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Justin's Linklog Posts

(Untitled)

Published November 20, 2001

I’ve just added weblogs.com support to taint.org. Been meaning to do it for a while, but plenty of other stuff got in the way in the meantime. :(

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Published November 20, 2001

“Please mind the closing doors…” The doors close…The doors reopen. “Passengers are reminded that the big red slidey things on the side of the train are called the doors. Let’s try it again. Please stand clear of the doors.” The doors close… “Thank you.”

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Published November 19, 2001

Due to a set of advocacy and plain show-off mails recently, regarding sub-pixel font rendering under Linux, my hand has been forced ;)

As a result, here’s a little HOWTO document I’ve written up for getting sub-pixel rendering working under Linux. Check it out if you’ve got a Linux laptop and want some sweet-looking fonts!

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Published November 15, 2001

What’s hot in Kabul today? Apparently, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai = hot, Fakhir Mohammed = not. Can’t say I blame them.

Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 13:51:13 -0000
From: “Martin Adamson” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Afghan music latest: Last chance to buy Osama praise songs

Evening Standard – 14 November 2001

In his music shop Mohamed Salim is quite literally erasing the Taliban from Kabul – taping new music over the cassettes of religious chanting which the former regime forced him to sell.

Today’s victim is former Taliban Top Ten chanter Fakhir Mohammed, whose monotonous warbles were a firm favourite until the regime fled on Monday. Now a tape of his chants is being dubbed over with the soundtrack from an Indian film.

Getting to the front counter in Salim’s shop means fighting your way past dozens of young men, all eager for tapes. For the moment he has run out, producing new ones only as fast as his tape-to-tape machine can dub over the Taliban cassettes. “This is the best business in five years,” he says. “We’re very happy just to hear music again.” Outside, Salim’s music merges with the cacophony of tunes – Indian and Western

  • being pumped into the street at maximum volume.

Until Monday night, when the Taliban fled, Farashgar was a grim place to visit: those shops which bothered to put music onto their speaker systems had only repetitive chants to offer. Business was bad, and also uncertain. “If a Talib came to the shop, he would say ‘give me one cassette, I will pay you after’,” said Salim, 22. “But maybe the money would never come. What could you do?” What they did was sell underground music: many of the tape boxes on Salim’s shelves held a secret.

He shows me why. On the labels of some cassette boxes are the names of various Taliban chanters. But he opens the box to reveal, scrawled over the tape, an Indian singer. “We would sell this way, to people we know. The hard thing was remembering which singer was in which cassette box.” The other hard thing were the men from the notorious Ministry for Vice and Virtue. These so called “religious police” were the Taliban’s gestapo, and the shopkeepers of Farashgar were a favourite target. “I was in jail four times. For one month, for one week, the last for 18 days,” says Salim.

In the next-door shop to Salim’s, his friend Mohamed Talut Taheri says: “Sometimes they could come to raid, they would open all the
cassette boxes, then you were caught. The other way was that someone would be arrested for something. They would search him and find a cassette. If he told them where he got it, you were in jail.”

Now the problem is supply. With the overland route to Pakistan cut, there are no more CDs and only dubbed tapes on offer to a public clamourous for music. This means prices have shot up: A tape from Salim’s shop that was £1.80 when you risked jail to buy it is now £2.80. But nothing drives away the customers. “We love to hear music. Indian, Western, it doesn’t matter,” says Salim. “It’s just so nice that music is back.”

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Published November 7, 2001

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing is on fire today. I was tempted to forward on an entry or two, but by the time I got to the end of today’s updates, I think the only thing a reader can do is just go there and read ’em: Quake players on drugs, Dance Dance Resurrection, and EMI uploading their own music to Gnutella…

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Published November 6, 2001

Hamlet vs. ISDN:

Technician 1: My name be John. What problem do you have?

Hamlet: A heart so full of woe to shame the gods.

My father dead. My mother newly wed

To mine own uncle who hath stole my crown.

But worst of all, like demon born of Hell,

Connection’s lost; I hath no ISDN.

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Published November 4, 2001

One to buy; a collection of J.G. Ballard’s short stories. I’m a big Ballard fan, so I’ll be keeping an eye out. Great review too:

The drowned worlds, scorched cities and overgrown jungles of his early fiction; his concentration on the new media landscape of celebrity and stylised catastrophe; his exploration of the connections between sex, eroticism and death; his fetishism of motorways, cars, technology and high-rise buildings – Ballard wrote about the twentieth century in its own idiom, at a time when most other literary writers were no more than grappling with the same old tired clichés of the English class system.

Date: Sun, 04 Nov 2001 11:29:27 -0000
From: “Tim Chapman” (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: Complete Stories – Observer review

http://www.observer.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,587030,00.html

The Ballard of Shanghai jail

The poetry of disaster gleams among the anti-utopian’s collected short stories in JG Ballard’s The Complete Stories

Jason Cowley Sunday November 4, 2001 The Observer

The Complete Stories

JG Ballard

Flamingo £25, pp1,189

When I worked at the Times, a couple of years ago, a shout used to echo through the newsroom at moments of great national trauma, the death of Princess Diana, say, or a terrorist outrage – ‘Call JG Ballard’. Strangely, at such moments, JG Ballard seldom seemed to be at home or was, at least, sensibly not answering the phone.

Yet the news editor, for all his harassed panic, was right to think that Ballard might have something to contribute at a time of crisis, because no other contemporary British writer possesses his prescience and perspicacity, his instinct for catastrophe. No other writer foresaw, in quite the same way, how televised images of fame and death were to become all-powerful in our culture.

Reading this book of collected stories, spanning more than 1,000 pages and 40 years, is a peculiarly enriching experience. Every sentence Ballard writes is absolutely characteristic. Ever since he began publishing stories in the mid-1950s, in low-circulation science-fiction magazines such as New Worlds and Science Fantasy, he sought to find new ways of writing about our emerging consumer society, not as other sci-fi writers did through speculating about space travel or the far future, but through constructing his own cool, detached psychopathology of post-industrial society.

The drowned worlds, scorched cities and overgrown jungles of his early fiction; his concentration on the new media landscape of celebrity and stylised catastrophe; his exploration of the connections between sex, eroticism and death; his fetishism of motorways, cars, technology and high-rise buildings – Ballard wrote about the twentieth century in its own idiom, at a time when most other literary writers were no more than grappling with the same old tired clichés of the English class system.

Those who complain that he repeatedly writes the same book, that he cannot do character or convincingly animate women, misunderstand a writer who is less a formal storyteller than a prose surrealist. The motifs in his work are abandoned airfields, drained swimming pools, crashed cars, flooded lagoons, overlit motorways. His male heroes – doctors, pilots, architects, engineers – are emblematic last men, moving uneasily though flimsy, disintegrating worlds (in their impassive striving they recall the sad urban dreamscapes of Edward Hopper).

Through his interest in medicine, science and psychoanalysis, Ballard understands how powerfully we are driven by irrational and unconscious forces, that we are often no more than mysteries to ourselves.

In ‘Motel Architecture’ a man called Pangborn retreats from the world, spending his days alone in a solarium, amusing himself by endlessly replaying the shower sequence from Psycho on a bank of television screens (this story was written in 1978, before the age of video and digitised surveillance cameras). One day, he discovers there is an intruder in the solarium, eating his food and sharing his private space. Sometimes he catches glimpses of the intruder, his spectral presence and shifting shadows. Then a cleaning woman is found murdered in the solarium, lying in the ‘familiar postures he had analysed in a thousand blow-ups’. Pangborn is terrified until, in a moment of blazing self-revelation, he realises he has always been alone in the solarium, that he is his own intruder, a stranger to himself and perhaps now a murderer, too.

‘I’ve always thought that life was a kind of disaster area,’ says Ransome, the narrator of his third novel, The Drought. In Ballard’s fiction society is always close to or actually breaking down, and civility is threatened with extinction.

