These are the places where I do
work,
work,
work,
work,
work,
work,
used to work,
and
do more work
(‘only remember always to call it
research’ — Tom Lehrer)
This is where I'd like to play,
when I get a life again.
I also edit the XML
FAQ, maintain some LATEX
documentation, run a few dozen mailing lists, and
hang out on Usenet (XML
and LATEX) when there's time.
Subscribe via 
My colleague Marc van
Dongen's new book, LaTeX and Friends
Slashdot, the best
tech news site.
My Samsung
Galaxy Note 4, replacing the Note 1.
Lifesaver: the WiFlyer
pocket AP with both RJ45 and phone dialer.
New edition of the TEX
Collection from TUG with the whole of CTAN and installable
systems on DVD
(contact the
office for a copy).
Software and sites: the TypesetterForum, the ClueTrain Manifesto, the Postmodern
Essay Generator and the SCIgen automatic
Computer Science paper generator, the FreeMind
mindmap diagrammer, and the Denim
website sketcher.
The Good Guys (in alpha order):
Adam,
Bitty,
Bob,
Brendan,
Bruce,
Ciarán,
Chris,
Cliff.
Donncha,
Elliotte,
Eve,
Fiona,
Heather,
Isabel,
Kaveh,
Lauren,
Livi,
LucyHK,
LucyL,
Mark,
Martin,
Martina,
Mary,
Mykel,
Norm,
Seán,
Tané,
Telsa,
TimB,
TimBL,
TimP,
TomF,
TomL,
Zotty
…
BookMooch, the free
book-exchange site.
|
|
The full scale of the disaster is beginning to become
apparent, even to former Leave voters
|
One year down, one to go. Everyone keeps hoping that the
Brits will see sense, but they dig themselves in deeper every
day. They talked a while back about an offer of £50BN as a
payment of all debts on leaving. Quite apart from the effect
on the UK — which can well afford a small sum like £50BN —
there’s the effect on their immediate neighbours (us) and the
effect on the (now) apparent majority of UK voters who would
vote to remain if there were another referendum.
There is the possibility that a second referendum will be
required anyway, to approve the details of any agreement, and
this could result in the whole thing being aborted, so fingers
crossed — provided their government doesn’t surreptitiously
change the law to negate that requirement.
But it’s not the £50BN, or the terrible waste of time and
resources in trying to negotiate the impossible, it’s the
gazillion other little things that they’ve all gotten used to
over the decades which will disappear. Thousands of little
rules and regulations exist, most of which are straightforward
and inoffensive, with which no other member state has any
problem, but which will cause significant problems for the UK
if suddenly deleted.
Businesses will be delighted, as lots of them relate to
Elf and Safety, or to product labelling, so they'll be able to
cheat the consumer and pollute the environment with even
greater ease than now. And if someone gets sick because there
was no warning on the bottle, tough: this is what going it
alone means.
Someone blogged that the whole thing only struck home when
he realised there won’t be any more British nominations for
European Capital of Culture each year, as it’s an EU
initiative.
There was recently a series on British TV about the
English Channel. One terribly sad segment featured a poor
English fisherman trying to catch enough fish to make a
living, and explaining that he voted Leave because of the EU
restrictions on what, where, and how many fish he can catch.
What he appeared to be unaware of was that the Common
Fisheries Policy is a multi-way deal: each country gets access
to the other countries’ waters on the basis of a percentage
limit on catch. Withdrawing from that would get the UK a
bigger bite of the take, but would result in huge problems of
where to sell it, because British consumers are
ultra-conservative and won’t eat three-quarters of what’s
caught because they don’t know what to do with it. Warming
seas mean some stocks have migrated out of reach, and some
restrictions predate the European Union anyway, and won’t be
affected by leaving. It was clear that British government
negotiations on quotas and access rights since the 1970s were
seriously incompetent, but this won’t change with Brexit
either. The problem for this fisherman was that in effect he
voted to leave over issues that leaving the EU won’t solve.
This type of situation crops up again and again in all kinds
of industries: the Leave lobby have only to misrepresent the
case once, and people will believe it.
Sadly, there are millions of well-meaning but gullible
people like the fisherman who believed the outright nonsense
peddled by the dinosaur press and the Leave lobbies —
including outright lies like being able to use on funding the
NHS the £500M they would save in other fields — which makes a
nonsense of any claim that this was the “will of the people”.
