Shifting with the Wind on OSes

Posted on July 8, 2010 by ehurst

There is nothing wrong with turning your sails to the wind if it gets where you are going. I find it ludicrous people feel there is some necessity of being tribal about a computer operating system. It requires a particularly childish turn of mind to think it matters. Sure, it’s okay to playfully poke at one another, but children throw a fit over the smallest failure to show sufficient reverence and devotion to their favorite.

I use whatever matches my needs and the hardware at hand. For example, as long as my HP Deskjet D-2660 was working, it worked best under Windows. This despite the much-ballyhooed HPLIP project where HP actually writes Linux drivers for their stuff. Fine, but it always printed too far down on the page, so the Windows drivers worked better. That is, unless you get sick of their oppressive bundled software which acts as if your computer has no other purpose than to run their stuff. But the printer was on sale, and some of their inkjets worked okay in the past, so I bought it. And some ink refills, which cost about the same as the printer, of course.

Well, the darned thing simply quit working. Under Windows it said something about not communicating properly. Under Linux, it says, “print job completed” when the stinking thing never so much as twitched or clicked. So the internal circuit board is probably fried. As you might expect, HP support was less than helpful. As in, “Oh, you run Linux? Good luck. Thanks for buying our crap.” And of course their HQ wants to see a long history of support tickets before they bother to respond to any complaints about the process. So I went through the motions, but their support staff says they are unauthorized to even discuss Linux. Yeah, they want your business, Linux users, but you have zero means to proving it’s a hardware issue so HP can honor their warranty.

This is not news. Most major corporations hate consumers, but love their money.

So with that sucker dead, and I haven’t even used up the original ink cartridges filled at 10% capacity, I have little reason to run XP. All the other stuff I did was doable under either OS. I keep XP around because so many folks I serve in the computer helps ministry won’t switch to Linux. It’s called “dual-booting” but without that printer, XP will have a lot less time on this machine.

This is not a victory for anyone. Linux slightly edges out XP at this point simply on the basis of my personal habits. It has nothing to do with superiority, and the next time something in Ubuntu irritates me too much, I’ll switch. Then after awhile, I’m sure something in Windows will irritate me and I’ll switch again. I don’t love either, and the realities of variation in any supported operating system, and the various software packages which run on them, means things can pass through rough periods on any of them. To the fanboys that appears to be childish because their whole orientation in life is backwards. If computers are your life, I suppose it matters, but computers are only so useful as they serve the needs of people. In my world, people rate more highly than computers. At the moment, computers are my one best tool for helping them, but never more than a tool. That’s the way it is with all God’s Creation.

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Firefox Container Never Closes

Posted on July 7, 2010 by ehurst

The most recent release of Firefox browser contains a new technology which was supposed to help with the way FlashPlayer, Silverlight and Quicktime runs inside the browser. It’s new and sometimes kinda shaky on Windows, at least. Since so many of my computer ministry friends use Windows, I run XP on my desktop to keep track of such things. (On my laptop, XP eats up the battery far faster than Linux, so it’s CentOS 5 there).

To help me diagnose some of the issues with Windows, I run GKrellM for Windows. Linux and BSD users will recognize this very useful utility which allows you to keep track in real time of CPU and memory use, among other things. I am amazed at the number of applications which default to chugging away in the background on Windows, but you wouldn’t know it if you didn’t run a CPU monitor which picks up on this stuff.

So I found that Firefox container, once opened in any browser window, or any tab in that active window, will keep the CPU pumping once the media stops playing. Even if you close that tab, it will keep chugging away. You have to manually kill it with Task Manager, or close Firefox. Compare that with the behavior of K-meleon, which knows when the media stops playing, there’s nothing left to do. So the meter on GKrellM goes quiet.

It’s how I found out Nero 7 (bundled with my DVD burner) has this nasty thing called “Scout” which likes to run in the background the same way. Most Windows users have no clue about such things because they don’t use CPU meters, and this is a great way to figure out when something is hogging system resources. Thus, I find K-meleon is far better than Firefox. You might want to get the spellcheck plugin.