In many stories, he constructs closed, artificial communities – a tropical island paradise, an internment camp, a luxury high-rise apartment block, a hi-tech business park, a seaside leisure resort – then watches as they collapse under the strain of their own internal contradictions. ‘Is this the promised end?’ asks Kent in King Lear. ‘Or,’ replies Edgar, ‘image of that horror?’

Through reading Ballard, we have lived vicariously with a sense of an ending, simultaneously embracing what we most fear and perhaps most desire – the ruin of cities, the collapse of communities, the wilful embracing of deviance and obscenity.

Many of the stories here can be read as sketches for the later novels they became. ‘Dead Time’, in particular, is a template for Empire of the Sun (1984), the marvellous autobiographical novel which liberated Ballard from the cult of avant garde celebration and carried him to an international audience.

As a detainee, between the ages of 12 and 15, in the Lunghua prison camp in Shanghai, Ballard watched as Chinese soldiers were decapitated, as the streets of Shanghai were bombed by low-flying aircraft and as his fellow internees were harassed and brutalised. In Empire he writes of returning to the International Settlement where his parents lived in colonial seclusion to find the houses inexplicably deserted, and of watching the distant glow of the atom bomb explosion in Hiroshima, ‘that spectral mushroom cloud’.

In ‘Dead Time’, the young narrator, liberated from an internment camp, hides for hours under a pile of corpses to avoid detection from the Japanese, and later journeys across a ravaged landscape in search of his missing parents, a search that Ballard enacts again and again in his fiction, as if seeking to return to that Edenic first moment, the world of tranquillity that was destroyed the day the Japanese arrived in Shanghai and took him away from home.

If Ballard is an anti-utopian writer, a pessimist of human nature, it is because by the time he returned to England, as a young adult after the war, he had seen and experienced the worst of the world and of man’s potential for depravity. He was without hope or illusion, his imagination forever after to be shadowed by the ruined towns, abandoned aircraft, crashed cars and arbitrary disappearances and injustices of his childhood. And so, as the political philosopher John Gray has written, Ballard’s fictional achievement is to have communicated a vision of what fulfilment might mean in a time of nihilism. And who would argue that ours is not a time of nihilism and that Ballard is not the ideal chronicler of our disturbed modernity?

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Published November 2, 2001

a classic tale of in-flight mass hysteria, courtesy of 0xdeadbeef. Read on…

Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2001 09:51:06 -0800
From: (spam-protected) (glen mccready)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: QANTAS Flight 203 and the Breadroll of Doom

Forwarded-by: Nev Dull (spam-protected)
Forwarded-by: Randy Cassingham (spam-protected)

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= QANTAS Flight 203 and the Breadroll of Doom

Just thought I’d fill you guys in on my rather eventful day today.

The day started off ok — flew from Melbourne to Brisbane with no major dramas at all. The only problem was that three of the five screaming little whipper snappers I had earlier noticed in the gate lounge at Melbourne had been allocated the row of seats behind mine. In hindsight, I probably should have taken a little more notice of this obviously bad omen….

Anyway, apart from the screaming, crying and the regular “sinking of the slipper” into the back of my seat with clocklike monotony, it really was not all that bad. Landed in beautiful Brissy and had a dream connection to my Mackay flight. The kids left the flight, the plane left on time, wow, this is going to be a good day.

Once we were on our way, the hosties decided to surprise us with some unbelievably ordinary food — no, not just the normal servings of ordinariness, this time they had gone to some extra effort. There was the standard cheese and crackers, the piece of fruit ‘n’ nut chocolate, and then the centre piece, a delightfully soggy bread roll with an internal smearing of curried egg and capsicum. Nothing else, just curried egg and capsicum. Mmmm Mmmm! Hot Tip: These rolls are best served when made a few weeks before hand so the curried egg can thoroughly soak through the bread.

Now, in these turbulent times, and following the 17 suspected cases of Anthrax poisoning reported yesterday, you would think Qantas would be rather careful about what they are serving on their planes. Nope. The aforementioned culinary delight that was the soggy bread roll was not a plain roll, nor did it have those sesame seed thingys stuck to its top, oh no, lets give everyone on the aircraft a bread roll completely laced with flour! Great idea that. How about we put so much flour on it that it will actually fall off in a clump onto your plate so that some paranoid git behind you can start screaming hysterically about anthrax poisoning!! Fantastic.

The hosties step in and calm the situation quite well. They quietly tell her (she actually was sitting right behind me — in hindsight I’d have rathered those little whipper snappers any day!) that they have taken her meal back and will send it for analysis once we land in Mackay. They took her details and told her she would be contacted with the results. Obviously if it really was anthrax, she would be the only one at risk of inhaling the stuff, what with the sealed aircraft environment and the recirculating air con….

Anyway, nothing more said until we land. It now seems that some ground official has cottoned on to the fact that if one person could be at risk, then, hang on while I do the maths …um… carry the five… oh yeah!! The whole damned plane is at risk!! Quick shut the doors! Oh, and lets keep that air con running!!

Then the action starts. On my side of the plane I see a fire truck pull up. Then another one. Then what looks like every policeman Mackay has ever trained. Then a water tanker. Ahh, the Hazardous Materials Van is here! That should induce some panic! And what should emerge from the Haz. Van? Why, two blokes in full bio suits of course!! For those that are familiar with the movie “2001”, they looked just like “Dave” when suited up to venture outside Voyager in his space pod. For those not familiar with 2001, blokes in yellow plastic suits with a massive, fully enclosed perspex face mask which would fit over the head of a baby elephant. Color coded of course.

Now, what terrifies human beings even more than the fear of death via biological warfare I hear you ask? Why, it’s taking a shower in all your good clothes of course!! Oh the horror!!!! Yes the bio suited guys have erected their little shower cubical and have connected up a massive 2″ outlet from one of the fire trucks. And, wait, who’s here now? Yes it’s the local media. They’ve turned up to film “the cleansing of the roll flour from the passengers”. Should make some great viewing, perhaps even a mini series.

Two and a half hours pass while being constantly updated that we “should be able to disembark in the next 15 minutes or so”. (Let’s just keep that air con. going though, just in case.) The bio suited dudes are so far the only people who have used the shower (after handling the highly toxic roll flour). The guys outside with the camera’s are obviously getting bored waiting for us — they start to pack up their cameras.

Then, out of the blue, Mr Plodd bravely enters our flour infested chamber with some news, and he has with him, a doctor. The doc gets on the PA system and tells us that they have run all the tests that they are capable of in the Mackay hospital, and while they can not be 100% certain, it seems that the substance taken from the plane is, wait for it, an ordinary substance used in the preparation of the flight meals. He had even diagnosed us — the entire plane. We have a phenomenon known in the medical world as “Excessive Vigilance”. Well done champ. Unbelievable. It would have been quicker to scrape all the flour up off everyone’s lap and whip up a batch of scones to prove the true identity of the substance!!

This is when in my opinion, the day’s highlight occurred. Following such a long period of such intense waiting, there is bound to be an outpouring of emotion… Sighs of relief, cries of laughter, cheering, clapping, and of course, the absolute verbal barrage of abuse for the poor lady sitting behind me who had now sunk so low into her chair that she was now practically wearing her lifejacket. It seems that another particular lady who had now well and truly missed her (spam-protected) flight to the Whitsundays had decided to give our friend a piece of her mind. The awkward silence that followed was priceless.

Anyway, before we all finally got off the plane they took everyone’s details in case forensic testing at Brisbane’s pathology centre turned anything else up. We got off the plane to a bit of a hero’s welcome — heaps of people, police and media interviews. I didn’t quite get to my destination from Mackay in time to see the local news, but apparently we were the headline story. All hail the paranoid chick from row 9.

