Indigo Jo Blogs

Daily Express puts its foot in it again

The flow of garbage from the Daily Express continues unabated. Last Thursday it published yet another multi-page feature on immigration, claiming that just as we are getting loads of immigrants coming in, Brits are moving to Spain! The thing is that a lot of Brits actually hate the British climate; they want to go to Spain where it's hot, or the Alps where you get proper snow (for the moment at least), anywhere but here where it rains. (As if it rains all the time). (Maybe we should run an exchange scheme, whereby a British family who hates our climate can exchange with (say) a Kurdish family, so that our whining Brits can sod off to sunny Kurdistan and leave this country to someone who appreciates it.) They interviewed this British family who'd emigrated to Spain and one of the stupid things they said was that the legal system was great and everyone's afraid of the Guardia Civil!

Oh yeah?! Tell that to the British ex-pats who tried to buy nice houses and found that the seller kept their deposit and sold the house to another family, who then had to wait months or years to challenge the sale in court, or the people who bought a house which had been built on top of another not-quite-demolished building (great building laws!) or the people in Valencia who are having bits of their land taken away and then being forced to contribute to what's being built on it?! Anyone who says the Spanish legal system is so much better than ours is talking out of their backside, or else they've been falsely quoted.

QT Learning blues

A few weeks ago (with birthday money from my mum & dad) I bought Matthias Kalle Dalheimer's book, "Programming with Qt" (published by O'Reilly) - Qt is a graphical user interface toolkit mostly used on Linux but you can also get it for Windoze, Mac and embedded systems also. It presents an extremely steep learning curve, and in the first chapter of 'serious' programming basically expects you to go off and learn whole areas of Qt programming by yourself. I ended up just looking at the answers, although perhaps if I'd had more time I'd have been able to work it out by myself.

In chapter four, he tells you how to set the widget style for the whole application, giving you a whole chunk of code without telling you where to put it in your program. I tried putting this into my main() function:

QApplication::setStyle( new QMotifStyle );

And this gave me a "parse error" when I compiled it, which seemed odd because that's exactly what he said to type (OK, he said "QWindowsStyle", but QMotifStyle is valid if you want Motif style). He forgot to mention that you need a special header file for whatever new style you want to use. I ended up putting this into main():

myapp.setStyle( new QMotifStyle );

With the header file I mentioned, it worked.

More bigotry from the LGF donkeys

The morons over at Little Green Footballs are getting hot under the collar over the decision in the state of Alabama to permit people to wear religiously-mandated head scarves and turbans in their driving license ID. This is a "victory for CAIR", which means that "a primary method of identification (hair type and color) has just been taken away from law enforcement, because of special interest group (read: Muslim) pressure."

What has escaped their attention (must be those blinkers) is that nowhere else in the US are women prevented from wearing their hijab in their driving license photo. On top of that, it kind of makes sense that women who are going to wear hijab when on the road wear it on their ID, don't you think? But that seems to have escaped the Zionist fanatics of LGF.

The first comment to be made on this issue was "Wait a minute....I thought letting Islamic women drive was a corruption. What gives?". In fact, it's only a minority opinion that insists women are forbidden from driving - the opinion of the establishment scholars of Saudi Arabia, and followed by virtually no-one outside Saudi Arabia. Women are not prevented from driving even in most of the Gulf states. We are not dictated to by any single mufti, whether the one in Saudi or the one in Egypt.

More on College Linux

I'm really happy (so far) with College Linux. I spent two hours last night downloading Dropline GNOME, but it's really worth it. It's probably the best version of GNOME out there, even better than ULB on SUSE although that's pretty good (better than SuSE's supplied version and certainly better than Ximian's). The installation for CL leaves a lot to be desired, however; I can install Linux easily because I had installed SUSE's Linux first. I then replaced that with FreeBSD and then that with College Linux. The biggest problem for new Linux users is partitioning, and that's something SuSE is really good at. We need a good, easy-to-use open-source partitioner - fast.

