Bájame

Just updated the server that hosts this blog; and… - FAIL! Seems that AppArmor is migrating how it refers to /var/run and this caused it to prevent mysqld fromstarting. If you care about the details, check here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apparmor/+bug/810270.

If you just want to get things running again, edit /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld and change

/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid w,
/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock w,

to:

/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid w,
/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock w,

I was shopping on Amazon for 13×19 photo paper. And, I saw this:

For sale: Used Paper

From the point of view of an American who has long viewed Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation as the epitomy of exploitation of the ignorant, the scandal surrounding the UK tabloid News of the World is not surprising. The clear criminality of the NotW's conduct may be different than that which we see from New York Post or Fox News, however the cynical commericalization of misinformation and personal tragedy are quite the same.

The most important insight I have encountered comes from The Telegraph:

David Cameron, who has returned from Afghanistan as a profoundly damaged figure, now faces exactly such a crisis. The series of disgusting revelations concerning his friends and associates from Rupert Murdoch’s News International has permanently and irrevocably damaged his reputation. Until now it has been easy to argue that [conservative party leader] Mr Cameron was properly grounded with a decent set of values. Unfortunately, it is impossible to make that assertion any longer. 

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100095686/david-cameron-is-in-the-sewer-because-of-his-news-international-friends/

This is exactly the situation we see here on our side of the Atlantic. With Republicans fighting to get throught the doors at Fox News to pander without regard for honesty or ethics, the same could be said about almost every leading voice in the GOP.

Though I do not hold out much hope, there is a chance that this News Corp/News International fiasco will provide both commercial interests and political leaders to focus on more sincere and legitimate news and discourse.

I just got a new HP Probook 4320s which has a buttonless Synaptics Clickpad. For whatever reason, the support for this device is totally borked in Natty and many other distros with recent kernel and xorg versions. For me, the fix that enables "dragging" is as follows

06:18 PM justin@justin-4320s:~$ synclient LeftEdge=2000

This sets the very left edge of the touchpad off, so that clicks on that edge do not interfere with dragging. You can see the source of this advice here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/+bug/762768

To make this work every boot, create a simple shell script with this command and then use System Settings/Startup and Shutdown to run the script at every startup.

Though the Ubuntu installer sets up a perfectly fine bash prompt, I felt compelled to prettify mine.

    PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;34m\]\@ \[\033[01;32m\]\u\[\033[01;30m\]@\[\033[01;35m\]\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '

Well, I've finally caught up with 2008! I've started using the much hyped cloud for extra server space and have now migrated this humble blog to Amazon's cloud infrastructure. This is being served by an instance of Amazon's EC2 and stored on EBS.

I'll fill in more details soon.

Michael Larabel, the guy behind the awesome Open Source focused website phoronix.com and the even more awesome Phoronix Test Suite/openbenchmarking.org, wrote a little wishlist for the Linux ecosystem.

- Apple iTunes gets a native Linux client 

I'm not a user of iTunes, so I really don't care. And, I feel that Apple, while doing great work to support development of projects like the webkit rendering engine, which they use their Safari browser, or LLVM, which they use in their OpenGL implementation, tends to hide their open source work in order to protect the "Steve Jobs is God" image which so many non-technical people have.

- Unrestricted right to S3TC granted to open source projects 
- OpenGL patents are invalidated 

I'd extend this one to all patented software. Basically, my position is that software should not be patentable at all.

- Gnome, KDE, Xfce & LXDE to unite into one universal linux desktop called KGXL
- Canonical and Gnome decide to work together
- Official release of the E17 window manager 

I'm a KDE guy. That said, every year or two I try out the latest versions of Gnome, XFCE and LXDE just to see if I'm ready for a change. So far, for five years, I've stuck with KDE for all my permanent systems. However, I have made a LXDE-based recovery installation on a USB key and have used LXDE for hosting VMs since it really does have significatly lower system impact than KDE or Gnome. In this area, I think that diversity is a strength, not a weaness, because it means that there is a UI that is more closely aligned with any particular taste an need than anything the commercial world has to offer.

- Steam migrates to Android (didn't they already announce this?) 
- Microsoft releases all versions of DirectX under BSD license 

I'm not that into games, but I know that Steam has a huge userbase and this would allow a significant number of people to drop the Windows partition that they keep just for gaming.

- Microsoft Visual Studio for Linux  

This is a really BAD idea. There are a million good development tools in the opensource world, from Vim and Emacs to Eclipse. I can see no reason to install MS bloatware on Linux, even if MS were to release it. 