I would note if you dig through the K-meleon settings menu, and you find the box which says you want animated graphics to run only once (I hate it when they loop continuously), the checkbox doesn’t work. You’ll have to actually configure it manually. Just open a new window or new tab, click the URL window and blank it out (or hit CTRL-L), then type in about:config. Click the warning button and type in the search bar image. The list of options displayed will be whittled down to very few. Look for the one which says “image.animation_mode” and right-click. Select “modify” and in the box type once. That’s the way you manually set this on all Mozilla-Gecko products, regardless of what OS it is running on. Different settings have different possible options, so you have to research it before you start poking around. This particular issue was widely known among geeks long ago.

K-meleon is the way Firefox was advertised to act way back when it was first proposed. You know, lightweight and simple, not taking too many resources, etc. Yeah. You want K-meleon on Windows.

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Not My Friend

Posted on July 5, 2010 by ehurst

The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my ally.

My only friend is Truth, AKA God. Everyone in Him is also my friend, but a great many of them still work against His revealed truth. My allies are those who work for that truth.

In every cause men discuss, I often find myself standing alone in the answer I propose. Since I don’t approach any of this with the attitude of needing to win anything in particular, I can afford to lose at every game. There is no competition which interests me. It’s about Truth, and if you start thinking in terms of absolutes, you’re certainly going to miss the point.

For example, I understand the notion electronic data cannot really ever be sold. You can take money in exchange for releasing it the first time, but after that it’s wide open. You have to continue poking and prodding around and finding ways to leverage your ownership, as it were. Given the vast efforts of government and corporations to do just this, it’s still a miserable failure. If I really wanted to run Windows 7 for free, I know where to get it, and Microsoft can’t really do much about it. The running game between corporate control and crackers always favors the latter simply by the nature of the thing. That so many are publicly pilloried with huge fines and sentences is more a testimony to how careless are those who refuse to play by the rules than it is for enforcement efforts.

Frankly, I believe they are doing it all wrong. In a certain sense, the old economic model of controlled access has no place in software. More, I find it not simply wrong headed, but wrong inherently, as in morally repugnant. If you reduce it to bits and bytes, you should know better, and have no justification for trying to control it after that. But I also find it not worth my while to push the issue. That is, not every moral evil is a crusade which calls me. God is God and He reserves the right to decide what will be important to me.

Further, He gets to decide what I will do or not do, not some corporate idiot stiff at Microsoft. The laws of the land are not a moral absolute, and the Bible made it all too clear only laws which fit the revelation of God are godly. Thus, any rule, law or whatever must pass the smell test of Heaven. (Hint: Almost none currently in place pass.) I obey God. That usually works out to obeying man’s laws, but no one should pretend they can count on that. Nor do I pretend there ought to be no consequences as men consider such things. No other man is required to consider my feelings on the matter, unless God puts that on his heart. Either way, it is not in my hands, and I won’t pretend it should be. You are not bound by my calling, nor I yours.

Thus, pirating software is by no means a moral issue. Attempts to control knowledge or information makes you an enemy of God. He is a God of revelation and truth, not of secrecy and hiding. Information is any knowledge which is expressed outside your own mind, and once expressed, it belongs to God. You no longer own it. Read between the lines of Scripture; all knowledge which can be known (information) is the common property of all humanity. It is His very nature to open things up, and I would maintain quite bluntly software piracy, so called, is not a sin of itself. But software pirates aren’t angels, either. Too many of them are moral reprobates. But so it is with a great many software developers, and most certainly true of anyone who takes advantage of laws which favor corporations. The very legal notion of corporations as persons before the law is an abomination before the Lord. So is most crime. How many software pirates do you know who love Jesus and walk in purity? The piracy isn’t the issue.