There's only a few small problems; although speedtouchconf (to get my Alcatel DSL modem going) works, it doesn't appear to set it up to connect on boot, nor give any way of doing this. And the lousy Alcatel driver is the main reason I wanted to get off SuSE - it is so unreliable, it often needs to be re-started as root, sometimes you need to reboot the machine even after that, and other times the machine crashes while loading the driver during boot-up. The Papillault driver is much more reliable. I should tell CL about this issue I suppose.

Bush Buddy Watch

Here's a piece from British IT site The Register about how a California judge has given the green light to Diebold - the company that's committed to delivering Ohio's votes to the President!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/35664.html

More on the Diebold scandal from Greg Palast:

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=301&row=1

BSD developments ...

I've decided to take BSD off my machine. The CD downloads are basically a demo, to get the full OS you're supposed to get the 4-CD pack from FreeBSD Mall or some other company. GNOME didn't work properly and the fonts were up the spout as well, at least as soon as you try to move beyond plain old Helvetica and Times. So I installed the College Linux CD-R I'd had sitting round on the shelf for weeks.

The installation was weird, very old fashioned. You use 'cfdisk' to partition the hard drive, which I wasn't used to although I've used 'fdisk' with BSD. With their installer all it takes is one wrong button and it goes wrong; CTRL-C during the installation sends you to the shell prompt! Also there's no package options - it seems to install everything on the CD. Even FreeBSD's installer allows you to choose what to install. But the OS works, at least - I'm using it to type this. It's based on Slackware which I've heard is a very stable system and good for development and for finding one's way around Linux.

I've had a pretty nasty cold the last few days which has meant that I haven't felt up to typing (and, by extension, blogging). Insha Allah I should feel better in a day or so.

TV Programmes on Islam

16th Feb - Channel 4 - 7.55pm
"IdeasFactory - Real - That Thing On My Head": programme about hijab

22nd Feb - BBC2 - 7.10pm
"Message In A Bottle" - about Muslim rivals to Coke and Pepsi

Religious education and "teaching atheism"

Today the Observer reveals that kids in schools are to be taught atheism, which, they say, should be welcomed, "for the move accepts a simple fact of modern life: that ours has become a secular society in which church-going is now a pastime for only a small minority". What they mean by "teaching atheism" is unclear. The beliefs generally associated with atheism - including Darwin's theory - have been taught in British schools, often as fact, for decades. Some of the established religions, like some branches of Hinduism and Buddhism, do not believe in God or else believe that the nature or existence of God is secondary to other matters, and children are already taught about other religions in many schools, even religious schools. Apparently we believers have more in common with atheists and agnostics than we like to believe, notably the rejection of idolatry. As Muslims we detest idolatry, but we hardly believe that agnostics and atheists have much more in common with us than Hindus and other idolators. We believe that Allah Most High is behind everything that happens; they believe in a multitude of forces, which is a type of polytheism in itself.

In the letters pages, we get a couple of basically anti-Muslim letters by Denis MacEoin of the Natural Medicines Society, and Marilyn Mason of the British Humanist Association. Mason complains that religious schooling risks "fragmentation of the school system along religious and racial lines and some children having very limited contact with the rest of society", and that the government's support for such schools does not square with their desire to "improve social cohesion". In fact, only a handful of such schools have been brought into the state system since Blair came to power. Muslims want Muslim schools specifically to give their children a decent moral education, with good Islamic role models. Children brought up in such schools would be more of an asset to British society than those forced through "sink schools".

MacEoin claims that the Muslim world has seen little "advance" in the field of human rights in the 150 years it has been in contact with Europe. The fact is that it has gone down in human rights terms, because in most of these countries people have neither their rights in the Shari'ah nor those people in the west take for granted. The lack of "freedom of religion" people talk about in the Muslim world affects Muslims as well as others, and there is probably no country where the government does not interfere in some way with Islamic education or where scholars and other intellectuals are not afraid of the government. At least two countries (Turkey and Tunisia) have seen open repression of Islam, with people liable to state harrassment for merely growing their beards, and any popularly-elected government wishing to remove some of the curbs on religious Muslims has to contend with the treacherous army.

