Beautiful scenery, warm weather, no mosquitos, no crowds, nothing but late summer goodness in the mountains. Well, after all our planning, including checking weather forecasts, we got spanked by nature.

While hiking to Redwood Meadow from Timber Gap Jucnction (elev. 7500 ft.), we ran into a hailstorm. We didn’t even know it was a hailstorm until I saw the rain bouncing off a rock. At that altitude, rain bouncing off a rock doesn’t seem too weird. At least, no weirder than the other auditory and visual non-drug-induced hallucinations I’d seen in the past 48 hours.

But this was different, because Sibylle saw the bouncing rain, too. Ok, it’s not a hallucination. “Let’s just wait this out in the redwood here.” So we waited inside a fire-damaged redwood for the hailstorm to pass. Our packs and us (and probably a few of our friends could have) fit comfortably inside this redwood.

So we wait it out then walk on. We start noticing a faint drizzle of rain. And lots of loud planes going by overhead. Sibylle and I wonder aloud if we’re officially at war now with Iraq again. We both get nauseous at the prospect of the planes overhead going off to crimianlize someone we used to help (refer to Manuel Noriega and Daddy Bush for the original game plan) so we can have more oil.

Anyway, it starts raining harder, and we take temporary shelter under a tree and have lunch. Only problem is that now, instead of just rain, it’s mixed with snow. And the sky is black. And there’s really loud thunder that’s getting closer and closer and scaring the living shit out of us but we’re too dumbfounded to make sense out of the situation because it’s changed so rapidly and now FUCK if we continue to Redwood Meadow we’ll end up spending an extra day here and we don’t know if it’s going to snow more and if we go back we have another 3 fucking hours of hiking through this storm not to mention and JESUS look how much snow has accumulated since we’ve been freaking out about the storm and wait a second, those weren’t planes we heard earlier, that was the storm and DAMN it’s getting louder and closer!

So we decide to head back to camp from the previous night. Our gear is wet. We are wet. The forecast said sun. We’re trudging back to camp in a snowstorm at 7000 feet on October 1st. Now there’s about 4 inches of snow on the ground. It was lightly raining about an hour ago. Putting on a brave face, I tell Sibylle everything will be fine, then I look down and see bear tracks in the snow. After about 30 seconds of contemplation, I figured out that the bear made the tracks in the snow, and the snow didn’t exist an hour ago, so the bear must be not too far off. There’s nothing like the feeling of panic of being in remote wilderness with no other people within miles and being unprepared for a snowstorm and knowing there’s a big-ass and probably hungry bear nearby.

So we make it back to camp. I try for a long time to make a fire, but the wood’s too wet. We go to bed early, very cold and very wet. Long time in the tent, very little sleep. Mostly thoughts of how the hell to make it over Timber Gap in one day with the trail all covered with snow.

The next day we wake up to the most beautiful scenery I’ve ever seen. You read about this in nature books and you hear of other people expericencing this, and you still can’t believe your eyes. The most pristine winter scene imaginable. We took some pictures, but it still doesn’t do it justice. So we put on our frozen boots and begin the climb out.

2800 feet up, then 2000 feet down to the car. That’s the day’s agenda. The trail is completely covered in snow. I thought there would be maybe 2 or 3 inches of snow on the trail. Turns out it was more like 12-18 inches of snow.

There are 3 rules we learned about finding the trail in the snow. One, look for a path that has a slight indentation from the snow around it. Two, look for an area that has no vegetation sticking up. Three, follow the animals’ trails. The animal trails are deceptive though, because they’ll stay on the path for awhile, then veer off for no good reason. That’s where rules 1 and 2 come in.

So we made it up and over Timber Gap, following the rules above. 8 hours of hiking over 5.5 miles in snow. Thoughts of John Muir and the settlers came to mind and we were thankful that we had our high-tech clothing and walking poles, even though we were unprepared for snow.

The biggest thing going through my mind overall was a sense of gratitude. Gratitude for being with the one I love, for being able to make it through a tough time, and gratitude for seeing nature at her best: scary, beautiful.

shiny 2.1

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +1300

Yay! This blog is now on SIlverStripe 2.1. Tag clouds, archives, and a ported theme from Ye Olde Rails Blogge from The Days That Shall Not Be Named.

Thanks to all my peeps at SilverStripe for putting together such a cool blogging system.

