Month: December 2004

Well, now that my router is working and both machines (desktop and laptop) can see the Internet, it’s time to get the 2 machines talking to one another. I was able to set up a simple network, and I can copy files from one to the other using ssh. But all this networking stuff is new to me; pages like this and this. Ideally, I’d like to be able to transfer files from one machine to the other using gFTP, it would be basically the same as uploading files to a website. Not sure how to make this happen, but hopefully it won’t be too difficult to set up.

Anyway, things are working well in this area. Hopefully I can continue to climb the learning curve….

Well, that was simpler than I expected it to be. Today I bought a Linksys WRT54G wireless router, and brought it home. Lo and behold, it Just Works™ with Ubuntu Linux! Everything was preconfigured in the install. All I had to do was run the Network Setup wizard from within GNOME on my Linux desktop and it worked fine out of the box.

So now I can be online while wandering about the house. Maybe I’m typing this naked….you’ll never know. Heh.

I’ve said it before, but Linux has come a very long way in terms of user friendliness….there was a time when stuff like this required recompiling the Linux kernel. And if you don’t know what that means, count your blessings.

I’m sure an experienced, professional typesetter would laugh at this question. “If it was easy, we wouldn’t have jobs.” And they’d be correct. However, I’m not referring to typesetting in general, but rather to using sections, master documents, and subdocuments in Openoffice. I’m getting it, and once I grok it it will be a very good tool for the work I have before me. But until then, grrr…..
it’s like beating my head against a brick wall.

I sense a theme here. The ways in which I use computers have been pushed to their limits recently. New laptop. Studio computer giving me fits. Trying to grok OpenOffice for advanced document preparation. Getting wireless working (that’s on the horizon actually).

Well, in theory I’m good at this stuff….

When I first saw The Return of the King in theaters a year ago, I decided that I would reserve judgment until the extended edition DVD came out. After all, for the first 2 films in the trilogy, I regard the extended editions as being definitive. It just seems ludicrous to me to limit a movie to 3 hours, just for marketing reasons. The extended edition movies are just better, in every way except brevity.

Well, suffice to say that this third extended DVD continues the trend of the first two. Indeed, I take all the movies together, extended edition, as one long 11-hour movie. And I also regard it as the most striking cinematic achievement in history. It’s certainly my favorite film, without question.

I won’t go into the details and the nitty gritty. But man. Peter Jackson, along with the thousands of people working with him, have cemented their place in our cultural legacy.

Now I want to take the time to watch the entire trilogy, back to back, blocking out an entire day to do so. Anyone feel like throwing a LotR party? ;-)

This article on Salon.com is a very interesting expose of how spammers work. I use Mozilla Thunderbird, which filters out much of the spam I get, but it is still interesting to know the levels of masking and deception at work in spam. I think a study on the relationship between spam and capitalism is in order….

Well, I’ve been watching the Extended Edition Return of the King DVD. In it, there’s a scene that I regard as Peter Jackson’s jab at President Bush and the war furor that is being protrayed in the American media. In the scene, Frodo and Sam get swept up in an orc batallion and are forced to march to war, with an orc sargeant smacking everyone with whips. His words are straight from George W Bush’s mouth: “Don’t you know, we’re at war!”

It is of course entirely possible that Jackson meant nothing by this and that I’m reading way too much into it. But somehow I doubt it.

This looks very cool:

In the coming months, Google will collaborate with Harvard’s libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of the 15 million volumes held in the University’s extensive library system. Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library.

The beginning of complete digitization of information, perhaps? Harvard’s library is 2nd only to the Library of Congress in terms of number of books contained. I can’t imagine the labor involved in this process.

Though it’s important to note that this will only be the case for books written before about 1920, since very few books published since then are actually in the public domain, Creative Commons stuff notwithstanding.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m currently typesetting a couple of books. There are several ways to accomplish this, some more efficient than others. I’m still sort of feeling my way around trying to learn the best way for me to do this kind of work. This page is a good start, I wanted to document it so I can easily find it again.

As ever, Noam Chomsky has insightful comments on the 2004 election. My favorite passage is this one:

In 2000, “issue awareness” — knowledge of the stands of the candidate-producing organizations on issues — reached an all-time low. Currently available evidence suggests it may have been even lower in 2004. About 10% of voters said their choice would be based on the candidate’s “agendas/ideas/platforms/goals”; 6% for Bush voters, 13% for Kerry voters (Gallup). The rest would vote for what the industry calls “qualities” or “values,” which are the political counterpart to toothpaste ads. The most careful studies (PIPA) found that voters had little idea of the stand of the candidates on matters that concerned them. Bush voters tended to believe that he shared their beliefs, even though the Republican Party rejected them, often explicitly. Investigating the sources used in the studies, we find that the same was largely true of Kerry voters, unless we give highly sympathetic interpretations to vague statements that most voters had probably never heard.

As usual, Chomsky also calls for organization and sustained action. He is optmistic, because he sees more mobilization and awareness of issues now than he saw in the 1960s. Let’s hope he’s correct.

CBS is running a story about the over 5,500 (according to the Pentagon) US soldiers who have declined to participate in the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

There are more of them than I thought.

I applaud them. The soldiers interviewed for the story are saying the right things (right, at least from where I stand):

“I found out, basically, that they found no weapons of mass destruction. They were beginning to come out and say it’s not likely that we will find any — and the claim that they made about ties to al Qaeda was coming up short, to say the least,” says Hughey. “It made me angry, because I felt our lives were being thrown away as soldiers, basically.”

“People should have a right to say, ‘I’m not fighting in that war. That’s an illegal war. There’s illegal stuff going on the ground. I’m not going,'” says House. “And anyone who says soldiers should go to jail if they don’t fight in an illegal war is persecuting them.”

Wasn’t he supposed to follow orders? “I was told in basic training that, if I’m given an illegal or immoral order, it is my duty to disobey it,” says Hinzman. “And I feel that invading and occupying Iraq is an illegal and immoral thing to do.”

It’s good to see that so many soldiers are seeing these truths, and recognizing Empire’s invasion of Iraq for what it is. But the last quote is most interesting in terms of war criminals. If this invasion/occupation is indeed illegal and immoral, then those who participate in it are not only NOT doing their duty by obeying an immoral/illegal order, but also are war criminals.

And please don’t give me the “support the troops” nonsense. What exactly does that mean? I’ve written about this before; the best way to support them is to get them out of an impossible situation where they cannot do the right thing. I reagrd these soldiers, despite their choice to participate in this illegal invasion, as victims of this war. Their lives will require rebuilding; their souls will be marred with their participation in this war.

I hope the US recognizes its insanity and gets these people out of Iraq where they are so clearly not wanted by the local people.

But hey, at least the oil is somewhat safe, where safe means under the control of American corporations…