MacEoin regularly gets his witterings aired in the Guardian's letters page (the Guardian and Observer are published by the same company, and feature many of the same writers). In the Guardian, 24th Dec 2003, he wrote: "The headscarf move is a sensible school uniform measure designed to stop the French school system from becoming the Northern Irish nightmare I was taught in. Multiculturalism gets you Northern Ireland: integration gives you tolerance and the rule of law for everyone". He knows full well that the situation in Northern Ireland had nothing to do with multiculturalism, but with centuries of British interference in Ireland, including the planting of the large Scottish Protestant population. How much of this dishonesty is behind the letters in the Guardian and other major newspapers I have no idea. Certainly they never mention his links to the Baha'is, for instance.

In any case, I do not see why Denis MacEoin thinks Muslims should rush to pick up the ideas put forward by their white colonial slavemasters and their "brown sahib" lackeys. We had our Englightenment 1,400 years ago. The movement referred to by this name in Europe is merely their attempt to throw off some of the superstitions and falsehoods their nations had clung to for centuries after we abandoned them.

Abu Hamza makes the front pages again

The Scum, Britain's leading red-top gutter rag, put Abu Hamza on its front two pages again for what must be the third week running. The paper has made a date of it each week, turning up at Abu Hamza's street sermons outside the Finsbury Park mosque (which was closed specifically to keep him and his gang out). Today it claimed that he "sunk to a new low ... with a sickening attack on Jews and the Queen".

The actual views expressed - that the Holocaust is exaggerated - have been common currency in the Muslim community for decades. I personally don't share these opinions - there have been no serious scholarly critiques of the Holocaust, only pseudo-scholarship by Nazi apologists like David Irving, and the fact remains that before Hitler came to power there were millions of Jews in Europe, and after he fell, there were probably less than a million. In Poland - the main area of settlement - the community has been virtually wiped out, and the figures don't support the idea that all of this was due to a mass emigration to Israel. But the Holocaust is the main justification put forward for Zionism, and so it's natural that the enemies of Zionism (such as those dispossessed by Zionists, and their fellow Arabs and fellow Muslims) should seek to discredit it.

The Scum then claimed that Abu Hamza (not "Hamza" - the name means Hamza's dad) "repeated an insult he made against Sun readers last month and branded them 'retarded'". Well, a cursory read of the paper would tell you that it is not written for people given to seriously-considered views on any political topic, and the political stories are usually placed on page 2 (as was the Abu Hamza story!) right next to the topless bimbo on page 3. He had a go at the French for banning headscarves in schools - well, why shouldn't he?

The paper then printed the opinion of Tory party chairman Liam Fox, that "the freedom of speech that we so cherish was never designed to give vent to the vile rantings of men of hatred such as Abu Hamza". Freedom of speech (which was not really enshrined in law until the Human Rights Act) protects everything which is not explicitly against the law, and questioning the facts of history has never been against the law in the UK. I am sure it was never intended to facilitate the drip-drip anti-immigrant propaganda of papers like the Daily Express either.

Someone should really point out to Abu Hamza that someone threatened with the withdrawal of his citizenship - and with that, imprisonment or deportation - is really in no position to be giving the Friday sermon given that such treatment might well cause some degree of personal resentment and anger. On the other hand, perhaps it is preferable that he is allowed to continue preaching in the street, so that he does not move on to the nearby Muslim Welfare House, with all the disruption that might cause.

Nothing much happened today :-)

Just writing to keep the blog active, really. Nothing happened which really got me going like the French headscarf thing. Went into Kingston, had a vegetarian breakfast at the Algerian cafe near the station, went to college, found that the girls I'm working with on my college project weren't there, dropped them a line, went back into town, went back into college, then back into town, then to my aunt Pauline's place, then home.

