| Monday, February 17, 2003 |
21:15 - Iraqi Explorer
http://www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
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Seems Microsoft has deployed an updated version of IE to the Gulf region, for the use of the weapons inspectors. (I guess having Blix look for the weapons by sitting behind a computer typing their code names into Google wasn't working well enough.)
Cute, I must say. Particularly in how it leaves no side of the debate unmocked. It's equal-opportunity ribbing! That's the way to go, if you ask me...
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18:51 - Just so's we're clear
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=5604_Fifth_Column_Rappers
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I don't think many thinking people are fooled by this sort of thing, but apparently there are a lot of people who need reality to have subtitles. So here's one piece of helpful translation:
Although he makes no bones about loathing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government ("I disagree with every aspect of Sharon"), Ahmad maintains that neither he nor anyone in the group is anti-Semitic.
"I am a Semite, so I can't be anti-Semitic," says Ahmad, pointing out that the correct definition of the word "Semite" is anyone speaking a Semitic language, including Arabs.
"We all come from Abraham . . . the Quran says that if you don't follow all the prophets, you're not a real Muslim," he says as the others nod.
Anybody who answers the question "Are you anti-Semitic?" with a tangent about what the definition of "Semitic" is, is anti-Semitic. Yes, yes-- I understand how broad the definition of "Semites" is in an ethnic and linguistic sense. But the interviewer needed a big sign to be floating behind him that read: YOU KNOW WHAT HE MEANT.
This is called a "dodge", and it is a tactic used by people who don't want to give a straight and truthful answer on the grounds that it will be self-incriminating.
(Via LGF.)
Me, I like Trey and Matt's exchange at the beginning of one of one of the South Park DVDs.
Trey: Many viewers see us making fun of Jews on the show a lot, and they want to know: Are you guys anti-Semitic?
Matt: <chuckling> Well, it's a fair question; but considering that I'm Jewish, I'd say it would be pretty hard for me to be anti-Semitic.
Trey: <sunny indulgent smile> I am, however.
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18:02 - Catching Up
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Hoo-boy. It's been a long weekend, and I've really been out of the loop.
I had a friend visiting from Canada, and we spent the last three days on a whirlwind tour of the Bay Area-- taking in all the points of interest that I could think of, both traditional touristy things like the Golden Gate Bridge and North Beach and the Castro, and cool spots of more personal significance like Summit Rock and Quimby Road and Kearney Street (up by Coit Tower) and Skyline Boulevard and my new house. We ended up discovering some cool out-of-the-way secrets that I hadn't actually known about before, and the weather cooperated and everything.
Little did I know that while we were laughing with friends in restaurants and hiking trails, San Francisco's lights below us hid a fresh wave of anti-war protests. It's really getting ugly out there, and I'm starting to feel less and less like I know what I'm doing and where the world is going. Having just watched Big Trouble in Little China and Akira for the first time this weekend as well didn't really help matters; now I'm haunted by nocturnal visions of San Francisco vanishing under a blinding white dome, slowly expanding outward from some central nexus as civil unrest changes the color of the streets worldwide faster and more sharply than has ever happened in the past. Writing on this page for the past year, I've been the proverbial frog in the saucepan, oblivious to the rising temperature and unwilling to shake off the miasma of dulled perspective that prevents me from realizing that I'm about to be boiled alive.
Right after the towers were hit, people on the news were saying over and over again that this changes everything. Few people could say much that added to that sentiment, but we knew, somehow-- instincively, viscerally-- that this changes everything. We had every reason to believe that the world would be forever altered from top to bottom, that either all of humanity would unite in brotherhood, or we would be plunged into protracted war and suffering. There wasn't much middle ground that we could see. We fully expected more attacks. We jumped at every news report. I woke up every morning with my hand twitching on the Refresh button on CNN.com.
But those follow-up attacks never came, and we started to realize that somehow, confusingly, not much had really actually changed. The towers weren't there anymore. Three thousand people were dead. But where was the changed world? Afghanistan came and went as a news item, and soon the only concrete evidence of 9/11 was the ongoing discourse over whether new and old movies should have the World Trade Center in their panoramas of the Manhattan skyline anymore.
I think, however, that 9/11 bit deep-- deeper than we've come to think it did. It's like a childhood injury that comes back to haunt you in the form of a bad back. It's like a seemingly small mechanical failure under the hood, a popped screw or a leaking coolant hose, that manifests itself in its full significance only when you decide to exercise that faulty part.
