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The latest REL version of FreeBSD is out now.

I was cleaning up my archives and came across this goodie which I decided to re-post here.  While I was living in Rochester, NY, I submitted an article to Deaf Rochester News shortly after the Sept 11, 2001 tragedy.   Much has happened since then with further clarification and understanding of where America stands in the world.  It’s interesting to relive what was going through all of our minds at the time.

—-

Time flies like a sign language
By Jared Evans

“May you live in interesting times.”
-old Chinese proverb

With the WTC crashes on September 11, the nation was harked back to the early days of the republic. We are back to the period of the first three or four U.S. presidents, from George Washington to Jams Madison to John Adams. The result is that we are now more vulnerable than at any time since the British burned down the White House in 1814.  Americans have always enjoyed the dumb luck of geographic placement in the world that has until recent given us a major strategic advantage against our enemies. Technology has at long last bridged the oceanic distance.

Before September 11, it seemed improbable that a nation as powerful as ours would find ourselves in this position but almost paradoxically, this is the very reason why we were attacked.   Why are there so many people in other countries that hate us so much, even to the point of crashing planes into our buildings?  Many Americans who have been overly-domesticated and see all the great things that our nation has to offer in terms of material possessions and peace of mind often wonder why other countries have a such disdain toward us.

The collapse of the Soviet Union did not result in, as some had hoped, a world where power was shared among several nations.  The distribution of power took a dramatic turn in America’s favor.  After the Soviet Union disappeared, the decline in ideological rivalry, weakened economic stability in Japan and Europe, the growing gaps in military and technological expenditure and America’s booming economy all increased the power consolidation during the 1990s.

The current situation as it stands is that America is a nation with neither equals or rivals.  America possesses such predominance in military, economic, cultural, and technological affairs, and that no country can compete with U.S. in these four areas combined and most would have difficulty competing even in only one of these areas.

One example is our military supremacy that has been unmatched since the days of ancient Rome and its reach is much more wider.  Even for the relatively modest investment of some 3.5% of the annual GDP, the U.S. could maintain with ease an powerful military power by outspending the next nine military powers combined.

It is the first truly global power in history, the only state to ever possess all military means and the first world economy with inexhaustible powers of innovation and flexibility with universally attractive culture.  Earlier empires such as Roman, Chinese, Mongol, were not global empires- they were regional powers.

But one major difference between America and the ancient world powers is that while Napoleon had to rely on bayonets to spread France’s revolutionary creed, the American popular culture is already seductive to other countries.  You don’t have to be a rich aristocrat to be a part of it and because it’s an informal culture, it is easy to entice and then suck up the new emerging middle classes.

The unease is felt even by our closest allies.  There are 780 profit-generating McDonalds in France, the country that always prided itself on world-class cuisine.   Baywatch is one of the most popular TV shows in other parts of the world, including other Islamic and developing countries.  That is exactly where the threat of U.S. lies.

In fact, the French have a new name for us: hyperpuissance or hyperpower.  They suggest that because the term ‘superpower’, all of sudden, seemed to be waning as an accurate way to describe U.S.  The prefix ‘hyper’ means excessive and there is a need for diminishing.

Europe has not shied from their attempt to create foreign policies aimed at changing the world power distribution to be more multi-polar in nature.  Witness the formation of the Euro currency and their own military taskforce.  They believe that it requires strengthening several poles and weakening the “one.”  Europeans are wary of America because we are the model to watch and match.  To catch up, Europeans have to start to become like the Americans and they hate this very idea and fiercely guard their cultural superiority.

The other Islamic countries also recognize this same threat and is why they hate us but at the same time it’s a type of respect.  They see their young children buying Coca-Cola, getting similar American hair styles, wearing Levis jeans or Nike shoes, or listening to American music groups.  They get uneasy when they start to see their  children’s divergence from their traditional cultural values.  Naturally, there would be global backlash as seen in the emergence of new groups to combat this threat, some of them which unfortunately may take on a more extreme approach like the one Al Qaeda has adopted.

