Friday, 3 December 2004

howlage

so I was watching tv and this wee northern irish boy is spelling for the entertainment of the adult audience which in itself is a bit problematic I think but anyway the announcer says spell "haulage" though she pronounced it something like "howlage" or "horloge" and the wee guy thinks this was meant to be english spelling but that's a french word but anyway i'll have a go and he spells "horlidge" which is actually closer to what she said, but they say no, thats meant to be h-a-u-l-a-g-e, you're wrong...

so I thought that was bad enough

but tonight the kids are watching the same thing which appears to be some kind of championship - and this announcer says "wapow" and the wee person has no idea what she's said and runs out of time and it's "rapport" which after all is actually a french word...

and he's "eliminated"

what is this? "entertainment"?

Thursday, 25 November 2004

a president in jail?

so... will palestine elect a president in jail ?

http://www.channel4.com/news/news_story.jsp?storyId=1199591

Barghouthi to run for Palestinian presidency
Barghouthi to run for Palestinian presidency

News Headlines: World




Published: 25-Nov-2004; 15:15
By: ITN




Jailed Palestinian Marwan Barghouthi has said he will run in the Palestinian presidential election on January 9.

Barghouthi, 45, was jailed for life for his role in leading a revolt for an independent Palestinian state after peace negotiations collapsed four years ago.

He was sentenced by an Israeli court last June to four life terms on murder charges stemming from the deaths of five Israelis in attacks by militants. Barghouthi denied the charges.

His candidacy will be a dramatic challenge to front-runner and ex-prime minister Mahmoud Abbas who was nominated on Monday by the Fatah faction's decision-making Central Committee.

Mr Abbas, 69, took over the Palestine Liberation Organisation after Yasser Arafat's death on November 11. He has has called for an end to the uprising, but he lacks a strong popular power base.

Last week Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom was asked if his country would consider releasing Barghouthi should he run for president.

Mr Shalom said: "Barghouthi was sentenced to life and he should stay there while he's responsible for the killing, the murdering of so many Israelis."


blr n msg - a bt f a stnt... but misses demographic, oops

so that's how it works...

Downing Street said it was the first time Mr Blair had tried technology of this type and that he saw it as a way of communicating with 18 to 24-year-olds

O2 later said the average age of people sending in questions to the prime minister was 25.

on yersel tone...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4042963.stm

Friday, 19 November 2004

Just one regiment... the Black Watch would have done...

Vietnam flashback: "All we needed was one regiment. The Black Watch would have done"

And so they probably would... The BBC's Paul Reynolds BBC News 28.10.04 - How would Kerry view Britain? states that the Black Watch are doing more than just military services in Iraq, they are also diplomats... but he reminds us of our Labour prime minister's refusal to endorse American military and political folly... that's the longest serving (so far) Labour PM...

It is interesting to note that the Black Watch, which has been redeployed to help strength US positions in central Iraq, has played a role in this relationship before.

Vietnam tensions
During the Vietnam War in the late sixties, it looked as if the relationship was special no more. The days of the Kennedy-Macmillan era were over and those of Reagan-Thatcher were yet to come.

President Johnson dismissed an economically depressed Britain as being of no importance, though he wanted a token British military contingent in South Vietnam.

The British Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson refused and skilfully kept Britain out of the war while giving the Americans diplomatic support.

The tensions were evident. In 1968, The US Secretary of State Dean Rusk told a British correspondent: "All we needed was one regiment. The Black Watch would have done. Just one regiment, but you wouldn't. Well, don't expect us to save you again. They can invade Sussex, and we wouldn't do a damned thing about it."

cheers Mike for spotting that :-)

Boss of world's biggest company says:

...you shouldn't take a position on open source vs commercial any more than you would between "economic models" ie socialism and capitalism...

from Microsoft-watch
What, exactly, did Microsoft's CEO say about Linux and patents? Here's the transcript.
Thursday, November 18, 2004
Ballmer: On the Linux Hot Seat (Again)

By Mary Jo Foley

...
("Ballmer: On the Linux Hot Seat (Again)" Page 2)
Number two, on licensing costs I would say two things. First of all, I don't know that it's clear to anybody what the licensing costs are for open source. Today, people say, well, isn't it just free, but we don't know in the long run. Open source software does not today respect the intellectual property rights of any intellectual property holder. There was a report out this summer by an open source group that highlighted that Linux violates over 228 patents. Some day, for all countries that are entering WTO (World Trade Organization), somebody will come and look for money to pay for the patent rights for that intellectual property. So the licensing costs are less clear than people think today.

