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.