  • Randy Cassingham, author of “This is True” * (spam-protected) + 
    • | http://www.thisistrue.com * autoresponder (spam-protected) |
    • FIGHT SPAM! Send blank email to (spam-protected) for details +

Forwarding these messages is fine — keeping the next line is appreciated: To SUBSCRIBE to this list, e-mail (spam-protected) To UNsubscribe from this list, DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE. Instead, just e-mail (spam-protected)

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Published October 31, 2001

Found on /.: Nuon have released a free-as-in-speech SDK for third-party developers to develop applications which will run on certain models of DVD players. According to ‘What Is Nuon?’, the Nuon DVD hardware is essentially both a DVD player and an open gaming platform. Incredible! Looks like I know now what kind of DVD player I’ll be buying — the one I can write my own apps for ;)

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Published October 30, 2001

Looks like my extensive Laxo and Publin experience will come in handy, if things get tight.

Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 15:15:33 -0500
From: “Damien Morton” (spam-protected)
To: “Jason Borum” (spam-protected)
Subject: RE: Programming position?

Dear Jason,

Thanks for your interest in employment at Dennis Interactive. These are indeed tough times, but its always good to hear from someone with as broad and varied experience as yours. Im am particularily impressed with your familiarity with Xwad and Verible. You time at E*pregnate must have been an interesting one.

Whilst we arent currently looking for T and T++ programmers, your experience with PROBOL and XVRT suggests that the transition to our in-house programming language, BABEL, would be a relatively painless one. We will certainly keep you on file for a later date, should we have an opening for someone of your calibre.

Thanks again for your interest.

Damien Morton, Technical Director, Dennis Interactive

The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty. Its too big.

—–Original Message—– From: Jason Borum
Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2001 2:24 PM
To: Damien Morton
Subject: Programming position?

Hi there:

I realize that in the current economic climate, jobs are scarce. But I believe I fill a programming niche overlooked by many employers. Please take a look at my attched resume, and let me know if you think I’d be a good match with Dennis Interactive.

Thanks! \jason

Jason Borum (spam-protected)

Goal: A position that will utilize my knowledge of programming languages,
operating systems, software products, and programming methodologies

Description: I have work-experience in a broad range of programming
languages in a number of different industries, and I believe that I have my finger on the pulse of the latest technological developments. I’m an ‘out of the box’ thinker willing to learn any and all new technolgies. My motto is “whatever it takes to do the job”.

Programming Languages: T+, T++, PROBOL, TSP2, TSP3, RSP, XVRT, XEL, XSM, AHP, EVML, NOML, QML, YML, LOGO

Development Tools: EUnit (EX, SX, SI, TI), Verible, SR Promoly, WevCan, WevCan SE, WevCan Pro, EyePopper 2.0, PluTo, Xwad, Spelunker

Databases: DuBase(4,5), NuQL, MyNuQL, XKSBase, WooferBase

Operating Systems: Eunichs, Firewater NT, Publin, Raxin, Laxo (FUI, TNP/TNT)

Experience: 06/1999 – Present E*Pregnate Senior TSP Engineer

-Developed OMP methodology for TSP reporting -Implemented XJIB based server-side reporting utilizing PluTo shell -Created SR Promly reports with UFML Port and XPO -Programmed multi-tier MRAF based on DuBase 4,5 -Engineered blocked WIML procedure with Laxo Connectivity

04/1998-06/1999 PolyAnemic.com RCSC Analyst

-Ported Publin 1.8.x content from legacy Raxin system -Utilized DMP 1.3/1.4 for EDE triggers -Secured KYB connection with ESS (XK, XL) -Analyzed RCSC driver with XLUnit, FoGrois

08/1997-04/1998 Bendix & Formalade IHML Developer

-Developed IHML surface for PROBOL, XSM EEIU system -Designed TNP/TNT FUI for ROP -Made coffee -TSP4 driven DCV System with PIO Connectivity -Created copies of documents using a P&H KX43400 ML Series photocopier

04/1997-08/1997 Orange Julius Customer Service

-Prepared Orange Julius drinks -Prepared and servered hot dogs -Answered phones -Took out trash -Swept and mopped

http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork

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Published October 30, 2001

Geek hero:

The publication in Genome Research gives details of (Jim) Kent’s algorithm as a demonstration of openness, which has been a hallmark of the public Human Genome Project.

“Instead of being a black box it details how it was done,” said John McPherson, co-director of the genome sequencing center at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., one of the many labs that contributed to the Human Genome Project.

The free exchange of information is a testament to why Kent became passionate about the public Human Genome Project in the first place.

“I thought it would help to get as much information about genes and the genome in to the public domain to help discourage people from patenting it wholesale,” Kent said.

“I was afraid that if the only people who had access were the people who could afford Celera’s (subscription) database, it would tie things up.”

Sorry, it’s old bits, but I hadn’t read it before.

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Published October 29, 2001

Absolutely classic.

  1. Drop (a) food, in yellow parcels, then (b) cluster bombs, also in yellow casings.

  2. Eventually realise potential for confusion.

“Do not confuse the cylinder-shaped [yellow cluster] bomb with the rectangular [yellow] food bag. […] All bombs will explode when they hit the ground, but in some special circumstances some of the bombs will not explode.”

Riiiight. Way to get the locals on your side!

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Published October 29, 2001

Good article on building a large-scale e-commerce site with Apache and mod_perl, for what that’s worth nowadays, at perl.com. This bit was especially pleasing to my SQL-database-phobic mindset:

Since Perl code executes so quickly under mod_perl, the performance bottleneck is usually at the database. We applied all the documented tricks for improving DBD::Oracle performance. We used bind variables, prepare_cached(), Apache::DBI, and adjustments to the RowCache buffer size.

The big win of course is avoiding going to the database in the first place. The caching work we did had a huge impact on performance. Fetching product data from the Berkeley DB cache was about 10 times faster than fetching it from the database. Serving a product page from the proxy cache was about 10 times faster than generating it on the application server from cached data. Clearly, the site would never have survived under heavy load without the caching.

Ha! Take that, database-backed-website fans! ;)

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Published October 29, 2001

Great article from Heise Telepolis, by Duncan Campbell: How the terror trail went unseen.

“It gives you a window into how it is that Al Qaeda … operates,” he added. Calls were so frequent were so frequent that the phone, rented from 1-2-1, was dubbed the “Jihad phone”.

But, like all the other European phones and lines mentioned in the New York trial, the “Jihad phone” didn’t use encryption to prevent the communications from being intercepted by the police or security agencies. It couldn’t. Yet investigators and surveillance centres apparently knew nothing of what was going on at the time, and were unable to piece together the links being run by the terror group.

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Published October 29, 2001

The BBC World Service has for the last 8 years, apparently been broadcasting an Afghan version of The Archers, called “New Home, New Life”:

There is Nazir, the buffoon of a security guard based on Eddie Grundy, who in a recent episode set fire to his neighbour’s haystack. There is Rabiya Gul, the bolshie wife in the mould of Jennifer Aldridge who the Taliban routinely complain embarrasses their efforts to subdue women. And there is Rahimdad, the village barber, a solid Sid Perks type character whose shop is the meeting place – much like the pub in western soaps. In the seven years since the show’s birth, the fortunes of these characters have become so vital to national morale that it is thought not only to have saved radio from banishment, but to have encouraged the Taliban to soften their line on a range of other issues.

00.html

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Published October 29, 2001

Dave said:

<

p>

Lawrence may have discovered the reason I’ll move to XP.

Or, alternatively, move to Linux ;) That’s my Konqueror browser window right there, using XFree86’s sub-pixel rendering. Best font tweak I’ve ever tried, IMHO.

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Published October 10, 2001

Great story from Jon Callas about the history of CD-ROM drives, and why they can play audio CDs in the first place.

Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 15:28:26 -0700
From: Jon Callas (spam-protected)
Subject: Re: ah, been waiting for this

At 5:38 PM -0400 9/27/01, t byfield wrote:


> i’ve never bought or even seen a CD of any kind that warrants
> that it will be playable in any physical device capable of in-
> terpreting a CD. and it was only a few years ago that the dis-
> tinction between audio CDs and data CDs was clear: one worked
> in certain kinds of devices, the other worked in other kinds,
> and at the time the twain did not meet. then for a while they
> did, and now manufacturers are reintroducing the distinction.
> i’m not endorsing their actions; but CDs have been around for
> ~20 years, and the ability to use a computer to read data CDs
> has been around for more like ~6 years. this doesn’t have the
> makings of a solid legal argument; it wouldn’t take a rocket
> scientists litigator to ask why no one seems to object to the
> fact that data CDs don’t function in audio equipment. and even
> if it did have the makings of a solid legal argument, pursuing
> a ‘truth in labeling’ strategy may very well end up with audio
> CDs that are truthfully labeled. brilliant.

I disagree on some of the facts.

CD-ROM players have always been able to play audio CDs. The very first CD manufacturing plant to be owned by someone other than the Sony/Philps consortium was built by Digital Equipment Corporation to made CD-ROMs for software distribution, in about ’87-88, as I remember it. While ISO9660 came after the audio formats, it was intended from the start to interoperate with audio CDs in the sense that a player can easily tell the difference.

Now then, early audio players couldn’t tell a data CD and would play them as audio noise. Also, some early DEC CD-ROMs did not have audio jacks. But this is a tale of corporate stupidity only. You see, someone brainiac decided that a CD-ROM was a Serious Business Device and not for entertainment. So they went to Sony and requested that Sony make a model that did not include the audio jack. Sony said, “Sure, no problem, it’s just a manufacturing line change, which we charge $3 million for, so pay us and it’s yours.” So DEC did.

Then customers started complaining about the lack of an audio jack. Their argument was, “Look, I paid $1000 for this CD player, and while I’m in the machine room, it would be really great if I can pop in a CD and listen to it.” The DEC response was, “This isn’t an entertainment device, it’s a Serious Business Device.” The customer response was, “Ummm, look at these schematics. This Serious Business Device that I paid a kilobuck for has all the audio circuitry. If I put an audio CD in it, it mounts up and spins. All it’s missing is an audio jack, which costs about a quarter at Radio Shack. So here’s a quarter. I’ll pay $1000.25 for one, okay?” At one DECUS, there was even a session on how to unscrew the cabinet and which Radio Shack part number would solder directly to the circuit board, and what I/O calls to the device would operate the play/stop/pause/etc. buttons.

Finally, DEC went back to Sony and said, “We’ve changed our minds. We want all our future CD-ROM drives to have audio jacks. Sony said, “Sure, no problem, it’s just a manufacturing line change, which we charge $3 million for, so pay us and it’s yours.” So DEC did.

Now until recently, CD-ROM drives would operate in either “data” mode or “audio” mode. In audio mode, you could punch the buttons and all, but you couldn’t get the digital audio bits off of it. So you could have a software-controlled CD front panel, but not digital music. The first one of those was the Apple double-speed CD-ROM, which for reasons that I don’t know allowed direct access to the digital bits. It is my belief that this occurred because by this time, Sony owned both hardware companies and record companies, and thought it would be cool to allow computers to process music. I do know, however, that for a couple of years, if you happened to have one of those Apple drives, people who were into digital recording would pay you a lot of money for one. And *that* happened around ’96.

*Ripping* is only about six years old. But there has never, ever been a CD-ROM that would not play an audio CD, with the exception of the early DEC fiasco, and even they would, really. The same is true with DVD players, that they’ve been transparently compatible with CD players, both data and audio. Consequently, consumers have the reasonable expectation that if they buy an audio CD that they can go to any CD-ROM in the world and it will play audio. I think they should put a label on the protected CDs that’s at least as big as the naughty word advisory, “WARNING: DOES NOT PLAY IN CD-ROM OR DVD PLAYERS.”

Jon

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Published October 9, 2001

The US Army has been, reportedly, seeking advice on handling terrorist attacks from Hollywood film-makers.

My take on this: it’s more likely they’re looking for help in running credible simulations. It has to be, otherwise it’s just a total farce!

Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2001 16:09:08 +0100
From: “Tim Chapman” (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: Beyond parody

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/film/newsid_1586000/1586468.stm

Monday, 8 October, 2001, 12:36 GMT 13:36 UK Army turns to Hollywood for advice

American intelligence specialists are reported to have “secretly” sought advice on handling terrorist attacks from Hollywood film-makers. According to the trade paper Variety, a discussion group between movie and military representatives was held at the University of Southern California last week. The group is said to have been set up by the US Army to discuss future terrorist activity in the wake of the attacks of 11 September. Among those reported to have been involved were Die Hard screenwriter Steven E De Souza and Joseph Zito, director of Delta Force One and Missing in Action. Other, more conventional, feature makers were also said to have been present, including Randal Kleiser, who made Grease. Expertise Such a scenario – where the army turns to the creators of film fantasy for advice about real-life disaster – would seem an unusual, not to say unlikely, reversal of roles. Variety dismissed the notion that such a scenario – where the army turns to the creators of film fantasy for advice about real-life disaster – was unusual, not to say unlikely, reversal of roles. The paper argues that there is much the masters of screen suspense can offer the US Army in the way of tactical advice. In particular, says Variety, the entertainment industry can offer expertise in understanding plot and character, as well as advice on scenario training. The US Army is also behind the university’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). The ICT calls upon the resources and talents of the entertainment industry and computer scientists to help with virtual reality scenario simulation. Variety reported that the ICT’s creative director James Korris confirmed that the meetings between the film-makers and the US Army were taking place. However, the paper added that Mr Korris had refused to give details as to what specific recommendations had been made to the US government.

‘…I said why can’t we just send James Bond into Serbia?’ ‘What did they say to that then?’ “‘James Bond,” says the NCO, “is a fictional character.” Well, my answer to that is – they’re the hardest bastards to kill, aren’t they?’

  • Grant Morrison, The Invisibles, July 99

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(Untitled)

Published October 3, 2001

I’ve just turned on sub-pixel rendered anti-aliasing on my desktop, using gdkxft and KDE 2.2.1. It’s amazing the difference it makes. Previously, anti-aliasing was pretty similar to just taking my glasses off; but with a TFT laptop screen, you can enable the ClearType-style sub-pixel rendering, and it becomes very smooth.

Dunno if rxvt has it yet, though, so I’m still using blocky ol’ text in my terminal windows.

(Untitled)

Published October 2, 2001

Slow Wave is “a collective dream diary authored by different people from around the world”.

(Untitled)

Published October 2, 2001

Mind-boggling article about one woman’s journey through Scientology, their surveillance and censorship of the members of their church, and her eventual return from la-la land with the help of Andreas Heldal-Lund and the Lisa McPherson Trust.

(Untitled)

Published October 1, 2001

So I’ve been taking a few snaps on a Casio Watch Camera I got for my birthday; check it out:


Luna Park;
A self-portrait;
Catherine

Cool.

(Untitled)

Published September 30, 2001

Matthew Leeming describes his unnerving encounter in Afghanistan with the murderers of General Massoud:

This summer that place was Afghanistan, from where I have just crossed, disguised as a woman in a shapeless burqa, over the 16,000ft Shai Salim pass into Pakistan. I met a number of people who, by English standards, were decidedly weird … so the two Moroccan journalists with whom I shared a house in the Panjshir seemed almost normal. It was not until after they had killed themselves and General Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of the Afghan anti-Taleban forces, a week later that I realised I had spent five days living with two of Osama bin Laden’s kamikaze fighters.

Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 14:25:20 +0000
From: “Martin Adamson” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Breakfast with the killers

http://www.spectator.co.uk

Breakfast with the killers

Matthew Leeming describes his unnerving encounter in Afghanistan with the murderers of General Massoud

‘Every year there’s one place in the globe worth going to where things are happening,’ says Basil Seal to his mother, immediately before stealing her jewels to fund such a trip. ‘The secret is to find out where and to be on the spot at the time.’

This summer that place was Afghanistan, from where I have just crossed, disguised as a woman in a shapeless burqa, over the 16,000ft Shai Salim pass into Pakistan. I met a number of people who, by English standards, were decidedly weird — one man asked me if it were true that in England women could marry their dogs — so the two Moroccan journalists with whom I shared a house in the Panjshir seemed almost normal. It was not until after they had killed themselves and General Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of the Afghan anti-Taleban forces, a week later that I realised I had spent five days living with two of Osama bin Laden’s kamikaze fighters.

Foreigners in Afghanistan tread a fairly well-worn path, usually a triangle between the acting capital in Faisalabad, the Panjshir valley and the government’s military base, Khawja Bahauddin, in the north. Transport is either by Jeeps that cost $200 per day, or — for the really reckless — the government’s ropy, Russian-built helicopters.

I had heard that if there is a Shangri-la it is the Panjshir in August, a narrow, fertile valley surrounded by arid mountains from which the Afghans have for centuries shot at their invaders. It ends at Kabul, which is now one of the main battle-fronts between the government and the Taleban. I arrived, after a torturing road journey from Khawja Bahauddin, between the mulberry and grape harvests, and as I walked along the road groups of men and children invited me to join them for lunch. It was a sponger’s paradise.

I was an official guest of the government, and now my guide, Qhudai, took me to the government guest house, opposite the government’s helicopter base, before leaving me to recover. I was woken before dawn every morning by the shriek of helicopter engines starting up, and would take my breakfast watching soldiers embarking for the flight to another front. No expense has been spared on the house itself, nor on the bill for staff, and I was comfortable for the first time in a month. (I had been sleeping in chai khanas, which are a cross between a night shelter for the homeless and a boarding school.) For two days I was served enormous meals of mutton and rice, alone in a dining-room designed to seat 30. This changed when the Moroccan journalists arrived.

I first saw them pacing up and down in front of the house. They did not return my hello. That evening I was served dinner on the floor of my room as the Moroccans made free with the dining-room. They spent all the next day in their bedroom with the door open, lying on their beds and staring at the ceiling.

On Qhudai’s return, I delegated him to make inquiries from the staff. ‘They are Arabs,’ he reported, with some disgust. ‘They are very unfriendly.’

The next day I determined to break the ice. ‘I’m not eating in my room,’ I told the major domo. ‘I shall eat with the journalists.’ At eight p.m. sharp I presented myself in the dining-room. Both journalists had already started on the bread. There was a definite hierarchy between them. The first sat at the head of the table. He was large and dark, but his most curious feature were two blackened indentations on his forehead, which looked like the result of torture with an electric drill.

I asked him where he and his companion came from and he said Morocco, but they lived in Brussels. I tried to have a polite conversation about holiday destinations in Morocco, but he was unforthcoming. There was something about his manner that prevented me from asking exactly where he lived in Brussels. His companion said nothing, but ate his way through the rice and mutton with a hearty appetite.

The next day the senior Moroccan saw me using a satellite phone, and he became a good deal more amiable. Satellite phones are status symbols but also basic necessities for travel in Afghanistan, and mine had got me out of a number of scrapes already. He approached me, and asked if I had the phone number of Bismillah Khan, the military commander of the Panjshir. I did, and volunteered the services of Qhudai to help.

‘We are doing a television documentary about Afghanistan, and we need to get on a helicopter to Khawja Bahauddin,’ he told me.

The person to arrange this was the commander of the Panjshir, Bismillah Khan. As it happened, I had met him several days before and knew his telephone number. But he didn’t answer.

‘Do you have General Massoud’s number?’ asked the senior Moroccan. I was slightly staggered.

‘No. I don’t think he gives it out. You see, the Russians can find out where you are from a satellite phone and send a missile in to kill you. That was how they got Dudaev.’

Qhudai looked slightly menacing.

‘Why do you want to meet Commander Massoud?’ I asked the Moroccans. I remember them exchanging glances.

‘For our TV film,’ he said.

Afterwards Qhudai said to me, ‘I think they are spies.’

‘But everyone’s a spy in Afghanistan,’ I said. ‘You’re a spy.’

‘But they are Arab spies.’ There seems little love lost between Persian speakers and Arabs, so I put this down to racial prejudice.

We left shortly afterwards, and gave no further thought to the Moroccans, except occasionally to speculate that they were probably still waiting in the Panjshir for a helicopter.

A week later we heard that Massoud had been fatally injured in a Taleban attack, but it was only after we had crossed the border into Pakistan and saw a newspaper report that two Moroccans posing as journalists were responsible that we realised the identity our companions. Qhudai reproached himself for his stupidity. I was horrified that we had spent five nights sleeping next to a room full of several kilos of explosives.

After talking on the phone to some of Massoud’s lieutenants we managed to piece together an account of what had happened. While Massoud’s security was tight in many ways, he was always prepared to see journalists. He was a charming, well-educated product of a French lycée and journalists were always happy to see him. Access was controlled by a sidekick we had come to loathe — Engineer Asim — who was obstructive until he was offered money. Asim let the Moroccans into Massoud’s room.

According to our sources, Massoud immediately realised that there was something wrong (the torture marks on the forehead?), and shouted to Asim to get them out. At this, the senior Moroccan exploded the bomb hidden in his camera. He and Asim were pulverised. The second Moroccan (the one who ate more) escaped and jumped into the river Oxus, from which he was fished by guards and shot. Massoud — still living — was flown to Tajikistan for treatment. The Taleban immediately claimed that he had been killed outright, and most press reports supported this, but it seems more likely that he hung on to life for nearly a week and died without regaining consciousness.

In retrospect, one can see that the murder of Massoud was a deliberate first step in a carefully planned series of atrocities. Massoud represented the only credible military threat to the Taleban. Known as the ‘Lion of the Panjshir’, revered by his men, he had defeated the Russians 15 times and almost certainly could not be displaced from his stronghold in western Afghanistan. Many people — including Massoud’s younger brother, Wali, the Afghan ambassador in London — have been urging the West for years to arm the Northern Alliance properly to ensure the Taleban’s defeat, but to no avail. Now the man who may go down in history as one of the great generals of irregular warfare, who, with proper support, could have defeated the Taleban in a year, is dead and the West is desperately looking for credible and committed Muslim allies with whom to fight the Taleban.

(Untitled)

Published September 30, 2001

The Enigma story, and the misattributions of credit:

In U-571, Hollywood gave the credit for the Enigma code-cracking heroics of World War Two to the Americans. In the British thriller Enigma, out today, the praise is given to the English. Now, if a protest from the Polish embassy in London is to be believed, it was the Poles that done it after all.

From what I’ve read, the Polish cryptographers are certainly missing out on a lot of the credit they’re rightly due.

Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 12:29:35 +0100
From: “Tim Chapman” (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: UK accused of movie history revisionism

http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Exclusive/0,4029,559785,00.html

Enigma deepens as Poles claim code-cracking breakthrough

Friday September 28, 2001

In U-571, Hollywood gave the credit for the Enigma code-cracking heroics of world war two to the Americans. In the British thriller Enigma, out today, the praise is given to the English. Now, if a protest from the Polish embassy in London is to be believed, it was the Poles that done it after all. The statement claims that Polish intelligence experts captured the Enigma machine on which the Germans conducted all their most secret cipher traffic before the war had even begun, and later presented this to the Allied forces. The statement quotes a Professor M.R.D. Foot as claiming that: “The most important service the Poles ever rendered to the anti-Nazi cause was something they did before the war had even begun.” An accompanying missive from the Federation of Poles in Great Britain adds that: “Mathematicians of the Polish Intelligence Service were the first to
break the Enigma code. In July 1939 passed over to British Intelligence a copy of the Enigma machine and the fruits of their work done in breaking the code in the years 1932-1939. This work greatly assisted the Bletchley Park code breakers and contributed to the Allied victory in world war two.” The Polish authorities are particularly annoyed with Enigma’s depiction of a traitorous Polish officer at Bletchley Park, the wartime headquarters of code-cracking intelligence, who works as a spy for the Nazis. The statement insists that no Pole ever worked at Bletchley Park. “Obviously we feel that this is a gratuitous slur on Poles who fought side by side with their British allies.”

