The mighty roar little things make upon crashing

Against an even darker background

I remember getting caught amidst the brilliant pages of the Player of Games in a bookstore, standing there not really minding myself, but still trying to be out of the way, and after a bit of fiddling with the thought I bought the book. It was probably 6-7 years ago. (Sure, others tell the tales of their first encounters with Banks’ books as he started publishing, decades ago. But then go and find their blags.) And the inventiveness of it, combined with the graspability of the storytelling, the sort of complexity of a task presented with the absolute ease only a true artisan is capable of.

Then years go by, I get my hands on the other books. The Use of Weapons turns my perspectives inside out, the Look to Windward folds them back, the Algebraist, a fairly recent addition to my experiences, though not part of the majestic Culture series, or more probably because this added degree of freedom, feels even closer and gives even more to the fortunate reader. Then Excession and Inversion. The former is the joyful splashing of the semi-intellectual waves of science-fiction as playful childs trying to outsmart each other so the other ends up more sploshed, except the story is about Minds, super-intelligent hyperspaceships. Then Inversions, a bit like the book Matter, much more surface-bound, but not at all without the operaness.

Matter, the genius of the whole setting, the sophistication of the interaction of the different layers. Whereas in the Use of Weapons time was interleaved, here space is. And Surface Detail and now The Hydrogen Sonata, more linear, more traditional space opera. Not a bit less interesting or immersive.

I’m not a fast reader, and lately I’m getting more scattered in my mind and reading activities, and have suffered from a no-reruns syndrome. (I have re-read almost no book. Yet. And I don’t like rewatching old movies.) So there are details that have escaped me the first time I read these books, so that’s a little consolation, knowing that little gems are still there, laying dormant, waiting to be ingested. But the fact that that it’s very improbable that there will be more is, defeating, like a full stop.

Oh, and. There’s one other thing.

There is an other Banks, without the M, the less-scientious, more gritty. Author of The Wasp Factory and so and so, highly acclaimed. And there’s a book I think best combines the two, a most remarkable lesson in contemporary reality - if viewed from the right angle, told via a very nicheous fiction, set in a solar system drifting in intergalactical space, far out in the black. So, Against a Dark Background a constant chaotic struggle of a society expanded to a dozen or so habitats orbiting their sun, to get a grip on itself resulted in a fragmented, oft violent and fragile stagnation of nations, ciy states and various influence groups. Smaller armed conflicts here and there, but without any chance of a solid resolution in sight, rich with injustice, small tyrants and zealous short-sighters, or whatever label you’d want to tack on the ethically-challenged. Sometimes ignorants, but that is not an excuse and neither a cause of their harmfulness.

We love twisting ourselves out of responsibility, we know the so common phenomenon of a discussion breaking down, or up into sub-problems and regressing to ideological differences, but we give up, instead of slapping the fuck out of our esteemed peers. There are hard problems, either lacking data to make an educated decision, or known obstacles on the path toward change and resolution. (Think the many incomplete schools of economics, think the recently surged North Korea conondrum.) But the more pressing concern is right at home, or next door. Fundamentalist fathers, merciless mothers, narrow-minded neighbours.) In a perfect (or ideal, or just, or caring) world any of ethical ideologies on the current table would work. But we don’t live in one. We have to find best approximations in limited timeframes against a backdrop of easily corruptible (hence corrupt) entities acting by a frustratingly stupid playbook. And it’s tiring, tiresome, it’s burdenous. It’s a hard thing to face the fallibility of others, it’s a lonesome responsibility to go even further and point out their errs and blind alleys of their logic, it’s even harder to see some limits of others (maybe with a hint of hope that they are soft boundaries, constantly improving), but then experiencing a sort of a no-go in myself is different. It doesn’t offer resolve, it doesn’t help understanding other - quite the opposite actually, after all the hardship of trying to malleate myself to be more effective, to be more ideal, more functioning, more accepting of these constraints of society were not exactly fruitful. And it could be frightening to some, that someone wants to liberate themselves even more to accept the fallacies of others, but currently I can’t even as give myself a good fuck with my oh so high and mighty open mind and full spectrum perspective.

I see the multidimensional constraints of our current problems, yaay, high IQ and all. But I lack the cognizance of what could/should be done, lack the motivation and energy to try to explore the solution space, and most saddeningly I even lack the resources (or prospective future of having enough) to organize a serious programme for change, or to contribute to similar efforts of others.

