All posts by John Goerzen

The Cynic’s Guide to American Presidents

Politics

Sometimes I’m just annoyed at politicians. Yesterday, after receiving a letter from Sen. Brownback and reading coverage of Sarah Palin, I was annoyed at them.

So, in keeping with my theme of being annoyed at politicians, here’s my cynic’s guide to American presidents. Yes, it’s biased, under-represents successes, but that’s the point.

I’ll start with FDR, because I feel like it.

FDR – 1933-1945 (D)

Took office during the worst economic crisis of the 20th century. Tried lots of things to fix it; a few of them actually worked, and the best produced social improvements that lasted decades.

Finally solved the depression by getting us into a war, but died before he could get us back out of it. In a stunning display of racial and ethnic discrimination, rounded up and jailed legal Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants and their children just because they were Japanese, German, or Italian. Presided over the firebombing of Dresden, which killed roughly 25,000 civilians in what would be called a terrorist war crime today. Formed an alliance with Stalin that indirectly led to the Cold War.

When asked if he wanted the German people to starve, he replied, “Why not?”

Had an affair with his wife’s secretary that must have inspired Gov. Sanford. FDR, however, kept it secret from his wife for 4 years and the public for 48 years.

Harry S. Truman – 1945-1953 (D)

Became vice president, but when FDR died 82 days later, didn’t want to be president. Victory in Europe was achieved shortly after he became president, but not due to anything he did. Ended World War II, started the Korean War, the Cold War, and the nuclear arms race. Saved the lives of countless Berliners, ended the lives of even more Japanese, though Stalin knew about the bomb years before Truman did.

Desegregated the US military in an early civil rights victory, but committed some of the worst mass murders in history using that same military.

Famously embarrassed the Chicago Tribune by winning re-election over Dewey.

Had the lowest approval rating for any American president until George W. Bush came along.

Dwight D. Eisenhower – 1953-1961 (R)

Before becoming president, was supreme commander of NATO during World War II, and thus also was implicated in the Dresden bombing. Reclassified German POWs, depriving them of Geneva Convention protections. Played on fear to justify building the interstate highway system, one of the largest long-term contributors to environmental and energy problems. Refused to defend people from McCarthy, despite privately criticizing McCarthy.

Integrated Washington, DC public schools. Took over the Arkansas National Guard to integrate Arkansas schools. Failed to get us involved in wars in Lebanon and Vietnam, despite his best efforts. Picked Nixon as his vice president, a decision nobody will forgive him for.

Famously warned of the military-industrial complex, a prediction that the profit motive of defense companies would lead politicians to support war for jobs. One of his most accurate predictions, ironically about a situation he created.

JFK – 1961-1963 (D)

Defeated Nixon to win the presidency, mainly because JFK looked better on black and white TV. Famously said “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” But the country did several things for him, including providing security when he had secret meetings with his mistress. (Gov. Sanford, you have a lot to learn.)

Tried Eisenhower’s plan to overthrow Castro. Almost got us a war with Russia, and Castro captured 1189 people. Also almost succeeded in starting the world’s first atomic war, also over Cuba, which was created partly because his earlier Bay of Pigs invasion. Despite putting 16,300 soldiers in Vietnam, it would take Johnson to finally turn that one into a war.

LBJ – 1963-1969 (D)

Supported the largest expansion of civil rights in the 20th century, and also the largest chemical weapons poisoning of a people in American history. Destroyed 6 million acres of land, intentionally destroying Vietnamese food crops, and poisoned 4 million Vietnamese and countless American soldiers. Vietnam war led to the death of 2 million Vietnamese civilians and tens of thousands of American deaths.

An early supporter of the war on poverty, voting rights, and the war on crime, he nonetheless stirred up some of the biggest riots in the 20th century because of Vietnam.

Managed to win re-election in 1964, though probably only because the Republicans had nominated Barry Goldwater, who made LBJ’s war policies look mild and sane.

Didn’t bother to seek re-election in 1968, knowing he was so unpopular. Though still remained more popular than Truman and Bush, which is saying something (though not a lot).

Richard Nixon – 1969-1974 (R)

Known as “tricky Dick”, managed to live up to the nickname. Announced he was leaving politics after losing to JFK in 1960 and a governor’s race in 1962, then won the presidential election in 1968.

Secretly expanded the Vietnam war to include Cambodia and Laos, while simultaneously calling himself a peacemaker. Greatly expanded Social Security and Medicare, supported the Equal Rights Amendment, Title IX, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act.