The people were, in fact, thoroughly duped and sold a pup, and
are just discovering that it was indeed not just for
Christmas. There are now rumours that the Canadian outfit
hired by the Leavers to diddle the population may have done so
with the help of data from Facebook via Cambridge Analytica.
There will of course be flat denials, but as with Trump’s
campaign, they learned early on that if you can foist some
plausible lies on the majority for long enough to get the
vote, it doesn’t actually matter if people find out later,
because “later” will be too late to change it.
What Brexiteers seem to want — and what they’ll likely
get — is a Britain something like it was in the late 1950s.
Deeply impoverished (by war in those days; by Brexit now),
grey, boring, tedious, repressive, architecturally barbarous,
socially unimaginative, and politically separatist; struggling
to mend-and-make-do while keeping a stiff upper lip, and
generally pursuing a cultural, social, artistic, educational,
and business path diametrically opposed to the rest of the
world. A country with “No Blacks, No Irish, No Marrieds” signs
on the B&Bs in pursuit of their “little Engländer” viewpoint;
the absence of any understanding of the importance of
internationally-accepted norms or standards; a kind of vague,
helpless sentimentality for steam trains, valve radios,
seaside family holidays on chilly beaches with the Ovaltineys;
District Nurses on bicycles, nice well-behaved middle-class
kids from grammar schools with neatly-pressed uniforms,
reading Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome; the poor, sick, and
destitute kept well out of sight in horribly under-funded NHS
institutions reeking of disinfectant; Shell Guides and
dog-eared travel books with beautiful Brian Cook illustrations
on the cover; Mums in aprons and Dads who smoke pipes; pubs
calling time at 10.00pm and closing mid-afternoon serving warm
beer and warm cocktails; prawn cocktails and spaghetti
Bolognaise as the daring alternative to “plain” cooking;
black-and-white TV quiz shows where the contestant bets that
he can identify different types of 1900s lawnmowers by the
sound their wheels make; and fantastically detailed Ordnance
Survey maps of the pre-motorway road system in the glove
compartment of your unreliable and primitive British-made
car.
Having spent the first decade of my life in that
environment before emerging chrysalis-like into the 60s and
70s, I can’t understand why anyone would want to return to it
except in a time machine for the purposes of socio-historical
research. In John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (the deluge of civilisation by undersea
aliens), the narrator recalls hearing foreign radio describe
”l’écroulement de l’Angleterre”, which he thinks has a
horribly final sound. The Brexiteers proclaim a Brave New
World to retake control of their own destiny — which they
never lost anyway — unaware that time has been called on that
particular meme and that trying to turn back the clock is a
delusion with frightening consequences.
Monday 2018-04-09 21:50:02 
|
Crawling out from under the bushes |
Having very nearly given up on the XPS 15 as simply too
hardware-dependent for meaningful installation of Linux, I had
one last try at building Enlightenment from source.
Downloading and compiling EFL (the core libraries) isn’t a
problem, but I’m still running Bodhi (because it’s the only
system which installs on the XPS 15), which uses its own
(ancient) kludged version of Enlightenment as the sole default
environment. This means that even if you manage to compile
both EFL and E, installing them in a usable manner is
virtually impossible. It’s not like adding a new
window manager: this is replacement of the WM. It
would mean ripping out Moksha (their private version of E)
and the default EFL libraries and
all their dependencies without breaking the
operation of the whole system.
That turned out to be unfeasible in any reasonable
timescale, so I went back to review what Mint was offering in
the way of video drivers (people were constantly saying that
the boot failure is a video driver problem — except that the
boot failure I was seeing occurred much earlier in the boot
process). I had already tried the Maté (lighter) version of
Mint 18.2, which got so close but failed to reboot after
installation. This time I found 18.3 was out, so I decided to
try the heavyweight Cinnamon version.
Astonishingly, it worked. I was so shocked I even posted
about it on the forums:
-
Don’t use unetbootin to create a Mint USB, use dd
instead. Apparently unetbootin does something odd with
Mint while writing the USB.
-
Install Cinnamon, not Maté. It appears that Cinnamon
requires higher-spec hardware, so it checks for it, and
therefore finds problems Maté misses.
The result of this is that the USB booted correctly, but
displayed a warning that it was running without hardware
support. This did not appear on any of my previous attempts,
which is why I am deducing that it is checking something not
previously checked for.
