Author: Bobby Rockers

Change and Stability

Ralph Peters in this position paper, originally posted in 2001 by Parameters magazine, discusses the role that stability plays in our foreign policy over the last 110 years. His point is that sense the Spanish-American war we have spend enormous resources propping up hopeless regimes in the futile attempt to contain the status quo; even at the expense of our shared national values. What’s more, Peters argues that our country’s success is a product of the overthrow of old-world paradigms. As such, the very stability we pursue works against our own long term best interests. The article is a though provoking piece but one paragraph stood out to me. While discussing the role of terrorism in his primary thesis, he makes one of the clearest observations about the nature of Middle Eastern terrorism I have ever read.

While most Islamic terrorism is culturally reactionary, another aspect of it is an impulse for change perverted by hopelessness. And terrorism is, finally, a brutal annoyance, but not a threat to America’s survival, despite the grim events of 11 September. Osama bin Laden and his ilk may kill thousands of Americans through flamboyant terrorist acts, but their deeds reflect tormented desperation and fear, not confidence or any positive capability. Terrorists may be able to destroy, but they cannot build, either a skyscraper or a successful state. Destruction is the only thing of which they remain capable, and destruction is their true god. These men seek annihilation, not only ours, but their own. No entrances are left open to them, only the possibility of a dramatic exit. They are failed men from failed states in a failing civilization. Claiming to represent the oppressed (but enraged by the “liberal” behavior of most Palestinians), fundamentalist terrorists of so hardened a temper would not be contented, but only further inflamed, by any peace settlement that did not inaugurate their version of the Kingdom of God on earth. They are not fighting for a just peace, but for their peace–and even if they attained that peace, they would desire another. They are, in every sense, lost souls, the irredeemable. Their savagery is not a result of the failure of any peace process, but a reaction to their own personal failures and to the failures of their entire way of life.

Another good part is the section discussing the relationship between Islamic governments in the Middle East and the Palestinians. Not exactly light reading, but well worth the time.

Javascript Debuggin

I have a disturbingly difficult JavaScript bug that I am trying to fix and needed a good introduction into using Venkman, the Javascript debugger. Here is a wonderful tutorial on just that subject. It works as a pretty good general introduction to using program debuggers. If you are not familiar with using debuggers in your application development process, check it out.

Sleep of the Oblivious

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has a superb article by Robert Kagan discussing the growing divide between Europe and the United States in how we handle international affairs. Kagan argues that a combination of Europe’s loss of international influence, combined with the relative safety provided by the umbrella of American military force have allow it to pursue its post Enlightenment Kantian ideal of “Perpetual Peace.”

The article was like a breath of fresh air in as much as it was an international policy evaluation that lacked almost all the red/blue, conservative/liberal, religious/secular bias that seems to be the norm for this kind of analysis nowadays. I believe Kagan undervalues the role that American individuality has played in our historically isolationistic world view. Specifically as it pertains to the UN and the role of international law. However I find its impossible to ignore the overall strength of his argument. I also disagree with the assessment that,  “Americans apparently feel no resentment at not being able to enter a postmodern utopia.”  I find that, increasingly, America’s “Ivory Tower” elite feel a great deal of resentment for the position soldered to the US and, to an even greater extend, that such a position even be necessary. Yet I suppose that such resentment has always been part of the La Trahison des clercs and is not to be unexpected.

Its a very long article (TTS is a god-sent at work!) but well worth the read. Especially if you are interested in the changing nature of America’s relationship with Europe and the long term ramifications thereof.

KDE in your own image

Stephan Binner of KDE fame has assembled a collection of distributor patches. Distributor patches are changes that different distributions make of the KDE sources to change the default behavior of KDE in some way.

For example Redhat would (for most of the Redhat 9.0+ versions) disable some functionality that KDE has that Gnome did not have because of a desire to see Gnome do better. Not all patches are for malicious reasons though. Many of the patches seem to be fixes to get specific compile time options working. Lindows has a patch to add text to kicker, thereby making it more “Windows like.” Overall there are some interesting modifications to KDE.

KDE Scripting Tools

Windows, How To Work Them is a tutorial chapter of the KDE Users Guide. The parts that are most interesting to me are the kstart application (for starting windows with specific window management facilities. kstart lets you start applications on specific virtual desktops, with/without specific window decorations, present/absent from the taskbar, etc.. Thus providing a dynamic scripting interface for detailed window management.

The second utility is ksystraycmd. Ksystraycmd lets you load ANY application as a system tray mini icon. The application will can be set to load in the background and minimise to the system tray just like the volume control or windows update. Want quick access to a calculator without having it on in your taskbar all the time, try:

ksystraycmd –title ‘kcalc’ kcalc

The best part is that it works with ANY Linux application available, it doesn’t even have to be a KDE application.

Peer Review & The Scientific Method

One of the cornerstones of environmental man-made global warming theories is the “MBH98 Northern Hemisphere Climate index” study. The basic findings of the Mann, Bradley & Hughes (MBH) study conclude the the 20th century is (by far) the hottest century on record; using known global temperature indicators such as tree rings and ice core samples. These number have been the basis for global temperature models and public environmental policy.

The primary rebuttal to this study is the ” M&M Critique of the MBH98 Northern Hemisphere Climate index.” McKitrick & McIntyre’s (M&M) basic findings are that the algorithms used by MBH98 produce a “hockey stick” shaped pattern (a pattern showing the 1900’s as the hottest century ever) in 99% of cases… even when the feed data was random noise! This would point to a statistical failure (or outright bias) on the part of the MBH98 algorithms. Using the same base data (i.e. the tree rings, ice core samples, etc..) against their own statistical analysis package, the M&M team gets a very different result. Their results conclude that the hottest century on record is the 15th century, not the 20th.

The debate has gone on for a number of years with strong opinions and heavy politics on both sides. Well things have taken a fairly significant turn recently. The M&M team has decided to open source their analysis and algorithm data. This provides for the much higher level of peer review. In addition, they use the well know (and well respected) R Statistics Package as the basis for their calculations suite. MBH has described their process but refused to open the entire algorithm suite (some select sources have been made available) to full peer review. While a number of third party studies have duplicated the MBH results, in each case the MBH algorithms (in closed source form) where used to produce the results. This leads to some serious questioning of the MBH methodology and therefore the validity of their results.

Real Applications without Real Programming

I have mentioned Kommander in previous posts. It occurs to me that it may be hard to conceptualize exactly how “functional” an application written entirely in Javascript, bash, or DCOP could be. So, anyone who is interested in some of the application capabilities of Kommander should check out Dik’s Kommander Applications. All of Dik’s applications, on that page, are written in Kommander without any real programming required. Another quick tutorial on using Kommander can be found at kde.me.uk.

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Because of problems with comment spam and a busted blacklist filter (it is actually so full that I cannot get it to run) I have to disable comments on my blog for a while. We are actively working on switching to another CMS. One that has better blacklist support and is open source. I hope it will be soon enough that I will not need to try and fix the blacklist filter for this old busted-ass version of MT.