We're now going to war, and so there's a requisite peace movement. There's nothing inherently new or unusual about this. But what is new is the deafening stridency of the protests-- the naked anti-Americanism, the shameless support of our declared enemies, the open distrust and fear of our own government and the belief in a nebulous concept called "peace" that everybody seems to believe is there for the taking, if only we allow ourselves to grow up-- and that in spite of the largest, most audacious, most viscerally compelling demonstration that we've ever in living memory seen of the fact that peace does not happen by itself. This world was well on the way to being more peaceful than it's ever been, true-- but we've had it brought home to us, forcefully, that mistaking complacency for peace encourages people to become our enemies and attack us. And these protesters seem unwilling to let themselves see that their good intentions ignore plain, bare facts-- that we're entering a new historical period of war, world-altering war, that has been thrust upon us; that 9/11 was not an aberration that can be quickly forgotten and forgiven; that a cancer has grown on the Earth, and if not excised it will only grow worse and eat us all.
Peace protests before 9/11 were points of passing interest. They were never unpatriotic; they were expressions of popular dissent, always a requirement in a free society. But 9/11 tweaked something deep down in our collective soul; it threw something off the rails, it loosened a few screws. And now that we're revving up the anti-war engine again, it's rattling and banging in a way that it never used to back when it was under warranty. It's making those kinds of noises that signal an imminent meltdown, the kind that costs us three months' pay, particularly if we keep on belting on down the highway without paying attention to the smoke pouring out the tailpipe.
Peace isn't the absence of war. Peace is the willingness to accept certain risks in the world landscape, on the understanding that other people won't take advantage of us-- because they're taking on those same risks for the same reason. Peace is a mutual understanding reached by a unanimous community of similarly-minded peoples, with an absence of hatred and resentment, with common goals and an inherent incentive toward cooperation and friendship. Peace isn't something you get if you just lie down and cover your head with your hands while the other kids hurl rocks at it. That's called surrender, not peace. And it's what comes about when your vision of "peace" is simply "not fighting anymore", even if that includes self-defense.
"America isn't under attack", some say. But one has only to look at the desires of our enemies, expressed in so many press statements and propaganda videos and sermons, to realize that the only reason we're not suffering more attacks right now is because they lack the means, not because they aren't really our enemies. They are. They say so every week. And sooner or later, 9/11 will happen again, or something worse. To disagree with that possibility is to ascribe to them immense fecklessness and unwillingness to follow through on their own threats. I don't think that's a tenable logical position. these are human beings we're talking about, but human beings deeply and thoroughly convinced that it's their duty to do whatever is in their power to destroy us. They've already declared war on us, and they're dead serious about it. For us to march for peace under such conditions is to proclaim that we can bend spoons with our minds.
The problem still exists; the threat is still real, because the hatred is still real. The hatred is of what we are, not of what we do; and so short of changing fundamentally what we are, there is no solution to that hatred other than to remove the immediate threat by whatever expedient force is necessary, and then work on defusing whatever cultural and religious schisms divide us from that part of the world that currently wants us dead.
I spent Sunday evening with a couple of friends, watching the sun set over Silicon Valley from Summit Rock, unaware of what human opinion seethed under the lights that came on pinprick by pinprick in the expanse that stretched under us, from Cupertino to Milpitas, from Los Gatos to the northerly city glow silhouetting the San Bruno mountain line. It was awfully peaceful up there, true; but I know that if I had to sit at that vantage point and watch those points of light being snuffed out below me, under a cloud of bioweapon or something worse, the peace I'd achieved by putting myself out of harm's way would have been the most shameful delusion I'd ever bought myself.
They're waving Iraqi flags down there, I told myself. They're chanting that Bush is dumber than Forrest Gump and more evil than Hitler. They're declaring the US to be the biggest threat to world peace that currently exists. I knew these things were happening, but somehow it wasn't until I came down the hill and started reading the weekend's news and blogs that I started to think about how deeply into the nation's heart 9/11 really cut-- and what's more disturbing, just how irrational and vigorous our reflexive reaction to that affront has been. Never before has this world been in such a position: accustomed to so much ease and wealth and power, and confronted with a menace of such raw and primitive fury. We've evolved beyond the ability to deal coherently with it. And while in Vietnam our country's protesters grew their numbers measure by measure, over the course of years, only becoming significant as a political movement some four years after the war began, today we've declared our own country the enemy before we've even taken a decisive proactive step toward cutting out the cancer that has attacked us. We've become astonishingly quick to blame ourselves, to declare even self-defense to be antithetical, to reject outright any shadow of the promulgation of our world philosophy that has been a hallmark of America since the days of the Monroe Doctrine. It's only now that our people have grown so eased and complacent that the ideas of "puppet governments" and "promotion of democracy" and even "right and wrong" all seem like sinister relics of our parents' time.
