Author: Bobby Rockers

Explaining

Politically, I consider myself socially liberal and economically conservative. If I was to ascribe to a particular political party it would most likely be the libertarians. For example I am opposed to the Patriot Act I & II, opposed to the DCMA, generally favor legalizing drugs, oppose the death penalty, etc..

One of the social issues that has most upset me over the last half decade or so is the issue of copyright law and its implementation in the digital world. So, for anyone who would like to learn more about this subject; I strongly recommend to you Larry Lessig’s presentation Free Culture. Larry worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org) for a number of years. If you are not willing to fight for your rights, be ready to loose them.

Of Eldar and Silmarils

I first read The Silmarillion when I was 12.  For someone who has been a Tolkien fan for almost his entire life,  The Silmarillion is not simply a good book.  It is required reading.  Admittedly more difficult to follow than The Lord of the Rings; yet it, in many ways, more completely fulfills the depth of culture and history that Tolkien has always tried to bestow.  The Silmarillion coves the long history of the Elves and the first age of Middle-Earth.  It is the Bible of Middle-Earth.  It’s as glorious as it is heartbreaking.  It is easily one of the most “unique” books I have ever read, combining fantasy with history; biography with myth.

If you are a fan of Tolkien’s world, and not simply a fan of the movies, then I strongly recommend reading this book.  It will leave you in awe of the “completeness” of the world that Tolkien created.  Its one of my most prized books.

Still Looking

Have not decided which CMS to replace Movable Type with. I have found a couple others (all PHP based) and figured I would post them. Here are b2evolution, blog:cms, and pLog. All of these CMSes (content management systems, i.e. blogging software) have support for mutliple blogs and plugins.

A useful location to demo CMS software (PHP and MySQL based) is Open Source CMS. They have a couple dozen working sites for you to test out; both as a blogger and as an admin. The sites are reset every hour.

Awards Season

linuxquestions.org is running their annual Users Choice Awards for various Linux related categories.  If you have not done so already, pick up a user account (must be a registered user to actually vote) and make your voice… errr… click heard.  Some of the more important categories (and the obvious, aka. my, picks) are Desktop Environment of the Year (KDE), IDE of the Year (KDevelop), Messaging App of the Year (Kopete), File Manager of the Year, (Konqueror), Web Development Editor of the Year (Quanta), and Distribution of the Year (Anything bug Fedora, because they really pissed me off.)

Gtk vs. Qt

Linux developers have argued the benefits of any given language/toolkit sense the beginning of time.  One of the oldest debates is between Gnome/KDE.  As anyone who knows me (or reads this blog) can tell you I have a strong attraction to KDE because of its design strength and flexibility.  However I was not always a KDE fan.  I started as a Gnome user/developer when I first began on Linux.  At the time I thought Linux’s development tools (through my Gnome/Gtk experience) were pretty bad; but were getting better. 

Then, one day, I discovered KDE/QT and have never regretted the decision.  I went from thinking that Linux development was harder/worse than Win32 development to realizing that Linux/KDE/QT development was better than ANYTHING else out there.  Think that C#/.NET is nice?  .NET is a giant leap forward in Win32 development, but still way behind QT/KDE development!  Any who, I found a couple articles that I read, back in “the day”, that helped me decided to give KDE/QT a try and I wanted to pass them along.

  • Toolkit Comparison — Compare Gtk to QT.  Its my experience that that 30% numbers specified are VERY conservative.
  • Why I Left Gtkmm — Comments concerning one of the “better” C++ toolkits for Gnome.
  • Gtkmm vs. Qt — Same author as above, more comments and responses to Gtkmm apologists.
  • Why Qt — Third article by said author.  Random thoughts about his project, Gnome, KDE, Gtk+, Qt, C, and C++.
  • More Qt — kuro5hin article on Qt.
  • Why Program for KDE — Dispels some of the more popular KDE myths.

They Looked to the Stars

Front Page Mag is running a article titled “How the Left Betrayed My Country – Iraq.”  Its written by an Iraqi National by the name of Naseer Flayih Hasan and should probably be required reading for anyone who opposes our presence in Iraq.  Now, keeping in mind that frontpagemag.com is a strongly conservative on-line publication;  I don’t think that invalidates the point made by Mr. Hasan.

What do you believe?

Edge.org is running their annual question of the year. This years question, asked and answered by notable intelligencia from around the country, is “WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?”

Its an amazing question to ask of that particular group of people. What is also amazing is the number of contradictory “beliefs” that people have. Topping the list are: there is a God vs. no-god, reality is in the mind vs. reality exists apart from us, life on other planets vs. no intelligent life on other planets, and we will create conscienceness vs. conscienceness can only exist in living things.

I believe in, errr.. know, there is a God. What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

Lockdown

Werner Puschitz has published an article on securing Linux on production environments.  It talks about simple things like stopping unneeded services and also covers more advanced subjects like configuring specialized PAM authentication techniques like locking down a users account during certain times of the day or number of failed logins.  Pretty useful article for anyone configuring Linux machines and making sure they are safe.

Nietzsche vs. Socrates

The New Criterion has a wonderful article discussing Julien Benda’s work, “La Trahison des clercs” (The treason of the intellectuals), and an extension of Benda’s work by Alain Finkielkraut titled, “La Défaite de la pensée” (The Undoing of Thought.)  I had heard of the term La Trahison des clercs, a kind of yuppie insult to post modern leaning college professors, but I was not actually familiar with the contents of the work. 

I found the article incredible interesting and will probably comment more on it at some other time, but what is most interesting to me is how this concept ties in with the idea of natural law (for example the destruction of diversity without a fundamental concept of the “universality of humanity”) and the effect that these concepts have on the implementation of free will.  I many ways this article acts like a philosophical discussion of the ideas presented in C.S. Lewis’s “The Abolition of Man.”