Syria

It won't fit on twitter, and I don't like monologuing so much on there, so...

It's not about Assad.
The aim of any surgical strike (if it happens) on Syria, will be to destroy weapons that Israel believe to be threatening to themselves whether in the hands of Assad OR whoever might gain power following Assad's removal.

This explains in part the US & allies readiness to strike. They really don't intend to get dragged in to an Iraq war scenario here. It's just destroy the weapons then leave Syria to fight it out again.

But it raises some issues:

Firstly Israel must not only believe that it's strikes on Syria earlier this year were unsuccessful or limited in scope so a risk still remains. That or Russia has recently supplied Syria with more advanced weapons that Israel can't confidently deal with.

Next that it has reached a point where Israel doesn't believe it's safe for them to strike again to remove this threat as they have done in the past. Far safer for Israel to get America & chums to do it for them to avoid direct retaliation.

Next up? That Russia has knowingly provided more advanced weapon capabilities to Syria presumably in response to Saudi and US constantly funding the rebels for dubious reasons.

So if you stand back and take a look at it, it's once again super powers that be using another country as the playground of political gain with messy results.

This time however, there are some problems. The Syrian military has already said it would view an act of aggression by the US as an attack directed by Israel and would fire on Israel in retaliation. Bluff? Bit of a gamble? Israel / US counting on the fact they can neutralise the entire Syrian threat to Israel in one strike? Well ... If Syria does respond with a successful strike on Israel, all hell will break lose.

Now .. it's at this point I get a bit worried.

In the UK in recent days there's been a dramatic up turn in immigration control stopping and "taking away for interview" any ethnic minorities they can scoop up off the streets. Today it was Victoria station in London, and Oxford that I heard of. Want to minimise the risk of terrorism in response from within? Strike first and round up all you can?

Tenacious perhaps. But then there's the build up of military planes in Cyprus today. Easily the preferred point for US attack on Syria ... But ...

Look back up at the top there? We started this ramble on the assumption the original strike was simply to remove arms that Israel regards as a threat. Now all of a sudden, we're looking at contingency plans going in to place for a prolonged engagement and presumably a successful retaliation from Syria against Israel. If that does happen and it is being planned for as a side effect of the initial strike? Then the term "All hell will break lose" is very carefully chosen.

The Egypt Problem

Just for the sake of own sanity faced with the barrage of tweets on the subject.

Let's go back a few years, to a point where it was widely regarded that Morsi supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, was without a doubt the US backed preferred government in Egypt.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-struggles-to-install-proxy-brotherhood-in-egypt/31552

Now since then. On a wave of optimism that the Morsi solution would hold, one of America's big five buddies, the UK, has been busy selling arms to Egypt. All sanctioned and approved by American political interest in the region. (I don't have this kind of info for other countries, I'm sure the UK wasn't the only one).

http://www.caat.org.uk/resources/export-licences/licence?rating=Military&region=Egypt&n=0&date_from=2010-01-01

Most if not all of that weaponry and body armour goes to the police and armed forces in Egypt. In the eye's of America and it's arms dealing buddies, that was all totally fine because Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood had the power and therefore the arms.

So what happened yesterday? The Egyptian Army moved to clear out a large Muslim Bortherhood protest encampment. There were preceding reports that the MB camp was getting heavily armed in readiness for a fight. If you dig through the AP post on what happened today, you'll find buried in there:

"Authorities said the encampment had been heavily armed and footage aired on state TV showed security forces uncovering stashes of ammunition and hand guns after storming the site."

Now I can't tell you which side is exaggerating the truth in their own favour here. I'm sceptical of the largely pro-US media coverage we get in the West, and I'm finding it a little hard to believe the Army just decided to go on a killing spree one day for no particular reason. If they did? America has problems, because someone high up in Egypt has decided to declare war on the MB using the very arms that America and it's allies have been happily selling them. It's worth also noting here, that many in Egypt reportedly view the Muslim Brotherhood as "terrorists". So in the eyes of much of Egypt, not a lot of sympathy is felt. They were told they had to clear the encampment, they didn't so ...