Second, for any piece of software, the overall cost of having it, the acquisition costs of the license is generally a very small percentage. You have to buy the software, you've got to install it, you've got to deploy it, you've got to develop for it, you've got to manage it, you've got to create and buy applications from it, and all of those costs are probably about 90 percent of the total cost, the acquisition price is probably about 10 percent of the overall cost. And on an overall cost basis, I think our products that compete with open source offer a lower total cost of ownership and I think the same is true of other commercial products versus their open source equivalents. Oracle has an open source equivalent competitor. Adobe has open source competitors. And I think that if you think of the total cost, it's often much cheaper to go ahead and pay the license cost because of all of the additional benefits in total cost of ownership that come with that.

So I think people get carried away on the issue that says, oh, it's free, free is wonderful. Certainly we have to offer you a good value. If we try to push our prices too high or we're not delivering enough innovation, our value equation won't look good.

But I think the government policy we'd recommend is to be neutral and if, I don't know, Linux works best sometimes you should use it, if Windows or Office works best sometimes you should use it. Our sales people will be happy to tell you why we think most of the time Windows is a better solution but I think you ought to let there be — you shouldn't take — taking a position open source versus commercial software is almost like taking a position on which economic model for society is better. I don't think you want to do that. I don't think this issue is worth it. I think what you really want to do is run your government efficiently and effectively, you ought to be neutral and then take a look at the products from all communities on their merits.
...

What "out the door" really means ;-)

I hope I'm not just posting geek stuff now :-) but I came across this little something regarding exhortation and working practices by Joel on Software...

from Microsoft-watch again
Novell vs. Microsoft: Here We Go Again:
Friday, November 12, 2004
Novell vs. Microsoft: Here We Go Again
By Mary Jo Foley
"Former Softie Joel Spolsky (of 'Joel on Software') fame � who is more of a Microsoft critic than cheerleader � also attributed Microsoft's success in the desktop suite market to Novell's marketing and development problems at least as much as Microsoft's strong-arm tactics.

'WordPerfect was written in the low level Assembler programming language, which meant it took ten times as much work to implement a simple feature than it took in Microsoft Word, which was written in the then state-of-the-art C programming language,' recalled Spolsky, a former member of the Excel team at Microsoft.

' It didn't help that the culture at WordPerfect was very relaxed and genial: Utah family men who were out the door every day at 5:00 sharp. They had no hope of keeping up with the hoards of aggressive twenty-somethings at Microsoft burning the midnight oil and using the latest tools. Microsoft Word was better and was available sooner, so it's not fair to attribute all of WordPerfect's problems to Microsoft's anti-competitive practices.'"

"Malky hates it when I'm in exhort mode ... "

13 entries found for exhortation. unlucky for some

Thursday, 18 November 2004

Black Watch

So... what did General Wade ever do for us? :-) Well, together with the building of his roads, the General designed this locally recruited force to pay impoverished highlanders to keep their impoverished and unruly compatriots in line on behalf of the British state... their experience has been put to work on behalf of British imperial and post-colonial adventures ever since - though it's interesting to note that these King's shilling men were specifically not deployed back to the Highlands during the '45... perhaps the butcher Cumberland felt that it would have been too risky to expect them to massacre their own people...

Black Watch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia has this and more about the Royal Highland Regiment...

The first independent companies of the Black Watch were raised as a militia in 1725 by George Wade to occupy and keep peace in the Scottish Highlands after the 1715 Jacobite Rising. In these early days, members were recruited from local clans, the first six companies were three of Campbells and one each of Frasers, Grants and Munros.

