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August 28, 2006

Debian Forever

Filed under: — Sven @ 16:18 IST

Last week sometime I was trying to fix my monitor issue with Kubuntu, and X11 stopped working. This was not too big of a surprise as that is what I was hacking on, but from that point on I was unable to get X to start. #^$% it, thought I, and install Debian Sarge:

Downsides include:

  • No cute KDE GUI for Bluetooth.
  • Needed to boot Debians kernel with acpi=off, thought apm seems to work.

I’m just wonder if my Kubunu problem will return when Debian Etch gets released.

Today, I read that the issues that put me over the top might of not been my fault. I always did upgrades as soon as I noticed them, and I remember playing with the packages before I started playing with the X11 settings. While the upgrade issue has been fixed this problem happened just about at the peek of my frustration. A few years ago Debian has a similar issue that made the system unbootable, so I can’t single out Ubuntu for this mistake.

So much for my soirée with Kubuntu.

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August 23, 2006

Kubuntu's Kamera

Filed under: — Sven @ 18:32 IST

Apart from my monitor issue with Ubuntu I’ve also had Camera issues. With Debian GNU/Linux I install the gphoto2 package and I can extract the photos from my Canon Power Shot A75 on the command line, no problem. Kubuntu comes with KDE’s kamera package, but when that opens up my digital camer is a window it says:

An error occurred while loading system:/media/camera/camera/camera:
Unknown error
Bad parameters

with no hint where to adjust the parameters, I tweaked things for a couple of hours, nothing. I was happy with this, I was just going to uninstall kamera and install gphoto2 and use the command line. However, even though kamera uses the libgphoto2-2, the gphoto command line package was not included in the default repository, just the library.  Reading the Ubuntu forums implied it stould be there, but using apt-cache found nothing.

This just might be the red card for Kubuntu.

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August 22, 2006

Martha Stuff(tm)

Filed under: — brendan @ 23:51 IST

Patrick (age 4-1/2) and I were on a guys-only stretch for a couple of days. This morning we played football—er, soccer—out on the front lawn, and finished building a wooden train we’d glued together yesterday. Then I said, “Ok, we need to go in and make some bread since we’ve run out.”

“No way, Dad, I don’t want to do any of that Martha Stuff.”

I convinced him to go upstairs and transfer some laundry into the dryer. He turned the knob to make the dryer start, then looked me square in the eye. “Ok, Dad, we can go down and do Martha Stuff. Let’s go.”

Next scene, he’s standing on a chair in front of the kitchen counter where the flour, sugar, and other elements were waiting.

Please tell me this is the positive side of television…

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June 24, 2006

Copa Mundail De La FIFA

Filed under: — Sven @ 23:56 IST

After today, all of my primary and secondary teams are out of the world cup.  Primary teams for me mean the USA and Sweden.  Secondary teams mean anybody in CONCACAF.  After that comes underdogs and anybody playing Brazil.  I guess I’m just glutten to loose.

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May 13, 2006

Arrogance by the Numbers

Filed under: — alice @ 18:07 IST

From The Financial Times

Bush administration’s telephone snooping

George W. Bush assured Americans this week that his administration was doing nothing illegal by maintaining a record of telephone calls made by about 200m US subscribers. But the president has already made clear that his definition of what is legal applies to virtually anything he chooses to authorise in the name of national ­security.

The leak on Thursday to the USA Today newspaper revealing that the US National Security Agency was keeping a log of billions of calls made each year in America – in what is surely the largest database ever assembled – is troubling at many levels. It is the latest example of the administration’s habit of intruding on American freedoms – whether the right to privacy, habeas corpus or other ironclad constitutional protections – without having obtained permission from the courts or Congress.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, Mr Bush de­clared America was engaged in a war that had no apparent territorial or temporal limits. He also made it clear he believed it was the president’s prerogative to decide how, where and when to conduct the war on terror – or any other war – without recourse to Congress. Mr Bush’s doctrine, which some call the “new imperial presidency”, strikes at the heart of America’s constitutional separation of ­powers.