All in all, it's a complete mess, once again with a root cause looking like Western interests meddling in foreign affairs for many years leading to a complete breakdown.

So that's why I'm holding back on comment on the situation unfolding in Egypt on Twitter. It's simply too complex an issue to fit in to 140 characters and there's little I can link to that demonstrates my point of view. I don't trust the media bias in the official news sources that I have access to. I don't trust the knee-jerk reactions of many twitter posters on the subject. I don't trust Obama's intentions either. Many of the Egyptian tweets I've seen are virtually the opposite of the slant of the AP or VICE news reports for example.

Calls to end financial support or military aid are short sighted. The military aid has already been supplied with intent to give Morsi the fire-power to retain control (Ooops). Cutting more general financial aid is likely to harm the citizens that everyone claims they are most concerned about.

The media machine and Western government official lines are a bit stretched here. Obama condemns the violence mainly because it's focused on his own pet project the MB. A sane person would condemn the violence simply on the grounds that violence doesn't solve anything. However, Obama and his supporting nations have been arming and funding Morsi and his supporters precisely to gain control through violence, and then to retain that position via violence if necessary. The word "hypocrite" springs to mind again.

Also worth noting here, that amongst some, the assumption that all protesters must be the good guys is a little jarring. It wasn't the MB protesting that caused the coup that wasn't a coup. That was most of the rest of Egypt against the MB / Morsi. But people seem to like thinking in little boxes without too much analysis, so somehow, the MB protesters are now the good guys because it was a protest. Sure there should always be a right to peaceful protest, but that doesn't mean the protester is always right. Sigh. Anyway. That's one example of the kind lazy thinking that got me to write this.

If you blindly cheer for the MB on this one, you're cheering for America's interests against the will of Egyptians that was shown by the largest turn out for sustained protest in human history just weeks ago. If you cheer for the Army, you're cheering for what does seem to be unjustifiable force from an outside perspective. Who knows? What if the MB was shooting at the Army and police from an encampment containing women and children? Who gave the orders for the Army to move in? As yet, I don't know. What we lack as usual is clear unbiased reporting.

For now, it simply looks like both sides are deeply in the wrong.

It's a horrible mess. The best I can do is hope that somehow out of the smoke, Egypt manages to emerge with a non US installed government and some form of peace. Some in Egypt are predicting civil war and an eventual geographic divide. I hope not. But I guess those in Egypt probably have a better insight in to what's going on than I or most the commentators I've seen in the West do.

Yet Another Game Review...

Sorry guys & gals.

I'm making a real effort not to spend my entire life bound up with the frustrations of injustice and petty run downs. So I still find the time to play games.

Most of the time, I'm even frustrated in that simple pursuit, but recently, I chanced some time with "Kerbal Space Program". And this one is something of a gem. Well a gem for anyone who ever dreamt of launching a rocket anyway.

It's a game in development, currently only with a sandbox style approach, and actually? That's moar than enough to have managed to give me some of the biggest laughs from a computer game for a long long time. It's self challenging. You don't need a plot. It's more ... well ... what can I do with this next?

The first challenge is simply building your own rocket and getting something, or some hapless Kerbal in to space. The Kerbal's and running humour in item descriptions work well. Your budding astronauts don't have a huge splay of skills and experience. They have bravery and stupidity. I'm not sure which serves them best as I accidentally curse them to a fiery death or life in a perpetual orbit I can't rescue them from, but the stupid grin or freaked out "ARGH!" on their faces has finally persuaded me to stop laughing snot bubbles out of my nose and send more unmanned test launches instead.