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(Untitled)

Published September 28, 2001

Nightmarish details of what the US planned to do as a first strike, in the event of nuclear escalation in the cold war. Mutual assured destruction is the only valid term, IMO.

Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 12:11:50 +1000
From: Justin Mason (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: US nuclear attack plans of the cold war (fwd)

— Jay Lake forwarded:


> In 1955, Gen. Curtis LeMay, the head of SAC, told the Joint Chiefs his
> nuclear attack plans for the first time: “The plan called for the
> instantaneous destruction of 645 military targets, 118 cities and sixty
> million people in the Soviet Union.” Note that since 1957 at the
> *latest*, and contrary to public statements by Presidents of the time
> and since, the commander of SAC has had the ability to initiate a
> nuclear attack, without orders from the President.


> “[….] In 1958, the military sought and received more classified funds
> to build more nuclear reactors, to make more plutonium, to triple the
> number of warheads within a year.” When Eisenhower learned of this in
> 1959, he summed up the military’s position this way: “They are trying to
> get themselves in an incredible position–of having enough to destroy
> every conceivable target in the world, plus a threefold reserve.”
>
> It wasn’t until late November 1960 that the then head of SAC, General
> Power, showed the President it’s plans for nuclear war. “The plan began
> World War III with a devastating first strike. Three thousand two
> hundred and sixty-seven nuclear warheads annihilated the Soviet Union,
> China and Eastern Europe in a single blinding blow. And the first strike
> was just that: the beginning. SAC planned to follow this apocalyptic
> spasm with thousands and thousands more bombs, everything we had on
> hand. Ten nations would be obliterated. Five hundred million people
> would die.
>
> “The plan accurately reflected General Power’s thinking. “The whole
> idea is to *kill* the bastards!” Power said in December 1960. “At the
> end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!””

(Untitled)

Published September 25, 2001

One thing I should note — World New York is possibly my best news source for WTC-related commentary, especially for the eyewitness reports. A great site. It was great before the WTC, too — let’s hope things get back to normal pretty soon…

(Untitled)

Published September 24, 2001

Great article on practical counter-terrorism in Salon today:

Ask now of any action you mean to take — bombing, assassination, ground war — whether it means there will be more or fewer terrorists when the children who are now in preschool grow up to fighting age. This is not an argument against the use of violence. Violence is absolutely essential; but it has to be used so that it conveys the right political message to the people who might become terrorists when they grow up. The state has to become as good at theater as its enemies. There’s a short version of this lesson: “Don’t shoot the boys throwing stones.”

(Untitled)

Published September 21, 2001

Jackie Chan cheats death — again:

A late script crucially delayed plans that would have landed action icon Jackie Chan on top of the World Trade Centre during last Tuesday’s terrorist assault. The Hong Kong star had been due to film a scene from MGM’s action-comedy Nosebleed atop the North Tower at the moment when the terrorists hit, but due to the scriptwriters’ tardiness, the shoot was cancelled at the last minute.

Via forteana.

Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 11:07:25 +0100
From: “Tim Chapman” (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: Jackie Chan cheats death (again)

http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Exclusive/0,4029,555058,00.html

Late script saved Chan from New York attack

Thursday September 20, 2001

A late script crucially delayed plans that would have landed action icon Jackie Chan on top of the World Trade Centre during last Tuesday’s terrorist assault. The Hong Kong star had been due to film a scene from MGM’s action-comedy Nosebleed atop the North Tower at the moment when the terrorists hit, but due to the scriptwriters’ tardiness, the shoot was cancelled at the last minute. “Filming was scheduled to have taken place at 7am last Tuesday morning,” Chan told the Hong Kong newspaper, Oriental Daily News. “As I had to be at the top of one of the towers I would probably have died.” Chan concluded, “Well, I guess my time is not up yet.” Chan was to have starred in Nosebleed as a Manhattan window cleaner who foils a terrorist scheme to blow up the Statue of Liberty. Backers MGM say it is still to early to say whether the film’s content will now be altered. As for Chan, he already has two films on the go. He is shooting the Hong Kong spectacular Highbinders and preparing for his role in Steven Spielberg’s Tuxedo

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(Untitled)

Published September 18, 2001

Worth a read. An Aussie columnist describes what happened on a mailing list he frequents, in the wake of the WTC attack.

Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 21:09:20 +1000
From: Peter Darben (spam-protected)
Subject: High emotion and internet mailing lists

Peter Wear is a regular columnist in the Curious Snail, normally devoting his scribbling to some rather clever (if occasionally heavy handed) political satire. This turned up in today’s paper and I think it provides some food for thought, given Bob’s excellent observation of the list as group therapy, and some recent postings.

For what it’s worth, when I first heard that “something” had happened in New York, my first movement was to the computer, not to the teev. I wanted to see what happened from your points of view, as I’ve found in the past that reading through the sequence of claim and counterclaim, news and rumour that turns up in this list always gives me a much more personal of international events as they unfold. As I read through the postings to the list, I noticed that my last posting for the night (sent at about the same time as the first jet hit the WTC) was a message or two before the first appearance of the news on the list.

—– (from The Courier Mail (Brisbane) 17.9.01)

WHEN WAR BREAKS OUT AMONG FRIENDS by Peter Wear

The catastrophic events in New York and Washington are yet to change our world, but the first tremors of the coming upheaval are already detectable

  • on the Internet.

Millions are trading e-mails, but the real eye-opener for me has been an Internet backwater, a small photography newsgroup I occasionally visit. That’s right, camera nerds from all over the world who tap keyboards, chatting about Mikons and lenses and tripods – a couple of hundred virtual friends from various countries. We know each other pretty well – the experts and the poseurs, the earnest and the flip. It’s all, well . . . folksy.

Not any more. Last week, like so much else, it began to fall apart. At first the messages conveyed shock and condolence. Then Luke, in New York, stood on the trip wire. “This sort of explosion and death,” he wrote, “has been going on for years in the Balkans and the Middle East. Now we know what it is like. Killing begets more killing. When does it end ?”

With all-out nuclear retaliation, it seems. “The same way it did in Japan,” wrote Jim, “turn every grain of sand to glass in these countries.” And quickly, added Fred. “No time to play around. It’s time to kill and break things. We can’t let cowards intimidate us.”

Leica Lust called for ” a response so terrible no one will ever again risk this kind of attack. Never again. Never. Never.”

“A couple of days vacation might be a good idea,” scoffed Mxsmanic, a longtime provocative contributor. Relations quickly deteriorated. Our little camera group was starting to fall apart.

“You are a puerile asshole,” frothed Leica Lust. “My only hope is that you are of draft age and will have the opportunity to water the tree of liberty you hide under with your own blood.”

These are people who have chatted amiably about lenses and flashguns.

It didn’t improve when someone called for prayers. “I’d rather be doing something constructive than bleating with the rest of the flock at church,” was the first reply. This attracted droves of hardline Christians, folk who’d previously only expressed views on auto-focus. God, it was made clear, was on America’s side. The cynics retaliated. “God moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform. And this was a real puzzler.”

