this girl drives a tank

This is a rather good Jon Stewart interview by Bill Moyers. I find it uncomfortable that as a Canadian I have in recent years, followed American politics far closer than I should, but there you have it. Now, I realize that relying on Crooks And Liars, The Daily Show, and Keith Olbermann for my slant on American politics might be a bit ideological and naive but the alternatives do not seem much better.

A lot has been made of Bush's attempts to muddy the line between Church and State but the slow merger of Media and State, to me, is at least equally disturbing.

Even as Stewart himself dismisses his show as nothing more than televisions equivalent of a political cartoon, it is almost sad how the current administration almost writes the stories for him.("Dick Cheney shoots a 78 year old man in the face")

From the interview...

JON STEWART: Yeah, it's kind of astonishing. There is I used to have a real disconnect, I think, with the administration, I couldn't figure out what was going on. I think it's suddenly become clear to me. They would rather us believe them to be wildly incompetent and inarticulate than to let us know anything about how they operate. And so, they do Constitutionally-mandated things most of the time, but they don't — they fulfill the letter of their obligation to checks and balances, but not the intent.

For instance, Alberto Gonzales, and you've been watching the hearings. He is either a perjurer, or a low-functioning pinhead. And he allowed himself to be portrayed in those hearings as a low-functioning pinhead, rather than give the Congressional Committee charged with oversight, any information as to his decision-making process at the Department of Justice.

And I used to think, "They're doing this based on a certain arrogance." And now, I realize that it's because they believe there is one accountability moment for a President, and that is the four year election. And once you get that election, you're done.

BILL MOYERS: They're right, are they not?

JON STEWART: They're completely not right. The election moment is merely the American public saying, "We'd rather you be President than that guy." That's it. The next four years, though, you still have to abide by the oversight process that is there to prevent this kind of bizarre sort of cult-like atmosphere that falls along. I mean, I accept that kind of veil of secrecy around Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, but I don't accept that around our government.

I should apologize for not writing much but it was only partly my fault. Yes, I have been extremely busy with work lately and it seems now, not only my weekends are fully booked, but many evenings also, but I have hit some bugs in Debian that have put my computer in text mode only.

Firstly there was a problem with the non-free NVidia driver which suddenly stopped working. I thought no problem, I will use the free (but non GL) `nv' driver instead. This didn't work as it was unable to do the resolution I needed for my flat panel.

Next, my desktop manager, XFCE4 also was slightly broken in Debian unstable and I had updated to the broken packages on my personal computer and the household computer Sarah, my brother and my fiancé all use. This left everyone grumbling at me :-)

I managed after a day or to, to get the Nvidia issue sorted out and installed KDE as a temporary fix for the XFCE4 issue. It is a tad slower, at least I notice it to be, but in general the rest of my household really like KDE a lot and don't want to switch to XFCE4 when it gets fixed.

I wonder what they find easier about it? I am not going argue with them as keeping my users happy has always been paramount for me :) As for myself, I don't mind KDE at all, but don't see much of an advantage in day to day use over XFCE4.

Someone who obviously knows what a slacker I have been this year, with regards to studying programming, was kind enough to send me a very good C programming book in PDF format. I will assume this was a gentle hint and hopefully find some time to get back into C.

Now that Debian has released `etch' I decided to upgrade both my servers to the newest versions. I have my main server where all my movies, music and email live, and a file server where all my backups go. I decided to start with the file server just to see if there were any major problems. Everything went smoothly except after the upgrade I could no longer ssh into the machine.

Since I use ssh keys to access the file server, when debconf asked me this question I figured there was no harm in answering `yes'

Password authentication appears to be disabled in your current OpenSSH server configuration. In order to prevent users from logging in using passwords (perhaps using only public key authentication instead) with recent versions of OpenSSH, you must disable challenge-response authentication, or else ensure that your PAM configuration does not allow Unix password file authentication. If you disable challenge-response authentication, then users will not be able to log in using passwords. If you leave it enabled (the default answer), then the 'PasswordAuthentication no' option will have no useful effect unless you also adjust your PAM configuration in /etc/pam.d/ssh. Disable challenge-response authentication? <Yes> <No>

After the upgrade I could no longer ssh into the machine except as root and spent the next hour or so trying to figure out why. I learnt quite a lot about ssh in the meantime but as it turned out, the problem was that the upgrade had left me with /usr/bin/zsh as a broken symlink, and consequently, every time I tried to ssh in, I was authenticated and then promptly kicked off the system because I didn't have a valid login shell. Once this was fixed, I was back in business.