In between my college project, I'm currently writing a rebuttal of a really stupid article by Eric Raymond, who is thought of as some sort of guru by some sections in the tech community, but who produced a really stupid "Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto" after 9/11. "Idiotarianism" is something invented on the "Little Green Footballs" blog, a really dreadful conveyor belt of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate propaganda. If you try talking sense on that blog, people will say you are stupid or something. Some of their fans are even worse than the bloggers. So idiotarianism is whatever these goons disagree with. Oh, they have a contest for "Idiotarian of the Year" and John Pilger, Rachel Corrie (!) and Noam Chomsky were nominated.

I'm also using this to test out w.Bloggar, which is a free (as in beer) desktop blogging program for Windoze, which you can use to post to Blogger / Blogspot blogs. So that's what I'm trying to do. I haven't found any satisfactory blog-progs for Linux yet. Bloggar is pretty good so far.

Update five minutes (or less) later: it worked!

Thirteen Reasons to Use Firefox over Internet Explorer

Sick of those pop-up ads? Time to get a decent browser:

http://www.flexbeta.net/main/articles.php?action=show&id=32

Mozilla home page
Firefox home page

Afghanistan: Rule of the rapists

Just to prove that America intervenes on the side of the bandits when it suits them (see this blog, 4th Feb 2004):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1146134,00.html

Note: this story was written by a member of the communist "Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan". These were among the most vehement opponents of the Taliban.

Blair plays to the tabloid gallery again

http://www.guardian.co.uk/soham/story/0,14010,1146529,00.html

Report submitted on rape of Muslim women in Gujarat (BBC)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/3481745.stm

The MS Desperation Tour

While it's still the 11th, I thought I should say something about the MS "100% Inspiration" tour which I mentioned earlier in the blog. They did a lecture followed by a lab session, but the lecture was basically a sales pitch rather than a recruitment session. I don't think I'd work for Microsoft anyway unless I was really desperate, but it was disappointing. I'm not convinced that all these new frameworks they are bringing in will be of benefit to the customer rather than the programmer, once he's paid through the nose for the programming tools. For one thing, they are compiled to "byte code", which may be a cut above interpreting a script, but it's still interpreted. And the guy had a very strong accent (Scottish or perhaps Northern Irish) and talked fast, which I could understand, but a lot of the audience probably couldn't. Something they should think about when they are choosing their salesmen.

Just before I go ...

A rather amusing entry in the blog Web Pages that Suck which pretty much tallies with my attitude to drink (except for the fact that Islam forbids it, although I stopped drinking before I converted). It's entry 2-9-4 about the Law Office of Timothy J. Kucharski.

"I've tried alcohol; it tastes terrible. I have a low tolerance for stupidity and I think people are stupid when they force themselves to learn to like something that is initially disgusting. Then there's the issue of drinking to excess. Why? So you can be loud and obnoxious and act like a fool? Heck, that's easy to do when you're sober and it's cheaper and doesn't give you a hangover."

Q-News

Alhamdu lillah, The new Q-News has been announced on their website. Special feature on the French hijab issue (see below) and on the issues arising out of this year's Hajj. I'm not sure if it's in the shops yet, but you should be able to order it directly from the company.

KDE 3.2

SuSE has now got some RPMs for KDE 3.2 of its own. I installed the base packages on my system this morning, and discovered that the problem I had with the menu not displaying properly have not gone away. Anyone who has tried this without having installed a set of contrib RPMs from the KDE website, please let me know!

Hypocrisy on show once again

It appears the French Parliament will soon be passing their law banning girls from wearing headscarves to school, and Belgium and Germany are preparing to introduce similar laws. The measures appear to be different in each country; in France and Belgium they are aimed at schoolgirls, and there is talk of extending them to female hospital patients, while in Germany the targets are civil servants, which include school teachers.