There is a global war already under way in our world. It’s not good versus evil, but one brand of oppressor fighting another for turf. The very categories of winning and losing themselves are not a part of Truth. When Truth wins, there is no consideration for what it costs any person. It’s not that we don’t matter; the Cross makes it obvious we do. But caring is the path, not the victory. Truth has already won long ago; the issue before us is manifesting the victory by manifesting Truth. We don’t lose ourselves into the great Nothingness or some other Eastern silliness. We lose ourselves into the ultimate Person, even while He regards us each individually. Paradox is the language of Heaven’s logic. We are at war with anything which attempts to reduce Truth from a person to something dead, lifeless and powerless.

There are no moral absolutes in the typical sense. There are some actions which are always wrong, simply because there is no right way to do wrong. But wrong is always defined in the mind of God, which is not quite within our grasp. We can know, at best, only what is required of us at the moment. Chances are we’ll get it wrong in some way most of the time, but God looks upon the desire of the heart — which is shorthand for saying He measures only your commitment to Him. Performance is simply what we can make of this living, dynamic and ineffable Truth.

So while I have friends, they aren’t necessarily allies. Allies are those who share that commitment and understanding. Friends can be enemies at the same time. But a lot of folks out there do things which are useful in my calling who are neither friend nor ally. I care about them as people, and they are a lot more important than the service they perform. The battlefield is not in actions of men to be shaped in moral paths, though we would like to see that. The battlefield in not in the minds of men to make them all see or agree with morality. The battlefield is my own soul, seeking to reclaim it from the years and years of a thousand sucker roots of sinful commitments I don’t even recognize. I’m not fighting people, and I’m not fighting for people, because I really can’t do anything to fix this world or people.

I can’t even fix me, but at least that’s where the focus lies. I keep seeking the path to Truth within my own soul, and in so doing my thoughts and actions produce an image the world around me can see. In both failure and the mere handful of victories, they should see the Truth, and what He says of things. The battle I fight is me, to kill off the desires of the flesh and die as soon as possible. Not according the wishes of this dead man of flesh, but according to the whims of my Redeemer, who owns me in full.

“Software piracy”? Feh. Talk to the sky, or the ground, or my shoes or my clothes … my attention is elsewhere.

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American Soviet Terror

Posted on July 4, 2010 by ehurst

So you surely have heard by now the infamous Russian spy ring. It took the FBI ten years to act against a crew which did almost no spying on a nation which has more spies than any other. Given the obvious lack of threat from this bunch, the backlash of criticism had to be shut down. Thus, the New York Times jumps to the cause and publishes this little heart-wrenching tale of a Russian mayor up against the FSB. Nobody with an ounce of Holy Cynicism would fail to notice the timing of this story from two years ago.

There is no doubt the Russian government remains as corrupt as ever, and the FSB is more so. The NYT article, along with some other similar efforts to support the corrupt American government, are doing their best to remind us of that, while at the same time ignoring the big stories of our own national moral turpitude. America isn’t the good guys. We are different, but by no means better. Our court system is equally Kafkaesque, just in a different way. We spy on everyone, and our national policy is to force others to do things which make us rich, regardless how it affects the local population.

There is one difference, though. We have a history of rising against tyranny. Just what do we celebrate today? That we killed a bunch of people in throwing off an oppressive regime. How appropriate we should find it’s back. So we have a bought Congress which has already passed an utterly foolish plan to raise taxes in the middle of a very deep depression. Why? Because they are so corrupt they can’t imagine cutting back on expenditures. So having borrowed to the hilt to give a trillion or so to bankers on the taxpayer’s dime — just because they are bankers — we now have to pay that debt, and they have raised taxes. But they aren’t going to pay that debt, just spend more money on things nobody really needs. So while the Russians are somewhat feudal and still rather communist, we are fascist. That is, we secure massive corporate debt against the taxpayers, but the profits always go in their private pockets, so they can share with our alleged Congressional representatives. And I predict this will cause an armed revolt.