- Microsoft releases Office 2012 under the GPL 

There was a point, somewhere around 5-7 years ago when I really noticed the feature difference between OpenOffice and MS Office. Now, I'm quite satisfied with LibreOffice/OpenOffice and am more concerned with seeing quality open source office capabilities coming to Android.

- A stable release of GNU/Hurd 

Snooze… 

- Linux PowerVR driver with OpenGL 4.1 support 

Absolutely, and the same for every mobile chipset. ARM is the new

- Linus Torvalds accepts the position of Head Windows Developer at Microsoft 

Oh my God, NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Monkey-boy and his henchman manage to cheapen and devalue just about every new and creative thing they touch. If we are going to lose Linus, I'd rather see him eaten by a grue.

- Linux users stop resorting to denial as way to fixing issues 

I'm sure he's right, I just can't quite figure out what exactly Michael means.

- AMD/ATI releasing a FOSS video acceleration API for decoding/encoding H264/MPEG-2/MPEG-4 videos 

Actually, I'm not sure that this, as stated is ideal. While it would be nice for that minority of the population that has AMD GPUs; it would be far better for there to be a consistent video decode and encode API for all drivers to share.

- Adobe Acrobat X Professional for Linux 

One of the things that I absolutely love about the FOSS/*NIX world is the plethora of postscript and PDF tools available. Why anyone would want to curse their system with the gigabytes of bloated and rotting crap that 

- VMware Workstation is released under the GPLv2 

Really, with Xen, KVM, VirtualBox, etc. there seem to be quite a number of virtualization solutions that are already FOSS. While adding the quite good VMWare products to that list would be spiffy, I don't think that the lack of GPL'd VMWare is holding back adoption on the desktop or in the server room.

- Java 7 final and OpenJDK 7 are officially released 

How exactly does this affect the FOSS world in any different way than it does the closed source world? 

- Adobe releases Flash under GPLv3 

That would really be awesome — not because Flash is great now but closed — because Flash is obnoxious, bloated and inefficient which can easily be fixed by developers outside Adobe. Having Flash, Gnash and others compete solely on performance and stability would make the world of web media much better for everyone, FOSS and commercial.

- Nokia drops Windows Phone 7 plans 

Nokia makes rock solid, wonderful hardware. It would be great to see them commit to Maemo and Android, but, clearly that ship has sailed. I'm sorry to see Nokia die off like this, but, there are dozens of handset makers who have proven immune to the Redmond Kool-Aid, so this is not a critical loss.

- Debian GNU/MINIX is announced 
- Linux reaches 5% market share 

Though seeing desktop GNU/Linux improving market share would be excellent, I'm more worried about whether FOSS thrives in the mobile device marketplace. I'm sure that vastly more people will interact with computers in the form of mobile handsets, tablets, car computers, smart appliances like net-enabled TVs and game consoles, etc. than they will in the traditional keyboard/mouse/monitor paradigm of desktops and laptops. FOSS here will mean much greater access to the world's information for those without significant financial resources — most people on Earth.

- Microsoft releases Windows 8 under the GPL  
- Ubuntu Bug #1 is marked as fixed and closed 

How nice to fantasize…

The modern Middle East is perhaps the most conflict dense place on the planet which should make it a game theorist's paradise. After all, conflict in its abstract essence is simply a competition – a game. The question is, what are the rules of this game?
Aside from the pointless line “no rules at all,” Thomas Friedman suggests that the rules are what he terms Hama Rules:

Hama Rules

Image via Wikipedia

 

In February 1982 the secular Syrian government of President Hafez al-Assad faced a mortal threat from Islamic extremists, who sought to topple the Assad regime. How did it respond? President Assad identified the rebellion as emanating from Syria's fourth-largest city – Hama – and he literally leveled it, pounding the fundamentalist neighborhoods with artillery for days. Once the guns fell silent, he plowed up the rubble and bulldozed it flat, into vast parking lots. Amnesty International estimated that 10,000 to 25,000 Syrians, mostly civilians, were killed in the merciless crackdown. Syria has not had a Muslim extremist problem since. …

This was ''Hama Rules'' – the real rules of Middle East politics – and Hama Rules are no rules at all. … I tell this story because it's important that we understand that Syria, Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia have all faced Islamist threats and crushed them without mercy or Miranda rights. (Friedman 2001)

If we wanted to describe Hama Rules as a function, the following would work.