The first challenge is simply to build your own rocket and launch something or someone in to space. It's ... well ... it should be easy. Actually it's a nice little first lesson in rocket design, staging and structure. When you eventually manage it, it's either a lesson in ... ohhhh that's that the parachute's are for! Or ... Yeah ... it's relatively easy to launch something in to a meaningless orbit round the sun.

And that's where it starts to really shine beyond the absurd hilarity of the initial rocket designs going wrong in all kinds of unimaginable ways. No really. Watching your own "That's my best idea yet!" design destroy itself in new and original ways just doesn't seem to get old. The physics engine in this bit of code is just fantastic. So yes, sometimes things don't place where you want them, and sometimes it's best to just save it, reload it and .. ta-da! It works more like it did before! But overall, glitches aside (it's still in development), physics are the cruel jester as you try to wrestle with gravity again and again.

Anyway. Having escaped the upper atmosphere, putting something in to stable orbit around your own planet becomes the next challenge. This is where you begin to learn about apoapsis and periapsis happens. In other words .. yeah .. actually? How do you chuck something in to orbit and adjust the orbit?

Then it only expands beautifully. Kerbal's own moon "mun" is a nice target, as is the insanely difficult challenge of building your own orbiting space station. The challenges of sending your homebrew payload across gravity wells of other planets and moons begin to beckon.

It's just a fantastic bit of coding. Raw around the edges. Yes you can find fault with part placement. Yes sometimes that previously good design needs a retouch on the launch pad, but somehow even those glitches add to the Kerbal derp humour level as you try to figure out work arounds.

For anyone who ever dreamed of being an astronaut or launching a rocket. This is one fantastic, time absorbing, oh so simple, oh so fun and yet oh so incredibly complicated bit of fun.

Tips

Take it small steps. Each challenge you set yourself and learn from helps a lot when you reach for the next milestone. Figure out the basics of staging and launching, then simple orbit, then adjusting orbit. Add in how to get your derpy Kerbal home again, and before long you've spent hours laughing like a loon and got a pretty good grip on what you can cope with.

The orbital view will blow your mind to begin with. What the hell are all these little symbols when I add an adjustment waypoint?!?! Start simple. The basic tutorials are minimal but put you in the right direction. When you do understand the challenges of orbital flight, the little symbols all suddenly begin to make sense. When that happens you suddenly find the orbital view is incredibly clever for conveying what you want to do next.

Back on the orbital view. If you've messed up a target flight path and can't get a delete X on it, just grab the inner circle and drag it to one side. When it turns red, let go and it's gone. Now try again derp head! What is this? Rocket science?

And...

What can I say? It's just a fantastic bit of coding. Physics become the challenge. What you want to achieve next becomes the aim. Even with it's basic graphics, the satisfaction of your first stable Kerbal orbit is fantastic. Watch the sun rise in true NASA style, launched from your own designed rocket. Then stretch it to managing a near miss with the Mun, then your first stable orbit of a nearby body, and eventually, your first non Kerbal landing. Then ... you begin to wonder ... which planet is easiest to get to next? Can I get a Kerbal to land and plant a flag on the Mun and then get them home again?

The game expands itself. It's beautifully done. Right down to your own space debris kicking you in the ass from time to time.

Don't pirate this one. If you do? Then it taught you that these guys deserve the payout. Now go buy it and enjoy the updates.

I've not enjoyed a game this much since discovering Grand Theft Auto III back in 2002. So this is my once in a decade "Oh hell yes that's goood!" game!