That seemed to inspire the first international response. “When I heard the “selected” President of the US end his speech by ‘God Bless America’, I felt an urgent need to vomit!” wrote Geert from Belgium. “Has anybody asked himself the question WHY these disgusting acts took place ? . . . Wasn’t it the CIA who supported Muslim fanatics against the Russian army trying to keep the Taliban out of the country?”

Tony from England agreed. “Islamic countries, and some other countries too, see the US as and evil, unprincipled despotic power which tramples on smaller nations . . .”

Ralf reminded us from Germany that : “Each day as many people as were most regrettably killed in the US starve in what we outrageously call the Thirld World . . . each bloody single day. Where are the presidents and prime ministers condemning this attack on all civilised mankind?”

The lectures from Europe incensed some Americans and chastened others. “This is largely our fault,” Bill wrote. “We are the cause of this,” Darren agreed. “Choosing money over morals. When you have more, some will have less.”

And Charo thought : “The innocent people of Afghanistan, who have already suffered temendously at the hands of this (Taliban) regime . . . should not be made to suffer doubly in our attempt to make ourselves feel better.”

Bill was having none of it. “The ‘innocent’ people of Afghanistan have had three days to fire up the camel or whatever it is they do while waiting for another hand-out from the US. I don’t care how deented the remainder are, they have to know this party will never last the weekend. Exterminate the bastards.”

The last message I read came from someone suggesting a huge defiant party on the roof of the Empire State Building, “as a way of showing everyone that we won’t be cowed, and we won’t be scared away from what makes us unique. This is New York, for chrissakes, we’re the toughest, busiest, most sleep-deprived, most trash-talking mother——- on the planet”.

The demise of our little group of multinational camera geeks is unimportant, but the manner of its crumbling left me with a sense of foreboding.

—–

Personally, I’ve been surprised at the care with which people have treated this. I can remember some of our biggest flame wars have started from something which seems so trivial when compared to the enormity of all of this. Perhaps something has happened which we all feel so strongly about that we have, for the time being at least, abandoned our regional biases and extended the hand of understanding. Fel noticed folks out in the real world being so much more polite all of a sudden, and, for the most part carried that into our little corner of the internet.

Bob hit the nail on the head when he spoke of the importance of this group for our emotional well-being. We’ve all shared personal tragedies and triumphs here. We came to an agreement long ago that the subject of this group would sometimes be allowed to extend out past the boundaries of forteana (not that forteana should have any boundaries ;) Let’s not try to justify our discussion of this as conspiracy fodder or rumour watch (although these are worthy goals) – sometimes we just need to talk things over, as all friends do.

That’s enough typing for me – I head off to the lounge room with some trepidation about watching the first satirical news program since last Tuesday. I’m sure Backberner will handle it with aplomb

‘night all

peter

“John Ryland pulled Christine Blackshaw to him. An embrace that said all, 

shut out everything. Two people in love in a world of their own. A higher 
plane where huge crabs did not exist, oblivious to everything else. 
Euphoria."                         Guy N. Smith - Origin of the Crabs

(Untitled)

Published September 17, 2001

My uncle Kevin, and the other members of the Irish Northwest Passage Expedition have successfully sailed the Northwest passage, from the Atlantic to the Pacific around the north coast of Canada. Cool!

(Untitled)

Published September 17, 2001

The view from Islamabad, courtesy of Z Magazine via FoRK.

Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 17:41:21 -0700
From: “Bill Hofmann” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: FW: ZNet Commentary / Hoodbhoy / the view from Islamabad / Sept 17

Another voice.


