September 22, 2008
General
12 Comments
For those of you wondering what the motivation behind that last post was (and for the benefit of one commenter, it’s not because I’m voting McCain – I’m an Irishman living in France), it’s because I’ve been growing increasingly disillusioned with the level of discourse in this election.
Most of the Americans I know (democrats) seem to be concentrating on the ultra-polarisation of the candidates their facing – there’s a consistent attempt to show how dumb McCain & Palin are (and similar attempts coming from the other side), how radical conservative ultra-Christian she is (“burning books! Dinosaurs in schools! Handing out automatic weapons to third graders!”) and so on.
On the other end, conservatives are trying to paint Obama as the no-experience, tax-and-spend (as opposed to reduce-tax-and-spend Bush) ultra-liberal Democrat, with Biden sticking his foot in his mouth every day.
The truth, and the election discourse, is not well served by this. We are discussing minutiae, not what’s most important.
I don’t care whether Gov. Palin knows what the Bush Doctrine is – I want to know if she agrees with it.
I don’t care if McCain knows what the name of the Spanish Prime Minister is (although I must admit, transcripts of that exchange are bewildering) – what I do want to know is how he will act when president, what his priorities are, the factors which will influence his decisions, whether he values human rights more than national security – in brief, his moral fibre.
For the record, it appears to me like the moral fibre is on the side of Barack Obama. The man is, aside from being charismatic and a great speaker, thoughtful in his reflections, and seems to me to have his heart in the right place when it comes not just to America, but to the world.
That’s what I want to find out. Where is your heart.
John McCain’s heart seems firmly set on the White House, his “put America first” mantra implying, of course, that Obama won’t. On that point, I think he’s right. I believe that if America’s interests are at odds with the interests of the world, Obama will do what’s right.
September 22, 2008
General
14 Comments
I find it amusing that we hold our politicians to standards that 99% of our citizens could not meet in terms of knowing stuff which usually figures as useless trivia. “Who is the prime minister of Spain?”, “How many soldiers in an army brigade, and an army battalion?”, “What is the Bush Doctrine?”, “How many chucks would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?”
It reminds me of programming job interviews where people think that questions like “What is the difference between an inner join and an outer join?” or “How do you do an XSLT transform using Xalan and Xerces?” are good measures of how good a programmer you’ll be.
Try measuring what decision people will take when faced with a big difficult dilemma, rather than whether he knows the answer to a question which 30 seconds in Google would get him. That seems to me to be a better measure of presiding skills.
September 10, 2008
General
10 Comments
After pvanhoof opened the floodgates earlier, I guess I’ll follow up with some thoughts from across the pond…
McCain’s spent the last 8 months being painted by the hard-right nuts in the US republican party as an independent moderate Republican – I think this is an election ploy to make him appeal more to the swing voters.
And now, McCain’s chosen Palin as his VP pick. Where some people see a woman, I don’t think that’s why she was picked. She’s anti-abortion, pro-guns, anti-environment (she doesn’t believe that global warming has been proven, and even if it has, doesn’t believe it’s man-made): all in all, she’s a woman who has nothing in common with Hillary Clinton, and has no chance of picking up any disillusioned Clinton democrats. Sure, she appeals to the right wing of the party, and will consolidate the base.
What’s been interesting after this pick is the way the entire election campaign framing has changed. What people see in Sarah Palin is inexperience. And that’s suddenly become the centerpiece of the election.
The republicans are masters at framing the discussion, at making the democrats play defense. Kerry was a flip-flopper, Gore and Bush were “essentially the same”, the list goes on.
The Republicans almost always win when the most important thing in the campaign isn’t actually the candidate’s platform.
And so, by picking Sarah Palin, McCain’s trapped the democrats. “She’s inexperienced”, they say. “She’s got more experience than Obama”, say the republicans. “Biden’s got more experience than her”, say the Democrats. “McCain’s got more experience than Obama”, say the voices in the voter’s heads.
When you put Obama against McCain and measure experience, McCain wins. When you allow the debate to be framed as “who’s got the experience?”, Obama loses.
What the Democrats need to do is talk less about experience, and more about what you do when elected, where you want the country to go. “I may not have the experience of my opponent, but that just means I haven’t had to cut as many deals as he has,” he should say. “I haven’t had to compromise my ideals. I know where I want to take this country, and it’s a good place, where we take care of our sick, give our children the education they need to survive in the world, and where we use our position as a world leader to make the world a better place, instead of bullying the regimes we don’t like.”
If he speaks to their hearts, Obama will win.
August 6, 2008
General
5 Comments
I’ve been evaluating Alfresco over the last day or two, and I’ve had some trouble getting started.
The main problem I’ve had is that there doesn’t seem to be any docs specifically for people trying out the 30 day hosted evaluation. All the docs I’ve seen have, at some stage, entries like “If you are unable to map your drive, contact your system administrator or refer to the topic Setting up the CIFS server in the Installation Guide”. There seems to be an underlying assumption I’m self-hosting.