Went on a famous trip to the Soviet Union, where he mocked Brezhnev for not having color TV. Went on a famous trip to China, where he opened up the possibility of numerous ping-pong tournaments between the two countries.

Despite being heavily favored to win re-election in 1972, his paranoid campaign organization, called “creep” (CRP), broke into Democratic headquarters. The resulting coverup had him ordering illegal actions by the FBI, and unleashed G. Gordon Liddy on the country, which we’ll never forgive him for. His arch-nemesis — print journalists everywhere — achieved new respect due to the Watergate scandal, immortalizing an otherwise obscure porn movie by naming a secret FBI informant after it. Perhaps Nixon’s most lasting achievement.

Famously lied when he told people “I am not a crook.”

Gerald Ford – 1974-1977 (R)

Became president, and lost to Carter, because of Richard Nixon. Wikipedia wrote 2 paragraphs about his presidency, which seems about average for him. Supported women’s liberation, opposed swine flu. Both supported and opposed LSD. Best thing to ever happen to Chevy Chase’s career on SNL.

Jimmy Carter – 1977-1981 (D)

A Georgia farmer, he defeated Chevy Chase to win the presidency in 1976. Got us involved with Iran, failed to rescue the American hostages.

Dealt with an energy crisis by talking honestly about it with American people and making solid plans to deal with it. That ended so poorly that it would be 20 years before another president attempted the “honesty and planning” approach. Could have saved us trillions of dollars if he had been less honest about saving energy.

Famously built homes for the people that Reagan made homeless.

Ronald Reagan – 1981 – 1989 (R)

Despite presiding over the largest expansion of the federal debt in history, he is still well-liked by fiscal conservatives. Unlike Carter’s “tell it like it is” approach, told everybody that things were fine and getting better, and got us into $3 trillion of debt as a result.

Famously fired all the nation’s air traffic controllers, leading to ongoing problems with ATC today. Started a war in Grenada, another in Libya, and escalated the Cold War, though gave the whole country Alzheimer’s about all these actions. Famously called Nazi SS soldiers victims, but ordered generals to lay a wreath on their grave after it became too controversial for him to do it himself.

Violated US and international law by selling weapons to Iran to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. Also sold weapons to Iraq to use to fight Iran. Single-handedly saved an American jelly bean company. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1994, but suspected of having it during his presidency, if his answers to the Iran-Contra investigation are any guideline.

George H. W. Bush – 1989-1993 (R)

Started a war in Panama and another in Iraq, but it wasn’t until 10 years later that his son could announce “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. Pardoned many of the Iran-Contra conspirators. Launched the careers of Dana Carvey and Bill Clinton.

He refused to take charge when Reagan was shot, throwing the federal government into turmoil during a crisis. Barely took charge even after being elected.

Bill Clinton – 1993-2001 (D)

Taught the world how to deal with allegations of affairs with mistresses. Future SC Gov. Sanford voted to impeach him for it, arguing that he broke a promise to his wife more important than the one to his country. Launched the careers of Ken Star and Monica Lewinsky, in rather different ways.

Brokered historic Arab-Israeli peace at Camp David in 2000. Despite shooting down plenty of Iraqi planes in no-fly zones, never managed to cure Republicans in Congress of their constant criticism that we should just re-invade and finish what H. W. Bush didn’t (it would take Dubya to finally cure the Republicans of THAT wish).

Had more “gates” named after him than any president (Whitewatergate, Travelgate, Troopergate). Tried to both encourage and stifle the Internet (clipper chip). Greatly helped the career of David Letterman.

George W. Bush – 2001-2009 (R)

Took office and promptly went on vacation. Responding to the worst attacks on American soil, started two wars, one of which actually managed to fight the people that were tangentially related to the ones that attacked us. Nominated an Arabian Horse judge to head FEMA, then famously praised him after his mismanagement led to thousands of deaths after Hurricane Katrina.

Finally invaded Iraq after his dad refused to go deeply into that country, and announced “Mission Accomplished” before the real fighting ever began. Never seemed to doubt it, either. Actively repressed science in government and supported archaic religious fundamental positions, ironically doing more harm to Christianity in the eyes of the world than any president in recent memory.

Ran for president as a “uniter, not a divider”, then proceeded to act as a divider. Criticized Clinton for nation-building, then tried to build up Iraq. Defeated the husband of a ketchup magnate for re-election in 2004. Launched the career of Jon Stewart.