``Never Whistle While You're Pissing''

Excerpts from ``Never Whistle While You're Pissing''

by Hagbard Celine

From the Illuminatus! Trilogy

Seventh Trip, or Netzach (the SNAFU Principle)

"The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded,
condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignore, suppressed, repressed,
robbed, brutalized and defamed of all Damned Things is the individual
human being. The social engineers, statistician, psychologist,
sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of
industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are
perpetually forcing this Damned Thing into carefully prepared
blueprints and perpetually irritated that the Damned Thing will not
fit into the slot assigned it. The theologians call it a sinner and
try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish
it. the psychologist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still,
the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Appendix Teth: Hagbard's Booklet

" I once overheard two botanists arguing over a Damned Thing that had
blasphemously sprouted in a college yard. One claimed that the Damned Thing
was a tree and the other claimed that it was a shrub. They each had good
scholary arguments, and they were still debating when I left them. The
world is forever spawning Damned Things- things that are neither tree nor
shrub, fish nor fowl, black nor white- and the categorical thinker can only
regard the spiky and buzzing world of sensory fact as a profound insult to
his card-index system of classifications. Worst of all are the facts which
violate "common sense", that dreary bog of sullen prejudice and muddy
inertia. The whole history of science is the odyssey of a pixilated card-
indexer perpetually sailing between such Damned Things and desperately
juggling his classifications to fit them in, just as the history of
politics is the futile epic of a long series of attempts to line up the
Damned Things and cajole them to march in regiment.

Every ideology is a mental murder, a reduction of dynamic living processes
to static classifications, and every classification is a Damnation, just as
every inclusion is an exclusion. In a busy, buzzing universe where no two
snow flakes are identical, and no two trees are identical, and no two
people are identical- and, indeed, the smallest sub-atomic particle, we are
assured, is not even identical with itself from one microsecond to the
next- every card-index system is a delusion. "Or, to put it more
charitably," as Nietzsche says, "we are all better artists than we
realize." It is easy to see that label "Jew" was a Damnation in Nazi
Germany, but actually the label "Jew" is a Damnation anywhere, even where
anti-Semitism does not exist. "He is a Jew," "He is a doctor," and "He is a
poet" mean, to the card indexing centre of the cortex, that my experience
with him will be like my experience with other Jews, other doctors, and
other poets. Thus, individuality is ignored when identity is asserted. At a
party or any place where strangers meet, watch this mechanism in action.
Behind the friendly overtures there is wariness as each person fishes for
the label that will identify and Damn the other. Finally, it is revealed:
"Oh, he's an advertising copywriter," "Oh, he's an engine-lathe operator."
Both parties relax, for now they know how to behave, what roles to play in
the game. Ninety-nine percent of each has been Damned; the other is
reacting to the 1 percent that has been labeled by the card-index machine.

Certain Damnations are socially and intellectually necessary, of course. A
custard pie thrown in a comedian's face is Damned by the physicist who
analyzes it according to the Newtonian laws of motion. These equations tell
us we want to know about the impact of the pie on the face, but nothing
about the human meaning of pie-throwing. A cultural anthropologist,
analyzing the social function of the comedian as shaman, court jester, and
king's surrogate, explains the pie-throwing as a survival of the Feast of
Fools and the killing of the king's double. This Damns the subject in
another way. A psychoanalyst, finding an Oedipal castration ritual here,
has performed a third Damnation, and the Marxist, seeing an outlet for the
worker's repressed rage against the bosses, performs a fourth. Each
Damnation has its values and uses, but is nonetheless a Damnation unless
its partial and arbitrary nature is recognized. The poet, who compares the
pie in the comedian's face with Decline of the West or his own lost love,
commits a fifth Damnation, but in this case the game element and the
whimsicality of the symbolism are safely obvious. At least, one would hope
so; reading the New Critics occasionally raises doubts on this point.