It turns out that we aren’t still weak or bloated as a society as others have percept.  For a few decades, we had nothing to struggle for and became decadent and overly legalistic.  We used to worry about matters where nothing much was ever at stake such as Clinton/Monica, OJ, Condit (“Did they really do it?” “Who Cares?”).

But once threatened with an almost comic-book evil, everything changed.   Americans have always been lucky to have to face different threats at the right time to save ourselves and have emerged stronger afterwards.  With the early colonists’ cautious treading, George Washington had the British forces, with the slaves and plantation economies, Abe Lincoln had the inner turmoil of civil war, and with racism and labor union unrest, Roosevelt had Hilter.  This new threat of terrorism against us redefines how Americans as a people and government have respond recently in a whole new light.

We are entering what is known as the “fourth generation of warfare.”   The new wars of the future will be based on the size and quality of intelligence services.  Now that the world is full of complex and different cultures, understanding interactions and intent is more important than satellite pictures.  The golden age of intelligence will be before us and the greatest spies are being born now.  The modus operandi of special forces which for a long time been perceived as “dirty or illegal” but now all the rules have changed as special forces are now eagerly used in our next war.

In the end, it won’t be the military supremacy that wins the war.  As our foes have told the world again and again, this is a war of values.  We cannot win by sacrificing ours.  If the forces of democracy and freedom are to triumph over the forces of terror, they must first flourish at home.

We must take delicate care that we don’t end up terrorizing ourselves with new anti-terrorism bills or laws that water down our civil liberties.  Being an American is what it is because of our openness and many freedoms.  It’s not simply showing of patriotism.  We aren’t strong because we fly our flags high enough but because we follow our unique set of ideals.   Especially in the hard times, we must remember and stay with the principles that have made us the bearer of democracy to the world.

We must remember that during war times, truth is often the first casualty of conflict and that war fever crowds want us all to conform and march in step.  This may help the herd to get some assurance that everyone is trustworthy and loyal.  We must not forget that one of the democratic freedoms is the ability to debate vigorously.

If we are not careful we could have an Orwellian “Big Brother” mentality set in and become entrenched in our mindset.  When a famous TV talk show host recently made a remark about how using U.S. cruise missiles was a cowardly act, and in addition to cancelled TV shows, sponsors who dropped out, the government issued this statement “Americans need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and there is not a time for remarks like that: there never is.”

The government has already claimed that they would not comment on war operations and if they do they would flat out lie about it.   Bush Administration needs to build a strong public support for the action against terrorism but this cannot be done by lying, withholding information, or reducing civil liberties.

This is done because the Bush administration claim they need the secrecy to avoid any American troops to be put at risk.  In contrast, Franklin Roosevelt was able to marshal the support of American public for the historical conflict during WWII even if the country was unprepared for the epic struggle.  He didn’t have to resort to the totalitarian measures of our enemies.  Roosevelt never had any doubt that the energies of a free people could overcome the most efficient totalitarian regime.  But then again, Roosevelt never had to deal with the media and the instant live video from anywhere in the world.

Orwell warned us about this one.  Big Brother, in order to control the population, know that it was necessary for the people to always believe they were in a state of siege, that the enemy was getting closer and closer and that the war would take a very long time.  When we all are in a state of uncertainty or fear, who wouldn’t submit to searches, or restrictions of movement to prevent another September 11?

How will this affect our future- the so called Generation Y?  Generation Y is the 70 million teenager Americans born between 1980 and 1996.  In the next decade, they will represent 41% of the U.S. population.  They all have just gotten a bucket of ice water in the face on September 11.

For them, nothing much had ever been at stake.  They have never experienced the hallowing fighting for the very survival of the nation.   There are big questions being asked about this group.  Will they submit to the war fever or start thinking about a political movement that has been embraced by some of them?  Will they look at the problems facing America and challenge the current policies and the global corporatization which was a part of the reason why the terrible attacks of September 11 took place?  Another possibility is that nothing will change and they will go right back to charging up some more credit card debt and be good and faithful consumers.