So in spite of my best efforts to try and use CIFS or WebDAV to copy content, play with versioning, etc, I have no idea what to enter for server name, share & directory for a file share in Nautilus, and the links “View in CIFS” and “View in WebDAV” don’t work for me in Firefox.
I also downloaded AlfrescoEnterprise 2.2.0, which suffers from the typical problems I’ve seen most Java enterprise software suffer from – it doesn’t seem to work out of the box. I have a JDK installed, and OpenOffice, but the various install scripts fail at various points because @@ALFRESCO_DIR@@ hasn’t been replaced during installation, and once I’ve edited the scripts to handle that, one script (start_oo.sh) looks for an soffice binary in “~/Alfresco/openoffice.org2.1/program/”. So, not heard of “which” then.
End result of several hours of playing around is that Alfresco looks like a nice web application, but I’m not in a position to recommend it to Linux users because the client software doesn’t install properly, and I can’t figure out how to use the file shares in Nautilus.
Lazyweb, can you help me out, please?
PS. Why does Nautilus’s “Windows share” dialog have all 3 of server, share and folder? I’d really like to be able to follow docs for windows that talk about entering \\YourMachineName\alfresco\Users\YourSpaceName as the share (s/\\/\//g;s/^/smb:/), and let the client software work out which bits are the share, and which bits are folders. Idem for WebDAV.
Update: I thought I’d hit the motherlode when I chose ” Custom location” and put in dav://community.alfresco.com/alfresco/webdav/Trial%20Spaces/dneary%40free.fr and got asked a username and password – but Nautilus gave me an error: “Response invalid”. No idea what that response was, or any indication of how I can fix it, though.
August 6, 2008
General
12 Comments
Federico: Completely agree. In fact, you’re now training people to go through a whole new “ignore security” conditioning – previously it was just “Add exception” or whatever. Now it’s “Next, Next, Add exception, Get certificate, Next”.
From that presentation you link to, this statistic stood out:
SecuritySpace survey found that 58% of all SSL certificates were invalid (expired, self-signed, unknown CA, incorrect domain, etc)
The presentation also said that “most people only see the valid certs from big sites, so this problem isn’t very visible,” which is the point that MoCo makes.
I discussed this with Gerv during OSCON, and his take on it was toweing the party line:
- Your cert is expired? Fix it already
- Your cert is from a different domain? Fix it already
- You’re self-signing a cert instead of paying $10 a year for one signed by a CA? Spend the money!
- If you’re running a volunteer site, and want a self-signed cert just to encrypt usernames & passwords, your visitors represent less than 1% of the internet population, sucks to be you!
(this is a paraphrasal of my memory of the conversation).
I may be an edge case, but I seem to run into an awful lot of sites where the absolute correct thing for me to do is “Add exception Next Get certificate Next Next”. Sucks to be me, I guess.
July 30, 2008
General
5 Comments
Can someone who understands markets better than me explain why this doesn’t imply I should go to the bank & borrow 10 or 12 billion dollars right now?
- Sun Microsystems assets (end March 08): $14.262 billion
- Sun Microsystems market cap at $10.21 per share: $7.98 billion
Incidentally, Sun’s market cap on the 15th of July, at $8.78 per share, was $6.86 billion.
Of course, you have to clear liabilities, and get a good price for the profit-making businesses, but doesn’t this smell to anyone else like a fire sale in the waiting?
July 10, 2008
General
1 Comment
Courtesy of Juliette Jarry of AJEL
Between:
- What I think
- What I want to say
- What I believe I’m saying
- What I say
- What you want to hear
- What you believe you’re hearing
- What you’re hearing
- What you want to understand
- What you believe you understand
- What you understand
…there are ten ways to have problems communicating with each other.
But let’s try anyway.
July 4, 2008
General
4 Comments
For anyone who has experienced pain when upgrading to a more recent version of Ubuntu with X and xrandr on Intel hardware, consider running this fabulous command.
This goes in particular for anyone who needed i915resolution before for wide-screens, and had a “ForceBIOS” option in xorg.conf. The driver to use for the hardware changed, and the xorg.conf got about 100 times smaller since Ubuntu 6.06 or 7.04.
This is the major weakness in the Ubuntu upgrade process, really… if hacks are needed to work around falings in previous versions, those hacks are (silently, IIRC) kept after an upgrade, even though they’re no longer necessary (and are, in fact, harmful).
Many thanks once again to Claude Paroz, wo helped me work through the projector problem & got me moving towards the fix.
June 6, 2008
freesoftware, General, humour
10 Comments
I only noticed this after finally meeting him in the flesh at LinuxTag – Aaron Seigo bears an uncanny resemblance to Franck Ribéry, French footballer extraordinaire (except for the scars that Franck got going through a windshield as a kid and the funky hairdo).
The proof?
Aaron Seigo
Franck Ribery
June 5, 2008
General
2 Comments
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This would be a great plug-in for rhythmbox – generate pink noise like the wind in the willows, a mountain stream, birds signing in the trees… I don’t know how you’d do it, mixing different samples + some randomisation?
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A decent source for samples for the relaxing sound generator plug-in?
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Another possible source of free sound samples
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