Human society can be structured either according to the principle of
authority or according to the principle of liberty. Authority is a static
social configuration in which people act as superiors and inferiors: a
sado- masochistic relationship. Liberty is a dynamic social configuration
in which people act as equals: an erotic relationship. In every interaction
between people, either Authority or Liberty is the dominant factor.
Families, churches, lodges, clubs and corporations are either more
authoritarian than libertarian or more libertarian than authoritarian. It
becomes obvious as we proceed that the most pugnacious and intolerant form
of authority is the State, which even today dares to assume absolutism
which the church itself has long ago surrendered and to enforce obedience
with the Church's old and shameful Inquisition. Every form of
authoritarianism is, however, a small "State," even if it has a membership
of only two. Freud's remark to the effect that the delusion of many men is
religion can be generalized: The authoritarianism of one man is crime and
the authoritarianism of many is State. Benjamin Tucker wrote quite
accurately:
Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression,
invasion, government are interchangeable terms. The essence of
government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to
control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the
nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it be made by one man
upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one
man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by
all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.
Tucker's use of the word "invasion" is remarkably precise, considering that
he wrote more than fifty years before the basic discovery of ethology.
Every act of authority is, in fact, an invasion of the psychic and physical
territory of another.

Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered
impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every
artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of
culture and "progress," everything on earth that is man-made and not given
to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man's refusal to bow
to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the
first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant,
and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, "Disobedience was man's
Original Virtue."

The human brain, which loves to read descriptions of itself as the
universe's most marvelous organ of perception, is an even more marvelous
organ of rejection. The naked facts of our economic game are easily
discoverable and undeniable once stated, but conservatives- who are usually
individuals who profit every day of their lives from these facts- manage to
remain oblivious to them or to see them through a very rose-tinted lens.
(Similarly, the revolutionary ignores the total testimony of history about
the natural course of revolution, through violence, to chaos, back to the
starting point.)

We must remember that thought is abstraction. In Einstein's metaphor, the
relationship between a physical fact and our mental reception of that fact
is not like the relationship between beef and beef-broth, a simpler
extraction and condensation; rather, as Einstein goes on, it is like the
relationship between our overcoat and the ticket given us when we check our
overcoat. In other words, human perception involves coding even more than
crude sensing. The mesh of language, or of mathematics, or of a school of
art, or of any system of human abstracting, gives to our mental constructs
the structure, not of the original fact, but of the symbol system into
which it is coded, just as a map-maker colors a nation purple not because
it is purple but because his code demands it. But every code excludes
certain things, blurs other things, and overemphasizes still other things.
Nijinski's celebrated leap through the window at the climax of 'Le Spectre
d'une Rose' is best coded in the ballet notation system used by
choreographers; verbal language falters badly in attempting to conveying;
painting or sculpture could capture totally the magic of one instant, but
one instant only, of it; the physicist's equation, Force = Mass X
Acceleration, highlights one aspect of it missed by all these other codes,
but loses everything else about it. Every perception is influenced, formed,
and structured by habitual coding habits- mental game habits- of the
perceiver.

All authority is a function of coding, of game rules. Men have arisen again
and again armed with pitchforks to fight armies with cannon; men have also
submitted docilely to the weakest and most tottery oppressors. It all
depends on the extent to which coding distorts perception and conditions
the physical (and mental) reflexes.

It seems at first glance that authority could not exist at all if all men
were cowards or if no men were cowards, but flourishes as it does because
most men are cowards and some men are thieves. Actually, the inner dynamics
of cowardice and submission on the one hand and of heroism and rebellion on
the other are seldom consciously realized either by the ruling class or the
servile class. Submission is identified not with cowardice but with virtue,
rebellion not with heroism but with evil. To the Roman slave-owners,
Spartacus was not a hero and the obedient slaves were not cowards;
Spartacus was a villain and the obedient slaves were virtuous. The obedient
slaves believed this also. The obedient always think of themselves as
virtuous rather than cowardly.

