May 2004 – a crank's progress

brittleness

I have been struggling with some brittleness in my FreeBSD installation here: the ports tools which have worked flawlessly have started breaking on me, for reasons I can’t work out. Usually, all that’s needed is to type portinstall archivers/rpm or portupgrade archivers/rpm4. Dependencies are looked up and built, the package database is updated, it all just works[tm].

But lately, I have been having to build ports by hand, making the dependencies as I go. Tedious.

In the course of this, I find some strange stuff: why on earth does a command-line packaging/archiving tool like rpm need the qt libraries?

Qt is a C++ toolkit for application development. It lets application developers target all major operating systems with a single application source code.

Qt provides a platform-independent API to all central platform functionality: GUI, database access, networking, file handling, etc. The Qt library encapsulates the different APIs of different operating systems, providing the application programmer with a single, common API for all operating systems. The native C APIs are encapsulated in a set of well-designed, fully object-oriented C++ classes.

Likewise, doxygen:

Doxygen is a documentation system for C and C++, Java, IDL and to some extent C# and PHP. It can generate an on-line class browser (in HTML) and/or an off-line
reference manual (in LaTeX/ps/pdf) from a set of documented source files. The documentation is extracted directly from the sources.

But there they are.
---> Installing 'rpm-4.0.4_2' from a port (archivers/rpm4) ---> Building '/opt/ports/archivers/rpm4' ===> Cleaning for libiconv-1.9.1_3 ===> Cleaning for db3-3.3.11_1,1 ===> Cleaning for doxygen-1.3.6 ===> Cleaning for gettext-0.13.1_1 ===> Cleaning for gmake-3.80_2 ===> Cleaning for libtool-1.4.3_3 ===> Cleaning for popt-1.6.4_2 ===> Cleaning for gsed-4.0.9_1 ===> Cleaning for qt-3.3.2_2 ===> Cleaning for rpm-4.0.4_2

It doesn’t build anyway, so I can ask the maintainer.

a Republican for all of us

I have found Ike to be quotable before now. In the run-up to the 60th anniversary of D-Day, I decided to look up some more information on him.

This quote struck me as germane to the current military adventure (bonus points if you can recall a link between the current White House incumbent and Eisenhower [1]).

Dwight D. Eisenhower – MediaWiki:

“I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of ’emergency’ is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.”
Source: A speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, DC on Nov. 14, 1957.

Reading over his achievements — general staff officer to Pershing and Marshall, architect of the D-Day invasion, commander of all Allied forces, desegregation of the armed forces, president of Columbia University, two-term president — he stands pretty tall against anyone we’ve seen lately.
Continue reading “a Republican for all of us”

depends on what your definition of IT is

Chad Dickerson @ InfoWorld follows up on the question“Does IT matter?” with a look at the book of the same name.

Chad Dickerson @ InfoWorld has touched on a provocative question that is certain to raise hackles on IT managers (and vendors), especially if they fail to read beyond the headline.

Chad has written on the issue of IT as a commodity before: anyone who has worked on a project (as opposed to a “click here to install” installation) understands that while the components become more manageable or commoditized over time, gluing them together still requires some effort that the vendor frequently glosses over or handwaves away.
Continue reading “depends on what your definition of IT is”

Abu Ghraib scandal rooted in porn?

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: It Was the Porn That Made Them Do It:

The […] hypocrisy of the blame-the-culture crowd is that “normal Americans” . . . . don’t partake of the “secular” entertainment that is doing all this damage. In other words, the porn that led to prison abuse is all ghettoized in the blue states. The facts say otherwise. Phil Harvey, the president of the North Carolina-based Adam & Eve, one of the country’s largest suppliers of mail-order adult products, said in an interview last week that his business has “for years” been roughly the same per capita throughout the continental United States, with those Deep South bastions of the Bible Belt, Alabama and Mississippi, buying only 10 percent fewer sex toys and porn videos than everyone else. Even residents of the Cincinnati metropolitan area — home to Citizens for Community Values and famous for antismut battles over Larry Flynt and Robert Mapplethorpe — turned out to be slightly larger-than-average users of porn Web sites, according to a 2001 Nielsen Internet survey.