function HamaRules(player_auth, player_threat):
  if player_auth.strength > player_threat.strength:
    player_auth.decimate(player_threat) # strong authority decimates threat
  else:
    player_threat.decimate(player_auth) # strong threat decimates authority
    player_threat.replace(player_auth)  # strong threat replaces authority
  if player_threat.is_decimated:
    player_threat.disperse()     # decimated player disperses and disappears

As you can see, we have two players in this game, an established authority and a insurgent threat. In the case of Hama, the authority was Assad and the Ba'ath regime and the threat was the Muslim Brotherhood. Since Assad's military strength was greater than that of the Brotherhood, he decimated them and they dispersed, effectively no longer being a player in that game. Friedman asserts that Hama Rules are the real rules in Middle East affairs, so we should be able to see this happen frequently. Looking at the conflict between Fatah and Hamas in Gaza, it certainly fits the pattern.

Hamas Rules

The near-perfect public order that reigned in Gaza this week can be attributed, at least in part, to the fear Hamas struck into residents' hearts last week, during the Strip's civil war. Testimony collected from the days of fighting indicates that Hamas imposed a methodical system of terror and scare tactics intended to deter, shock and frighten Fatah operatives and Gaza residents in general.

It began on a Monday 11 days ago, when a Fatah man was tossed off a multi-story building in the Strip; it subsequently came to light that Hamas operatives managed to shoot him in the legs before throwing him to his death. …

Aside from assassinating Fatah officials, Hamas also killed innocent Palestinians, with the intention of deterring the large clans from confronting the organization. Thus it was that 10 days ago, after an hours-long gun battle that ended with Hamas overpowering the Bakr clan from the Shati refugee camp,… the Hamas military wing removed all the family members from their compound and lined them up against a wall. Militants selected a 14-year-old girl, two women aged 19 and 75, and two elderly men, and shot them to death in cold blood to send a message to all the armed clans of Gaza. (Issacharoff 2007)

In this “game” Fatah is the authority and Hamas is the threat. Much to the chagrin of Fatah backers in the Western world, Hamas proved stronger. And, the proceeded to decimate Fatah in Gaza and replace them as the authority.

The example of Hama Rules abound. In Iran, after last year's disputed presidential election, the “Green” movement became a significant threat to the Khamenei – Ahmedinajad regime. As our function predicts, the stronger party, the regime, proceeded to destroy the threat by force. Though not as dramatically brutal as Assad's bombs and bulldozers, mass arrests and show trials damaged enough of the Green movement to eliminate the threat.

Having established that Hama Rules indeed do have a role in the Middle East, it is interesting to see if they are uniquely Middle Eastern.

Machiavellian Rules

Wolin called “the economy of violence.” When the population is restive, as Napoleon put it so eloquently, give them a “whiff of grapeshot” and they’ll calm right down. And of course, in Arab political culture, this approach is not just the norm, it’s taken to pathological extremes… what Thomas Friedman called Hama rules. (Landes 2008) 

Napolean, from Stalin to Mao, from Kim Jong Il to Than Shwe, there are plenty of examples of Hama rules playing out all over the world. Even the United States has seen Hama Rules in effect – Sitting Bull's annihilation of Custer or the Sand Creek Massacre are less than 150 years past. Even Harry Truman knew the Rules. The massive, instantaneous destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were as effective as the destruction of Hama.

The Point

The whole point of such exercises in the “economy of violence” is to let the population know that you are ruthless, that resistance is worse than useless, it is a ticket to oblivion. (Landes 2008)

The Rules Don't Apply

For Hafez Assad, Hosni Mubarak and Ayatollah Khameini the Hama Rules apply. Yet, for Banjamin Netanyahu or George Bush, they don't. So what rules do apply?

Hamas' New Rules

But Hamas is now playing a different game now, one that plays out in the media theater of war where you can’t openly attack your own people. On the contrary, in order to play the victim, you need someone to victimize you. (Landes 2008)

These rules include a third player, the Western public via its agent the news media. We can describe these rules like this:

function MediaRules(player_auth, player_threat, player_public):
  if player_auth.strength > player_threat.strength:
    player_auth.decimate(player_threat) # strong authority decimates threat
  else:
    player_threat.decimate(player_auth) # strong threat decimates authority
    player_threat.replace(player_auth)  # strong threat replaces authority
  if player_threat.is_decimated:
    player_public.punish(player_auth)   # public punishes auth for defeating threat
  if player_auth.is_punished:
    player_auth.strength -= 1     # authority loses strength

While the Hama Rules were nice and clear, the Media Rules are not. We see that regardless of the victor in the conflict, the third party – the public – acts to punish whomever wins.