If authority implies submission, liberation implies equality; authority
exist when one man obeys another, and liberty exists when men do not obey
other men. Thus, to say that authority exists is to say that class and
caste exis, that submission and inequality exist. To say the liberty exists
is to that classlessness exists, to say that brotherhood and equality
exist. Authority, by dividing men into classes, creates dichotomy,
disruption, hostility, fear, disunion. Liberty, by placing men on an equal
footing, creates association, amalgamation, union, security. When the
relationships between men are based on authority and coercion, they are
driven apart; when based on liberty and non-aggression, they are drawn
together. The facts are self-evident and axiomatic. If authoritarianism did
not possess the in-built, preprogrammed double-bind structure of a Game
Without End, men would long ago have rejected it and embraced
libertarianism. The usual pacifist complaint about war, that young men are
led to death by old men who sit at home manning beaurocrats' desks and
taking no risks themselves, misses the point entirely. Demands that the old
should be drafted to fight their own wars, or that the leaders of the
warring nations should be sent to the front lines on the first day of
battle, etc., are aimed at an assumed "sense of justice" that simply does
not exist. To the typical submissive citizen of authoritarian society, it
is normal, obvious and "natural" that he should obey older and more
dominant males, even at the risk of his life, even against his own kindred,
and even in causes that are unjust or absurd.

"The Charge of the Light Brigade"- the story of a group of young males led
to their death in a palpably idiotic situation and only because they obeyed
a senseless order without stopping to think- has been, and remains, a
popular poem, because unthinking obedience by young males to older males is
the most highly prized of all conditioned reflexes within human, and
hominid, societies.

The mechanism by which authority and submission are implanted in the human
mind is coding of perception. That which fits into the code is accepted;
all else is Damned to being ignored, brushed aside, unnoticed, and- if
these fail- it is Damned to being forgotten. A worse form of Damnation is
reserved for those things which cannot be ignored. These are daubed with
the brain's projected prejudices until, encrusted beyond recognition, they
are capable of being fitted into the system, classified, card-indexed,
buried. This is what happens to every Damned Thing which is too prickly and
sticky to be excommunicated entirely. As Josiah Warren remarked, "It is
dangerous to understand new things too quickly." Almost always, we have not
understood them. We have murdered them and mummified their corpses.

A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more
precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of "monopoly in the means of
production." Since man extends his nervous system though channels of
communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who
controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of
society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every
individual's brain.

Thus in preliterate societies taboos on spoken word are more numerous and
more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organisation. With
the invention of written speech -- hieroglyphic, ideographic, or
alphabetical -- the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less
concern with what people say and more concern with what people write. (Some
of the fist societies to achieve literacy, such as Egypt and the Mayan
culture of ancient Mexico, evidentially kept a knowledge of hieroglyphs a
religious secret which only the higher orders of the priestly and royal
families were allowed to share.) The same process repeats endlessly: Each
step forward in the technology of communication is more heavily tabooed
than the earlier steps. Thus, in America today (post-Lenny Bruce), one
seldom hears of convictions for spoken blasphemy or obscenity; prosecution
of books still continues, but higher courts increasingly interpret the laws
in a liberal fashion, and most writer feel fairly confident that they can
publish virtually anything; movies are growing almost as decentralised as
books, although the fight is still heated in this area; television, the
newest medium, remains encased in neolithic taboo. (When the TV pundits
committed le`se majeste after an address by the then Dominant Male, a
certain Richard Nixon, one of his lieutenants quickly informed them they
had over stepped, and the whole tribe -- except for the dissident minority
-- cheered for the reassertion of tradition.) When a more efficient medium
arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
You can order The Illuminatus! Trilogy over the Web from
The Robert Anton Wilson Bookstore

Cross platform eh?

Total change of track from usual ramblings. This time as a result of trying to develop a simple cross platform GUI application on a Windows machine. Here's what we learned!

I started with Mono as the platform of choice. It has a neat opensource development IDE for Windows called SharpDevelop. It uses Windows Forms for it's GUI design. That's Windows as in windows on the screen, not windows as in Microsoft, so it does indeed run Windows Forms apps fairly happily in Linux land.

First problem. Don't bother checking to see how your creation looks on a Windows machine using Mono instead of .Net. It'll look really terrible and have fun graphical glitches and bugs. You really do need a Linux box or a virtualbox with Linux on it to test your creation.

Now it gets fun.