Yet, I’m still here. Enjoying life as best as I can, laughing vividly at the inside jokes of The Hydrogen Sonata, and hoping; no, seriously unfairly and selfishly demanding more from Banks. Even though he has already and still provides with so much sustenance for us.

Through struggle we find

Even some of the most successful persons can be at risk. How? Why? I never would have guessed. He has a brutally popular blog, a blossoming business and family, all the time in the world, a US citizenship, what else one could ask for nowadays?

And every loss just increases the rational mind’s frustration in a few dimensions, and some are fortunate enough to gain motivation and strength trough this. I’m stubborn enough not to be a quitter, nor have been moved by others’.

So, I found just yet another data point. And sadly, that’s it. I sit on my relative mental peak and feel powerless. After all, mountains just sit and wait.

Scala (and Eclipse)

So Scala 2.10 is out since Jan 4, just as the M3 milestone release of the Scala IDE. So far so good.

I had a working Eclipse 4.3M4 (Kepler) with Scala 2.10-nightly (a build from December) and the wonderful Scala Worksheet plugin, and now after I excidedly waited for the completion of the upgrade, it broke.

Okay, let’s see the workspace logfile.

!ENTRY org.eclipse.e4.ui.workbench 4 0 2013-01-15 04:15:29.818
!MESSAGE Unable to create class 'org.eclipse.ui.internal.e4.compatibility.CompatibilityEditor' from bundle '217'
!STACK 0
org.eclipse.e4.core.di.InjectionException: java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.eclipse.jdt.internal.ui.text.java.JavaStringAutoIndentStrategy.<init>(Ljava/lang/String;)V

and

!MESSAGE Problems occurred when invoking code from plug-in: "org.eclipse.jface".
!STACK 0
java.lang.NullPointerException

And lines and lines of the usual Java stacktrace.

I downloade 4.3M4 again (just because), and installed the scala-ide nightly, now without anything else (no Android Development Tools, no Scala Worksheet, no C/C++ dev tools). Same error.

Let’s try with the latest Oracle Java (7u11), okay, how to specify which JVM Eclipse will use? Okay, then let’s see the latest from the Java 6 major release series. (6u38) Same.

Let’s report this as a bug for Scala IDE. Bah. Done.

Okay, then, I still don’t have a Scala IDE. Let’s try with 4.2 SR1! (4.2 SR1 started with a SIGSEGV - a segmentation fault. Good, it works with Scala IDE 2.1 M3. (And to cover all bases, I checked the M3 milestone on 4.3m4, it does the same as the 2.10 nightly.)

tumblrbot asked: WHERE WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO VISIT ON YOUR PLANET?

Oh. So, it turns out I disabled replies and questions. (Or, rather, never enabled them.)

And now this lands in my inbox. Tumblrbot. Great. Instead of fixing discussions by allowing me to filter the filthy noise of “xy liked this”. Maybe there’s a userscript for that! (Why there isn’t a Tumblr Enhancement Suite?)

Bugs

https://trello.com/board/bugs-i-care-about/50e730465a3e303b5c0003b9 — a list I made to track these - and other - bugs :)

* synaptiks (a touchpad manager for KDE, written in Python, uses PyQt) crashing on resume, plus when it gets manually restarted it doesn’t enumerate current pointing devices (so if you have the “disable the touchpad when a mouse is plugged in” setting enabled, you gonna have a bad time)

* KDE’s display manager (both KDM and the Display/Display Settings “applet”) gets confused if I unplug a display (HDMI or DSub/VGA output makes no difference) while the notebook was in sleep/hibernation, and it requires an “xrandr —auto” from terminal (or konsole if you’re a purist!)

* The hot corners (Workspace Behavior/Screen Edges, where you can set mouse hotspots for the Exposé task/window switcher) in the KDE Plasma desktop manager can’t handle multi-screen mode properly, especially if one monitor’s resolution is bigger than the other’s (so the X server internally uses a desktop resolution big enough to contain both; then maps whatever is configured to the correct displays, the mouse can’t escape the actual visible regions, but the “corner” and “screen edge” detection does not take this mechanism into account)

Hm, other than this, KDE is rather robust. It’s a bit frustrating, that Dolphin can’t (or at least I haven’t found how, and by default it doesn’t) import bookmarks (sftp and other network drives and what not) from Gnome’s Nautilus.

Oh, That freedom? What about You!?