If late 20th Century porn is responsible for the Iraq prison scandals, explain the picture below the jump from August 1930.
Continue reading “Abu Ghraib scandal rooted in porn?”

we never learn

CNN.com – Army finds Tillman probably killed by friendly fire – May 29, 2004:

U.S. Army Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former professional football player killed last month in Afghanistan, was probably killed by gunfire from his own unit during an intense firefight, the U.S. Army said Saturday.

As the article reads, this in no way diminishes his sacrifice: he is no less a role model to his fellow soldiers who he was leading to the rescue of a convoy, nor to others who want to focus on something more ennobling than the Abu Ghraib debacle.
Continue reading “we never learn”

Yeatsian imagery matched to Shakespearian tragedy

Sit through the ad, if you’re not a member: it’s worth it.

Salon.com | Washington’s Chalabi nightmare:

Washington, which was just weeks ago in the grip of neoconservative orthodoxy and absolute belief in Bush’s inevitability and righteousness, is now in the throes of agonizing events and being ripped apart by investigations. Things fall apart; all that was hidden is revealed; all sacred exposed as profane: the military, loyal and lumbering, betrayed and embittered; the general in the field, Lt. Gen. Sanchez, disgraced and cashiered; and the most respected retired generals training their artillery on those who have ill-used the troops, still dying in the field; the intelligence agencies, a nautilus of chambers, abused and angry, its retired operatives plying their craft with the press corps, seeping dangerous truths; the press, hesitatingly and wobbly, investigating its own falsehoods; the neocons, publicly redoubling their passionate intensity, defending their hero and deceiver Chalabi, privately squabbling, anxiously awaiting the footsteps of FBI agents; Colin Powell, once the most acclaimed man in America, embarked on an endless quest to restore his reputation, damaged above all by his failure of nerve; everyone in the line of fire motioning toward the chain of command, spiraling upward and sideways, until the finger pointing in a phalanx is directed at the hollow crown.

Things fall apart? Passionate intensity? You doubtless remember where those come from . . .
Continue reading “Yeatsian imagery matched to Shakespearian tragedy”

when did CNN decide it wanted to be Fox News?

Eschaton:

[Kelli] ARENA: Neither John Kerry nor the president has said troops [will be] pulled out of Iraq any time soon. But there is some speculation that al Qaeda believes it has a better chance of winning in Iraq if John Kerry is in the White House.

There you go. We’re fighting al Qaeda in Iraq and they think John Kerry is a wimp.

This is so not right, it’s not even wrong. I thought the Iraq==Al Qaeda notion was finally understood to be a figment of the warheads’ imagination.

Atrios has the phone numbers to call in and gently suggest some fact-checking might be in order.

the ancients said it best

apropos of Iran using the US to rid themselves of Saddam Hussein:

Persian Proverb
“Use your enemy’s hand to catch a snake.”
[Motivational Quotes of the Day]

This is the same part of the world that gave us “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This one is just a little more to the point. Maybe we’ll get a president who isn’t so gullible next time . . .
Continue reading “the ancients said it best”

What would George Washington think?

a friend writes: “a .sig quote I liked”

“Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British army in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren.”

-George Washington, speaking to the officer he placed in charge of 211 prisoners taken at Princeton.

According to a recent review in the NY Review of Books “After the war, over three thousand Hessian soldiers elected to remain in a country where they enjoyed rights denied them at home.”

Think those Iraqi detainees/prisoners are thinking of emigrating to these shores?

if you respect our folks in uniform, you should sign this petition

Remove Rush Limbaugh from American Forces Radio Petition
:

We request that Secretary Rumsfeld remove talk radio host Rush Limbaugh from the American Forces Radio and Television Service (formerly known as Armed Forces Radio). Mr. Limbaugh, whose program is broadcast for one hour per day to U.S. troops overseas, has spent the past four weeks condoning and trivializing the abuse, torture, rape and possible murder of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. guards at the Abu Ghraib prison—gross misconduct that you have described as “fundamentally un-American.”

While I can see this as a freedom of choice issue, I don’t agree that taxpayer dollars should pay for the distribution of radio broadcasts that are at odds with the public opinions of the president, the secretary of the defense, and I suspect, most Americans.