To begin with I was disappointed with what could be done with Windows Forms, so I had a look around and found Monodevelop appears to have had some updates since I last tried it. So much so that it's now called Xamarin Studio instead. It uses GTK for it's GUI design which is a much richer toolkit than WinForms. It's also open source and in theory lets you target mobile phone apps as well. Sounds fantastic! Except .. just like my last attempt to use Monodevelop in Windows, it's still buggy as hell. Sometimes it will refuse to let you click and put your cursor back in the edit window. I gave up telling it I wanted a Mono target because if I did that, every so often it would break the Posix library. Uninstall library. Reinstall library. Recompile. Ok. Go back to code. Can't edit code. Quit. Restart. Posix library breaks again. Reinstall Posix library. Edit code. Run. Edit code. Run. Edit .. oh it crashed. Give up on Monodevelop. It might work fine as a Linux development platform, but that's not what the original plan was.

So I look around and decide Python with GTK might be the way to go. Uh. No. Back in the good old days of Python 2.6/2.7, it seemed relatively easy to get a whole Python system running on Windows including ERIC, Python's own IDE with GUI designer. Now you have two choices. Try and install 2.7 and hunt for the now obsolete dependencies for it, or go for 3.x and face the fact most people are still on 2.7. I'm not an idiot when it comes to computers, but I gave up after about the fifth time around of "ERIC should run now!" ... Oh no it doesn't. Complete uninstall. Clean registry. Carefully recheck all stated requirements, try again. Once again. It probably works fine on Linux.

Fine. Have another look around. Well. There's Eclipse with SWING / SWT or Netbeans! JAVA! Java will save the day! Surely! ... Er. Not exactly. For a fairly long time now, Sun java hasn't been supported on many Linux distributions. And who can blame them? It's a security nightmare of a product. But if you accept that most Linux users will be on OpenJDK, you have a problem. Most of the fancy Netbeans applications (ok, all of them). Will fail to run without Sun Java. Even the fairly simple Eclipse + Swing app I tried died with AWT errors when I tried to run it on Linux. So it's not cross platform. You can either jump through hoops to stuff all the SWT libraries in with your creation (manually, Eclipse won't do it for you), or reduce yourself to a GUI so basic, that actually, WinForms back on SharpDevelop looks at least as good if not nicer with a lot less hassle.

The other side to that problem is I can't actually justify telling people it's "Linux compatible", if that means they have to go through a long relatively complex process to get Sun Java (a big security risk) installed before they can run it. Once again. If I did my Java application development on a Linux box, it would almost certainly work on a Windows machine.

Then there's dependencies. If I want to get fancy and use GTK for a Mono application, I can ... but I have to bundle in a bunch of DLL's for distribution that Linux doesn't need. That or point people at GTK runtime bundles for Windows. Again. Not exactly out of the box cross platform.

So basically ... If you really want to write cross platform applications, you have to write them from inside a Linux environment. If you want to be a pain like me and insist on a Windows development platform, then Mono looks like the best bet. Mono isn't perfectly cross platform tolerant (you do have to add code to cope with some things Linux does differently), but it does work in the main if you don't do anything too fancy. Java should be a great idea, but since Sun is no longer welcome in Linux land, it's not any more. Python seems to me to be slowly dying. I don't think the jump to version 3+ went very well. Windows support for the 2.x versions vanished yet most people still seem to prefer to code for 2.7 on Linux. So even though most of the development time has gone in to 3.x, less people use it simply because more people still use 2.7. Oh and Python guys & gals? Having install instructions on the webpage that differ from the readme that came with the download that point to no longer available requirements is a bit of a killer on Windows.

End result? I'm back on SharpDevelop using WinForms. It's not perfect by a long shot, but it's stable, fast, and what it spits out can actually run on Linux and look pretty darn similar to how it did on Windows without a lot of additional messing around.