The current conflict should be so black-and-white, so good-and-evil on its very surface that it seems it should have given the world a consensus unlike any it had ever seen in history. But it would seem from the evidence that when the MTV Generation meets the Dark Ages, there's no context for dialogue. There's just too big a rift. Wry irony, when given a sword and an enemy to smite with it, would rather impale itself with a smirk for the sake of the laugh it will get, than to take the obvious "right" course and swing for the bleachers. We all expect a trick question, and so we can't bring ourselves to come up with a straight answer no matter how high the stakes.
"Interesting times," they call them. It's never intended in a good way.
I worry that the wounds to our own country's confidence in its own system will be every bit as hard to heal, after all this is over with, as the wounds in the Middle East will be.
UPDATE: Dane Petersen says much the same thing, only a lot more succinctly. Plus he goes on to link to the bizarre movies and stuff I've been accumulating over the weekend. It's so good to see that some people still know when wry irony is appropriate (freaky pop-humor memes) and when it's not (waving US flags with swastikas instead of stars).
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| Saturday, February 15, 2003 |
03:12 - Pixel Pushers
http://www.shynola.com/j_s/j_s_download.htm
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I once dreamed of being able to create pixel art like this-- and not even pixel art that moved, either. It's seeing stuff like this that makes me realize there are some things I'll never achieve, no matter how little sleep I allow myself for the rest of my life.
There's just something so refreshing about watching this video. I can't describe it. It's like... low-pixel-count animation was never ever meant to look this good. As a technical and artistic achievement, it's unassailable; as a style statement, it's stuck in my brain forever now. You'll have to look for yourself.
"Shynola", huh? That's a name I'll have to remember...
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02:55 - It's sort of all about oooiiiil
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html
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A reader sends me this link so as to inject it into the "warblogger" discussion. It's a theory that the Iraq war is not about fighting terrorism, or about oil per se. It's in fact about protecting the monetary context of Iraq's oil rights, which are currently scheduled to switch from the dollar to the euro as a trade currency, which would reduce the US' buying power by 20-40%.
Although completely suppressed in the U.S. media, the answer to the Iraq enigma is simple yet shocking -- it is an oil currency war. The real reason for this upcoming war is this administration's goal of preventing further Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard. However, in order to pre-empt OPEC, they need to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its 2nd largest proven oil reserves. This lengthy essay will discuss the macroeconomics of the `petro-dollar' and the unpublicized but real threat to U.S. economic hegemony from the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency.
Now, bear in mind first of all that this article was posted on that paragon of unbiased academic writing, IndyMedia. And while it has lots of facts and figures to back up its postulates, I can't help but note that a) it's ultimately founded on a guess, and b) it depends on a tacit acceptance of the idea of a total censorial blackout of this damning angle by the all-powerful US government.
I'm not one to dig up my own facts and figures at 3:00 AM to bolster or disprove a thesis like this. But my gut tells me this isn't what's going on. Quite frankly, Iraq's oil is not that important-- not so important that Bush would instigate the largest lie in US history for it (making unpopular war on a sovereign nation for self-serving reasons never made clear to the American public?) and risk being made an international pariah if such truth ever came out. What with all the talk of "political capital" and deals struck with the UN in the interest of answering charges of unilateralism, and Rumsfeld playing up the derisive Franco-German anti-Americanism bloc as a moral foe... can you imagine Rumsfeld or Bush having to answer French or German claims in 2004 that the war wasn't in fact about what Powell had tried so hard and so doggedly to convince them of, but was instead just some petty price-fixing maneuver over Iraq's oil (most of whose output goes to France's TotalFinaElf anyway)?
It's an interesting idea, but it's a theory that presupposes a level of diabolical subterfuge that borders on 9/11-was-engineered-by-Bush conspiracy-theory territory. I'd say it's more a matter of food for thought experiments than a stroke of enlightenment.
But that said, and my skepticism out of the way, I can now press the plunger and inject this puppy into the general discourse. I'll let those with more facts and mad bl0gG1ng sK1lLz than myself take it from here.
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04:27 - Arrowed!
http://www.homestarrunner.com/tgs2.html
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No sane person should care about this, but of course that's why I find it of such grave importance: There's a new addition to "Teen Girl Squad", the newest running gag at homestarrunner.com.
(If for some inscrutable reason you want to know where this meme of doom came from in the first place, it's right here.)
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04:10 - Warmackin'
http://www.macstumbler.com/
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Marcus sends me this link to a nifty AirPort-network-scanning doodad for OS X. If you want a more visual idea of what kinds of precious bit-carrying airwaves are bending around you than what shows up in the system menu bar, this looks to be an invaluable tool.