Media Rules in Fallujah

The town of Fallujah is under siege and there are reports of a massacre of Iraqis at the hands U.S. troops. The death toll in the town has now topped 600 with over 1,000 injured. Local hospitals reported the majority of the dead were women, children and the elderly. (Glantz 2004)

Though George W. Bush managed to defeat John Kerry in 2004, this drumbeat of criticism about the US' conduct in Iraq help to drive his approval rating, and his executive effectiveness, to record lows. Were we playing by Hama Rules in Fallujah, B-52s and M1A1s would have reduced the city to desert dust. And, the insurgency would have ceased to be a problem. We were not, however playing by Hama rules.

Media Rules in Gaza

Israel's operative military policy in the Gaza Strip has been fairly consistent with its stated definition of what it considers to be legitimate military targets, which in practice has amounted to mass killings of innocent Palestinian civilians. Based on the overwhelming evidence available, one conclusion can be drawn regarding the nature of the US-backed Israeli attacks on Gaza: a genuine massacre of ordinary, unarmed people has been taking place for over two weeks. (Kantar 2009)

Hamas shoots rockets from Gaza into southern Israel; Israel invades Gaza to stop the rockets; Israel succeeds in stopping the attacks; and, Israel is punished. From the popular press to the Goldstone Report, Operation Cast Lead showed quite clearly that Hama Rules do not apply to Israel any more than they do to the US.

In the end, Friedman's assertion that Hama Rules are the rules of Middle East politics is flawed. Hama Rules apply to dictatorships and theocracies because dictatorships and theocracies are not dependent on the sentiments of a liberal, dovish press and public. Western democracies, on the other hand, cannot play by Hama Rules because they are defined by liberal, dovish media and electorates.

The Rules for America

[We] must learn to think like an obstetrician, behave like a friend, bargain like a grocer, and fight like a real son-of-a-bitch. (Friedman 1990)

Image via Wikipedia

 

In the post-publication third section of From Beirut to Jerusalem, Friedman gives us some more rules to follow – this time strictly for the US. The first goes like this:

He's got to understand that we can be the greatest obstetricians for peace. We can be the greatest midwife's for peace in the Middle East. … We can help deliver settlement. But only if the parties are ready to get pregnant. What I mean by that is only if Arabs and Israelis are ready to nurture a peace settlement together and make all the sacrifices and compromises necessary for such an agreement. Only if they're ready to do that can we be effective players in the region. If they're not ready to do that then there's nothing we can do. … And that's why I say you've got to think first of all like an obstetrician and ask yourself is this couple really ready to get pregnant. Really ready to nurture an agreement together with all the sacrifices and compromises that it would entail, or are they just telling me that in the waiting room and then going back home and sleeping in separate bedrooms? Think like an obstetrician.

Hmm, this is not so much of a rule of action as an event trigger. To put it into code:

def obstetrician(Israel, PLO):
  # endlessly loop, checking to see if the parties are ready to sleep together 
  while (Israel.ready_to_compromise == False) or (PLO.ready_to_compromise == False):
    self.friend()    # play the friend function
  # we're out of the loop, they are ready
  self.do_peace_process()

Well, that is simple enough in concept though it tends to go against an established political tradition. Ever since Jimmy Carter, American presidents have attempted to woo Jewish voters and engrave their names in history by trying to bring peace to the Middle East. According to the Obstetrician Rule, no matter the political or personal motivation here in the States, nothing happens until the Israelis and Palestinians are ready.

Secondly, you've got to be able to play the role of the friend. What does the friend do. The friend is the one first of all who walks you to school on that first day. Maybe everyday of the year. … You've got to be able to put your arm around them and move them along sometimes but with your arm around them. The friend also always tell you the truth about yourself. The friend never allows you to delude yourself into thinking that this problem will go away if I just close my eyes. (Lamb and Friedman 1989)

def friend():
  if Israel.is_fearful:
    self.reassure(Israel)
  if PLO.is_fearful:
    self.reassure(PLO)
  if Israel.is_deluded:
    self.be_honest_to(Israel)
  if PLO.is_deluded:
    self.be_honest_to(PLO)

The Friend Rule is also pretty simple. The challenge with this rule is again political. It is often easy to woo the Jewish voter base by playing into Israel's illusions of victimhood and helplessness. This is not helpful to the Israelis or the Palestinians, but it might bring a few extra voters to the polls in Miami Beach. The Friend Rule dictates that our leadership refrain from this tactic.