I also learned you can waste most of a week trying other possible "better" solutions to a problem when the one you started with was actually a pretty good bet.

Just thought I'd share! :-)

There are no words

Curious title.
Just another ramble on a topic I can't hope to fit in to tweets.

It's just that there is no alternative language or voice against the situation the western world finds itself in at the moment.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's been assumed that the good guys won. That's us right? The cold war ended and glorious American style capitalism won out over corrupt terrible communism.

Well that's the history we're told. Having learned more about how the media treats those the establishment don't like over the years, I begin to wonder quite how horrible East Berlin and the old USSR actually were. Probably quite bad. But ... dare I suggest .. just as bad as the "good guys" that won?

We have a growing perceived threat of terrorism. Increasingly domestic. That is people radicalised and ready to carry out atrocious acts without ever needing to travel to some far off easily blamed country. The only language I see in the main media against that is quibbling over just how draconian the surveillance laws need to be to catch these evil people before another bomb goes off.

I have another idea.

Why aren't we asking what makes a terrorist act against our own people seem logical to some? I don't know, maybe it's an illegal Iraq war, the injustice of Guantanamo Bay, blind support for Israel and it's persecution of Palestine, countless innocents killed by ongoing drone strikes ... you know .. stuff like that. Maybe it's us doing that kind of stuff that gives people the beginning of an idea that the only way forward is to blow something up.

Worse. Maybe it's the fact there is no voice in the mainstream saying "Hey! Maybe it's this stuff that's creating terrorism against us?!", that makes it even MORE likely for someone to feel horribly aggrieved against America and it's allies. If there was a political voice arguing against the hypocrisy then it would remove a huge part of the incentive for someone to go and make a bomb. Why would you? Wouldn't you join the party protesting the injustice, that has it's voice heard in mainstream media and shout even louder instead?

Yeah yeah. Go for it. Call me a terrorist sympathiser or something. I'm not in anyway justifying terrorist acts. I'm simply saying American acts ARE terrorist acts, or at least can very easily be interpreted as terrorist acts, and it seems highly likely that being a terrorist to others is going to result in some terrorism being done in return.

What do we do? Remove our own liberties and rights as a reaction. Maintain that we (the western world) are not terrorists, even though we commit acts of murder that we would call terrorism by others.

It's just plain dumb. It's a self perpetuating spiral down. I know "think outside the box" makes people spit in hate. But we are in a very small box.

The 'Science' of Economics

Deep sigh.
This follows on from my "Why Krugman is an Idiot" post horribly well.

You're safe. You don't have to read that one. In it I criticise the start point of Krugman's thought experiment as distorted to fit his conclusions. There you go. That was easy!

Well take a look at this then ...

Got that? A chunk of missing NZ data for whatever reason, that's royally messed up a currently widely respected and followed piece of economic research.

Tell that to the families and friends of the suicides in Greece.

Just one huge deep sigh at how we are being led increasingly by stupidity instead of ability.

My father was an educational researcher. It's a messy hard to explain field. Fundamentally though a lot of it rests on data, analysis and research of whichever area is under the microscope. What he did well, and seems to have rubbed off on me. Is respect for source data.

It's the same from instruments, through good old record decks right up to modern audio systems. The quality of source data is vital. If that's deformed, mangled, distorted in any way at all, then there is no way in hell you are going to make up for it no matter how good the analysis is that follows.

If done properly, the life of the educational researcher is a test of skills in that respect. The source data is often a mix of quantitative and qualitative data. The funding for time spent on gathering it is often as little as humanly possible. Each scrap of data is like a tiny nugget of gold. One inept field researcher can demolish vast swathes of valid input.


Where am I going with this? Just that the art of good research and solid conclusion based on it seems to be slowly fading away from the world. Outside the world of the purely scientific, it seems anything goes as long as it pays. Well actually. Even within the world of the scientific. Look at climate change deniers and who funds their papers.

Just another facepalm night in a world full of fail.