That’s because there is no way on God’s green earth Congress is going to wise up, nor any of the millions of DC bureaucrats. No, they will insist you and I have to go along with this, and have prepared a court system and local police force conditioning to think of us as criminals just because we breathe. To make sure there is no way to question this situation, we have a vast horde of insane laws which means not a single beating heart has failed to commit some crime which would justify on paper worse treatment than the Russian mayor. Do you doubt this is all wrong? What was the sage advice God gave to Rehoboam through his elder counselors? Lighten the excessive burden of your father, Solomon. He refused and there was a revolt, fully justified by God’s own prophets. How about Nehemiah thrashing the nobles over their abusive taxing of the poor? Armed revolt against tyranny is not a sin, and many know this instinctively. Russians have no history of such things, but I rather believe it will happen here. Soon.

Christian pacifists like myself should be on the watch, and prepare your heart to face serious unrest. We have a very bad government, but when authority breaks down you often face even worse from the rebels.

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Ignoring Game

Posted on July 3, 2010 by ehurst

People who understand “game” — AKA, the Battle of the Sexes — will tell you in modern Western societies, America in particular, the best approach is none at all. That is, for a guy who really wants to get her attention, he has to pay her almost none. Glance at her because she’s attractive to you, but don’t let her see you overcome by it. Glance away as if she isn’t really all that interesting. The game is to come just short of ignoring her, says one expert, and so say a lot of others, as well.

The biggest struggle for guys is overcoming that overcoming power of feminine beauty. Women dress to compete with each other, and in part simply to please themselves; that it happens to affect guys is just part of the fun, but not central. If it knocks you out, they win, and you lose. If you don’t seem to be impressed, you are more interesting. The ball is still in her court as to whether she notices you, but that’s another matter. If you keep putting yourself in situations where other men are strutting like peacocks, you have to be competitive. If you put yourself in situations to encounter women in other settings, you are more likely to be the center of her attention, if only briefly.

So game is a matter of grabbing her attention, and a critical element is not letting her take the high ground. She is driven to seek the high ground, but oddly reacts more favorably when she can’t have it. The best gamers, of course, are those who aren’t driven so driven by their neediness. You have to convince her you aren’t desperate, or she will simply toy with you. You don’t win her affections; she has to win yours. Make yours precious and hard to get, because you have more important things to worry about. It’s crazy, but generally accurate.

Walking in the Spirit means you know God put men in charge by design, and if women take the lead, things go awry. It’s not as if she can’t advise you wisely, but you are the president and carry the final veto. That’s not a privilege or right, but a burden of responsibility. But walking in truth means not playing the game. So while the game is ignoring her, as it were, it’s best of all to ignore the game. The real man of God needs God, knows it, and is never satisfied with what he has of God, and what God has of him. Women are important only if God says they are. See where this goes? You don’t have to play the game to win.

The spiritual man is decent with everyone, but not fawning. He has a mission and needs no one’s approval on this earth. He can afford to relax and let people have whatever it is they demand, unless that demand is something in your hands God does not permit you to give. You and you alone can discern what God forbids, and no other human on earth can do more than advise you. Being your true best self — committed to Truth, empathic, yet disengaged — ends up putting you at the top of the game. This puts you in a position to draw more suitable women in the first place. That they may not be the finest foxy babes should not concern you, if you are spiritually minded.

Rightly does Apostle Paul describe human sexuality as the single greatest affliction in terms of holiness. Stop playing the game, and you’ll win anyway. You’ll have the very best God can build for you. In a sense, the same holds true with women who seek the Spirit. Don’t pursue him just because he is interesting to you. When the time comes, and you meet him, God will can tell you if you are listening. If not, both of you have better things to do. If it matters too much, you are already wrong.

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It’s the Debt, Stupid

Posted on July 1, 2010 by ehurst

I’m not the only who realizes debt is the reason for this season of madness on earth. All those highly paid economists and other policy wonks are incapable of simple logic, even at the Aristotelian level.