Which side will Generation Y be on?  All we have to do to find out is listen.  As a famous playwright, Bertolt Brecht said, “In the dark times, will there still be singing?  Yes, there will be singing.  There will be singing about the dark times.”

[For the readers who have seen the column title above for the first time, it is a play on the famous phrase “Time flies like an arrow” which reveals the depth of ambiguity in English]

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Thanks to Bionic Ear, I found out about PLYmedia, which offers professional subtitling/captioning tools and services for online web clips.  They recently launched SubPLY which offers a plugin for your video player so you can simply send the url of the video clip to SubPLY human translators who will take care of the subtitling work.  Within 24 hours, you’ll automatically see the subtitles if you watch the video clip using their plugin.

In short, it’s a simple A-Z solution with no additional work on your part beyond submitting the url of the video clip.  I believe this is the “pay” part of the service.  It would take a lot of burden off businesses by making their online video clps accessible immediately and everywhere it’s shown embedded.

However, right now, they are offering a free service for your YouTube video clips.

When you submit one of your youTube video clips to SubPLY, they will send back a subtitle file which you upload to the matching youTube video clip.  After youTube processes the subtitles, anyone will be able to turn on subtitles when watching your youTube video clips.

While this will be a nice break for Bill Creswell, a champion of captioning online web clips of movie trailers, it’s of no benefit for the Deaf community using American Sign Language.  While I would love to have subtitled version of my ASL youTube clips, I highly doubt SubPLY has anyone on board who knows ASL.  I cannot submit my AMERICAN sign language clips to them since it’s their current policy to accept only English-spoken clips.  Somewhat Ironic in my eyes considering the country of origin for ASL …

However, this is a great step in making more content accessible to others!  Is it worth the hassle of subtitling?  Here’s some research from TechCrunch:

Is captioning videos really worth the hassle? YouTube clearly believes as much and PLYmedia’s internal research supports this claim as well. SubPLY was piloted with a video publisher that tested ten different videos for a period of six weeks, in three different languages (English, Spanish and French). Here are the results for videos watched with captioning:

1. Foreign language usage and viewership increased over 700% in a 5 week period.
2. 19% more viewers watched videos to completion than those without subtitles.
3. The share function (sending the video to others) was used by viewers watching subtitles 171% more often (the viral effect was boosted).
4. A 37% increase in both users who watched the video in full screen mode and users who replayed video.

The OpenSuse Linux distro got a major update to version 11.1 a few days ago.  While I’m still an Ubuntu fan, I decided to try out the latest version of openSuse. I’ve heard a lot of good things about that distro and it certainly doesn’t hurt that openSuse team can count on the corporate backing and support of Novell.   Novell sells Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) and Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), which closely follows the cutting-edge openSuse distro.

However, I’ve ran into numerous annoyances with openSuse (which I’m not going into details here) which were at times difficult and time-consuming to resolve.  While none of these problems were major roadblocks or prevented me from using the system, I still have much higer expectations of modern Linux Desktop environments nowadays since they are all trying to target the general non-technie populace, instead of the hacker minority.  For newcomers to the Linux desktop, I would still highly recommend Ubuntu since I rarely ran into problems that weren’t easily resolved.  I’ve been very impressed with Ubuntu because “it just works.”

While I use the CLI (command-line interface) often, I also like my eye candy.  On Desktop Linux distros, the software responsible for the fancy graphical interface that can do all sort of nifty things is called Compiz.  I ran into problems using Compiz on openSuse and after some research, came across this:

Compiz on openSUSE 11.1
by cyberorg, Thursday, December 4th, 2008 @ 3:31 pm

After making sure compiz is switched off and disabled, remove old configuration:
rm -rf /home/your-username/.config/compiz
Launch simple-ccsm and enable Compiz.