It installed to the SSD without error (earlier attempts
installed, but issued a warning that it was unable to set up
the repos for the CD correctly (!), and then failed to create
a boot partition and install Grub. That in itself probably
didn’t matter (just looked embarrassing) but I noticed that it
did install Grub explicitly and do a grub-update; again this
was either missing from previous installs, or wasn’t being
flagged.
Rebooting then worked: previously the system hung on
shutdown and needed the power button. Now it starts up
correctly, and appears all to be in running order.
I don’t know if this was some minor update from 18.2 to
18.3 just happened to fix the specific error that the XPS 15
was creating, but if so, my grateful thanks to whoever on the
dev team did it.
So now we have a working system: the only thing failing is
the shutdown. So now’s the time to install Enlightenment…
Saturday 2017-11-16 21-20-13 
|
No, not a rant (thank goddess, sez you) but it’s time
to face the facts
|
Having originally wiped Dell’s preinstalled Windows off
the new XPS 15 lapdog in order to install Linux, I decided
that perhaps a corporate image might be useful, on the rare
(once-a-decade) occasions that I actually need to boot Windows
for something.
In fact when I do this, it’s a royal PITA because not only
does Windows invariably need a dozen updates, all Rabbit’s
friends and relations chime in with ‘XYZ needs an update
too’ (you know who you are, and you can wipe that look
offa your face, Adobe). Why Windows chose the intrusive path
is anyone’s guess, when Linux silently updates in the
background, no trouble to anyone except on the odd occasion
that it’s a kernel update needing a restart.
Burranyway, I sent the XPS 15 to be inscribed with love
and kisses from Redmond, and back it came the other day,
presumably in working order, but as I didn’t have a clue how
to get into it, I resolved to try again with single-boot
Linux, and if that works, to send it back for a refreshed
Windows 10 and I’d bite the bullet and re-re-install whatever
Linux solution worked afterwards.
(I did actually try to log into it, but it wouldn’t
connect to the wireless, and when I gave it a live Ethernet
cable to chew on, it refused to recognise that too. As it
couldn’t then join any domain, it wasn’t worth the effort
pursuing the attempt.)
So finally, I got to re-try Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu,
Arch, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Mini, Mint, and Bodhi. The Ubuntu
flavours were useless: same problem as in the original
attempt, except that this time it wouldn’t even boot
the on-USB test copy: when it got to that fatal third dot, it
just hung there. When trying the Server and Mini versions,
however (which are text-mode installers, not graphical) the
laptop refused to recognise its own plug-in Ethernet
connector, so without a path to the outside world, the
installers couldn’t do anything. What they did reveal,
however, was that the underlying error of hanging
is apparently attributable to a bug in the
kernel, failing to recover gracefully from a wrong diagnosis
of a failed 8th processor.
Onwards and upwards: both Mint and Bodhi booted their
demos just fine. I hadn't looked at Mint before: it's very
nice, so I installed it, and when it came to reboot from the
hard disk (well, SSD), it stopped ead with a blinking cursor
in the top left-hand corner. This normally means ‘no OS’,
so it had clearly fouled up the whole-disk encrption (no trace
of that) and lewft an unbootable machine.
Finally, booted Bodhi from USB and it worked
(Enlightenment, of course, although they call it something
else). I tried to install gparted while still in
demo mode, because I wanted to see what damage, if any, the
failed Mint installation had done. But apt
refused, saying it was already in use. WTF? Yes,
ps showed a task trying to update the nVidia
driver, FFS. The very thing that had caused the touchpad
oversensitivity last
time! No indication of why it was just sitting there,
so I killed it, and then copied and pasted the failed command
into the terminal, and it worked.
Enthused by such eagerness, I went ahead with the
install — and it passed the third dot with flying colours. Not
only that, but it installed Bodhi, and it was able to reboot
successfully (although on power-down it hangs with the same
chip bug as before). But Emacs installed and
worked: no sign of the weird Elisp timer error that had
plagued me for a week with Ubuntu.
Next up: more testing, then if Bodhi (or even Mint) can do
the same with a full-disk encryption, I might consider allowing
Windows back onto the disk and trying for a dual boot.
Thursday 2017-11-22 16-35-00 
|
Sometimes you just need a little patience |
Having fired off a huge screed of stuff to the wonderful
people on the Ubuntu support list, and having taken Ralf
Mardorf’s advice to Google first, even for things I don’t
believe anyone would ever have encountered, I started reading
more deeply.