Leopard ACLs

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +1300

I love Apple's Leopard. Except for the Access Control Lists.

It seems that as part of backing up to Time Machine, Leopard will set a bunch of ACLs on each file and directory that go into Time Machine:

simpler:src brian$ ls -le README 
-rw-r--r--@ 1 brian  staff  111 20 Oct 18:12 README
 0: group:everyone deny write,delete,append,writeattr,writeextattr,chown

The 'e' above in the 'ls -le' means "show ACL information", and that line beginning with '0:' means "nobody can do shit on this file even if the file permissions are set to 777. Ha! Sucker."

Why does it matter? It matters if you want to do something crazy like manually copy a file (or a directory) from Time Machine to your filesystem. Which I wanted to do because I had some stuff on a beta Time Machine drive that I wanted to wipe once Leopard went final. I thought I could just copy files from the Time Machine drive to my new regular Leopard installation. After much weeping and gnashing of teeth, I finally found a way to make it work.

The answer lies in using chmod to remove the ACLs. I thought this would get rid of the time machine crap on all directories from here down:

find . -type d | xargs chmod -a# 0

(no, this won't work b/c chmod can't take a bunch of fname args at once, which is what find throws at it)

The following works because one chmod will be executed for each directory, like we want:

find . -type d -exec chmod -a# 0 {} \;

Just replace the 'type d' above with 'type f' to remove the ACL for regular files.

Lastly, to make sure I got everything (I had over 140,000 files/dirs to deal with!), I created a file which could be grepped for "0: ":

ls -lateR > ACLtest

Whew. You know, I don't really mind all this too much, because technically it makes a lot of sense what Apple chose to do with ACLs and Time Machine. My only gripe is that Apple didn't tell anyone outside of Apple HQ about all this! Maybe it's hidden somewhere in the bowels of developer documentation? Dunno. Seems like a lot of people are going to try to copy files from a Time Machine drive onto their local hard drive, only to find they can't add to directories, modify files, etc.

SilverStripe 2.2.1

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Heaps of bug fixes and a much cooler admin interface are part of unbounded now that it's on the latest 2.2.1 version of SilverStripe. RSS should be working a lot better now, too. Nice to see so much progress across the board in recent months. Cheers, guys!

Gold, oil, and music

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Yesterday, the spot price of gold hit an all-time high on the New York market. Generally, gold (and other precious metals) go up in value when the fiat currencies (US dollar, Kiwi dollar, British pound, Euro, hell, pretty much all currencies I believe) go down. Makes sense that if you lose faith in fake stuff, you want to believe in real, tangible things. So why the big rush towards metals?

Also yesterday, the price of a barrel of oil broke $100 USD for the first time.

Gold and oil set all-time highs on the same day? How does this compare to the USD? Here in New Zealand, One US Dollar will get you 1.29 New Zealand dollars. Three years ago, that same US Dollar would have gotten you 1.7 New Zealand dollars.

On another currency front the European Central Bank recently pumped 350 billion Euro into the market to "head off a liquidity crisis". Someone at ECB just pushed a button and injected a buttload of money that came from...where again, exactly? Out of thin air. As you do with fiat currency.

Are these events related? Probably, at least to some degree. The decline of the US dollar is happening for a number of reasons: the US sub-prime mortgage market collapse (now extending to prime mortgages), the insanely stupid controlling of other countries' natural resources, the global lack of respect for the idiot-in-chief, the insurmountable trade deficit, and the pain that is named Paris Hilton. So the US dollar losing ground will drive up the cost of gold and oil when they're priced in US dollars, for sure.

But the real scam is that there's heaps of money yet to be fleeced from people straight into the pockets of the big multi-nationals. This is why they've sat on clean energy sources for decades. Yes, peak oil is happening, but the effects are being controlled to maximize profit.

So how does music fit into all of this? It fits in for me because it's something to focus on that's a postive antidote to all of the above. There's no button I can press to make the oil companies act responsibly. They'd probably argue that they are acting responsibly in that shareholder value is their number one concern. Thus anything they do to maximize it is justified. But back to music. Listening to music and creating music is one way for me to not so much counter, but maybe "deal with" the global economic bilge.

I was looking for a good quote with the word "antidote" in it. Here's the best one I could find:

At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five dollars for the second glass. The refill contained the antidote. -- Emo Philips