What can be said about a group of people which deals with its problems by attacking schoolgirls and sick women? It appears that these laws please two groups of people: the secular (ie. anti-religious) left, and the anti-Muslim right. Once again, the hypocrisy of western conservatives comes out, as it so often does in America. Muslims agree with the conservative position on most social and moral issues, but the pseudo-conservatives still hate us. "Never will they be satisfied with you until you follow their form of religion" as God tells us about them in the Qur'an. In the case of the French right, they still bear a grudge against the Arab population for (quite rightly) kicking them out of Algeria, which they insisted was part of France.

On the other hand, much of the left supports it because they claim girls wear it because they are being forced to by their families. This is also why they support extending the law to cover hospitals, refusing to allow women to insist on being treated by a female doctor (because, they say, "[some] women only do it because their husbands insist on it"). What gives these people the right to interfere between husbands and wives, or parents and children? These very same people would be angry if we, or some nosy neighbour, started dictating how things should work in their families. Let them mind their own business! Of course, everyone else knows that it is quite normal that, when young people live under their parents' roof, they obey them. It is not that onerous to wear a headscarf, especially for someone who has worn it since they were young, and they can be rather pretty. These people cannot stomach the idea of a family doing things any way other than their way, especially if this is a more "backward" or less free-and-easy way than their own. "Open marriages", adultery, promiscuity, teenage pregnancies - all this they can tolerate, but a woman obeying her husband, or a daughter her father, is intolerable to them. To this French type of "liberal", freedom is not negotiable: people have to be "forced to be free". Of course, most women would prefer not to have a man touching their bodies, and most men feel the same way about their wives, sisters and daughters. But these people cannot fathom this, of course.

These laws are disturbing for other reasons. Some of the people behind them know that the way to provoke Muslim men is to attack their womenfolk - and yes, this is an attack on Muslim women. If these laws lead to riots, or something bigger, it would be an excuse for the French (and other countries) to crack down on Muslims even further. Second, they are conveniently framed so that the majority of French people - and their religion - are completely unaffected. Nuns and monks may wear huge crosses, but school students don't - they wear a barely-visible silver or gold crucifix on a chain. Third, some of the proposed laws shut religious Muslims (especially women) out of the civil service, effectively making them second class citizens. Clearly Europe can't tolerate a large minority population without doing this to them, and we all know what happened to the last major minority which lived in Europe. It just goes to show that the leopard doesn't change its spots, and how easily people forget history.

More on KDE 3.2

I've stopped using KDE 3.2. I found there were bugs in the build I had, and the GTK applications I was using (including Sylpheed) displayed horribly - it interfered with the font which no other window manager does with a GTK 1 application. Firebird was just as bad. I've downloaded Thunderbird and Firefox (ex Firebird) and they are working really well. I'm not sure if I'm going to replace Sylpheed with Thunderbird, however; GTK2 applications don't really display well outside of XFCE4 and GNOME.

As for KDE, it interfered with my KDM menu and I couldn't find any way of getting GNOME back into the login menu. In the end, I had to go into YaST2 and change my login manager from KDM to GDM! My advice to all the Susephiles (and other SUSE users!) out there is not to bother with the current builds of KDE 3.2, at least until SUSE produces some decent RPMs of their own (they were quite quick getting KDE 3.1 out - much faster than they were with GNOME 2.4).

Caravansaray

Just thought I'd include a plug for this site which has a lot of fine Islamic books, clothes and gifts.

More on KDE 3.2 and BSD

Got KDE 3.2 running last night, just before I went to bed (too late, as usual) just in time to hear "Westway" on the BBC World Service (this is during Radio 4's graveyard slot from 1am to 5.30am). Nice to see they've finally got round to building tabs into the Konqueror browser, but I still prefer Mozilla Firebird (or Firefox as they now call it) because the fonts are a thousand times better. Funnily enough Konq's fonts are fine on FreeBSD, but it's always a struggle getting them to work on SuSE. There are some bugs in it, such as that the K menu is cut off on the right hand side.