Ramón Casero has a page on dual-booting an XPS 15 with
Windows and Ubuntu (which I’m not doing) which has some useful
advice, firstly to switch to the latest nVidia driver, and
second to fix the touchpad oversensitivity by switching from
the Synaptics driver to libinput (Juan Hernández’
suggestion).
Both of these worked: I haven’t noticed any particular
improvement in the screen, but the touchpad jumping all over
the place has certainly got much better.
So when I rebooted, it went into full graphical mode and
this time it completed the boot successfully instead of
hanging after entering the disk crypt. Weird but wonderful — I
wonder how long this will persist?
Thursday 2017-11-09 22-25-00 
|
A boot routine — of all routines — should be the most
stable
|
This ain’t good. I powered up the new laptop and typed the
encryption key as prompted, but I noticed I made a mistake in
typing. No problem, it asked me for it again, so I did it
right and it started turning the white dots red under the
Ubuntu logo…and then hung on the third dot. The message
underneath said:
cryptsetup: nvme0n1p5_crypt set up successfully
I powered off and restarted, and picked Advanced Options
for Ubuntu from the Grub menu, and selected 4.10.0-38-generic
(recovery mode). This boots in text mode and asks for the disk
to be unlocked. I give the crypt key and it unlocks OK. I ran
Update grub bootloader from the menu, and fsck’d the file
systems, and then went for resume and got the normal login
prompt. Everything seems to be working, except…
…when I log out and power off, then restart, I get the
same problem: the Ubuntu logo and little red dots hang in the
same place.
I have no idea what it is doing while it is cycling the
red and white dots, so I don’t know if the problem is the logo
itself or something executing in the background (grub?). But I
know some people who do.
At least it does boot…after a fashion, and in normal
operation appears undamaged. But I think the next step might
be to revert to Xubuntu for 17.10.
Monday 2017-11-06 22-35-00 
|
Yes, it was right there on the screen and I didn't see
it.
|
Probably general age and debility. Last time I built
Enlightenment I used a build script, and I had completely
forgotten that.
Explanation: my preferred window manager is Enlightenment,
as it runs light, provides pretty much everything I need, and
doesn't make decisions on my behalf about what I want where.
Plus it looks vaguely Mac-like, which I find more usable than
those interfaces which look vaguely Windows-like.
For the last few years, I have been using a script from
https://www.enlightenment.org/docs/distros/debian-start
which has worked excellently. I recently noticed that the
equivalent page for Ubuntu was updated at https://www.enlightenment.org/docs/distros/ubuntu-start,
so I used that, forgetting about the script, although it did
mention one.
Everything went fine, except that Enlightenment didn't
appear after reboot as one of the options. Thanks to Eric from
the enlightenment-users mailing list, however, I got it
running — he pointed me at the location of the .desktop file,
which had been sitting there all the time.
I'm hoping something similar will emerge from my puzzle
about Emacs playing sillybuggers with the timer. I hope it's
not a little hardware present from Dell.
‘[V]erging on decrepitude and imbecility’, as Landor
said in one of his final letters. Well, maybe not quite that
bad yet.
Monday 2017-11-06 08-45-00 
|
Update your OS before something worse comes
along
|
No, not that time of year when the British burn the image
of a perfectly well-meaning Catholic who felt that history
would be better served if he blew up their Houses of
Parliament with everyone inside. He was probably right,
anyway: they can’t have been any worse than the current shower
of self-deluded sycophants and time-servers in
Westminster.
Yes, it is Novermber 5th, and yes, I’m sure the fireworks
are very pretty, but there are other, more important,
imperatives driving my computers: upgrades to the operating
system. I settled on Ubuntu desktop and server many years ago,
and I think it was the right decision: sufficiently up-to-date
to run the software in versions that I need (unlike Red Hat
and its clones, which are now so far out of date as to have
become a joke in the industry); but sufficiently widely-used
that there are plenty of good and generous people out there
who can help if there are the occasional rough spots — and
sufficiently well-curated that those rough spots are very few
and far between.
What triggered the current upgrade was the need to find
something usable to put on an old Dell 32-bit laptop to keep
it running. It’s an old but extremely solid machine, very nice
hi-res widescreen, plenty of disk space but limited processor
and memory capacity. To heavy to schlepp to meetings much now
(although I did bring it to XMLSS this
year), as my phone plus BT keyboard does pretty much
everything I need while travelling, and certainly so where the
USA is concerned, where I never bring a
laptop.