Supported massive tax breaks for the wealthy, ran up the federal debt more than anyone since Reagan, supported massive deregulation. Not to be outdone by the worst response to a natural disaster in recent times, his policies also implemented the worst response to an economic calamity since Woodrow Wilson. Finished office with the worst popularity ratings in history and tried to reignite the Cold War after staring into Putin’s soul and finding it just as divine as Brownie’s.

Barack Obama – 2009-? (D)

Defeated Tina Fey and the ghost of Barry Goldwater to win the presidency. He’s trying Carter’s “honesty and long-range planning” approach to not just energy, but health care, education, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as well. Good luck with that.

I’ll get the hammer and nails.

An Update on the Music Player Quest

Music

I’ve written a few times (parts 1, 2, 3) about my annoyance at music players. I’d come down to two finalists to consider: Rhythmbox and Banshee. I’ve used both for awhile now, and as of today, am also trying Songbird (after finally managing to make it run; see part 3 above).

In addition to my previous observations, then, I’ll add:

Rhythmbox

Two problems exist in the current version. The first is that playlists aren’t sortable, which is annoying for those of us that use them as an organization tool. I put a patch in bug 327042, but the authors say they won’t apply it, and there has been no recent activity from anyone working to do something better. Highly annoying, but I’m running my own patched copy anyhow.

More annoying is that it doesn’t let you modify metadata of tracks on the iPod. Perhaps worse, its GUI lets you remove tracks from iPod playlists, but this change is not saved back to the iPod (bug 586964). Confusingly, adding tracks to playlists does get saved. There has been no action on that bug in the 1.5 weeks since I’ve reported it.

I was able to supply the Rhythmbox developers with the needed information to resolve the issue of moving files to .Trash-1000 instead of deleting them on the iPod (586649). However, they refuse to fix the larger problem of leaving these directories on the filesystem; a great annoyance for people using KDE or no desktop environment at all.

Banshee

On the surface, its iPod support looks even better than Rhythmbox. Yet it silently ignores some (not all) metadata changes. You can modify a rating, a compilation artist, etc. and it will look like it changed. But close Banshee and open it up again and you see it wasn’t. (Bugs 580632, 389550) They’ve done some troubleshooting with me, but there hasn’t been activity there since June 30.

Songbird

Aside from my story today griping that it doesn’t even start by default on Linux, I haven’t written about this one before. Its philosophy is somewhat similar to Thunderbird: ship with a very minimalistic set of features, and support multiple addons.

I found that its iPod support works the best of any of these I’ve mentioned, at least for manually-managed iPods. It has a feature to sync your iPod, but has no documentation whatsoever on what that does. It also doesn’t document what it will do with the FLACs I’ve downloaded from Magnatune when it puts them on the iPod. The only references I’ve seen to transcoding state that it will be present in 1.2.0 (which I have), and that it won’t be present until August. Not very helpful.

With a few addons, it makes a quite nice player, with quite good iPod support. The interface, however, has a few quirks. First off, it’s really sluggish, even on very fast hardware. Secondly, if you flip from playlist to playlist, or even breathe on it the wrong way, it will move you back to the top of the playlist you’re on, leaving you to manually find the track that’s playing again. It has no “jump to currently-playing track” feature like other players do. Its tray icon (which you must get an addon for) has a basic menu of play, pause, next, but no ability to set ratings from there. Also, sometimes setting ratings don’t appear to work from the UI, but might have actually been saved anyhow.

Overall, though, Songbird looks like my best bet for the moment. I’ll keep using it and see what I think.

The other option is gtkpod+audacious. I’d miss the integration of player with browser, and gtkpod’s extremely sluggish interface makes even Songbird look like a Formula 1 car in comparison. But its iPod support works well (though its attempts to sync with the filesystem are undocumented and cause issues more than once).

Songbird: How To Make Great Software Unpopular

Music

As part of my ongoing quest for working media players, I’ve more than once tried Songbird. But it never wanted to work in Linux, always crashing before it even fired up the GUI with errors like this:

(songbird-bin:17595): libgnomevfs-WARNING **: Cannot load module `/usr/lib/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/libmapping.so' (/usr/lib/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/libmapping.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)
././songbird-bin: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gst-0.10/gst/_gst.so: undefined symbol: gst_xml_get_type
Could not initialize GStreamer: Error re-scanning registry , child terminated by signal

Googling reveals dozens of threads about this among Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora… well, ALL Linux users. Some people reported success removing bits of GStreamer from their systems, but that didn’t work for me.