I completely reinstalled FreeBSD on my laptop as somehow using Windoze 2000 managed to mess up my boot manager on BSD. It's a pretty painless process although sysinstall has a few holes in it (like, you can add a user with it but not change their details or delete them). I am planning to install GRUB as I've never had any problems with that bootloader.

KDE 3.2 update

Finally got KDE 3.2 up and running! I had to de-install the KDE SuSE desktop in order to get the 3.2 base RPM to install, and in order to keep the help system I then had to install the Apache web server! Luckily that only took up 2Mb of disk space though. Getting the RPMs to install was still a nightmare and I had to do it on a --force basis, but it got done. Haven't tested it fully yet as I'm just about to go to bed. Oh, my BSD broke down again. More later insha Allah.

"Institutional Racism"

Yet another British institution is found to be institutionally racist - and this time it's the mental health system, which really shouldn't surprise anyone. See BBC report but it's all over the national British newspapers. On the same day, Rod Liddle in the Spectator (you'll need to subscribe) reports that the social services are no longer able to help children out of trouble because everything they could do would infringe their human rights.

I am lucky (alhamdu lillah) in never having been in "care" or in the mental health system. I have, however, been in the "special needs" system, and was sent to a supposedly special boarding school in Suffolk from the ages of 12 to 16 (1989-93). Rod Liddle complains that they can't stop a young girl from corresponding with a convicted sex offender in jail (!) and can't stop kids going out after 10pm. People should not be so dismissive of the concept of children's rights or quick to invade their privacy. There is a good reason not to allow loco-parentis carers to read (ie. censor) children's letters, which is to allow the children to communicate freely with outsiders about what might be going on in their school. Imagine if you wrote about something a care worker was doing, or that you had been bullied and the staff did nothing or made spurious excuses - something which happened a lot at my school. Things like these need to be reported and, if the school or care home can't sort it out, someone else has to. I remember an incident in which the headmaster walked into a lesson, dragged a boy out by his ear, yelling "Who's a nosy c**t then?".

I witnessed several incidents of racism both by pupils and staff, including the deputy head calling a boy a "fat Jewish slob" to his face. The best this man could come up with in response to a complaint about bullying from me was a racist jibe against that person. People should think more about the effects of racism, especially press racism, because it makes it more acceptable in society - and this is the result. People being victimised, and people dying. But also, stop your complaints about rights! Human rights is another way of saying you can't treat people like dirt.

Daily Express - same old garbage

As might be expected from a newspaper owned by porn baron Richard Desmond, the Daily Express once again went for the lowest common denominator in its coverage of the EU expansion issue. It was reported yesterday that politicians want restrictions placed on immigration from the new EU members in Eastern Europe (from Estonia down to Hungary) for seven years, as was the case when Spain, Portugal and Greece joined. The UK was supposedly the only country which has not imposed such restrictions (actually, France has not imposed any either, and others are allowing a few thousand a year).

In fact, there are two major differences between the UK and Germany. One is that the UK does not face the reunification issue, and the other is that the UK has not actually lost territory to Poland within living memory (pre-war German territory extended all the way to Klaipeda in Lithuania, with only one break to allow Poland access to the sea). All this is lost on the Daily Express which peddles its usual crude scaremongering about a "Gypsy horde" which might flood into the UK if no restrictions are implemented. The continual anti-immigrant diatribe issued by the Daily Express over the last couple of years is sickening, but what is more so is that the government is seriously considering changing its policies to appease a shrill gutter rag like the Express. This country needs immigrants to do jobs the English despise, like wiping their grandmothers' backsides, cleaning the streets, and shifting food up and down the country (go and take a look at New Covent Garden Market in London at 4 in the morning if you don't believe me). When the Polish government gets the money to build decent roads, one would expect that most of their workers would go back and build them.

These wretched viruses

I'm sure most of you reading this by now will have received at least one copy of this MyDoom virus. I get several of these files landing in my inbox every day, and I never know which is MyDoom and which isn't. A lot of them pretend to be from Microsoft technical support and promising upgrades, etc.

