The recent debacle surrounding the arrest and threat of death penalty for
the man in Afganistan who converted from Islam to Christianity is nothing less than an embarrassment for the nations involved in the deposing of the Taliban government. While this embarrassment is more easily explainable in terms of the Afghan invasion being a more direct response to 9/11 and thus there was less time for planning a post-war Afghanistan, it does raise some questions on how such things are handled. George Bush wanted to set up Afghanistan and Iraq as shining democratic examples, but seemed to forget that a democracy is more than just allowing elections. And its not that there was a lack of experience with how to establish a democracy in a conquered nation, as it was done in both West-Germany and Japan after World War 2.

I googled a bit and I found this section from the Potsdam declaration, which was the document setting the terms for Japanse surrender.

We do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation, but stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners. The Japanese Government shall remove all obstacles to the revival and strengthening of democratic tendencies among the Japanese people. Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for the fundamental human rights shall be established.

After the war the allied forces put clear directions of the writing of the new constitution. In Afghanistan it seems that apart from demanding a system based on elections there wasn’t any such guidance given. And it seems just as little guidance has been given in Iraq.

I am not sure how its been possible to screw up so completely twice in a row, but I guess part of the problem was ‘selling’ the wars as freeing the peoples of said nations. I guess that when you come in as a liberator as opposed to a conquerer its harder to impose your rules on the freed. Nontheless I am sure that the US government had a lot of negotiation options with the northern alliance before the Afghan invasion and maybe that would have been a good time to demand that a post-war constitution that was based on the same values and principles as was demanded of Japan, as shown above. Instead we got Taliban-light .

So I went back to Norway for the weekend. My main reason for going was to cheer up my mother who had been sick and undergone as lot of testing lately as the doctors feared for a while that she had gotten cancer. While back I also used to the chance to connect with some of my friends in Norway again.

I re-discovered is that doing stuff in Norway do cost a shitload of money. One night I went out with Kjartan Maraas and Owen Frasier-Green. We ate pizza, had a few beers and played snooker for a few hours. In the end the evening cost me almost 200 Euro, and that was for just me alone. Considering that my airplane ticket to Norway cost me almost 200 Euro sort of sets things in perspective :)

Anyway I think the trip back to Norway worked out well. That I felt like I returned after a two month vacation when stepping into the Fluendo office today probably means I had an eventful four days in Norway :)

So Edward managed to get me hooked onto Battlestar Galactica. I have seen the whole series and for season two I even checked out a couple of the podcasts done by the writer behind the show, Ron Moore.

Listening to those podcasts was kinda interesting as it gave me a impression of a person who cares about his show in ways very similar to how we care about our projects like GNOME and GStreamer. The similarities in feelings towards ones labour of love is of course one of those things which are in many ways obvious when you think about it, but having it confirmed by listening to such a podcast does make it more ‘real’. Another interesting parallel is the often difficult to manage relation with the community of strong feeling users. ‘Battlestar Galactica was great until you did X’ or ‘Battlestar Galactica would be great if only you did Y’, has a great similarity to ‘GNOME was great until you did X’ or ‘GNOME would be great if only you did Y’.

Anyway to make some specific comments on the Battlestar Galactica. I think one of the reason I like it is because they do fairly clever storylines and characters. Ron Moore and the others behind the show are smart people and it shows. That said, even if I think Season 2 is better than most other current television made it do feel a little less good than the first season. The reasons for this is probably complicated, but Ron has pointed out in his commentaries that some of the episodes turned out less well due to time contraints. As they increased the number of episodes per season the time pressure increased leading to more glitches in the storytelling. For instance one thing they did better in season one than in season two (especially second half of season two) is keep some final truths from you. For instance take the ghostly ‘number 6’ that follows Gaius around. For a long time they held us from being able to conclude on wether she is ‘real’ or a figment of Gaius’s imagination. As long as she was only telling him about the past or about things a genius might have been able to deduce himself you where kept guessing. Some of the things that has happened during this season doesn’t rhyme very easily with that uncertainty but has instead ‘cemented’ her a bit as an actual entity. The same with Laura’s religious prophercy fulfillment where I feel they wanted it to be unclear for the viewer if there really is a supernatural prophercy at work or if it is just a person that belivies in the prophercies making them true by acting them out. There was items in this season pulling strongly towards the first option. Of course Laura being cured from her terminal disease did make things a bit murky again to the show makers defence.

Of course it is possible to ‘correct’ these items by adding things to story patching over the glitches in the storytelling making the ‘other’ option in both cases seem much less likely, but my general feeling is that the ‘stress’ of the higher episode count has simply given them to little time to think out each scene well enough to keep the option for multiple interpretations there. So while the Ron and Co. are smart, even smart people need time to think to come up with clever stuff.

Anyway, I still think its a fun show and will be tuning in for Season 3 in the fall.

So I got my old phone stolen last week by pickpocket. My old phone was among the most expensive the operator was offering when I got it about 2 years ago. It had every feature you could dream of like Java support, bluetooth, tri-band, video and audio streaming, built in Radio, camera, support for email, slot for memory cards, mp3 playback support, themeable screen and more. Problem was I never ever used any of those features. So my new phone is the cheapest flip-top they had and it has no extra features at all. In fact it is even missing features I thought wasn’t considered a ‘feature’ anymore, like support for sending and receiving address book entries. So now I am doing on the painful job of trying to recreate my list of phone numbers as all my phone numbers got lost with the previous phone.