The Regiment of the Line was formed officially in 1739 as the 42nd Highland Regiment of Foot under John, the Earl of Crawford, and first mustered in 1740, at Aberfeldy. The regiment's earliest days were inauspicious; ordered to London in 1743 for an inspection by King George II, rumors flew that they were to be shipped to the West Indies to fight in the War of Austrian Succession, and many left for Scotland. They were recaptured, three of the leaders shot in the Tower of London, and the remainder of the regiment shipped to Flanders. The regiment's first full combat was the Battle of Fontenoy in Flanders in 1745, where they surprised the French with their ferocity, and greatly impressed their commander, the Duke of Cumberland.

When the 1745 Jacobite Rising broke out, the regiment returned to the south of Britain in anticipation of a possible French invasion. From 1747 to 1756 they were stationed in Ireland and then were sent to New York.

... etc

Also here's The Black Watch lyrics to a not-so-well-known Irish rebel song... but some evidence of what the natives of a more recent campaign think of our boys...


The Edward Said Archive

The Edward Said Archive :: ????? ?????? ???? - News

I found links to the articles in the previous posts online here. Well worth checking out.

btw if you see ????s above here I think it's because that's how the Arabic script in the url was rendered... :-) clearly occidentalised (dumbed down?) by mystificatory powers!!!

Dead palestinians

After Arafat is a big theme with all the commentators - and the received or as Edward Said might put it "orientalised" wisdom is that Arafat was an obstacle to solving to Palestinian problem. Edward Said was himself a critic of Arafat. Reading some essays in the collection "The End of the Peace Process" 2nd edition published 2002 I was interested in the 2 essays whose publication dates straddled the 11 September 2001... the attack on the World Trade Centre and certainly a turnig point in history if there ever was one...

Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | Occupation is the atrocity
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 16 - 22 August 2001 Issue No.547

Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | Collective passion
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 20 - 26 September 2001 Issue No.552

My own and only yet visit to Palestine was in late August 2001 a couple of weeks before 9/11. The passage below from the "Occupation is the atrocity" article published a week before I went reflects exactly what the situation in Palestine was on that visit:

... But consider what Israel's unrelenting war against the undefended, basically unarmed, stateless and poorly led Palestinian people has already achieved. The disparity in power is so vast that it makes you cry. Equipped with the latest in American-built (and freely given) air power, helicopter gunships, uncountable tanks and missiles, and a superb navy as well as a state of the art intelligence service, Israel is a nuclear power abusing a people without any armour or artillery, no air force (its one pathetic airfield in Gaza is controlled by Israel) or navy or army, none of the institutions of a modern state. The appallingly unbroken history of Israel's 34-year-old military occupation (the second longest in modern history) of illegally conquered Palestinian land has been obliterated from public memory nearly everywhere, as has been the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and the expulsion of 68 per cent of its native people, of whom 4.5 million remain refugees today. Behind the reams of newspeak, the stark outlines of Israel's decades-long daily pressure on a people whose main sin is that they happened to be there, in Israel's way, is staggeringly perceptible in its inhuman sadism. The fantastically cruel confinement of 1.3 million people jammed like so many human sardines into the Gaza strip, plus the nearly two million Palestinian residents of the West Bank, has no parallel in the annals of apartheid or colonialism. F-16 jets were never used to bomb South African homelands. They are used against Palestinians towns and villages. All entrances and exits to the territories are controlled by Israel (Gaza is completely surrounded by a barbed wire fence), which also controls the entire water supply. Divided into about 63 non-contiguous cantons, completely encircled and besieged by Israeli troops, punctuated by 140 settlements (many of them built under Ehud Barak's premiership) with their own road network banned to "non-Jews," as Arabs are referred to, along with such unflattering epithets as thieves, snakes, cockroaches and grasshoppers, Palestinians under occupation have now been reduced to 60 per cent unemployment and a poverty rate of 50 per cent (half the people of Gaza and the West Bank live on less than $2 a day); they cannot travel from one place to the next; they must endure long lines at Israeli checkpoints that detain and humiliate the elderly, the sick, the student, and the cleric for hours on end; 150,000 of their olive and citrus trees have been punitively uprooted; 2,000 of their houses demolished; acres of their land either destroyed or expropriated for military settlement purposes.