The upgrade on my main server went much more smoothly, with only this little `lpd' bug causing a little hiccup. It is a bug with the printing daemon, but seeing as my printer isn't hooked up yet, I will ignore it for now.

I must confess, Debian releasing another version has hardly had much impact on my day to day operations and perhaps that's a testament to how good of a distro Debian really is. I went from having a rock solid server platform, to having a rock solid server platform with newer software with just one dist-upgrade command.

Many thanks to the DD's.

I have been given an external hardrive by a friend that contains about 110GB of music. This is indeed a very nice gift as many of the bands I do not have and/or have never heard of before.

Several problems are now presented to me. We estimate that out of his 110GB, only around 60GB is music that I will actually add to my collection. First I have to go through his drive and identify what exactly I do not have.

Next I have to check that the artists I do have, are not of worse quality than his versions. Obviously if something I have is encoded at 128KB/S and his are at 256KB/S I will replace mine with the better quality ones.

What can get tricky is the same song, with a different filename, and/or a different encoding. Almost certainly the filename problem will arise as I like to have no spaces in my filenames and he comes from a Windows world that has spaces in filenames all over the place.

There seems to be just too many variables to juggle for me to look at any sort of script to handle some of the grunt work so it looks like it will be one of those long drawn out tasks that you pick at every evening for 20 mins or so until months later, it is finally done :-)

On the bright side though, it is tons of fresh music for my hungry ears.

Don Marti of LinuxWorld wrote to tell me that it was indeed a bug in the CMS that they use causing the Joey Hess article to be split into tiny pages, so it turns out my cynicism was rather premature.

Joey Hess is long time Debian developer who has done lots of work on the new and improved Debian Installer and has also written a `wiki compiler' known as Ikiwiki.

As it would be an understatement to say Joey is well respected amongst his peers, I was happy to see that Linuxworld had asked him to write an article about Ikiwiki.



The site has decided however to split the article into 10 pages, and you can see, some of the `pages' have become rather terse. I really don't get why websites do this and in fact even suspect that this dissection of content might even be done by the CMS and not by a human.

Either way though, somebody at LinuxWorld must have noticed this? I don't know what the reasoning is, perhaps as the advertisements appear to be dynamic, making the user click through 10 pages will expose them to far more banners than a 3 page article? How clever, except that they have no way of calculating how many users are turned off and will make the old `mental note' (as I do sometimes) to not even bother with that site next time, or worse, not even finish reading the article.

Its a shame a really as the presentation does a disservice to an otherwise great article.

By contrast, here is a somewhat sobering article about Bisphenol A that appeared in today's Globe and Mail, the content is balanced across 4 pages and yes, there are a couple of flash advertisements, but in general the site does not get in the way (too much) of the content it is trying to present.

Most of you probably know about the Amazon owned Internet Movie Database, which is quite a useful resource for movie buffs. I am even now somewhat trusting of the user ratings, something I am usually take with a grain of salt.

Often times though I just want to quickly see what movies an actress/actor has appeared in, or who directed what or look up a title without opening up a web browser and waiting for it to load the page. It turns out you can easily do this by installing the entire database onto your computer, granted it will take up a lot of room (over a GB for me) but the convenience seemed to outweigh the space requirements, so I decided to try it.

I tried to build the command line tools, following the README file's instructions. The first time it wouldn't build at all and I had to increase MAXTITLES in src/moviedb.h. The database then built without any complaints and downloaded lots of data, but when I tried to run the collection of tools it compiled, only a few of them would produce any results, for example the `lindex' and `list' commands worked ok but both `title' and `lguide' commands produced no output at all which wasn't very useful to me. I spent about an hour reading the documentation and FAQ but couldn't get it to work properly and finally gave up.