Hopefully, this will provide a short-term solution to getting compiz from freezing or muckling up the X display until a long term solution is devised and included as the default in openSuse.

Off the subject note: What do I think of openSuse Desktop environment when compared to Ubuntu Desktop?  The only major differences between them are the package repositories management and menu layout.  While these distros have different package repo management, they are both excellent and execute very well (as long as I don’t have to struggle with package dependencies and these are resolved for me automatically).  Menu layout is pretty much a matter of personal taste.  Everything else with the distros is pretty much the same.  Which is why I think it’s critical for openSuse to make absolutely sure that their distro doesn’t cause all sort of small and irriating problems that have to be cleaned up by the user.  Ubuntu distro is hands-down beating them in this usability area.

One of the most worrisome part of the Internet experience is how much data a company can keep on users behavior while they are browsing the company’s services.  In order to be able to give them the best and most relevant information while on their site, the company needs to be able to track what the users are currently doing and have done in the recent past.  The question becomes:  “How much of the recorded past behavior should be kept in their systems?”

If a company keeps a detailed record of customers’ behaviorial patterns for all time ever since the date the accounts were created, this set of user behaviorial data can become a very tempting target by the US government or other quasi-legal organizations since it would expose a lot of information on many users.  This would be a tremendeous loss of privacy on the part of users and greatly increases the likelihood of abuse and fraud.

Ideally, a company would only keep detailed data on users for only a limited period of time beyond which it becomes of little benefit from a business/user perspective.  After a period of time, all the user behavior data can be anonymized to make it much more difficult to link the a behavior pattern to an user.  This would allow users to retain their privacy, and at the same time, allow the company to be able to identify specific trends over a long period of time upon which can be used to make better business decisons.

Only a few companies have declared their policy on retention of user data.  Today, Yahoo announced that they would be keeping only three short months worth of user behavior data.  Google by comparsion keeps nine long months worth.

Yahoo, for all its recent and very public troubles, are still getting new ideas out the door, providing great services and generally getting things done.  I have great admiration and respect for the people who are at Yahoo now- they are doing all the right things.

I watched the movie “Fearless” (or “Huo Yuan Jia”) and couldn’t help but see many parallels between the film and the history of the signing Deaf community in midst of a hearing society.

The movie is loosely based upon a man called Huo Yuanjia who actually existed in late 1800s China.  During his time in China, foreign colonizers took control of China and took steps to marginalize the Chinese pride and culture.  Being a martial arts film, naturally there is a fight at the climax of the movie in which Huo tries to give the Chinese people back their cultural confidence as a race.

Wait until the 1:00 hour mark in the film for the parallels to start hitting you in quick successions :-)

You’re running a Dom 0 Xen kernel with a nvidia graphic card?

And you’re frustrated by the low-res X (vesa) when running on X?  Want a higher res X cuz you have a kick-ass Nvidia video card?

sax2 -m 0=nv

should resolve all your troubles.

note: Don’t expect 3D acceleration yet.  Nvidia is currently working on a xen video driver.

It’s been quite a while since I migrated from a hosted blog at jarednevans.typepad.com to my own self-hosted Wordpress installation at jaredlog.com.  When I went through with the transfer, I lost all the Google mojo of my former blog.  Many of my posts at my former blog came in at the top for results of various search terms.

Tonight, I was glad to see the top result for “transfer waypoints google maps gps” :-)  This blog is finally back on track!

The legacy ifconfig and route commands can now be seen as being deprecated and be no longer used for setup of network configuration.

People who are comfortable using ifconfig and route will be fine with the new iproute2 suite, which provides similar functionality and improves upon the older net tools.

Here’s a short n’ sweet cheat sheet using iproute2 for network configuring.  If you want more in-depth information, go here.