But it’s still a 32-bit system, and Ubuntu discontinued
32-bit support with 17.04 (Zesty). The problem was that the
laptop was running 14.04 (Trusty) when this was announced, so
I knew that the last-ever upgrade would be on the way — to
16.04 (Xenial), as it happened (there was no v.15). The hunt
for a supported 32-bit system was on.
After reading through the half-dozen ‘Ten Best Low-Powered
Linux Systems’ articles and taking advice from friends, I
lighted upon N Linux, which seemed to cater for about the
right point of balance between usability and availability. It
installed fine, and it’s basically perfectly usable — except
that the repos are over a year out of date (only TEXLive
2015, for example), despite being Debian-based. It’ll do for
the moment until comes up for cyclical replacement, and then
I’ll probably sacrifice speed for support and install Ubuntu
16.04 and leave it as the emergency machine.
In the meantime there’s a Dell XPS 15 to be provisioned.
This is the big brother of the XPS 13, on which linux can be
had preinstalled. No such luck with the 15, however: Dell
don’t cater for the top-end developer, so you have to do it
yourself. I did try to ‘continue’ with Windows
installation, but it wanted driver updates, and it accepted a
long passphrase and then refused to honour it afterwards, so I
did a full wipe and encrypt with Ubuntu 17.10.
At least, that was the intention, but on boot, the 17.10
startup ticker (or spinner, or whatever the widget is called
that displays five white dots and slowly changes then to red
dots and back again) hung on the fifth dot and wouldn’t go any
further. So for the moment it’s 17.04, which installed
immediately without complaint, and I can then experiment with
upgrading to 17.10 once I’ve finished logging the installation
of the user software needed.
That has thrown up only one problem, but rather a weird
one, which I have queried on the Emacs
StackExchange until I can get together enough
material to report it. Basically, Emacs started and
immediately threw the error Error running timer
'blink-cursor-start': (wrong-type-argument listp 0.5)
and refused to handle any keyboard input (giving more
wrong-type-argument errors). On of the Mods (Dan) suggested
the -Q argument as a workaround, which removes
the error by bypassing all startup files. This needs to be
tracked and fixed: Emacs is a core application for text
editing for both XML and LATEX, and this kind of error is a
show-stopper, either for the hardware or the software,
whichever it turns out to be. Everything else looks
fine.
The XPS 15 is a nice piece of hardware. The trackpad is
way too sensitive, though (maybe it’s better in Windows).
There’s a port-extender which provides an RJ45 socket when you
need better transfer speed than wifi, and the suspend-resume
mechanism seems to work in Linux. I haven’t tried the audio or
video yet — that’s for the next installment, before something
worse comes along.
Sunday 2017-11-05 16-00-00 
|
Your quality of service depends on the quality of your
data just as much as on the quality of everything
else
|
We’re constantly being told that organisations “must go
digital” or die, and experts like @damienmulley
run courses to get you started or bring you up to date. Which
is all very well, but there’s little point in tweeting or
facebooking your organisation’s finer points if your services
fall over because your data doesn’t flow.
Right now, one organisation I am involved with is in the
middle of a web site revamp, so the developers are looking for
things like pages which are supposed to be under revision but
aren’t (yet), and for the page sources to index for a new
search system.
This weirdly requires JSON, not HTML, probably for the
convenience of the indexing engine rather than the convenience
of the customer (always a bad idea). Not that there’s any
problem in generating it: anyone equipped with
wget, tidy, and
lxprintf can rattle out document metadata and
normalized text, which is all they apparently want for
indexing. As all inline markup gets dropped, there won’t be
any faceting except by source directory, so it will at least
be able to distinguish pages about training courses from those
about supply contracts; but like Google and others, it won’t
otherwise have sufficient context to tell a cookbook from a
novel or a product brochure from a password reset page.
Ironically, the organisation’s data is actually fairly
good in web pages: it’s in areas like corporate administration
that it falls down. For historical reasons, custody of the
email address list is handled by a different office from the
one which handles custody of the internal phonebook data, and
ne’er the twain shall meet. This means a search for the person
you want to contact requires two separate and
unconnected searches, and returns two separate
and unconnected results, one from the email list and one from
the phone list. It’s inefficient and unnecessary, and JSON
ain’t gonna fix this kind of problem.
