Category Archives: Philosophy

On the London bombings

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Something to think about:

I am astounded at the number of commentators, like Thomas Friedman (“Muslims in danger,” Views, July 9), who refuse to link what happened in London with what is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq. Britain and the United States are killing Muslims by the thousands in these two countries, yet we are shocked when there is reprisal.

There are not just extremists as Friedman would have us believe. They are humiliated people fighting back with the weapons they have available. When the dust settles and sanity returns, the war on Iraq will be judged as one of the great catastrophic blunders in all of history.

This is a quote of a Letter to the Editor to the International Herald Tribune, by Robert Billyard, Langley, British Columbia, published on June 12th. The highlighting is my own, and has not been reproduced as in the original.

When consumers do the work

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This is another old blog entry of mine I want to have available again. Be assured, I will not start to republish my entire blog. Partly I am way to lazy to do this, and partly that would be extremely bad manners in my opinion.

The reason why I republish a bit of the blog entry over here is not only because I like it, but because I didn’t think, of the situation the quoted article describes, in such a way before. Look at the situation like at the famous egg of Columbus. Which ultimately makes me look like a stupid old fish, but well… It’s interesting, in my opinion.

The article has been written by Nicols Fox and has been published by the International Herald Tribune on Friday, May 6th 2005 on page 11.

It began in the 1970s. Or at least that’s when I became conscious of it. Americans began cleaning up after themselves in fast-food restaurants.

I had been living abroad and didn’t know about such things, but my children, faster to pick up on American cultural expectations, made sure I took back my tray and put my trash in the appropriate bin.

Cleverly, the restaurants made this choice not only easy but gratifying. Customers were given the sense of being good citizens or helping out the teenage minimum-wage workers who wiped off the tables.

I was never fooled. I knew what was going on. We were doing the restaurant’s work, and if we didn’t we felt guilty. My children would shrink into their coats while people stared disapprovingly if I tried to abandon a cluttered table.

Having a quick look on Google just revealed me, that the IHT got an online version of the partly quoted article.

As ridiculous as it might seem. I decided that I would no more clean up my desk in fast food restaurants. I am actually not used to visit McDonald’s. The only fast food I like is the one you can get at Burger King. That said, they do clean up the tables (at least the Burger Kings I have visited – over here, in good old Europe), which means that you do not have to do it.

Walls of perception

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This is about the first essay in poetry I ever did. I however felt like putting it online. Got some other too – I will publish them one day – probably.

Now, what you should know as well is that I had already published this piece of writing, back in the days in which I was using WordPress. As I took that (old) blog offline though, I felt that I needed to put it online again. Can’t tell you why, as I don’t really know myself. Anyways…

Mental walls are floating,
the only thing growing,
is my own will to die,
you can indeed kill me,
my soul will stay untouched,
have no problem, but do not judge,
for to judge you need to know,
what is good or bad, even though,
some people judge without having
a context to set it all in.
Do not do so, horror is a need,
to know bad, as such – indeed,
ataraxia is what is necessary for good,
now – who has ataraxia can’t have seen blood,
so who can judge properly?

Things I wanted to share

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Now, I have some stuff, I wanted to bring to your attention. Basically you could see this post as some kind of container, holding different subjects. I thought that it might be ridiculous to write numerous entries, just to stay on topic.

So… First of all, I am sure many of you people know WordPress. I for my part have been using if for some months, and it seems to suit everybody’s needs at the beginning. No comment spam whatsoever and some other interesting features are literally waiting to be explored. However, sooner or later, and even if you keep everything slick and tidy, you will be confronted with comment spam. Do not ask me why, for I simply do not know an answer to the question. The thing is, that I know numerous blogs, which have been using wordpress (of whatever version) and it simply always resulted in that same fact.

Comment spam, is than something that I hated so much, that I (when I still was using WordPress) killed the ability to leave a comment. Interestingly this didn’t prevent comments from being posted. That’s when I went ahead and deleted the PHP files, which should allow the job of posting a comment. This didn’t help either. (Not that I still cared, as I didn’t show comments on the site anymore, but still – that’s some kind of scary.)

Anyways. Yesterday, Daniel K. Gebhart told me about an interesting (new?) Blog software, called s9y (Serendipity – a PHP Weblog/Blog software). This sounds great, as it got tons of features and other perhaps important stuff. It might be worth a try if you are bored by the problems you might encounter by using WordPress. (On a side note, I do not want to complain about WordPress just like that however. Do not get me wrong, for WordPress still is an amazing thing. And actually everything is great, but the comment system. This is however, as I’ve previously explained an important feature for me, and I suppose, numerous other people.)