Look, every single dollar in existence today is a debt slip, not actual money. Thus, for every dollar the Fed creates through banks and other lending institutions, we owe the value of one dollar plus interest to that institution. Thus, the entire US owes the Fed (a private banking institution) more than we can ever have. Do you see that? By it’s very nature, a debt-based economy is broke. It has to grow constantly to stay ahead of the game, and no economy on earth can grow forever. When it runs out of steam, as it must eventually do when other factors slip out of place in the calculations, it will begin to break down the whole machine.

But there’s another bit of logic necessary which Aristotle rejects: humans are fallen. We are sinners, a divine truth so easily tossed aside by those who just don’t like it. We can’t be fixed, and all the policy in the US assumes people can be fixed, either in the individual or at large. Both are false. Indeed, humans are never worse than when they are congregated into a political entity. So fallen humanity given a free, but debt-based, economy will always mess it up by pulling forward consumption from tomorrow’s production. Humans are suckers and will as a whole always consume more than they can afford, and the extra consumption without fail will be the most decadent and morally improper. This accelerates the rate of failure.

Finally, it has been revealed in the Word of God debt-based hedonism makes God unhappy. It makes Him unhappy enough He actively intervenes to make sure such an economic model fails. We can debate how much effort it takes from Him, but anything we can mess up will surely be made worse by natural forces. God promised those natural forces would work nice for us if we embrace His design for governing fallen mankind, and those promises are demonstrably unfailing (see the Old Testament). But when we discount those promises, we also ignore the curses which form the other edge of the blade. It cuts both ways. So chasing every creaturely comfort with debt, living on the promise of future production, we stack up the curses against us.

America, and the rest of the world clinging to debt-based economic structure and policies, is doomed. All these artificial efforts to borrow from tomorrow’s output guarantees the output will fail. The current astronomical borrowing means astronomical liabilities we expect to pay back with mere earth-sized output. Sorry, but the burden of debt is so large, and the off-shoring of production, means the eventual collapse will be far bigger than it ever should have been. Most of the world’s apparent wealth is actually very real debt.

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I’m No Better

Posted on June 30, 2010 by ehurst

Attending high school in the early 1970s in Anchorage, Alaska, I joined the East High School choir because I wasn’t good enough for much else in terms of extra-curricular activities. I just barely qualified to sing with the baritones. I was never really part of the choir socially, but they let me sing with them. I gained more than I gave, for sure.

We had a festival my junior year, hosted by the big rival across town, West High. Not that rivalry mattered much to us, but the school had more money, thus better facilities. The festival had us present our best and we were scored in some fashion I hardly remember, but it was vaguely competitive among a half-dozen area schools. The supposed highlight was a training session from a real serious conductor. He taught us to sing a few numbers as a massed choir. I remember two things — (1) the kids mostly reacted with mass resentment, and (2) one of the songs had an ending which stuck in my head.

After all these years, I decided to look up the lyrics and see if I could identify the piece. The lyrics were the poem by Thomas Hornsby Ferril, No Mark. The music was by Cecil Effinger, one of his “Four Pastorals” by the same name as the poem. I recalled the part at the end:

O swing away, white gull, white gull,
Evening star, be beautiful.

I can still sing it.

The sad part of all this is it was all I remembered. I never understood the reference to Chancellorsville, though I seem to recall the guest conductor told us something about the song. As far as I know, I was so deeply wrapped in my own little world, I paid no attention. And I was one of those who resented him, anyway. I remember the antipathy we all had for each other, too, it seems. I suppose being smart-aleck brats then is hardly different from today. I was just one of them, but with only half their talent, so I didn’t say much.

When I see a world falling down around me ears, I know somewhere along the way some of that mess bears my finger prints. I see it now, of course, and weep. I’m still out of place, fitting in no where, with no particular crowd I have encountered. Utterly without any sense of superiority, I see the same crazy headlong rush to ruin which has characterized the US since it began, at places like Chancellorsville. Everyone around me it seems is in on that resentment — things just don’t go the way they should, but no one’s really paying attention to the beauty of things which could be.