Since the Al-Aqsa Intifada began late last September, 609 Palestinians have been killed (four times more than Israeli fatalities) and 15,000 wounded (a dozen times more than on the other side). Regular Israeli army assassinations have picked off alleged terrorists at will, most of the time killing innocents like so many flies. Last week, 14 Palestinians were murdered openly by Israeli forces using helicopter gunships and missiles; they were thus "prevented" from killing Israelis, although at least two children and five innocents were also murdered, to say nothing of many wounded civilians and several destroyed buildings -- part of the somehow acceptable collateral damage. Nameless and faceless, Israel's daily Palestinian victims barely rate a mention on America's news programmes, even though -- for reasons that I simply cannot understand -- Arafat is still hoping that the Americans will rescue him and his crumbling regime.

...
The situation in Palestine - as pretty much everywhere else, starting with Afghanistan - got a whole lot worse after Septmeber 11, a grim September indeed. Said's next article deals with the political situation mostly as you'd expect from a liberal humanities professor in a New York University, that is to say very rationally. Here is his description of how Israel responded:

Rational understanding of the situation is what is needed now, not more drum-beating. George Bush and his team clearly want the latter, not the former. Yet to most people in the Islamic and Arab worlds, the official US is synonymous with arrogant power, known mainly for its sanctimoniously munificent support not only of Israel but of numerous repressive Arab regimes, and its inattentiveness even to the possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who have real grievances. Anti-Americanism in this context is not based on a hatred of modernity or technology-envy as accredited pundits like Thomas Friedman keep repeating; it is based on a narrative of concrete interventions, specific depredations and, in the cases of the Iraqi people's suffering under US-imposed sanctions and US support for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, cruel and inhumane policies administered with a stony coldness.

Israel is now cynically exploiting the American catastrophe by intensifying its military occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. Since 11 September, Israeli military forces have invaded Jenin and Jericho and have repeatedly bombed Gaza, Ramallah, Beit Sahour and Beit Jala, exacting great civilian casualties and enormous material damage. All of this, of course, is done brazenly with US weaponry and the usual lying cant about fighting terrorism. Israel's supporters in the US have resorted to hysterical cries like "we are all Israelis now," making the connection between the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings and Palestinian attacks on Israel an absolute conjunction of "world terrorism," in which Ben Laden and Arafat are interchangeable entities. What might have been a moment for Americans to reflect on the probable causes of what took place, which many Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs have condemned, has been turned into a huge propaganda triumph for Sharon; Palestinians are simply not equipped to defend themselves against both Israeli occupation in its ugliest and most violent forms and the vicious defamation of their national struggle for liberation.


The last statement is the fact which I observed. The way it's written seems to imply (perhaps the basis for any optimism which Said might hold on to) that Palestinians may be equipped to do one or other form of defence, but not both (and that perhaps the latter was the more viable route?). My own reading of it in consonance with what I saw myself would be that they could do neither, which is a deliberate objective of Israeli policy of course and also the effect of American, British, Arab and all other foreign policies - but that they need to (continue to) do both.

I observe also that it is one thing to be a professor in New York and another to be a "terrorist"/"freedom fighter"/"obstacle" trapped in the rubble of Ramallah.


Collective passion

Al-Ahram Weekly Opinion Collective passion
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 20 - 26 September 2001 Issue No.552

Occupation is the atrocity

Al-Ahram Weekly Opinion Occupation is the atrocity
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 16 - 22 August 2001 Issue No.547

Tuesday, 16 November 2004

'Israeli' jazz star praises Yasir Arafat

An interesting Aljazeera interview - I particularly like the quote about the smell of falafel... a good reason to think ich bin ein palestinian... or philistine, to coin a more biblical way of speaking...