> —–Original Message—–
> From: (spam-protected) (spam-protected)
> Behalf Of Michael Albert
> Sent: Sunday, September 16, 2001 11:24 AM
> To: (spam-protected)
> Subject: ZNet Commentary / Hoodbhoy / the view from Islamabad / Sept 17
>
>
> Hello,
>
> During September we are mailing to ZNet’s 50,000 Free Update Recipients
> our Daily Sustainer Commentary which usually goes only to our Sustainer
> Program members.
>
> If you don’t want these mailings you can turn them off for the month at
> the ZNet Top Page (www.zmag.org/weluser.htm).
>
> We hope you will consider joining our Sustainer Donor Program. To learn
> more about the program and for links you can use to join it, please
> visit:
> http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm
>
>
> ======
>
>
> BLACK TUESDAY: THE VIEW FROM ISLAMABAD
> by Pervez Hoodbhoy
>
> Samuel Huntington’s evil desire for a clash between civilizations may
> well come true after Tuesday’s terror attacks. The crack that divided
> Muslims everywhere from the rest of the world is no longer a crack. It
> is a gulf, that if not bridged, will surely destroy both.
>
> For much of the world, it was the indescribable savagery of seeing
> jet-loads of innocent human beings piloted into buildings filled with
> other innocent human beings. It was the sheer horror of watching people
> jump from the 80th floor of the collapsing World Trade Centre rather
> than be consumed by the inferno inside. Yes, it is true that many
> Muslims also saw it exactly this way, and felt the searing agony no less
> sharply. The heads of states of Muslim countries, Saddam Hussein
> excepted, condemned the attacks. Leaders of Muslim communities in the
> US, Canada, Britain, Europe, and Australia have made impassioned
> denunciations and pleaded for the need to distinguish between ordinary
> Muslims and extremists.
>
> But the pretence that reality goes no further must be abandoned because
> this merely obfuscates facts and slows down the search for solutions.
> One would like to dismiss televised images showing Palestinian
> expressions of joy as unrepresentative, reflective only of the crass
> political immaturity of a handful. But this may be wishful thinking.
> Similarly, Pakistan Television, operating under strict control of the
> government, is attempting to portray a nation united in condemnation of
> the attack. Here too, the truth lies elsewhere, as I learn from students
> at my university here in Islamabad, from conversations with people in
> the streets, and from the Urdu press. A friend tells me that crowds
> gathered around public TV sets at Islamabad airport had cheered as the
> WTC came crashing down. It makes one feel sick from inside.
>
> A bizarre new world awaits us, where old rules of social and political
> behavior have broken down and new ones are yet to defined. Catapulted
> into a situation of darkness and horror by the extraordinary force of
> events, as rational human beings we must urgently formulate a response
> that is moral, and not based upon considerations of power and
> practicality. This requires beginning with a clearly defined moral
> supposition – the fundamental equality of all human beings. It also
> requires that we must proceed according to a definite sequence of steps,
> the order of which is not interchangeable.
>
>
> Before all else, Black Tuesday’s mass murder must be condemned in the
> harshest possible terms without qualification or condition, without
> seeking causes or reasons that may even remotely be used to justify it,
> and without regard for the national identity of the victims or the
> perpetrators. The demented, suicidical, fury of the attackers led to
> heinous acts of indiscriminate and wholesale murder that have changed
> the world for the worse. A moral position must begin with unequivocal
> condemnation, the absence of which could eliminate even the language by
> which people can communicate.
>
> Analysis comes second, but it is just as essential. No “terrorist” gene
> is known to exist or is likely to be found. Therefore, surely the
> attackers, and their supporters, who were all presumably born normal,
> were afflicted by something that caused their metamorphosis from normal
> human beings capable of gentleness and affection into desperate,
> maddened, fiends with nothing but murder in their hearts and minds.
> What was that?
>
> Tragically, CNN and the US media have so far made little attempt to
> understand this affliction. The cost for this omission, if it is to stay
> this way, cannot be anything but terrible. What we have seen is probably
> the first of similar tragedies that may come to define the 21st century
> as the century of terror. There is much claptrap about “fighting
> terrorism” and billions are likely to be poured into surveillance,
> fortifications, and emergency plans, not to mention the ridiculous idea
> of missile defence systems. But, as a handful of suicide bombers armed
> with no more than knives and box-cutters have shown with such
> devastating effectiveness, all this means precisely nothing. Modern
> nations are far too vulnerable to be protected – a suitcase nuclear
> device could flatten not just a building or two, but all of Manhattan.
> Therefore, the simple logic of survival says that the chances of
> survival are best if one goes to the roots of terror.
>
> Only a fool can believe that the services of a suicidical terrorist can
> be purchased, or that they can be bred at will anywhere. Instead, their
> breeding grounds are in refugee camps and in other rubbish dumps of
> humanity, abandoned by civilization and left to rot. A global
> superpower, indifferent to their plight, and manifestly on the side of
> their tormentors, has bred boundless hatred for its policies. In supreme
> arrogance, indifferent to world opinion, the US openly sanctions daily
> dispossession and torture of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation
> forces. The deafening silence over the massacres in Qana, Sabra, and
> Shatila refugee camps, and the video-gamed slaughter by the Pentagon of
> 70,000 people in Iraq, has brought out the worst that humans are capable
> of. In the words of Robert Fisk, “those who claim to represent a
> crushed, humiliated population struck back with the wickedness and
> awesome cruelty of a doomed people”.
>
> It is stupid and cruel to derive satisfaction from such revenge, or from
> the indisputable fact that Osama and his kind are the blowback of the
> CIAs misadventures in Afghanistan. Instead, the real question is: where
> do we, the inhabitants of this planet, go from here? What is the lesson
> to be learnt from the still smouldering ruins of the World Trade Centre?
>
> If the lesson is that America needs to assert its military might, then
> the future will be as grim as can be. Indeed, Secretary Colin Powell,
> has promised “more than a single reprisal raid”. But against whom? And
> to what end? No one doubts that it is ridiculously easy for the US to
> unleash carnage. But the bodies of a few thousand dead Afghans will not
> bring peace, or reduce by one bit the chances of a still worse terrorist
> attack.
>
> This not an argument for inaction: Osama and his gang, as well as other
> such gangs, if they can be found, must be brought to justice. But
> indiscriminate slaughter can do nothing except add fuel to existing
> hatreds. Today, the US is the victim but the carpet-bombing of
> Afghanistan will cause it to squander the huge swell of sympathy in its
> favour the world over. Instead, it will create nothing but revulsion and
> promote never-ending tit-for-tat killings.
>
> Ultimately, the security of the United States lies in its re-engaging
> with the people of the world, especially with those that it has
> grieviously harmed. As a great country, possessing an admirable
> constitution that protects the life and liberty of its citizens, it must
> extend its definition of humanity to cover all peoples of the world. It
> must respect international treaties such as those on greenhouse gases
> and biological weapons, stop trying to force a new Cold War by pushing
> through NMD, pay its UN dues, and cease the aggrandizement of wealth in
> the name of globalization.
>
> But it is not only the US that needs to learn new modes of behaviour.
> There are important lessons for Muslims too, particularly those living
> in the US, Canada, and Europe. Last year I heard the arch-conservative
> head of Pakistan’s Jamat-i-Islami, Qazi Husain Ahmad, begin his lecture
> before an American audience in Washington with high praise for a
> “pluralist society where I can wear the clothes I like, pray at a
> mosque, and preach my religion”. Certainly, such freedoms do not exist
> for religious minorities in Pakistan, or in most Muslim countries. One
> hopes that the misplaced anger against innocent Muslims dissipates soon
> and such freedoms are not curtailed significantly. Nevertheless, there
> is a serious question as to whether this pluralism can persist forever,
> and if it does not, whose responsibility it will be.
>
> The problem is that immigrant Muslim communities have, by and large,
> chosen isolation over integration. In the long run this is a
> fundamentally unhealthy situation because it creates suspicion and
> friction, and makes living together ever so much harder. It also raises
> serious ethical questions about drawing upon the resources of what is
> perceived to be another society, for which one has hostile feelings.
> This is not an argument for doing away with one’s Muslim identity. But,
> without closer interaction with the mainstream, pluralism will be
> threatened. Above all, survival of the community depends upon strongly
> emphasizing the difference between extremists and ordinary Muslims, and
> on purging from within jihadist elements committed to violence. Any
> member of the Muslim community who thinks that ordinary people in the US
> are fair game because of bad US government policies has no business
> being there.
>
> To echo George W. Bush, “let there be no mistake”. But here the mistake
> will be to let the heart rule the head in the aftermath of utter horror,
> to bomb a helpless Afghan people into an even earlier period of the
> Stone Age, or to take similar actions that originate from the spine.
> Instead, in deference to a billion years of patient evolution, we need
> to hand over charge to the cerebellum. Else, survival of this particular
> species is far from guaranteed.
>
> The author is professor of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University,
> Islamabad.
>
>
>

http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork

(Untitled)

Published September 16, 2001

The Sun provides tolerant coverage of Islam? Never thought I’d see the day.

Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 12:13:27 +0100
From: “Tim Chapman” (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: Sun shocked into tolerance

On the press

Papers went for it and won


> >From the Sun leaders defending Islam to the Telegraph quoting Kipling the nationals made a good fist of their first drafts of history

Special report: Terrorism in the US

Peter Preston Sunday September 16, 2001 The Observer

There were, of course, all the predictable oddities, banalities, illogicalities and flat-out eccentricities. The Sun (oddly, maybe even eccentrically) cleared a double-page spread to tell its readers that: ‘Islam is not an evil religion… Blaming Islam for the horrors the world witnessed on Tuesday is like blaming Christianity for the hatred between Protestants and Catholics in Belfast. The Muslims in Britain ARE British.’ If that’s eccentricity, give us more of it by the bucketload. The Mail, within a single leader column, railed against British ‘appeasement’ of Sinn Fein/IRA while instructing George Bush that ‘it is surely the time for another effort at Middle East settlement’. … full analysis of UK media coverage at http://www.observer.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,552462,00.html and of US coverage at http://www.observer.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,552463,00.html

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(Untitled)

Published September 16, 2001

Oh dear — Astrologer takes credit for predicting WTC attacks. “Aye right”, as they say.

Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 12:26:36 -0700
From: Brian Chapman (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected) (spam-protected)
Subject: Astrologers predicted it

http://www.mirror.co.uk/shtml/NEWS/P24S1.shtml

The Mirror | 14 Sept 2001

WAR ON THE WORLD: I FORESAW IT

MIRROR astrologer Steve Judd predicted a catastrophe involving America

  • and possibly Afghanistan – nearly six weeks ago.

Judd – part of our renowned Jonathan Cainer team – was close to tears yesterday as he recalled his prophecy of August 6.

The key, he wrote, was the opposition of two planets, Saturn in Gemini and Pluto in Sagittarius. Judd said this occurred every 35 years “from last night until May 2002”.

He wrote: “The opposition hits the US horoscope powerfully and immense changes in American political, financial and even constitutional circles are more than possible – even probable.”

Judd, who specialises in charting the fortunes of nations, warned the world to expect an “intensification, and hopefully resolution of religious conflict worldwide (Israel, N.Ireland and Afghanistan etc)…while extremism will rise in the short-term”.

Judd, 46, said yesterday: “I knew as early as 1994 that something cataclysmic was going to happen. There was an intensification in America’s chart from 1999 to 2002.”

A similar picture was apparent just before Vietnam and when the US entered the Second World War.

Judd added: “On Tuesday, I was appalled that astrologers are not taken seriously.” He believes there is worse to come in the next six or seven months, with stability to follow from the end of May next year.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/13_09_01/art19.htm

Daily Star | 13 Sept 2001

Local astrologer predicted attacks in US

Terrorism will strike again in the heart of the United States, Lebanese astrologer Samir Tomb predicted in his yearbook for 2001. Preempting Tuesday’s attacks on America in his book, which describes astral influences and Chinese, Arab and Indian astrological horoscopes, Tomb announced “a terrorist attack which will cause victims.” The Lebanese astrologer also foresees a “strong shake in the world market,” and a stronger euro against the dollar in the fourth quarter of 2001. AFP

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