Month: September 2005

I’ve been working on an x86 laptop for work. It came with Windows XP Home and I put Linux on it, trying a number of different flavors but always coming back to Ubuntu.

There are a couple things that have frustrated the heck out of me with respect to ubuntu on this particular laptop —

* the sound server, ‘esd’, has some flakiness with respect to starting and stopping sessions.
* I cannot for the life of me get it to ‘suspend’ so I have to shut it down and start it up every time I change locations with the laptop. (The laptop is very low-end and does not have built in suspend capability in the hardware, and Linux’s software suspend capability is way too bleeding edge.)

So I decided, to heck with it, I’m gonna go with Windows! I can get a very linux-like situation going on there with the help of the Cygwin project, Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, Emacs for windows, python and perl and wxwidgets and everything I need is out there. Why not just use windows and not fight the hardware?

A couple days later, I have my answer:

It totally sucks.

Back to Ubuntu.

UPDATE: to be fair to Bill, most of the suckage seems to have been caused by being nearly out of disk space. It’s much “snappier” when that problem is fixed.

Michael Homan: One of the Millions of Hurricane Katrina Stories

BELLACIAO – %u2019US Troops mutiny in Iraq%u2019 – Share – Collective Bellaciao

US Troops mutiny in Iraq

US Embassy in Baghdad inquires into reports that American troops in Iraq have mutinied against their officers.
WMR has learned that the US embassy in Baghdad is checking into reports that U.S. troops in Iraq, including National Guardsmen, Army and Marine Corps Reserves, and regular military troops from Louisiana and Mississippi, have mutinied against their officers and are demanding to be immediately sent back home to help their families.
It is not known whether the reported mutinies involve physical violence.
The reports of rebellions among U.S. troops are filtering out of the Green Zone and at Baghdad International Airport from Iraqis who are working alongside their American counterparts at both locations

Via MeFi. Caveat lector: ultimate source seems to be The Wayne Madsen Report, which ain’t exactly the New York Times.

OK, there are a lot of reasons one can “blame Bush” for how bad things are in the New Orleans flood. Levee funds were specifically slashed, specifically to free up funds for Iraq and “Homeland Security.” Mike Parker, former head of the Army Corps of Engineers, was forced to retire for questioning the reduction of flood control funding, etc, etc.

But you know, I don’t think anything that amounts to “this proves Bush is a horrible president and the people who voted for him are stupid” is not going to help anyone. It will put Republicans on the defensive (understandably enough) and it will be a battle of spin.

I’d like it if this sort of thing was taken as a reason to concentrate our funds on planning to take care of people in the event of trouble, and taking the long view and preventing future problems, and helping the poorest of America to the point where we don’t have a city full of people living paycheck to paycheck and therefore unable to evacuate. Or modifying the American infrastructure to a point where it provides for people without respect for their economic status — good public transportation on a national scale, which is pressed into service in emergencies for evacuations and the like.

That’s what I’d like to see.

You can hardly blame the government for the rescue situation in New Orleans when people were constantly firing shots at rescue helicopters right? It proves they’re a bunch of ungrateful savages who barely deserve a rescue. If there’s one thing that’s been reported almost as extensively as the hurricane itself it’s the sniper fire on the rescue helicopters. One would imagine this shooting was going on everywhere…

Except…

Lt. Col. Pete Schneider of the Louisiana National Guard said other evacuations were continuing and were not affected by trash fires burning outside the Superdome. Law enforcement officers will ride with the school buses, he said.

“At the Superdome, we have a report that one shot was fired at a Chinook helicopter,” Schneider said, adding that the Chinook is “an extremely large aircraft.”

Laura Brown, a Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman in Washington, said she had no such report.

“We’re controlling every single aircraft in that airspace and none of them reported being fired on,” she said, adding that the FAA was in contact with the military as well as civilian aircraft.

Via Watching the Watchers, which notes that unfounded tales of minority savagery in the lawless wake of a giant natural disaster have happened before in U.S. history and in fact social scientists have noted that the phenomenon of “looting” itself is prone to this kind of mythologization.