Today, in the Guardian's "Online" supplement, there's yet another feature on "MyDoom", which has spread like wildfire and forced SCO to shut its website down. Why this virus was written is not clear - most people think it was a Linux fan trying to get back at SCO, while Bruce Perens suspects that it is a plot by SCO, who he says has lied under oath in court, to discredit the open-source community as part of what he believes is a stock scam. I've heard Russia mentioned in all this, and I've got a sneaking suspicion that the author may be a speaker of an obscure language that Linux will deal with, but Windoze won't (Ukrainian for example). Also, Linux is much less expensive than Windoze and much more within the reach of the eastern European budget. But that's only a theory.

Two things stick out about this fiasco, however. One is that the practice of "opening" an attachment in an email has to change - at the moment, if you "open" a file, and that file is an executable (ie. a program), it runs it. This is, obviously, a bad idea. The other thing is that some of these viruses are just so big, and the reason has to be because of the huge executable files produced by Microsoft's compilers. A quite simple program written in Visual C++ can easily run to over 100K in a release version; GCC will put out something like 15K, which is another good reason for Microsoft to base its next OS on BSD (or even Linux) even if it uses a proprietary GUI as Apple did. A few 150K viruses will blow anyone's Hotmail or even Yahoo quota. It's these two factors alone which make these virus attacks so damaging.

Microsoft's "Inspirational Tour"

At my University (Kingston, in Surrey) Microsoft is going to be stopping on its "Inspirational Tour" next week - 11th Feb 2004! That's next Wednesday! That means we can all go along and ask them some pertinent questions.

Like:

(1) When are they going to put out a decent operating system?
(2) Given that Windoze XP has been such a disaster, how can we trust Longhorn if and when it comes out?
(3) Why don't they move over to a Unix-type operating system, as Apple has done so successfully?

Got my BSD working again ...

As it turns out it didn't mess up my whole laptop, and all I had to do was re-save my system settings and BSD works again (I haven't tried Windoze 2000 for some time). Restarting took a little longer - perhaps because of the unjournalled file-system - but it worked, ma sha Allah.

Islam and American Family Values

An interesting little site called "Ladies Against Feminism" - a call from some rather quaint-sounding ladies apparently in Oregon to give up their trousers and become housewives, among other things - has published an article by one J. Grant Swank, Jr, a lying Bush propagandist, sorry, conservative journo, and pastor in the "New Hope Church", about the appalling situation of women in Afghanistan. There is no doubting that the situation is appalling, and in fact most of his article is the work of Amnesty International. You can read the full report here.

As might be expected from this duckspeaker - and what a doubleplusgood duckspeaker he is - he fails to realise how this situation came about. In case you weren't listening in 2001, as it seems Swank wasn't (and what sort of name is Swank anyway), the USA invaded Afghanistan, which was mostly run by the tyrannical but stable Taliban regime, installed a president who is now known as the Mayor of Kabul, and the various militia groups which the Taliban got rid of. As has happened in Iraq, tyranny was replaced by lawlessness and the situation for women, in particular, got worse rather than better. But everyone was happy because people could get their TVs out and play their music again.

We all know that family values are very dear to these conservatives, but when their commitments are put to the test we find them all to be as much hot air as the US constitution itself. The latest victim of America's post-9/11 vindictive racism is Amina Silmi, a mother of three US citizens whose husband was deported to the Middle East. Apparently the US's immigration laws make absolutely no allowance for parents of citizens, even if they are children with special needs, and this lady is to be deported to Venezuela where she was born, yet has no home, job nor relatives. You can find reams of garbage written by Swank (and others like him) about Islam and how, according to them, it supports murder, terrorism and abuse of women. Those of us who know Islam properly know that it does not condone banditry - unlike Bush, who intervenes in the bandits' favour, and we also know that it enjoins us over and over again to honour our parents and other elders, and treat women and children well. The unbelievers, on the other hand, think nothing of separating a mother from her children for petty political reasons. Shame on them.