Aljazeera.Net - 'Israeli' jazz star praises Yasir Arafat

"Let me make it clear, I am not an Israeli. I was born in Israel, for the first 22 years of my life I thought of myself as an Israeli. But when I realised what Israel was all about, I stopped regarding myself as an Israeli. I demand not to be seen as one. I am a Hebrew-speaking Palestinian," he says.

...

Atzmon has just released his fourth album, is published in 15 languages, banned in Israel and remains an ardent anti-Zionist.

"For me it is clear that Zionism is a racist, nationalist and a fundamentally religious perception, and I don't want to live in a racist set-up," he says.

"Palestine belongs to the Palestinian people"

"Everything I liked about this place (Israel) the smell of it, the authenticity of it, the food, hummus, the falafel, didn't belong to Jewish nationalism it belonged to the Palestinian people."

Atzmon says the only solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a single state with two people living side by side.

...

etc


Gilad Atzmon's website

Monday, 15 November 2004

Europe reaches the Moon

check it out, ion power!

ESA Portal - Europe reaches the Moon

Artist's impression of the SMART-1 mission


5 November 2004
ESA PR 59-2004. During the night of 15 to 16 November, ESA’s SMART-1 will reach the first of its closest approaches to the Moon after a 13-month journey. Then the spacecraft will begin adjusting its orbit around the Moon in preparation for a scientific investigation of its surface, starting in January.

During the long cruise, consisting of a spiralling orbit around the Earth that brought the spacecraft close to the lunar capture point, SMART-1 achieved all the technology demonstration goals of the first part of the mission.
The exciting final manoeuvres to enter a stable lunar orbit, the challenges of the journey and the results of the SMART-1 technology tests paving the way for future interplanetary missions, will be presented at a press conference on 16 November at ESA/ESOC in Darmstadt (Germany), starting at 08h00.


ESA Portal - Europe reaches the Moon

Friday, 12 November 2004

and here's the book of avante-garde...

Avant-Garde Graphics: 1918-34

Lutz Becker, Richard Hollis
September 2004, 240 x 172mm, 96 pp
c.100 colour images
1 85332 238 5
£14.95

The early twentieth century was a time of creative ferment in Europe. This 'heroic' period of modernity found particularly forceful expression in graphic design and photomontage throughout Europe, where new techniques allowed a fusion of typography, painting and photography, evoking the dynamism and fragmentation of cinema. With colour reproductions of posters, prints, book designs, and political and commercial ephemera, Avant-Garde Graphics focuses on many of the leading practitioners of the Modern movement, from the Dutch members of De Stijl and the German Bauhaus to the Constructivists of the USSR and central Europe. Drawn from the Merrill C. Berman Collection, one of the greatest collections of twentieth-century graphic art in the world, the book includes essays by film-maker and curator Lutz Becker and graphic designer and historian Richard Hollis. Artists include Jean Arp, Herbert Bayer, Willi Baumeister, Theo van Doesburg, John Heartfield, Gustav Klucis, El Lissitzky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Liubov Popova, Alexandr Rodchenko, Oskar Schlemmer, Kurt Schwitters, Nikolai Sidelnikov, Vladmimir Stenberg and Georgii Stenberg, Varvara Stepanova, Solomon Telingater and Piet Zwart. Buy online from the distributor, Cornerhouse Publications.

Avante-Garde art and revolutionary science at Hunterian

Suze and i went to excellent exhibition at hunterian gallery earlier... Avante garde graphics... the Hunterian is famous for its Whistler collection but also has touring shows like this one...

http://www.hunterian.gla.ac.uk/news/avant/garde.shtml

plus i noticed they were hanging the Edwin Morgan pictures what he has donated - he was one of my tutors at uni, a very nice man as well as a good teacher, probly wasted on me ;-)

http://www.hunterian.gla.ac.uk/news/edwinMorgan/bequest.shtml

and then we went across to the Hunterian Museum where there was a cool (-273) show - actually a recently opened permanent display- about Lord Kelvin. The real artefacts he used in class and for doing experiments plus some really rather good interactive demos - much better than the Glasgow Science museum, entertained elizabeth (6) and free!

http://www.hunterian.gla.ac.uk/news/kelvin/kelvin.shtml


not a bad afternoon out in fact...