I noticed that the Linux binary distribution of Songbird contains a lib/ directory, which has, among other things, full copies of many GStreamer libraries, libvorbis, libFLAC, libogg, libtheoradec/enc, and more. On a lark, I ran rm lib/libgst*. And that fixed Songbird.

Now, that gets me to the point of why Songbird isn’t popular on Linux, a fact which appears to mystify the Songbird developers from the posts I’ve read.

And the reason is: Songbird doesn’t work on Linux out of the box. More to the point, Songbird tries to distribute itself on Linux as if the user is running on Windows.

You do not install a local gstreamer with each app on Linux; you use the system’s. You don’t try to use a local copy of everything; you use the systems. Even songbird plugins package their own .so of files I already have installed system-wide. The Linux shared library system can handle it, I promise.

And even worse, the fact that they are trying to use local copies of things instead of system ones are making it very difficult for distributions to package up Songbird. Distributions — the ones that care about quality, anyhow — want to do things The Right Way, which means only one copy of GStreamer on the system. Songbird doesn’t want to get along well with this. None of Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora have Songbird packages in their repositories, though third-party packages of greatly varying quality exist for each. Read their respective bug tracking systems and you’ll see that it has to do with Songbird wanting local versions of system-wide libraries.

So, Songbird folks: If you want to make a cross-platform app, please stop treating Linux as if its library system is as broken as Windows. It wasn’t until you got here.

Aside from that, it looks like the best music player I’ve tried yet, despite its sluggish interface.

Update: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that Songbird was a Mozilla project.

Tagging music… No, not like that

Music

I’m thinking it would be great to be able to assign arbitrary tags to my music, like I do to my photos. For instance, I might tag the finale to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony like this:

symphony beethoven loud choir german

I can’t figure out how to Google for this sort of feature because, well, the word “tag” is already taken for something else in the context of music.

I believe Amarok offers it, a bit, but Amarok has too many other serious flaws for me to be able to consider it.

Any ideas?

More Bumps on the Music Player Quest

Uncategorized

So a few days ago, I wrote about my failure to find a good music player. Since then, I’ve made some discoveries.

Amarok

  • Version 1.4 can’t sort an iPod’s library by genre. Oh, and any version less than 2.x isn’t supported upstream anymore.
  • Version 2 has mysteriously lost: the ability to see an iPod’s playlists, the ability to store a playlist in an m3u file and automatically keep it up to date, the ability to sync the Amarok statistics to an iPod, and more. Reminds me of the Gnome print dialog fiasco. “We’ve removed features. It’s better! Really! Oh, and we won’t support the old version either.”
  • The entire Amarok 2 interface is very slow and sluggish.

So just as I was about to post about how nicely Amarok’s playlist saving works with Firefly, here I’m instead posting how I can’t use Amarok because it can’t even do what Rhythmbox does with an iPod anymore.

Banshee

  • Can’t play most of my iPod tracks due to a long-standing case sensitivity bug.
  • The only player other than gtkpod that groks iPod advanced playlists.
  • No way to tell it where to put tracks copied from iPod to PC.
  • Strangely thinks that every track is a different album with some albums.

Listen

  • Now does actually see the iPod and seems to play it well.
  • When you try to copy tracks from the iPod to the PC, it appears to work and gives visual cues that it’ll work, but silently does nothing.
  • Strangely thinks that every track is a different album with some albums.
  • Strangely doesn’t let you sort when you’re looking at a playlist.
  • Doesn’t let you set a rating.

Rhythmbox

Conclusions

I’ve renamed some of the directories on my iPod so they work with Banshee and Rhythmbox. I’m going to try Banshee for awhile and see how I like it.

The Quest For A Decent Music Player

Uncategorized

So I have an iPod, and I have several PCs. I have the 60GB iPod, which is enough to hold my entire music collection. I want to have my music there, and on the PCs, and sync it all together: if I rate something 4 stars one place, rate it 4 stars everywhere. If I add music to my PCs, add it to the iPod, and in the same playlists.

Nothing like that appears to exist.

So here are my reviews of some of the Linux-based music playing systems. I am not all that happy with any of them. Actually, these aren’t reviews so much as they are wishlist (or more serious) bug lists.

Amarok

Last looked at it just before KDE 4.

  • Copied tracks to iPod OK, but couldn’t put them in a playlist on the iPod.
  • Poor sorting of stuff on the iPod. One giant list of albums, and no sorting of the playlist.
  • Did seem rather stable.
  • Showed album art from local collection only — not from the iPod.
  • No apparent actual syncing; just copying back and forth.