So, there is Tor, a surprisingly enduring implementation of the concept that there must be a way to get on the net completely anonymously. It hides your original network address, so you can claim to be from Africa, or the US, or China, or whatever exit node your traffic happens to go through. It’s nice for whistle-blowers, political dissenters, security-curious people, transparency organizations, testing webpages, circumventing censorship, hiding information (ooh, spooks) - as there are tor-only websites. Yes, and it’s completely sufficient to do all sorts of fucked up things, hack & crack, spam & scam and exchange “CP”. Kiddie porn.

So, what’s CP? Well, that depends on your legal environment, but in this case it’s digital material. Media content. Files. Pictures and video.

Is it wrong?

• legally: oh yes, it burns through defendants like depleted uranium AP bullets
• economically: it participates in the “child sexual abuse ecosystem”, so, without a question it’s at least an enabler; it’s the - hypothesized - basic currency of “collectors”
• biologically: some argue that pedophilia is a mental illness, the sexual drive and craving gets stronger upon feeding it
• socially: it causes a lot of legal problems, it’s used as the ultimate red herring, the internet boogieman. it hinders policy-making.

Okay, so what’s the problem? Just make sure that we destroy all of it, right? Orbital bombardment, to be sure, of course.

How do we find “it”? D’oh, just use Google! Or .. wait. Hm. Well. Fuck knows, actually. It’s illegal. It’s actually so illegal, that creating it by photoshopping someone to be younger, or even drawing something that looks like CP can get you convicted. Putting a kid’s head from Facebook into something that can be interpreted as sexual, can land you in jail. So, there are no sites that display as the evil you can stare down. It’s so bad, that search engines, forum software and rather significant parts of the Web will just ignore your inquiry when it comes to CP. Or get you on some lists. And forum black lists would be the least of your problems then.

Hm. But, what about mothers sharing countless photos of their kids on the ‘net? What about sexually active minors and the nowadays so ubiquitous media recorders? What about inheriting a computer? Or buying a few CDs at a garage sale? What about downloading massive ZIP files, promising to contain legal amateur oh-so-hot lesbian porn from P2P networks? What about Hänsel and Gretel? What about classicist paintings full of nude baby cupids? Oh, okay, there are differences and whatnot. Frighteningly there are people whose job is to … sort this stuff.*

So. Sting operations, and heavy law enforcement involvement altogether. Interpol, separate units (for example the UK Paedophile Unit), the adult industry spends a lot of resources (time, money, manhours) to screen actors/performers, supports organizations that handle reports and forward it to the relevant governmental offices. (And rather proactively contact stakeholders and try to persuade them to cut the questionable content off. Data center operators, hosting services, ISPs, and companies supporting or endorsing the suspect.) Therefore a lot of CP gets shredded each week, justice prevails. People can feel that it’s getting solved.

Well, the problem is, that as long as there is demand for it, there will be supply. This is rather uncontested. And along the way .. things like Tor, civil liberties (mainly privacy and free speech) gets written off as collateral. Absolute freedom is just too philosophical, children are getting harmed each day while we sleep, think of them! We must compromise. We .. we .. must do .. whatever it takes.

Oh, and then we do. But it just isn’t working.

So, see the clashing of arguments, the rage, the frustration, the futility, the ignorance and reasoning on: Hacker News, Reddit, NANOG (Nort American Network Operators Group, archives of November and December)

Know, what’s at stake.

No. Well, yes. Freedom from child abusers on the Internet, and freedom from oppressive surveillance, total censorship and information control.

What?

Making the Internet a conservative school principals dry-dream won’t prevent real life principals from inappropriately patting pupils. Yes, it’s a fact, prohibition doesn’t work with humans, only the stupidest of us gets caught. And censorship gets abused about 99% of the times. Just as with any authority. (See - for example - the Australian blacklist which included quite a few innocent bystanders. There are similar problems with CCTV feeds too, and other surveillance systems without lack of real oversight. One of the problems is selective enforcement either due to inherently biased- or due to simply malevolent human actors.)

Confrontation of interests, ideas and public display of serious worries: Google’s campaign. ITU’s blog. We’ve seen ACTA/SOPA/PIPA, all in the name of lesser goods (or evils, because, technically the RIAA/MPAA/WIPO is never really for intellectual property, it’s just against copyright infringement and “IP theft”; they don’t support, they just sue and claim).

While the real problems are left untouched.

