JADB

One of the RSS feeds I get in Liferea is Gnomefiles. This as background only, of course.

One of the recent articles to have come through on said feed was one announcing an update to something named Drivel, nominally a LiveJournal client with some other back-ends hacked into it.

Curious, I downloaded the application, built a Fedora Core 4 compatible RPM, dumped it in my YUM repository and installed it; this is my first attempt at posting to JADB with it, and herewith my impressions.

The first of the things I like about it is that it supports categories, something I use fairly extensively. Unfortunately, however, it only supports posting the entry under a single category. That’s okay in general for people who only use primary categories, I suppose, and even I can always go in after the fact and add multiple categories, but I would really have liked multiple category support. To be fair, though, I’ll admit that I’m not too certain whether the Movable Type API actually supports that, or not.

Spell checking works as expected, underlining wrongly spelled words with the accustomed red wavy line and allowing correction or adding to the dictionary on a right-click. That is, it works fine if you actually remember to install gtkspell-devel before you compile Drivel…

Drivel unfortunately doesn’t have a Gnome Panel plugin, something I got quite used to having with gnome-blog. Fortunately arbitrarily adding launchers to the panel is an absolute no-brainer which does go quite some way to mitigation.

Another drawback compared to gnome-blog for some people may be the lack of a WYSIWYG option. I must admit to not minding much since I prefer the source-view, but I could easily understand those users’ point.

I have to ask myself the question, however, whether I prefer Drivel’s implementation to gnome-blog’s.

Currently, that is a definite maybe — which could quite easily become an unreserved, if slightly selfish, definitely if the developer/ developers added some of the more advanced features of the “Movable Type” API as used by WordPress, the software driving this blog. Something I consider quite inevitable; the wheels of Open Source seems to turn that way…

In all, currently Drivel gets the thumbs-up; I’ll be keeping an eye on it to see how it improves.

The Beeb has the following charming tale of wit and insight:

Apparently two youths of great wisdom decided to film a fan-flick based on Star Wars.

Not all that unusual in this day-and-age, but to add the well-known and quite distinctive light-saber effects, they decided to fill fluorescent tubes with petrol and then light it. Said light-sabers — most obviously — promptly exploded. Something I’m fairly certain a well-designed light-saber should never do.

Must have made a hell of a scene, though. Hope somebody remembered to keep the film going. The show must go on, and all that, old chap.

Damn fools. Apparently never heard of Industrial Light & Magic, the people who create the “Special Effects” (aka. Not petrol in tubes) after the filming of the movies are done.

And then the Yanks say that Darwin’s theories were were bunk?

Hello, people. Wake up: this is Evolution in action…

There are a couple of things in this world I find quite fascinating. But the single thing that tends to hold my horrified fascination above little else is the human capacity for utter brutality.

Once in my dimly remembered youth (i.e. more than a week ago) I was a member of the South African Defense Force on the border of Namibia and Angola, whom we as a country were at war with at that point.

Of my memories of that period, one remains with me with a special vividness. We guys were playing rugby in the river with some of the PB (”Plaaslike Bevolking” - Local population) lads — something we did fairly frequently. We were having quite a good game, soldiers versus the local civilians. Let me tell you, once they get to grips with the concept of the game they play a hell of a game of rugby!

Things were going quite well, we were winning, as was our wont — we’d been playing rugby for years and they had only recently learned the game, after all — when all of a sudden all of the PB lads ran for the bushes.

We were still looking around non-plussed when we noticed that the police had arrived — in force, as usual. Since we had no idea where the lads had disappeared off to and since we had no philosophical or other quandaries with handing them bloody noses for spoiling a good game, they didn’t linger.

To understand the situation you have to know that the police normally sent some of the worst of their people to guard the border region and, we have been told, Police brutality was rife.

It is a sad thing, for a soldier especially, when you realise that you — whose job it is to potentially get violent with these people — are trusted far more than the police — who are supposed to actually protect the people.

Okay, so what has brought all of this back, you may ask. Well, the BBC has a story of firefighters being ambushed while merely trying to do their work, keeping people property safe and protecting other property and people from fire.

What makes the story particularly sick is that people were taking photos of the attack on the firemen with their cell-phones. An act of “Recreational Violence”…

As you may see from my ‘blog, I’ve suggested a potential solution to that problem, somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But removing my tongue from my cheek I need to state most emphatically that this is not the action one would expect from a “First World” country.

It is starting to appear to me more and more that the major differences between first and third world countries is this:

1. The “First World” is way more arrogant and,
2. The third world is more civil…

Whether you happen to agree with me or not is, of course, your prerogative.

But let me add that, in my opinion at least, the only difference between these thugs in Belfast and the police on the Angolan border is this: the police wore uniforms.

Which OS are You?

This is a serious question. I mean, how does one go about eating one?

Well, after shooting off my huge mouth — repeatedly — at the current perceived state of degeneracy in the British youth, I had to come across the following in Jo’blog:

In Middelburg Mpumalanga (I have to assume it’s the one in Mpumalanga and not the one in Eastern Cape since the town of Hendrina also gets a mention) police finally managed to arrest a half-naked teen after a 35 minute wild chase through the town, during which time the boy tried to ram the police off the road multiple times in his mother’s car.

Not only was the little delinquent drunk and driving without license, but the whole episode started when the police saw the car zig-zagging and on closer inspection found the 17 year old in “a compromising position” with his 14 year old girlfriend.

It is at time I read stuff like this that I honestly think that maybe it’s time we had national service reinstated as well. It would give idiots like this something to occupy their thoughts before and themselves during the time they served their country; afterward military discipline normally keeps them in at least nominal check for some time.

Of course, the mere fact that this forces me to eat crow, something I acutely dislike, and to the Pommies, something I dislike much more, does not actually make me feel any great charity towards his current plight.

Maybe mother nature should just call it quits on us and let some other animal to have a go at being the dominant species…

Yes, I’m still on my Pommie rant. Yes, I will get over it. Yes, quite soon. I hope.

However, a little article in BBC News does go quite some way to explaining some of my feelings from a previous post. From it:

“Carol McMillan, 34, of Spey Walk, Holytown, Lanarkshire, admitted the culpable homicide of Ann Whittle on 15 August last year.

The pair clashed over a space at a car boot sale at Blochairn Road, Glasgow. McMillan repeatedly kicked Mrs Whittle, who later died in hospital.”

Come on, you have to be kidding me! Over a parking spot? And this is supposed to be “First World” and “Civilized”? Give me a break, sounds to me more like anarchy in action.

I think I’ll just stay in Africa where I’m safe, thank you very much…