I'm just wondering why Apple doesn't provide a tool like this themselves. Surely some "advanced" options, to view all available networks and their signal strength in a more useful format than the little four-level icon, would be a worthwhile addition to the Internet Connect window (or somewhere similar)?
This'll be an interesting thing to have along next time I'm in an airport. I swear the baggage-handling machinery was emitting an 802.11 signal the last time I was in O'Hare...
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| Wednesday, February 12, 2003 |
20:51 - Who fixes plumbing problems in a flash?
http://crustacea.nhm.org/~dean2/crab.html
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This is the creepiest damned thing I've seen in a long, long time.
(And yes, I'm even including this among the runners-up.)
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12:34 - Nauseating Cartooning
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Okay-- just as an aside or a preamble, towards those who tar Little Green Footballs as a "hate site", I just have to wonder at Charles Johnson's reaction to the recent death of Arab News cartoonist M. Khalil, creator of hundreds of blatantly offensive, blatantly anti-Israel and anti-American cartoons, and how it jives with that accusation:
Arab News cartoonist Mahmoud Kahil has died following surgery in a British hospital. Kahil was a talented illustrator whose gift was, unfortunately, often misused in the service of a corrupt regime. On the day of his passing I choose to remember and respect his talent, and think of what he might have achieved if nurtured by a free society.
Somehow I can't imagine, say, an Aryan Nation site posting a message like this over the death of, say, Spike Lee.
With that in mind, here's something that makes me wonder just what the ACLU thinks it stands for these days: the USA PATRIOT Acrt Show. Nothing less than a gallery of some of the most vile and tasteless post-9/11 cartooning this country (and the world) has yet seen, presented as a celebration of civil liberties and freedom of speech, things that have (evidently) been beaten out of workaday Americans by FBI agents going door-to-door with sjamboks and electrodes on a daily basis for the past eighteen months.
It's no surprise that Ted Rall is one of the featured "artists"; but the site gathers together dozens more like him, from all over the world, united by a common voice that speaks out from under the crushing heel of American patriotic brainwashing, braving the horrors of post-9/11 state censorship: 9/11 was Amerika's just reward.
(I'm not even going to include an inline thumbnail of any of these, because each one carries a red tagline: CARTOON CANNOT BE USED IN ANY WAY WITHOUT ARTIST'S PERMISSION! Yessir! Go to the site yourself if you're that curious.)
Some of these cartoons proudly carry the banner of "BANNED" (well, at least, one of them does); it waves it like an arm-tattoo, claiming that the cartoon was pulled from papers due to Big Brother's omniscient information-filtering mechanism. Never mind that the papers actually pulled it because it was offensive and tasteless, not because it antagonized The Party. I mean, come on-- what are these people snorting? Why is it so hard to distinguish a nation of uncensored weblogs and mostly-peaceful un-cracked-down-upon anti-war demonstrations... from a police state? Why is it that the hip and urbane treat Soviet-era propaganda posters and tales of the KGB as quaintly amusing and attractive, while at the same time whimpering about those with unpopular opinions being mercilessly silenced right here at home? Doesn't anybody see the existence proof in action-- or, more accurately, the lack-of-existence proof?
I don't know if the ACLU thinks it's being heroic and honorable in sponsoring this presentation, but it's certainly succeeded in turning one person into a contemptuous skeptic.
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11:51 - Safari Forges Ahead
http://www.apple.com/safari
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Safari users, fire up your Software Update thingies-- there's a new beta out (v60).
The Safari Update 2-12-03 improves the compatibility with popular web sites based on Safari user feedback, further improves the performance of loading web pages and Flash content, adds support for XML, increases standards conformance and delivers improved application stability. The update also enables access to web sites that offer self-signed security certificates.
From my initial impressions, it's a lot faster at large-table form performance, something that was lacking in the earlier beta; it's also got proper text-dragging handling, and lots of other things seem greatly improved. URL completion seems much more demure now. Table layout and reflow (quickly resizing the window a whole bunch to make it re-layout everything in real-time) is very snappy-- though, unfortunately, it still doesn't hold a candle to the velvet-smooth reflow of that same page in IE on my Windows machine, and that machine is a mere 667MHz. Ah well.
Safari still doesn't have keyboard focus/navigation for drop-down menus, and I'm still seeing issues that might be specific to my workplace network, where almost every page fails to load one or two objects in the course of loading; it seems like it's not being aggressive enough with retrying requests where packets get dropped, or something. I wonder if there's any way to troubleshoot/debug that. And this beta won't have any fixes to the monstrous list of comments and TrackBacks that users sent to Dave Hyatt the other day; we'll have to wait another few weeks for that, I daresay.