The traged of Orphanages (a TED(x?) talk), ChildHelp statistics. And more numbers.

http://www.cpiu.us/statistics-2/ — “96% of female rape victims in 1991, younger than 12 years old, knew their attackers. 20% were victimized by their fathers or step-fathers.” (US Department of Justice)

http://www.nspcc.org.uk/Inform/resourcesforprofessionals/sexualabuse/statistics_wda87833.html — “Nearly a quarter of young adults (24.1%) experienced sexual abuse (including contact and non-contact), by an adult or by a peer during childhood.“

What the fuck!? Why? How? Shouldn’t we do something against that first? And ruin very likely innocent people’s lives?

* - interestingly, there was a great Reddit “IAmA”, where a canadian (or brit) forensics expert answered a lot of questions about his work, which was to organize a suspect’s files, categorize evidence and give testimony. It was really raw, moving, brutal, into the face, straight down your soul description of what is the worst. Alas, I can’t find it. It’s just poof, gone. Either my memory is playing tricks with me, or it has vanished from search indexes.

GNOME3, again.

So, there’s a long thread on LWN about a rant about the rants about Gnome3. (Yes, that meta.)

But there are a few comments that list particular grievances, such as this.

And I’m sure a few days ago I bumped into some other annoyance, alas I can’t recall it, so maybe next time.

Hm, maybe it was PPTP VPN configuration? Which looks great, but it tells nothing about any error, so log-digging it is. (Luckily it is not that bad, so behaves and logs to syslog.)

And it seems, there will be a “classic” mode for GNOME 3 in the future.

GNOME3: Pidgin et al.

So, if you started using Unity, it will set up Telepathy Mission-Control-5, and it uses ~/.mission-control to store accounts information. Which is nice, it uses the gnome session bus (a D-Bus messaging goody/bane), but .. it won’t shut up. Even if you remove telepathy-haze, telepathy-gabble, telepathy-indicator, and whatever. It will still poison your peace with completely nonsense “Connection to (some account) failed”.

Other than this, and that a lot of crucial extensions are still not updated to Gnome 3.6, gnome-shell is quite nice, and resilient (even if it dies due to some exception in an extension code, it will be just restarted).

Alt-Tab. So, without AlternateTab or WindowsAltTab it takes at least plus one magic hand-waving (or a lot of patience) to switch to an other terminal window. (Because by default gnome3 kindly groups them together, and on pressing alt-tab it will just show the groups, and if you select a group you have to still hold down Alt, and wait until it “folds down” the windows belonging to that group. Oh, or you can use Alt-0 (Alt-~ or maybe Alt-` on US keymaps — oh, and keymaps. It’s bugs all the way down. Hopefully adding this PPA and apt-get updgrading fixes the keyboard layout indicator problem.)

Oh, and the most awful abomination of this absurd adventure through gnome-land is … *suspense* … the system tray and message indicator! Of those two the first auto hides, but to lure it back one has to tap the “windows” key or go into overview mode with the mouse (by default the top-left is the hot corner which triggers that mode) … and the message indicator pops up smack dab in the middle of anything I do in a terminal which touches the bottom of the screen. (Because terminals usually host a command shell - over an ssh session - their most important line is the last one, where you type your precious little abracadabra to cause strange weather on the internets!)

Tech Journalism is Broken

stupidiswinning:

Today TechCrunch writes about a leaked document that may be AT&T’s action plan for combatting piracy.   Or rather they reworded that article from TorrentFreak which is standard operating procedure for most AOL properties, also known as The AOL Way.

On this same day Wired reveals a stunning celebrity opinion on SSD drives, that they’re both faster and quieter, and that developers prefer them for those reasons in the sensationally titled Linus Torvalds Compares Hard Disks to Satan. 

Business Insider informs us that Amazon and Apple don’t need any help beating Google.  Actually Reuters informs us, BI republished their article the other day and are now presenting their rewording, a masterpiece of SEO:  3 visible links to articles on their site, and 5 carefully hidden links to inflate their search engine rankings for company names.

Mashable presents us with an infographic on the evolution of Windows finding four weak excuses to link to their SEO spam pages before presenting what must be the billionth infographic designed to convert some sensationally-skewed dataset into backlinks.

It must be quite embarrassing to have grown up dreaming to become a journalist and a bitter victory if you ended up in tech.  What will inspire another generation to share that dream?

Oh, finally, something worth reblogging. (Oh, wait!)