(Update 5th February: CAIR has reported that officials put a brake on the deportation as Ms Silmi was in Atlanta en route to Venezuela. So there is still hope of keeping this family together, but it speaks volumes that powerful people care nothing about breaking up families.)

Peter Bowditch and Roy Meadow

The "Millenium Project" has got to be one of the most odious little websites ever published, and this guy seems to think he's the most rational dude out there. This website (despite its occasional attacks on racism and Holocaust denial) is mostly about defending the medical establishment, or rather, defaming anyone who criticises it.

Millenium is not a spelling mistake - it's a pun on "millennium", and if you take one of the Ns out of annus (meaning year) you'll get what this guy thinks of anyone who disagrees with him. On his "anti-vaccination liars" page you'll find the anti-MMR mob, for instance. Most of these people are not against vaccinations per se, they just oppose giving little children a jab which has been linked (even if without certainty) to autism and bowel disease. People want to protect their children and who is Bowditch to call such a person an a***hole? The entirety of alternative medicine is quackery, according to him, and opposing flouridating the drinking water (which makes people ill) comes under "dentistry fraud".

Last Saturday, this moron posted an article to his front-page blog about Roy Meadow - the guy who put several women in jail in the UK and tore families apart up and down the country by standing up in court and giving false statistics about child murder. Bowditch does not mention this; he only says that he "acts as an expert witness for the prosecution in Shaken Baby Syndrome trials" and is thus a hate figure for anti-vaccination liars, who insist that the real culprit is vaccines. This is a complete load of nonsense. Roy Meadows is a hate figure because he gave false testimony which put innocent women in jail and splits apart families unnecessarily. Three women were cleared last year, two of them after spending years in jail on the grounds of Meadows' dodgy evidence (and none of them were anything to do with Shaken Baby Syndrome). Munchausen's Syndrome By Proxy may well exist, but this doesn't mean that anyone accused of it is guilty, or that it can't be used for spurious and/or malicious prosecutions by arrogant doctors and lawyers and others who, like Bowditch, apparently have nothing better to do.

KDE 3.2 got published yesterday. I stayed in late (I was meant to have a college lecture starting at 9.45am) in order to get the new SuSE RPMs downloaded. I set up a wget script, then left the computer while I went for my shower, then came back to find that it had timed out. So I revised the script, started it again, and it stalled again. Eventually I got them all downloaded. And then after I'd installed the new version of Qt, and got the RPMs I don't need out of the way (like the laptop and palm-pilot bits) I started on installing it ... and it failed, because the DSA sigs were wrong. Help!

Oh yeah, and two nights ago I installed FreeBSD (4.9) on my laptop (a Compaq Armada M700, Compaq P3, 600Mhz, 18 or so Gb hard drive), and installing it was pretty easy because I'd used YaST2 to partition the disk, so none of that messy fdisking (back up your data? What with?). I then had to use the CD burners at college to transfer the Alcatel Speedtouch drivers onto the system, but once done, it worked a treat after rebooting. KDE actually looks better on FreeBSD than on SuSE's version of Linux, because SuSE goes in for posh fonts which actually don't look all that nice. Whereas BSD keeps it simple. Got the modem connected, then left it on to get the Mozilla Firebird port, went away and had dinner, and came back to find the computer had switched itself off. This thing has two on/off switches, a blue push-button one and a black slidey one, and I've still not worked out which does which. I tried both, and neither did anything. Pressed lots of buttons and nothing happened. Then turned it on at the mains (so it had been working on battery power and not charging, perhaps that's why ...), turned the system back on, to find that ... it had messed up everything. It didn't even recognise the disk. "Non-system disk or disk error, press any key when ready". How can a crash mess up your boot record AS WELL AS your BSD system?! Linux has never done that to me. When I get the answer I'll post it here insha Allah.

This is a test