The implications of Mr Bush’s doctrine are too manifold to enumerate here. But it is worth restating the most egregious. Since 2001 Mr Bush has decreed that it is the right of the executive alone to decide who – whether American or foreign – qualifies as an “unlawful enemy combatant” and then to detain that person without access to a lawyer or possibility of trial for an indefinite period, until death if necessary. Likewise, Mr Bush has absolved himself from following US and international laws that ban the use of torture for certain categories of people who are determined by the executive alone. Any attempt by Congress to constrain the administration by enacting new statutes is treated as advisory rather than legally binding. Mr Bush has appended more than 500 “signing statements” to new laws that give him the right to interpret what the law means. The most shocking example was Mr Bush’s assertion of the president’s right to ignore elements of a bill enacted by Congress last December that outlawed the use of torture.

In the words of the pro-Republican Cato Institute, Mr Bush’s doctrine states that, “when we’re at war, anything goes, and the president gets to decide when we’re at war”. Any attempt to question Mr Bush’s doctrine or to divulge its operational detail to the public is portrayed as assisting America’s enemies, including al-Qaeda. The only safeguard proffered against the executive’s abuse of these extraordinary wartime powers is that Mr Bush can be trusted to do the right thing.

None of this is to dispute the fact that the fight against terrorism is different to the prosecution of conventional war and might necessitate the temporary curbing of certain freedoms, including the right to privacy. Most reasonable people, including judges, legislators and ordinary citizens, can agree on this. But Mr Bush’s actions go much further. Ultimately, they are also self-defeating. Whether or not Congress turns Democrat in November, Mr Bush faces a constitutional backlash that is probably unstoppable. In pursuit of the imperial presidency, Mr Bush has turned himself into a very premature lame duck.

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May 10, 2006

The Bush Administration at Work

Filed under: — alice @ 15:56 IST

This story from today’s The Washington Post is a perfect illustration of way George W. Bush’s corrupt Administration operates:

Costly Words: ‘I Don’t Like President Bush’
By Al Kamen
Wednesday, May 10, 2006; A23
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson was back home in Dallas on April 28 giving a speech to minority real estate folks and offering a most interesting take on how business is done in Washington.

Jackson, former head of the Dallas Housing Authority, recounted a conversation he had in the nation’s capital with a minority publisher.

“He had made every effort to get a contract with HUD for 10 years,” Jackson said of the bidder, according to an account of the speech in the Dallas Business Journal. “He made a heck of a proposal and was on the GSA [General Services Administration] list, so we selected him. He came to see me and thank me for selecting him.

“Then he said something. . . . He said, ‘I have a problem with your president.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘I don’t like President Bush. ‘ I thought to myself, ‘Brother, you have a disconnect — the president is elected, I was selected. You wouldn’t be getting the contract unless I was sitting here. If you have a problem with the president, don’t tell the secretary.’ “He didn’t get the contract,” Jackson continued. “Why should I reward someone who doesn’t like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don’t get the contract. That’s the way I believe.”

Dallas Business Journal reporter Christine Perez asked HUD spokeswoman Dustee Tucker , who attended the speech, about the value of the yanked advertising contract. Perez was told that could not be provided.

“Because it was not awarded per what the secretary said, we don’t have any record of it,” Tucker said. “It was probably all verbal at that point.” Tucker didn’t return calls yesterday. But Democrats, led by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (N.J.), called for Jackson’s head.

Aside from violating the Constitution’s prohibitions on government retaliation for speech, we’re told Jackson’s peculiar view may violate federal procurement law, which requires “complete impartiality and . . . preferential treatment for none.”

