Stuff to make your head swim. An old idea — Virtual Machines — is about to make a lot of waves. See, for example, how Quentin has been running Ubuntu Linux on his Mac — without any dual-booting nonsense. This has lots of interesting implications for the Ndiyo Project btw.
Category Archives: Asides
Tut, tut
More tales from the Downing Street nursery…
The Prime Minister and the Chancellor are feuding so poisonously that attempts to stage shows of unity between the two only highlight how divided they are. It is a commentary on the state of the relationship that it is regarded as remarkable that they managed to share a car journey to the launch of their party’s local elections campaign last week.
More revealing about that tortured relationship is what actually happened when the two men were forced into each other’s company on the back seat of the limo. The Prime Minister tried to engage the Chancellor in conversation. I’m told that Mr Brown responded by taking out some papers and burying himself behind them, refusing to reply to every overture until Mr Blair finally gave up trying to make conversation. The journey passed in a bitter silence…
Well, according to Andrew Rawnsley anyway. A sceptical reader might ask: how does Rawnsley know this? There would have been four people in the limo — the PM, the Chancellor, a driver and a minder. So who told tales out of school? The driver? The Minder? Blair? Or Brown? I hate this kind of phoney know-all journalism.
Stand by…
… for a new spasm of demands from clueless politicians for the Internet to be banned/censored/controlled. The reason? Today’s Observer has a report about the 7/7/ London tube/bus bombings which claims that:
A Whitehall source said: ‘The London attacks were a modest, simple affair by four seemingly normal men using the internet’.
The funny thing is that no politician ever calls for the telephone network to be banned, despite the very good evidence that it is used for drug dealing, terrorism and many other nefarious activities…
What you get for that £195 XP licence
Aw… isn’t that sweet — an iMac running the official Microsoft Blue Screen of Death. From TUAW.com. They think it’s a first. It’s definitely not the last.
Many thanks to Gerard for the link.
The price of insecurity
Er, I know I can now run Windows XP on my Mac. Or at least I could if I had a fancy new one like Quentin has. But answer me this: why would I pay £195 + VAT to make my machine vulnerable to the plagues of viruses, worms and trojans to which Windows is vulnerable?
How I Work: by Bill Gates
Interesting interview in Fortune…
At Microsoft, e-mail is the medium of choice, more than phone calls, documents, blogs, bulletin boards, or even meetings (voicemails and faxes are actually integrated into our e-mail in-boxes).
I get about 100 e-mails a day. We apply filtering to keep it to that level—e-mail comes straight to me from anyone I’ve ever corresponded with, anyone from Microsoft, Intel, HP, and all the other partner companies, and anyone I know. And I always see a write-up from my assistant of any other e-mail, from companies that aren’t on my permission list or individuals I don’t know. That way I know what people are praising us for, what they are complaining about, and what they are asking.
We’re at the point now where the challenge isn’t how to communicate effectively with e-mail, it’s ensuring that you spend your time on the e-mail that matters most. I use tools like “in-box rules” and search folders to mark and group messages based on their content and importance.
I’m not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I’ve flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs…
Hmmm… I get more emails than Bill Gates. What am I doing wrong?
The Donaldson murder
Many things puzzle me about Denis Donaldson, the senior Sinn Feiner who spied for the Brits in Northern Ireland, not least the question of why the Director of Public Prosecutions decided some time ago that it was “not in the public interest” to proceed with the prosecution of Donaldson and others for their alleged espionage in Stormont.
His murder took place in one of my favourite parts of Ireland — the hinterland of Glenties, a lovely country town where we always stop at Highlands Hotel on our way through. So there was a creepy edge to the story for us. It’s a reminder that Ireland is sometimes like Sicily — all that warmth and family values and hospitality, while below the surface is a dark underbelly of savagery.
Robin Wilson has a thoughtful piece about the murder in OpenDemocracy.net. Excerpt:
My guess (and that is all it is at this stage) is that the deed was done by IRA members embittered by Donaldson’s treachery, and meanwhile keen to taunt the Sinn Féin leadership of Adams and McGuinness for their endless preening in front of the TV cameras in pursuance of a “peace process” that is doing nothing to deliver the objectives for which the ordinary IRA volunteers sacrificed so much of their adult lives.
An additional political aim would be to signal to the governments of Bertie Ahern in Dublin and Tony Blair in London that some Republicans remain defiantly outside any tent of “inclusion” and “reconciliation” they can construct.
If dissident IRA members are indeed responsible, this might signal the beginning of the collapse of the organisation’s own edifice, which could take place quite quickly and engulf a Sinn Féin leadership that is already finding the reception has got much colder in Dublin, Washington, and even London.
It seems highly improbable that the attack could have been authorised by the IRA leadership. Adams and McGuinness “condemned” the killing, a toxic word they have not used since the Real IRA splinter-group committed the Omagh atrocity in August 1998; this suggests they are serious about their denials of any responsibility (when the Provisional IRA commits a murder but won’t admit it, the organisation just says it’s “wrong”). And while I think the Real IRA or Continuity IRA would have claimed Donaldson’s murder if they had authored it, internal Republican dissidents who had decided it was time to give up on loyalty to the leadership and “whack” the informer would have no reason to identify themselves.
Aside: I launched Google Earth to have a look at the location of the cottage — only to find that it had been obscured by cloud on the day the satellite pictures were taken.
Iran’s nuclear aspirations
Wanting to have nuclear weapons is a perfectly rational aspiration for the leaders of the Iranian regime — for two reasons. The first is that they saw what happened to Iraq (which didn’t have nukes) — and what hasn’t happened to North Korea (which does). The second is that they have a hostile country in the region which surreptitiously obtained nuclear weapons many years ago — Israel.
I’ve always been baffled by the way Israel’s nukes are NEVER talked about in polite conversation. The Israelis always refuse to discuss them in public, and there the matter ends. Imagine the hoo-hah if the Iranians took that approach. It’s as if the Israeli nuclear capability isn’t an issue. But it clearly is for the Arab world, and for Iran (which, remember, was bombed by Israel some decades ago, with the aim of disabling Iranian nuclear capability). So it was refreshing to see this article by David Hirst which doesn’t just mention the unmentionable, but actually ponders it at some length.
For all I know, there may be good reasons for Israel to have nuclear weapons. (There are some countries in the region which deny the right of Israel to exist.) There may be rational reasons for the West to be less worried about Israeli nukes than they would be about Iranian ones. (Israel is a democracy, for example, whereas Iran is not.) But these are all reasons to talk about the Israeli weapons, not to pretend that they don’t exist.
Poetry for Windows users
Salon challenged its readers to translate Windows error messages into Haikus. Winners here. My favourite is this entry by Peter Rothman:
Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.
Thanks to Spencer Goodman for the link.
Funny titles
Hmmm… There’s a book called Writing with Power written by someone named Peter Elbow. Why is this funny? Only because we have a saying in Ireland: “More power to your elbow”, which is a vague exhortation to people about to embark on a worthy but futile task.
The funniest title I’ve come on recently though is Yoga for people who can’t bothered to do it by Geoff Dyer.