The recent ruckus about the caricature drawings of Mohammed is curious.
The reactions seems a bit misplaced considering that there have been much harsher criticism published of Islam and Mohammed in various books, papers and tv programmes over the last few years than these drawings.

One thing is clear to me. If there is anything that needs to be kept it check through public criticism so is it religion. The Church too used to try to keep criticism silent by calling upon blasphemy. They
didn’t stop with the calling upon though, but had people arrested or killed too. Either directly our through local governments under their sway. Luckily Europe has left the dark ages behind and through public criticism of the church and christianity the era of englightenment came about.

Today I was shocked to find that the Catholic church dared bring forth a statement that they want to bring back the bad old times where they and Christianity where impossible to critisize. The Vatican stated the following – The right to freedom of thought and expression … cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers. Right, so let the book burning start again eh? I guess they would love to burn the Da Vinci code for instance.

That there are violent reactions in the Islamic world is of little suprise, most of these countries are poor underdeveloped dictatorships, rallying against the evils of the free world is the bread and circus those governments provide for their populations, to keep the population to occupied to wonder why their glorious political and religious leaders are unable to provide them with anything but anger and poverty.

Always fun to make some predictions for the coming year, mostly so one can look back at the end of it and find out how wrong one was, or how innacurate. Anyway, here I go with my predictions for 2006:

• The cultural collision between the Free Software community and the content industry will fully blossom with the widespread availability of Blue-Ray and HD-DVD devices everywhere with their new DRM systems.
• The major players in the music industry will start to feel the pain of getting squeezed between other activities lessening the interest in music and improved distribution and marketing of independent music. Copy protection scheemes will start to look more like a liability than a tool for survival to them.
• GNU/Linux will become a serious contented as a media platform and Fluendo will play a major part in that rise.
• Microsoft will appear more and more like an ally of the open source community in their fight against DRM as also Microsoft sees that the increasingly draconic DRM measures requested by the content industry is killing the usability of their systems.
• The Spanish speaking world will have many major Linux desktop deployments and come to be seen as the adoption leader for Linux desktops. They will mostly choose GNOME as their Desktop.
• Research papers will start to get published that show that software patents are hindering growth and innovation, not promoting it. Supports of free markets like the Economist will start to demand wide patent reforms.
• Creative Commons experiences something bad enough to open their eyes to the fact that open content is only open if its in an open format.
• There will be people in 2006 not agreeing with my predictions
• And last but not least, the new Spanish laws against smoking in public areas cause both Wim and Edward to stop smoking

So I am back from Norway after spending Christmas at my mothers place. Had a nice time in Norway and got my batteries recharged. Also discovered that my family must have felt I was in lack of shirts as I got 7 of them for Christmas, and a necklas which I traded in for an extra pair of cufflings.

Also ended up reading
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. It had gotten rave reviews back in Norway and being set in Barcelona I thought it could be an interesting read to get to know the city a little more. The book did not appeal to me much, to somber and depressing. Even if the book had a in many ways happy ending it tasted to strongly of entropy for my taste. I am going to try to go out and look for some of the locations mentioned in the book though, as a way to learn more about the city I live in if nothing else.

Feel a bit bad about making fun of good efforts, but there was a very good example of a non-decision being made quoted the other day on OSDL Desktop Architects group mailing list. It was said that one of the things that had been agreed upon at the meeting in Portland was that when people where recommending GUI toolkits they would recommend those which allowed cross-platform development. On the face of it seems like a meaningful agreement, but in reality its not. If you look at what people actually use on GNU/Linux today its Gtk, FLTK, Qt, wxWindows, Swing, SWT and XUL and to some degree Motif. So I guess the agreement is that nobody recommends Motif…Wow the power of people coming together and making hard compromises :)

So I got George R.R. Martins latest book ‘A Feast for Crows’ delivered on Friday and spent a large part of the weekend reading it. The book has been something of a disapointment and its shortcomings are similar to the problems with recent Robert Jordan books, a cast of characters grown to big, the author not being able to cut away some dead meat and general verbiosity. The too many characters problem has the same origin in both George R.R. Martins and Robert Jordans books. They started out with a group of people and at that point their number wasn’t a problem, then they split the group up so no you need multiple storylines to cover them all. Neither author seems prepared to put any of their characters on the backburner either, turning them into secondary characters (at least for a while) although Martins did kill of a few of them in his first books.

Martins have also ended up splitting this fourh book into two, with the second part meant to come out next year. Problem is he split it mostly on a per character basis, which means that the next book will in many ways not move the story forward at all compared to this book. And this book did very little to move the story forward to begin with. Sigh.

I still think its a good book series, but Martin (and Jordan) should take to heart that even in multi-book epic series, sometimes less is more.

The recent news coverage about the case of a 23 year old female teacher having sex with a 14 year old boy made me think about the problems you face as when being a 14 year old boy.

Honestly I think if you do a poll among 14 year old boys if they would be willing to trade in their acne, bracers, school bullies and exam problems with having sex with a 23 year old good looking blond woman, I think the poll would come out fairly unanimous. Could of course be that I am misremembering my priorities when I was 14, but I don’t really think so.