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The wonders of human memory

Filed under: — brendan @ 15:52 IST

While doing some work, I was listening to “Homeward” by The Sundays. The open window behind my monitor shows a bright sunny day in Ireland, a gentle breeze ruffling the (far too many) sheets of paper on my desk. My mind quickly left the code I was trying to debug on the screen, and put me driving on Highway 17 in the hot summer of 1993.  I was on my way home to Santa Cruz on a Saturday afternoon from work. (I was single, hacked obsessively, it was Silicon Valley, of course I was working on the weekend.) There I was in my second-hand 1990 Hyundai Excel, working my way up to the summit where the temperature would drop by 10 degrees and I’d start my downward spiral on the curvy roads to get home. In the tape deck is a cassette (which I still own) with a copy of The Sundays’ Static & Silence album, playing for the 100th time.  The song finished, I left the image of the car twisting and turning its way along the many curves and came back to reality.  It’s truly remarkable how much is unconsciously saved in the depths of your mind.

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May 4, 2006

No Doctor Who for Me

Filed under: — Sven @ 01:32 IST

I came home today to limited basic cable. Since September 2004 I had been getting extended for free, so I’m happy. The first thing I thought was no more Doctor Who! Since March I have been reliving my childhood with Doctor Who on the SciFi channel. I guess I’ll have to wait until Netflix has the Zone 1 DVD. No more Daily Show too. As for the World Cup, I guess there is always Fútbol. Oddly enough, I get MTV2, but not MTV. Weird.

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April 21, 2006

A Good Place to Live?

Filed under: — alice @ 19:36 IST

The nation involved is a large, wealthy and powerful one; but …

– Government officials reserve to right to eavesdrop on your telephone calls, read your email, search your home, investigate your political interests and personal background, all unbeknownst to you and without Court approval.

– Anyone who voices disagreement with the Rulers’ policies, actions or behaviour is automatically labelled disloyal, unpatriotic and suspect.

– Your name, ethnicity and/or appearance are considered reasonable grounds for anonymous imprisonment without charge, for an indeterminate period and without access to legal counsel or contact by family or friends.

– The party in power creates laws favouring the wealthiest citizens and pays for them by plundering support for education, elderly services, aid to the poverty-stricken, and food and heating assistance to the poorest of citizens.

– Laws pertaining to health care, environmental protection and corporate taxation are written by and for the corporations most directly affected … many of whom have close financial ties to Government Officials.

– The Country’s Head of State creates lies and distortions on which to base an order to invade, bomb and loot a non-threatening nation, resulting in unknown deaths, injuries, hardships and extraordinary degrees of suffering amongst innocent, helpless civilians. All in the name of “Freedom,” “Democracy” and “Individual Rights.”

– At the same time, that Head of State warmly welcomes a dictator internationally recognised as a vicious suppressor of human rights, with much pomp and ceremony and then, apologies to that dictator for any discomfort created by a brave woman who spoke up and publicly protested the dictator’s unspeakable outrages in their mutual home country.

– The woman is subsequently arrested and charged with the Federal Offence of “Threatening a Foreign Leader” for voicing objections to the dictator’s suppression of and violence against the philosophical organisation to which she belongs.

If you think that sounds like a good place to live … welcome to the United States. You can have it.

[PS: Finances, alone, have prevented me from long since moving back home to Dublin. Anyone thinking of emigrating to the US needs to think long and hard about the sort of society in which s/he really wants to live.]

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March 24, 2006

University Fine

Filed under: — Sven @ 15:09 GMT

First of all, so far I am loving my job at Princeton University. I don’t feel guilty working on the tasks I have, which I sometimes did at NEC. Most PhDs at NEC where up on a high horse looking down at the non-PhDs. While I rarely interact with Princeton faculty, the staff members with higher degrees I interact with seem to treat me as an equal. My input isn’t duly ignored, but accepted and often incorporated into the projects.

However, I just had to pay a $20 fine for having my parking tag on the wrong side of the car. Reviewing the parking regulations, I was in error. However, the University probably lost more money in man hours having me walk across campus to pay and get a new tag then they would of if they sent a warning and a new tag to me via campus mail.

The lady I paid the fine to was very kind, and was actually worried she was going to get ticked too. Plus she caught my Swedish accent, it’s been years since I got accused of having a non-American accent! After, I stopped for a cup of coffee, trying to save a tree I pulled an old beat-up thermos. “Why don’t you just get a new one” she said. I replied, “not until there is a hole in it.” How drivel.

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