Something entirely different. Flickr… I love it. I had huge web hosting expenses back in the days when I published my pictures in the good old fashioned “Apache will list it all” way. Now though, my flickr account allows me to cut down those bandwidth costs for the moderated sum of 25$ a year. (Actually I can’t remember the exact cost). Interestingly I had to pay much less, because of the conversion rate €/$. Which was great. So what I am trying to tell you here is, that if you are interested in sharing pictures, or putting pictures online, so that many people can have a look at them, consider flickr, it’s well worth it. Now, I do suppose that most of the use perl people will have an own server, where they can put all their things online, but there might be some more people reading this, who do not want to get themselves through all those different things. As of now, I have already infected two people with the flickr virus. Namingly elver (Elver Loho) and fotex (Daniel K. Gebhart).

Flickr offers you some (at least in my eyes) great features. Like for instance, the favorites, which basically is nothing else than a good way to bookmark good pictures. Beside, the huge amount of users on flickr, makes it easy to get comments, which might inspire your motivation to make good shots yourself. For all of those who are interested in uploading pictures, you should have a look at Flickr-Upload on CPAN.

Speaking of Elver, he visited Luxembourg and by there me, from Saturday till Thursday. It was a great time, and I am interested in visiting Estonia one day as well. Seems to be great, and the beer seems to be by far not as expensive as over here in Luxembourg.

Well, anyways. I can’t think of something that I would want to tell right here, at the moment. This is thus the way I will end this shiny but unimportant post.

What I have always been searching for

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I think to finally have found what I have been searching for for quite a moment. You see, I have been using Linux for some time now. First contact was made with Debian slink somewhere in 2000 or 1999, I am not so sure. However I didn’t really start to use Linux until 2002, occasionally switching between different distributions, but always settling down, back to Debian.

Now, I had planned for a rather long time, to get myself a shiny new notebook, and after a lot of hesitations, I bought myself, while at the LinuxTag in Karlsruhe this year, a Thinkpad T42p with the UXGA+ (1600×1200) resolution.

Now, as always, or as one could imagine, my first move was to throw away the Microsoft Windows XP installation, and put Debian (Sid) on it. While many things worked with the time, nothing, and I literally mean nothing worked out of the box.

Some days later already I wasn’t to confident to get everything working. However, with all the wondrous things that had been said about Ubuntu, I thought, that I could very well give it a try. And guess what. During the installation already, Ubuntu 5.04 (called Hoary Hedgehog by the way) detected and configured correctly all of the hardware. Well, not all, because the fingerprint reader doesn’t work at this moment, but frankly I couldn’t care less about that device.

I was really happy when I installed Ubuntu. I mean, after all, it was exactly what I have been searching for, for a couple of years. It’s a system relying on free software, which runs perfectly stable and is secure. What more do I need? I can’t tell. It’s good in a productive sense, for it allows me to do just about anything. And while the packages might not be as bleeding edge as with Debian Sid, I can’t say, that it uses outdated packages either.

The possibility to use all of the apt-get tools and aptitude, is a great plus as well. Hell, if there was a root user, I think you could offer Ubuntu as a new tree in Debian, called: Consumer or something.

Stable is in my opinion at least for servers. Sid or unstable is for people who like to live on the bleeding edge (although that hasn’t been true the last few months, especially concerning Xorg), who accept all the problems that show up, with dependency problems and all. Testing is a bit a bit of a mix, at the beginning of it’s life cycle it’s technically “unstable”, and with the time it moves closer and closer to stable. While security fixes aren’t applied just as fast as with stable. There definitely is a place for such a tree in Debian. (Note that this is the way I see it, nobody has to share my opinion.)

Unfortunately Debian didn’t think about publishing it. But that isn’t important, as Ubuntu cared about. And as the flow of packages is in one direction and in the other, I do not think, that Ubuntu is for the bad of anybody.

But, as you might expect, I am drifting from the thing I wanted to write about at the beginning. When I said that about everything was working straight out of the box, well, I wasn’t telling the exact truth. However, the only things I had to install was “tpb” and “tpctl”, that is “Thinkpad buttons” and “ThinkPad Configuration Tools for Linux”. And everything worked fine.

However, I still didn’t have suspend to ram, and honestly I didn’t care for some time, this morning however, I was having a look at it, because I will need the possibility to suspend to either the hard disc or to RAM, in the near future. Well, it turned out to be more than simple. All I had to do, was sudo vim/etc/default/acpi-support and uncomment the second line, above which it read: # Uncomment the next line to enable ACPI suspend to RAM.

I am more than astonished about the simplicity with which everything can be configured. One really has to see it for oneself to believe it. Or better, I would never have imagined that Ubuntu could be this good, at any point in time.

To sum it all up: “Ubuntu, I love it!” ;-)