Thursday, 11 November 2004

Ramallah Online

Here's a place... and a person.

Ramallah Online



In August 2001 on a visit to the West Bank as part of a delegation from the Scottish TUC, I was privileged to meet Yasser Arafat in Ramallah (in his 'compound', the White House or 10 Downing Street and other government buildings are not described thus ;-) . It was about 2 weeks before another disaster for Palestine and the world, the September 11 bombing of the twin towers, and even then the situation was grim.

Saturday, 6 November 2004

After Arafat...

quoting George Galloway
from Morning Star
Saturday 06 November 2004
Morning Star online

In Palestine, incapacitated by the stricken condition of President Yasser Arafat - whose hospital bed I am visiting this morning - momentous events loom.

Should Arafat die, Sharon has already declared that he may not be buried in his birthplace, occupied Jerusalem.

But what if a million Palestinians carry his body upon their shoulders and march to the Holy City?

Will Sharon shoot them down while the whole world is watching? And what about the succession?

If the so-called "international community" is serious about negotiation, then the only man worth talking to currently languishes in an Israeli dungeon serving five life sentences.

Marwan Barghouti is the only leader who can unite the Palestinian people and with the strength to negotiate and deliver on any agreement.

If Tony Blair is serious about rescuing anything from the ruins of the peace process, he'd better start working for Barghouti's release without delay.

In his absence from the field, should Arafat die, the occupied territories risk descending into warlordism, with local leaders and local fights breaking out all over.

The world will quickly miss Arafat when he's gone. After him may come the deluge.

Saturday, 30 October 2004

Auctioneer

Here comes the auctioneer
he's taking all my gear
going to be a brave new year

He knew I couldn't pay
so he took my stuff away
gonna be a bright
new day

Wednesday, 22 September 2004

Mysterian goes bust

Transcript of Malky statement to Donald Pollock for BBC Highland
Wed 22 September 2004

> What's your reaction to the news?

We are very sad that we've had to cease trading, and make our team redundant this week.

We created a very exciting wee software company in the Western Isles which is a great place to live and work, and have provided excellent jobs over the last couple of years - we were completely committed to doing this in the Western Isles and had good support from the Royal Bank and Western Isles Enterprise.

The Western Isles economy needs companies like Mysterian - and we are really disappointed that we have not managed to realise our full potential - we think we were actually very close to making it work.


> What went wrong?

Well, in fact we have done a lot of the right things. we have put together a good team of talented people, we have developed products which solve problems for specific clients, and we intended to take the intellectual property which we have created and market it more widely.

But as anyone who has been in business will know, you have a limited amount of time and resources to do what you need to do. We had projects and contracts which we hoped would realise enough cash soon enough for us to continue too expand but several of these took longer than we expected to materialise.

It is pretty chastening when you hit the wall, and I'm afraid thats what has happened to us.

We certainly haven't been doing nothing over the last couple of years and I hope that what we have created will still bear fruit in the future.

Like I say, the Western Isles needs companies like Mysterian.

Tuesday, 27 July 2004

Jackie Sparrow

Terminal: "Jackie Sparrow was my best mate in secondary school and he taught me the guitar. He died on Friday 23 July 2004. My diary says: 'frank called to tell me he'd heard jackie sparrow had died... not sure how...' I still don't know for sure, but I guess it was a heart attack. He was 44, same age as me. "

Sunday, 4 July 2004

Fahrenheit 9/11 | In Theaters Now!

Fahrenheit 9/11 | In Theaters Now!

Denied on the 4th of July!

Glasgow Film Theatre

Was going to take Liam and Neil to the GFT to see Fahrenheit 911. But it's a bloody 15! and they're too young at 13 and 12.

Booger.

Wednesday, 30 June 2004

Sunny Stornoway

yes its wet. june 29/30 and its pouring with rain. anyway i quite like it.