Lunchtime render

Povray 3.6 in a live CD boot of Mediainlinux.
20 minutes creation time (not including final render).

camera {location <1,3,-4> look_at 0}
//light_source{<0,1000,0> color rgb 2}
light_source{<0,0,0> color rgb 1}
#declare RRR=seed(123);

blob{

#declare n=0;
#while(n<2000)

threshold 0.2

sphere{<1/rand(RRR),0,0>, .1, 1
rotate z*360*rand(RRR)
rotate x*360*rand(RRR)
}
#declare n=n+1;
#end
pigment{rgb <1,0.1,.1>}
finish{phong 0.9}
}


box {200000,-200000 hollow pigment {rgb 0 }finish{diffuse 0}
interior{ media {//emission .001
scattering {1, 0.1}
}}}

Blame the church

Yahoo! News showed an AP report on recent events in Gaza:

"Israeli forces cut water, power in Gaza Palestinians inspect a bridge destroyed by Israeli army warplanes on a main road in the northern Gaza Strip, near Gaza City Wednesday June 28, 2006. Israeli tanks and troops entered southern Gaza and planes attacked three bridges and a power station, knocking out electricity in most of the coastal strip early Wednesday and stepping up the pressure on Palestinian militants holding captive a 19-year-old Israeli soldier. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)"

In order to save a solider, the IDF will cause massive suffering to an entire community, including bombing bridges and destroying a power plant.

You have no where else to look for blame in this situation than the church.

Oh, I don't blame the actual eternal, invisible Church of Christ. Not the actual God who is revealed in the Bible, not the One who is revealed as Word or is faithfully described in the "papyrus" as some say-- the literal printing in front of us. Not the tradition of the church historic, the institution that holds the creeds and teaches it to new generations. Not the sacraments of Word and Water and Wine.

I'm talking about the church of the Gospel of Prosperity, the church of Social Darwinism, the church of Fearing your Enemies and Killing their Children. The church that was indifferent to slavery, indifferent to the civil rights crisis-- the one that griped when these temporal distractions were brought up when it was talking about Law (God's command of what is to be done) and Gospel (God's promise to forgive sins). The church that insisted on keeping the doctrine of original sin as an essential yet abstracted doctrine but then griped whenever the specific sins of civilization were mentioned. The one that will go to great extremes to cause offense in posting the Ten Commandments in all public places, but cannot remember three of them.

I believe Augustine was quoted as saying, "The Church is a whore, but she is my Mother." We see it for sure whoring across the streets of Gaza today. This is no time for a City of God apologetic on the positive sociological effect of church on society. The world will laugh.


Lutherans have spoken of the church as being invisible. That you cannot see it even when you drive by its buildings. Such a time as this we have believe in such a concept even more...

The language issue in Linux distro web sites.

If you go to the website for SUSE linux, a distro made in Germany, you might find it hard to find any German language at all, especially in negotiating your way through the download pages or the help forums. Same with finding any language other than English at Mediainlinux, made in Italy. If you go to the website for Knoppix, made by Germans, all you have to do is click on one US/British flag, and you're done with worrying about languages. Similarly, for Paipix, you just have to click on one link for [EN], and all your lanaguage problems are done. These latter two do a wonderful job of accomodating a multilingual international audience.

A less successful model, in my opinion, was that of the website for kanotix in 2005. For quite some time there were too many places where the German and English content were jumbled together, or snippets of English buried in largely German pages.

1. For example, the official English forums are to be found by going to the forum and then paging down past several categories of German ones to get to the English ones.
2. If you wanted to log on to the wiki, even to help write an article in English, you had to go to a page that was all German in its interfaces. I experienced a problem there upon registering that my userid violated some rules (lacking a capital letter), but the error messages were all in German.
3. Clicking on the links for downloaindg brought me to a page where there was English buried under German I left looking for another English page and never found one.
4. For the longest time, the website defaulted back to German interfaces every time you hit a new page, even if you were to choose "English" in a small drop-down to the side, unless one were a logged-in, registered user. This got me in the habit of maddeningly clicking through the front page (default in German) for announcements, and so I missed a news item telling me not to dist-upgrade. I wrecked my system.

The last item was the least excusable one, and when I complained in their fora, it got the strongest defense. It seemed that to some degree they were circling the wagons in response to suggestions for improvement. They were invoking the international nature of the community using the OS, and the non-native-English speaking-ness of the distro designers. See Paragraph One above.

So I quit using the distro (installed SUSE, and ubuntu) back in December 2005, and then started testing all kinds of live CD distros. I wrote one blog post a few weeks ago where I complained that kanotix was not for non-German speakers based on my 2005 experience. Since then, I looked back at the site, and problems 2-4 are fixed. I hope I didn't besmirch the helpfulness of the people, I just thought the distro's web site was plagued by a sloppy approach to bilingualness. But three of four problems I griped about regarding language in kanotix web sites are fixed. I am posting a correction.

I still hold up the examples of the knoppix and paipix as the ideal to strive for in internationally-acclaimed software and OS web sites.