Posted form data still loses the final CR/LF at the end, for some reason; and lines with italics in them are leaded more than lines without, which makes paragraph layout kinda gross. That's really gotta get fixed.
But I'm very pleased with the changes so far. This is shaping up to be the real deal.
Thanks to J Greely, who alerted me to this before I had a chance to check the site (which I've been doing a lot lately).
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| Tuesday, February 11, 2003 |
12:29 - That's a whole lotta storage.
http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/
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I'd been wondering how the Xserve had been doing since its introduction last year. Apple making rack-mount servers? Fie! Vade retro, Satanas! I'd talked to one of the exhibitors at MacWorld and heard from him that sales were brisk, but it's always been difficult to gauge this sort of thing. 1U servers are supposed to be industrial and unsexy. It's not like you see them on people's desks or on sitcoms.
Well, somebody'd better tell Apple, because whether the thing is selling or not, they've committed wholeheartedly to applying the whole "Sex Equals Power" algorithm thing to the server space. They just released the Xserve RAID, and having seen it in action on the show floor, I can't imagine even the most stolid IT guy being able to keep from going all gooey over it. Just watching the stacks of blue LEDs going up and down the middle as disk access rises and falls is a trip. And from a pure technical standpoint, it looks like a real competitor. I treat Apple's bar-graphs with as much skepticism as anybody should who knows it's more for eye-candy purposes than to report actual real-world benchmark results; but I suppose it's pretty hard to argue with storage-space density measurements.
Do the math: the gigabyte-per-dollar ratio of Xserve RAID is the best in the world for Fibre Channel storage, and trumps most SCSI storage solutions as well. Xserve RAID offers up to 2.52TB of high-performance redundant storage at just over $4 per gigabyte -- a fraction of the cost of storage from Dell, HP, Sun or EMC. (as compared to pricing on their websites in February, 2003) The days of seemingly unlimited IT budgets are long gone -- no more blank checks for digital asset management -- so as an IT professional, you need to cut costs, without cutting corners. For that reason alone, we think you?ll appreciate our pragmatic approach to help you save huge amounts of data -- as well as a nice chunk of change.
I wonder whether they'll be taking heat for committing to ATA over SCSI. I know it raised a bunch of eyebrows when the Xserve first came out with these ATA drive units; I mean, sure, they're cheaper. (Way cheaper. Way way cheaper. Like 1/3 the cost and three times the available storage size. Not 15Krpm, true, though.) But some people do still demand the absolute best in throughput. I suppose that's one of the selling points of Xserve RAID, though: it offloads the disk-access load onto the storage-unit processor, so the server CPU doesn't have to worry about it. Essentially it's all the benefit that SCSI offers anyway; plus the Fibre Channel interface, which the guy at the Expo wouldn't even let me take a picture of because it was apparently brand-new and top-secret. (It'll offer much longer cable lengths than SCSI, for one thing-- it's optical.) I think the speed argument probably won't be much of an issue.
In any case, they've got a bunch of pages at the site that seem to flood the reader with reasons why ATA and Fibre Channel should give buyers no reason to pine for SCSI. Their slogan at the top of the site right now is "We Mean Business", and it does indeed look like they're pouring it on here.
This can either mean they're seeing an extraordinarily lucrative market for Xserve and Xserve RAID products, and they're striking while the iron is hot; or else they've had these products in the works for years, and they're just giving them the big fanfare of marketing hoo-hah that they'd always planned to, whether it ends up selling or not. We may never know, unless these products mysteriously vanish from the inventory in a couple of years.
Optimist that I am, I'm willing to believe that the Xserve has found itself a pretty healthy niche, and is growing in popularity (with a surge due now that Xserve RAID is out), and is helping to reestablish the Apple name in heavy-duty business. They've got a new 1.33 GHz Xserve out now too, and it looks as though they're serious about keeping things in step. So I'll give this effort the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe I'll do my part and pressure our IT guys into letting us have one next time we have to replace one of these auto-disintegrating Dell 1550s with their faceplates that don't lock properly and their CD-ROMs that fail and their Ethernet cards that stop working three weeks into service.
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09:54 - Hey... stop that.
http://www.clevescene.com/webextra/2003-02-05/derf.html
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In deciding how indignant to be about this, I have to conclude that what's worst about it is probably that it's largely true, about lots of people's opinions of the world these days. I wouldn't say it's too far off. I mean, maybe not worded quite like that, but...
I'd like to see one of Europe, though.
UPDATE: Ask and thou shalt receive; Mike Silverman comes through in the clutch.
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Brian Tiemann