I missed the window, and I see it now too late. Most of the world sees about as well as I did then, all wrapped within themselves. They don’t have 40 years to escape.

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Medical Death System

Posted on June 29, 2010 by ehurst

We don’t have “health care” in the US; not really. What we have is a tightly controlled delivery system for pharmaceutical companies for the sake of unconscionable profits which help to destroy our economy. Yes, we can blame the mortgage bubble, and the commercial real estate bubble, but there are a few other bubbles which constitute the same fraud where someone in private business gets government to hold a gun to our heads and force us to pay them.

While I don’t agree with the notion we can fix government and make it behave, and especially can we not use government to make others behave — unless we wipe it all away and start from scratch — I heartily recommend this review of the situation from Alternet. This summarizes neatly the pervasive nature of influence buying by Big Pharma. The various major pharmaceutical firms compete only in who gets to stake out the turf first on a particular drug. Otherwise, they collude on price fixing and regulation buying, along with perverting the entire medical field so it’s just a delivery mechanism for their products.

And it only keeps getting worse.

Yes, a few doctors remain who care and actually practice medicine as the high art it should be. Good luck finding them. That business of 100K deaths per year is not just made up, either. There have been several studies pointing this out, and links can be found in the comments attached to the article at Alternet.

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Unix Tools on Windows

Posted on June 28, 2010 by ehurst

I still had my old XP license, so I installed it on my spare hard drive. The reason I care at all is, as everyone knows, drivers. Linux drivers for some things are just great, but even HP can’t create a proper HPLIP driver for CUPS which prints as nicely as it does in Windows. Having tried it repeatedly with different distros of Linux, it always prints a little too low on the page, and I can’t find any way to adjust that. Then there’s that business with the on-board Intel-HDA sound chipset which always clicks and pops under Linux, and not a one of the various manual adjustments works to fix the jack sensing so plugging in my headphones kills the speakers. And on and on it goes. After awhile it just gets tiresome.

So I reinstalled XP and all is dandy, except I was still jonesing for the CLI tools in Unixland. Thank God for GnuWin32. For my personal use, it was enough to grab the basic core utilities, along with units, and the file command to ID stuff in my browser cache. These are the things I use most.

In a similar vein, after my discussion on grabbing videos from your browser cache, playing with the Firefox add-on which downloads and converts media files, the author wanted money for some of the critical features. I have no problem with that, but I also have no money. Besides, that constantly animated icon on the mainbar at the top of Firefox drove me nuts. So I went and found this wonderful page on ffmpeg and related tools for Windows. There are several GUI frontends for it, and you’ll have to make up your own mind. I am prepared to do it on the CLI, so converting FLVs to MP4 or stripping the audio file down to MP3 is pretty easy to do, once you find a decent recipe. However, just for fun, I decided to test the one labeled Super from eRightSoft. It comes bundled with a reasonably recent copy of the ffmpeg backend, and appears to work well enough.

As you might expect, I’m also using Cream/Gvim for Windows — yes, I actually use Gvim quite a bit without the Cream — and other nifty things like Really Slick Screensavers, PuTTy, and stuff like that. Naturally, you gotta have that AV package, and I keep a homesite license to Sunbelt VIPRE because I can scrape up just enough every year to renew it. That way I can run it on as many Win-boxes as I have in my immediate family.

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Killer Solitaire Package: PySolFC

Posted on June 27, 2010 by ehurst

For quite some years I have been a fan of PySol. If any particular Linux distro dropped it, I dropped that distro. Eventually it seemed to have disappeared. But no, it was rescued by it’s own fan club, so to speak.

You can download it again, and it’s better than ever. All it really takes on Linux/BSD is a recent developer version of Python. On Windows, all it takes is downloading and installing. Best of all the Windows version comes with some peaceful background music.

There are more card games in this package than you are likely to ever play. What are you waiting for?

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