Third, you've got to be able to bargain like a grocer. … [The Middle East] is a merchant culture. And to be an effective statesman you've got to be able to go into the closet roll up your sleeves take out that apron and get into the bazaar and bargain with these people because that's what they expect and everyone will be testing you. … (Lamb and Friedman 1989)

def grocer(Israel, PLO):
  for issue in all_issues:
    while Israel.wants_concession(issue) == True:
      ip = Israel.get_position(issue)   # learn what both sides want
      pp = PLO.get_position(issue)
      propose_compromise((ip-pp)/2)    # suggest middle ground
   while PLO.wants_concession(issue) == True:
     ip = Israel.get_position(issue)
     pp = PLO.get_position(issue)
     propose_compromise((ip-pp)/2)

The Grocer Rule is harder in practice than on paper. There are nuances to each sides' desires that are not necessarily clear to Americans, so negotiating and bargain is imprecise. The core principal here, though is that it is crucial for the US to truly be an honest broker.

Finally, you've got to be a son of a bitch. You have to understand that Middle East diplomacy is a contact sport. … whatever peace settlement you achieve there by your efforts as an obstetrician grocer friend will always be challenged by people. And unless you're as tough an S.O.B. as everybody else in the region, whatever you produce will easily be blown away.(Lamb and Friedman 1989)

def son_of_bitch(party):

  party.demonstrate_consequences()     # show them why the really should compromise

Looking at it all together, we see that Friedman's rules for America have one core commonality. They all require that America's leadership base their Middle East diplomacy solely on the realities of the Middle East. While this seems obvious, it means that our elected leaders must take the risk of ignoring electoral constituencies to reap the rewards of a lasting Israeli-Palestinian accord.

Final Thoughts

One of my favorite works of fiction is Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. One of the core elements of these books is the science of Psychohistory:

Psychohistory
Definition: That branch of mathematics that deals with the overall reactions of large groups of human beings to given stimuli under given conditions In other words, it is supposed to predict social and historical changes. Hari Seldon modeled his science of psychohistory on the kinetic theory of gases.  Each atom or molecule in a gas moves randomly so that the position or velocity of any one of them cannot be known.  Nevertheless, using statistics, the rules governing their overall behaviour can be worked out with great precision.  In the same way, Seldon intended to work out the overall behaviour of human societies even though the solutions would not apply to the behaviour of individual human beings.

To me, this is the most marvelous concept – a rigorous, provable definition of sociology that functions in the same way as the Standard Model does in physics. Of course, in Asimov's fiction, this was developed many millenia in the future, long after the little problem of faster-than-light travel had been resolved.

For those of us in the real world, there is no such rigorous framework underlying the social sciences. This drives me slightly crazy, but also motivates me to try and discover whatever tidbits of social calculus I can find. When learning about Middle East history, US history, the nature of Thia politics and government, the oddities of religion or anything else, I try to find some sort of conceptual mechanisms common to all human activity. To me, this ends up changing value judgments from those of “morality” to those of effectiveness.

References

Friedman, Thomas. 1990. From Beirut to Jerusalem. 1990th ed. Anchor Books, August.

———. 2001. Foreign Affairs – Hama Rules – Op-Ed. The New York Times. September 21. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/21/opinion/foreign-affairs-hama-rules.html.

Glantz, Aaron. 2004. Massacre in Fallujah: Over 600 Dead, 1,000 Injured, 60,000 Refugees. Democracy Now. April 12. http://www.democracynow.org/2004/4/12/massacre_in_fallujah_over_600_dead.

Issacharoff, Avi. 2007. Shock, awe and dread. Haaretz. June 22. http://www.haaretz.com/magazine/week-s-end/shock-awe-and-dread-1.223750.

Kantar, Max. 2009. The Massacre in Gaza: Check the Facts. Palestine Chronicle. January 14. http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=14675.

Lamb, Brian, and Thomas Friedman. 1989. Booknotes – From Beirut to Jerusalem. Booknotes. September 10. http://www.booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1435.

Landes, Richard. 2008. Get me a Massacre: Up next — the Kfar Qana of Operation Cast Lead. Augean Stables. December 31. http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2008/12/31/get-me-a-massacre-up-next-the-kfar-qana-of-operation-molten-lead/.