Banshee 1.4.x

  • Claims to sync with the iPod, but doesn’t actually document what it does anywhere. Messed up my iPod when I tried it.
  • Mysteriously can only copy tracks from PC to the iPod; can’t copy tracks from iPod to the PC.
  • Rescan library wouldn’t remove missing tracks. Not sure if it did anything at all.

    • Listen

    • Couldn’t ever get it to even see the iPod. Complex interactions with hal. Numerous bug reports with complicated workarounds — or not. Fail.

    Exaile

    • Bug in the box that asks where the iPod is. Couldn’t get it to see the iPod.

    Rhythmbox

    • Doesn’t actually delete iPod tracks. Moved them to /ipod/.Trash-1000. Caused my iPod to fill up until I noticed that.
    • Doesn’t update the iTunes DB at all, rendering new tracks invisible to the iPod.

    gtkpod

    • The best, most fully-featured iPod support out there. Far better than iTunes even.
    • Docs claim to have some sort of iPod-to-PC syncing, but it is poorly documented and appears to break if the absolute path to the music on the PC ever changes — and doesn’t support more than one PC because it writes the paths to a file on the iPod.
    • No built-in player, but can send tracks to xmms, xine, audacious, or the like.

    Other

    I have had brief experiences with the popular proprietary software such as iTunes. The one time I tried iTunes, it ironically scrambled most of the metadata on my iPod, especially the playcounts and the data that said whether or not I had listened to the podcasts. I am none too enamored with other Windows software either, and of course all this stuff is proprietary.

    So, I guess music players are like mail readers. They all suck. Some just suck a little less.

Buying a SoundBridge Radio

Music

A day or two ago, I asked for suggestions for a tabletop MP3 player. I got lots of good ideas — thanks! The two most common were the Roku SoundBridge Radio and the Nokia N800.

I’ve ordered the SoundBridgeRadio. I spent some time looking over its website, and it really impressed me for several reasons:

  • It’s one all-in-one device with Wifi, FM and AM tuners, speakers, even an SD card slot and atomic clock shortwave receiver.
  • It has explicit support for Linux. Roku actually sponsors the Firefly Media Server (package mt-daapd in Debian), which will serve up music to this and other devices. They also can stream from SlimServer. In general, it supports any UPnP AV server.
  • They publish specs for just about everything: the TCP-based Roku Control Protocol that lets you control the SoundBridge remotely; user-editable localization files; even detailed IR specs for the remote control. The only other thing I could wish for would be the firmware on the device itself being Free.
  • Their manual has a “Hey geeks, read this!” section describing telnetting to a port. People are doing some fun stuff with it.

The N800 is also a good suggestion. It has an FM tuner built-in, and of course is capable of streaming media files. I have an N810, and I just don’t think a device this size would be capable of playing loudly enough for a kitchen. So I’d have to get external speakers, and then we’re into a mess of wires and stuff — making it less portable to other rooms in the house.

One person also suggested a Chumby. It sounds like an awesome gadget, but I couldn’t find anything on their site that indicated that it could stream music from my own server. From the Internet or an iPod, yes, but not from my server.

Thanks to everyone for your ideas. I’ll post a review of the SoundBridge Radio when I get it.

Looking for tabletop MP3 player

Uncategorized

We’re looking for an MP3 player for our kitchen. Ideally, it would be a standalone device that can browse and play music from our server using Wifi. It should have its own speakers and a reasonably small footprint. If it has an FM tuner, that’s a plus too.

I’ve tried searching, and found things such as the Squeezebox. But ones that are decent at this task seem to be in the $200-$300 range. That’s trange, because TV devices that do this are actually cheaper!

I’ve tried Googling, and can’t seem to craft good search terms.

Any ideas?

Free Software enforcing DRM?!

Uncategorized

So I just recently switched to KDE 4 (still using it with xmonad, of course) and I just now ran into my first really big annoyance.

I just downloaded a PDF, and tried to copy and paste a bit of text from it. I used the selection tool, and Okular (KDE’s document viewer) offered to speak it to me, but said “Copy forbidden by DRM.”

pdftotext was able to convert the entire file to text format in an instant.

Why are people intentionally adding code to KDE to remove my freedom? This is crazy and nuts. Nobody should be doing this, least of all in Free Software!

Review: In The Beginning. . . Was The Command Line

Reviews

A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.