Just for the record, I wasn't the only one to complain:

• I wrote in "Learning German" in the kanotix forum:

  1) The Kanotix team are dedicated, brilliant, genuinely humanitarian folks.
  2) The German language barrier on some interfaces (like a broken wiki) makes some newbies demand more attention directly from the technical genuises.
  I'm suggesting that the kanotix team just take a breather, look at how some of the stuff might appear to present an unnecessary language barrier. Then some of those anglophones gushing with praise for kanotix in this forum could start writing wiki articles. The payback would eventually mean less newbies berating the technical team on IRC out of frustration. I know. I was one of them once.

  
  
• Danielle writes in "This Website Can Be A Real Pain" in the kanotix forum:
  "Update: trying from Underground Linux right now: things seem to be better, but it takes several attempts before you can get English as your default language."


• Andy King write in Making the jump to Linux: Six frustrations
  "The sixth, and final frustration, is the fact that I don't understand German -- most of the content on the Kanotix site is in German!!! Why didn't I take German???"


• I wrote in my blog in 2005:
  "So I was a big fan of the kanotix distribution, and pushing it on all my friends, including my local LUG, who had never heard of it.
  Eventually I grew tired of the distribution and went on to choose kubuntu and SUSE. Most of the reasons revolve around the German language:"


• Andrew Raevsky wrote in 2006 at NewsForge:
  "Remember, kanotix is currently a german focused distro, but all the developers have no problems with english, so that's not an issue. "


• bigkahuna at blender artists said in 2004:
  "I used Kanotix for about a year, the only negative I can think of is that most of the users are German speaking, so getting easy to understand help in English can sometimes take a couple tries."


• anonymous reader at linux.com writes:
  "Yes the Kanotix site is in German *as the default* but you can translate it to any of about 10 languages by choosing a drop-down menu on the far left of the screen."


• VMWare's has a virtual appliances directory says:
  "Kanotix is a German-language Linux distribution, based on Debian-sid (unstable) and KDE 3.5. It is also usable as a LiveCD. 977MB zipped."

Water and waves...

... is the new IRTC theme. Don't know if I'm going to get an entry completed by July 15th, though.

A Story about Fate

When I was in graduate school, I lived in a little house that was right off campus. Within two blocks of me were a Lutheran church I attended, and two fraternities. Both frats were probably ultimately made up of rich athletes, but one frat was a little bit more "yacht club" in its reputation; the other a bit more "captain of the football team." One year, a member of the yacht-club frat committed suicide.

I would often attend Thursday evening bible studies at the Lutheran church, which was immediately between the two frats. I imagine that the "football captain" frat guys thought I was a member of the other frat because of the path I would walk. They probably assumed I was cutting through the church's parking lot instead of actually going into the church. Anyway, one evening, shortly after the suicide, as I entered the church parking lot, I started hearing the word "suicide." Soon I noticed that every window in the football-frat's house was filled with brothers who were chanting "suicide" in a spooky, erratic fashion, each at different rhythms, and they were chanting at me! The funny thing was that it really didn't faze me once I figured out what they were doing. They thought they were teasing and mocking a member of their rival frat over the tragic loss of one of his brothers. The gall and cruelty were so over the top that I really didn't have any emotional response.

Within a few months, one of the football-frat guys was murdered behind their house. Shot. I believe they found the assailant but not a clear motive.

test comic

test comic, originally uploaded by pterandon.

June 25,2006

Gratuitous test of blogging "at Original Size"

zfixirishh47f03, originally uploaded by pterandon.

Wonder how this will work. Will flickr actually send at 640 and will Blogger display at 640??

Revoking John 15:13

In an NPR story, Anatomy of a Shooting: A Civilian's Death in Iraq Maj. John Dunlap, the chief law officer for the 256th Army Division, is quoted:

"Soldiers were called upon to make decisions on a daily basis in snap seconds," Dunlap said. "And we did not want to create an environment where soldiers thought they were going to be second-guessed and prosecuted for making decisions that would save their life. Rule number one is to come home alive."

I remember reading St. John Chrysostom's commentary on the Sermon on the Mount. He was discussing whether statements such as "If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic" were to be taken as literal, prescriptive commands for us today. Chrysostom was musing whether following such advice would be hopelessly impractical. He said if anyone were to have become naked because they let people take all their clothing, that indeed you'd find folks willing to give up their very skin to make sure that such a faithful person would not go without clothes.

I've been to a few street festivals that allowed public drinking of beer. There were policemen there. I have often seen an appropriate police presence at these festivals. Now suppose in the middle of the crowd of families brawls were to break out among those who have had too much to drink. On one hand, can you imagine even the worst cop-hater having anything but sympathy for the cop injured breaking up a brawl to keep children from being injured? On the other hand, if your children were right next to the brawl, how would you feel if the cop's marching orders reallywere:

"Rule number one is to come home alive."

My goodness! if such a cop were right next to your kids, wouldn't you be bothered?

waiting

waiting
Originally uploaded by mukroe_.

This photo was taken by mukroe_ at flickr. I thought it so inspiring I just had to share...

Wow. Not even all BSD distros work with all hardware.

I was fascinated by this report posted at distrowatch where someone compared a bunch of live CD's for BSD. BSD is another free operating system and is not the same thing as linux. The fascinating thing to me is that only one out of four tested distros worked on all four boxes the author tested.

"My overall impression was that BSD live CDs are not on par (yet) with their GNU/Linux cousins, but that they are catching up fast. "

My experience with linux distros this weekend (see yesterday's post) is that the linux distros aren't as universally good at hardware detection.