Author: Bobby Rockers

Who Reads What

Newspaper Readership:

  • The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
  • The Washington Post is read by people who are elected to run the country. 
  • The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country. 
  • USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t really understand the Washington Post. They do, however, like their statistics shown in colorful pie charts. 
  • The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country, if they could spare the time, and if they didn’t have to leave L.A. to do it. 
  • The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and they did a far superior job of it, thank you very much. 
  • The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country, and don’t really care as long as they ca n get a seat on the train. 
  • The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who’s running the country, as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated. 
  • The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure there is a country or that anyone is running it; but whoever it is, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist dwarfs, who also happen to be illegal aliens from ANY country or galaxy as long as they are Democrats. 
  • The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores. 
  • The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

No New Backgrounds

A common questions from system administrators concerns the ability to turn off functionality on computers systems installed in a group usage environment.  Something like an internee cafe or a library.  Kiosk Admin Tool is a KDE management tool for exactly such needs.  Kiosk Admin Tool gives system administrators the ability to lock down a desktop by say, removing command line functionality or disabling the file manager.

The Joy of Hobbits

The Lord of the Rings books have always been my favorite recreational reading material.  I have no idea how many times I have read these books but each and every one has been a wonderful experience.  There is nothing I can say about The Fellowship of the Ring that has not been said before, by someone more articulate than me.  I suppose the best review I can make, and the greatest statement of the quality of this book, is the joy I get in its reading and how that joy has not diminished with the number of times I have read it.  I may not know how many more times I will experienced the The Fellowship of the Ring, but I know it will be, at least, one more.

Wizards and Data

DataKiosk is a KDE database tool that lets you (through an series of Kdevlop style wizards) create custom database query API styles for data access.  Anyone familiar with Juk will understand how well this kind of functionality works on generic table structures.  Here is a flash demo to help convey the concept.  Currently it in KDE CVS (kdeextragear-1)and available for testing.

Learning to Share

Another site claiming to be “The Vault” has a quick how to on setting up KDE Public File Server (aka kpf.)  Kpf lets you share files with other users across a network using http.  Its basically a personal web server that doesn’t require administrator rights to use and is fully manageable from your KDE desktop.   The tutorial is light on information but has screen shots.  Oh, and FYI yes those Max OSX looking dialogs are KDE dialogs.  KDE/Kwin can be made to look like almost any desktop; OSX, Solaris, CDE, or even one from a company in the northwest United States (who shall remain unnamed.)

The Power of KDE

One of the most advacned development tools of any environment is KDE’s UI scripting environment (aka DCOP) and a GUI scripting tool by the name of Kommander.

Kommander may be a revolution in application development, unlike any other tool created for scripting. What Kommander does is essentially extends the power of RDE to scripting. Language support include Bash, sh, Csh, Zsh, straight DCOP, or even Javascript. linux.com has a two part series on Kommander that should be required reading for anyone who is starting to do development on the Linux/KDE platform.

What is amazing is that the bulk of execution time is actually done by the KDE application binaries themselves; meaning that Kommander applications run almost as fast as stright C++/KDE/QT apps. Peviosuly I have talked about kdialog and its uses as a GUI interface for commandline scripts. Kommander takes this functionality to the Nth power.

Couple other quick KDE tutorials are:

Success in a Global Environment

Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States is an article by Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters for the U.S. Army War College Quarterly. The article talks about some major factors that limit a countries military and economic abilities in the world market. The article offers some insights into how developing countries can hold themselves back even when natural resources are abundant. It also does a spectacular job of showing how inter-related the issues of liberty and the free market really are. While most people understand that capitalism is not truly possible without liberty; many fewer people to understand the liberty is not possible without capitalism. Happy Meals and women’s rights have more in common that one might think.

A Concise Review

I started reading “A Concise History of the Catholic Church” because my friend Matt, who went through RCIA with my wife, decided that he knew very little about the history of his new faith and wanted to do some informal study on the Catholic Church.  Now, my knowledge of early Catholic history consists of what I have read in the New Testament and a general assumption on my part that there was probably a Pope John Paul the first and that, just maybe, there was a prequel to Vatican II (although I was not entirely sure.)   “A Concise History of the Catholic Church” was the book we picked up to enlighten our historical Catholic viewpoint.

The book was pretty good.  It gave a high level overview of the major historical trends and treaties of the Church over the last 2000 years or so.  It tries to go into more depth on topics that the author feels are a good barometer of Church trends at the time.  These “low level” views were helpful to get a better picture of the place of the Church at a given historical period.  In addition the book was good about covering a good balance between the, admittedly rocky, political history of the Church and its spiritual progress.

I thought that most of the book was fairly balanced (as balanced as you can expect a book about the Catholic Church to be.)  The only disappointment I found was an obvious bias on the part of the author toward the modern progressive Catholic Movement (i.e. liberation theology, historical literalism, etc.) and a fairly vocal disappointment in the lack of support from the current Pontiff for these ideas.  I am a huge supporter of the Church’s current position on world social issues; something the author is evidently not.

Overall I would rate the book as a good read, especially if you want to learn about the pre-twentieth century Catholic Church. The shear number of references and quotes make it an excellent “start point” for further Catholic study.  The history of the Catholic Church is not a study in perfection; but any institution whose historical linage can be traced back almost 2000 years is bound to be interesting.