– Neal Stephenson, “In The Beginning. . . was the Command Line”

What a fun read. It’s about technology, sure, but more about culture. Neal takes a good look at operating systems, why we get emotionally involved with them, and why Windows is still so popular. He does this with a grand detour to Disneyland, and a hefty dose of humor. The above quote was from near the end of the book, where he imagines hackers creating big bangs from the command line.

He starts out the book from some anecdotes from the early 1970s, when he had his first computer class in high school. His school didn’t have a computer, but they did have a teletype (the physical kind that used paper) with a modem link to some university’s system. But time on that system was so expensive that they couldn’t just dial in and run things interactively. The teletype had a paper tape device. You’d type your commands in advance, and it would punch them out on the tape. Then when you dial in, it would replay the tape at “high speed”.

Neal liked this because the stuff punched out of the tape were, actually, “bits” in both the literal and the mathematical sense. This, of course, led to a scene at the end of the schoolyear where a classmate dumped the bin of bits on the teacher, and Neal witnessed megabytes falling to the floor.

Although the book was written in 1999, and needs an update in some ways, it still speaks with a strong voice today — and is now also an interesting look at what computing was like 10 years ago.

He had an analogy of car dealerships to operating systems. Microsoft had the big shiny dealership selling station wagons. Their image was all wrapped up in people feeling good about their purchase — like they got something for their money. And he said that the Linux folks were selling tanks, illustrated with this exchange:

Hacker with bullhorn: “Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!”

Prospective station wagon buyer: “I know what you say is true…but…er…I don’t know how to maintain a tank!”

Bullhorn: “You don’t know how to maintain a station wagon either!”

Buyer: “But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music.”

Bullhorn: “But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!”

Buyer: “Stay away from my house, you freak!”

Bullhorn: “But…”

Buyer: “Can’t you see that everyone is buying station wagons?”

That doesn’t mean that Stephenson is just a Linux apologetic. He points out that the CLI has its place, and has a true love-hate relationship with the text-based config files (remember XF86Config before the days of automatic modelines? Back when you had to get out a calculator and work some things out with pencil and paper, or else risk burning out your monitor?) He points out that some people want to just have the thing work reasonably well. They don’t want control — in fact, would gladly give it up if offered something reasonably pretty and reasonably functional.

He speaks to running Linux at times:

Sometimes when you finish working with a program and shut it down, you find that it has left behind a series of mild warnings and low-grade error messages in the command-line interface window from which you launched it. As if the software were chatting to you about how it was doing the whole time you were working with it.

Even if the application is imploding like a damaged submarine, it can still usually eke out a little S.O.S. message.

Or about booting Linux the first time, and noticing all sorts of cryptic messages on the console:

This is slightly alarming the first time you see it, but completely harmless.

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. . .

Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer–i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed–emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. For page layout and printing you can use TeX: a vast corpus of typesetting lore written in C and also available on the Net for free.

I love these vivid descriptions: programs secretly chatting with us, TeX being a “corpus of typesetting lore” rather than a program. Or how about this one: “Unix. . . is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.” Yes, my operating system is an oral history project, thankyouverymuch.

The book feels like a weird (but well-executed and well-written) cross between Douglas Adams and Cory Doctorow. Which makes is so indescribably awesome that I can’t help but ending this review with a few more quotes.

Because Linux is not commercial–because it is, in fact, free, as well as rather difficult to obtain, install, and operate–it does not have to maintain any pretensions as to its reliability. Consequently, it is much more reliable.

what really sold me on it [Debian] was its phenomenal bug database (http://www.debian.org/Bugs), which is a sort of interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption.

It is simplicity itself. When had a problem with Debian in early January of 1997, I sent in a message describing the problem to submit@bugs.debian.org. My problem was promptly assigned a bug report number (#6518) and a severity level (the available choices being critical, grave, important, normal, fixed, and wishlist) and forwarded to mailing lists where Debian people hang out.

That should be our new slogan for bugs.debian.org: “Debian’s interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption.”

Unix is hard to learn. The process of learning it is one of multiple small epiphanies. Typically you are just on the verge of inventing some necessary tool or utility when you realize that someone else has already invented it, and built it in, and this explains some odd file or directory or command that you have noticed but never really understood before.

I’ve been THERE countless times.

Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters; this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.

It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or “honoring diversity” or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing ) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.

The stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments carved in immutable stone–the original command-line interface

Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it’s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army.

Available for free online, or as a 160-page book from Amazon.