Configure network card:
ip link set mtu 1500 dev eth0 (use mtu 9000 if on 1000M gigabit network for more efficiency)

Showing all network cards/IP information
ip addr show

Adding one or several IP addresses on network card.
The iproute2 suite doesn’t need fictitious interfaces such as eth0:1, eth0:2, etc.  This is legacy naming scheme for ifconfig. The ‘label’ will allow older ifconfig to be able to see all the addresses.
Using the CIDR notation with network prefix (after the slash) will automatically calculate the broadcast and netmask.
ip addr add 192.168.0.213/24 label eth0:1 dev eth0

Removing an IP address from network card
ip addr del 192.168.0.213/24 dev eth0

Adding default route
ip route add default via 192.168.0.1

Viewing routes
ip route show

Turning up/down network card
ip link set eth0 up
ip link set eth0 down

You are having problems inside the VMware BIOS because you’re unable to navigate the BIOS menu due to messed up key mappings.  For example, the arrow keys among other keys don’t work.

If you’re running VMware server on Ubuntu, you will want to stop the key mapping madness in X:

echo ‘xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true’ > ~/.vmware/config

or put this line into /etc/vmware/config for the change to affect all users.

One of the advantages of an open-sourced OS such as Ubuntu is that you can take the OS and repackage it in any way you want then distribute it free of charge.  There have been a number of Ubuntu derivatives which are purpose-based or language-based.

Kubuntu - Ubuntu with the KDE Desktop Environment
Edubuntu - Ubuntu for Education
Ubuntu Server Edition - Ubuntu for Servers
Xubuntu - Ubuntu with the XFCE desktop environment
Gobuntu - A flavour of Ubuntu that strives to be completely devoid of software, drivers or firmware with restrictive licenses
Ubuntu Studio - Designed for multimedia editing and creation
Mythbuntu - Designed for creating a home theatre PC with MythTV

There are localized language versions such as Italian, Japanese, French, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, Nordic, German, or French.

However, I think this one takes the cake:

Ubuntu Muslim edition [screenshots]

What’s next??

While there are many ‘Tasks’ or ‘To Do’ Lists type of apps, the native applications are often stand-alone so the task list is tied to the computer.  If you switch to a different computer (workplace and home), you can’t access the tasks or are forced to copy the tasks to email or somewhere on the network so you can access them from a different place.

I’ve been looking around for Tasks List where I am able to easily review/add/delete my tasks from anywhere.  I signed up at Remember The Milk and came away impressed by the implementation and design.

The AJAXy website focuses on one purpose and does it very well.  Best of all, it’s possible to manage the tasks on the web via key shortcuts without touching the mouse!

I am able to add new tasks (or To Do items) via the website, inside Google Calendar, via twitter direct messages, mobile website on pager, email, and the Ubuntu Deskbar along with other services.  If you’ve been waiting for a Task or To-Do list that is easily accessed from anywhere, give RTM a try!

Laptop runs like molasses:

[click image to see full-size]

trade-off with SLES: running the minimal FVWM windowing environment to conserve CPU/RAM.

Here are the simple steps to get TweetDeck installed on Ubuntu Desktop.  Adobe AIR needs to be installed first before TweetDeck can be setup on the desktop.

Install Adobe AIR for Ubuntu:

1) Visit Adobe Labs where “Adobe AIR for Linux” can be found. http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/linux/ Find the latest BIN.

2) Create adobe_air in your home directory, cd to the directory and wget the BIN into the directory.

3) chmod u+x adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin (or whatever the BIN file is)

4) sudo ./adobeair_linux_b1_091508.bin

Adobe AIR will be installed.  To be safe, restart your computer at this point.

To install TweetDeck:

1) Go to http://www.tweetdeck.com and find the download link for TweetDeck AIR file.

2) Create a TweetDeck directory in your home directory and cd to the directory.  wget the AIR file into the directory.

3) Double-click on the AIR file and the install will start.  Install it in the same TweetDeck directory in your home.

You should see the TweetDeck icon show up on your desktop and TweetDeck will be ready for all of your twittering!