Americans tend to have this touching faith in the
efficiency of corporations. You come across it most often in
discussions of government and state-run enterprises, where
they really do believe quite religiously, hand-on-heart style,
that everything would be sooooo much better if it was handed
over to private enterprise. Their reasoning is that private
enterprise is motivated by profit, so if something doesn’t
work, it will cause a loss, and so will get fixed quickly.
It’s become an article of their faith in capitalism, and it
skews their judgment heavily, and sometimes
disastrously.
Quite where they get this view from is a mystery, but like
all myths, once promulagted, it’s impossible to stop the
uncritical believing it. Both state and private organisations
are equally bad at data governance, in my experience, although
probably in different ways. I have dealt with government
offices who seem to be living in the late 1800s, and not only
have no clue what they should be doing, but don’t have the
data to do it with anyway. I have also dealt with government
offices who do a spectacularly brilliant job, clearly
understanding what they are at, and having all the information
right where it’s needed. The UK’s Opening Up Government
project is a good example of How To Do It Right (OK, I’m
biased, I know several of the people working there, because
they’re in the same field as me, but nevertheless).
In businesses, there are those who likewise have a
seamless flow of information, and you can visit their web site
and order their goods or services, and it all works fluidly,
with everything in its place. I ordered a micro-USB OTG
charger hub the other night, and I was done in a few clicks,
and it arrived today. There are also those who quite
clearly have no clue what they are doing. You order goods and
the form either asks for information you cannot possibly have,
or fails to ask for something which you know they will need.
They then don’t pass all your address to the shippers, who in
turn claim that your address doesn’t exist, so delivery
fails. I’m still waiting for an item I ordered back at the
start of the summer, and it’s now October. I think it will
eventually arrive, but ‘clueless’ doesn’t even begin to
describe the company. JSON won’t fix their problems any more
than XML will.
Another favourite trick is from suppliers to my local
university, who take purchase orders from many departments,
but for shipping labels they just pop up the name of the
university and pick the top address from the list. So your box
of four borosilicate 500ml lab retorts gets delivered to the
project office for humanities research in a different building
the other end of campus, while their order for a dozen 1TB
hard drives gets sent to the zoologists at the wildlife park
12Km away, because theirs was the most recent address used,
and the individual in charge of packing labels either can’t be
bothered to get it right, or doesn’t realise there is a
difference. Some of this is human, but most of it is simply
bad data in the wrong place. JSON won’t solve this problem
either.
Programmers tend to love JSON and hate XML, usually for
the wrong reasons. Neither format will solve the problems of
bad or missing data, only expose the data for what it is.
Programmers are used to dealing with two-dimensional data:
database tables, row-and-column spreadsheets, and CSV files.
Go deeper, and you use relational algebra to handle
n-to-m joins, but the data is still
rectangular. Both JSON and XML can handle this with ease, and
it’s not important which one you use. Text document markup
with mixed content (think HTML) is messier: stuff is perhaps
present, but there again, maybe it’s not; raw text is
intermingled with more elements, sometimes nested arbitrarily
deep. Yes, there’s life in the tree, but not as we know it,
Jim. JSON may possibly be able to represent this, but not
meaningfully, and all statements to the effect that this is
human-readable are from now on inoperative. There’s a
fascinating thread over on xml-dev
about the pros and cons of JSON vs XML but it’s
clear that the message about using the appropriate format for
the task has yet to penetrate the murkier recesses of
corporate development. And if the data simply isn’t there, or
is in the wrong place, neither format will do anything to
help.
Friday 2017-10-06 09-55-02 
|
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
repeat it
|
The human race has probably been down this particular
slope in one form or another many dozens or hundreds of times.
Just in case anyone has missed it, the politics of western
civilisation in parts of Europe and north America have taken a
hit from the disgruntled, disenfranchised, dispossessed,
disregarded, and disconnected (perm any three from five). It
shows up in the UK as a vote to leave the EU, in the USA as a
vote for the so-called President Trump, and in France as a
vote to return to fascism with Marine Le Pen.
Depending on your stance, of course. In the UK, it was
dressed up as a vote to get rid of Johnny Foreigner, which
appealed to the latent xenophobes. Or as a claim to return
British sovereignty, which boils down to a dislike of EU law.
In the USA, the xenophobic card carries a different weight,
but was just as useful, as was the dislike of Federal law. In
France, it’s the same as in the UK (one of the hallmarks of
Franco-British relations over the last 300 years has been that
the reason they dislike each other so much is that they’re so
alike).
But if you remove the layers of humbug and snake-oil which
Trump, Farage, Le Pen, and others used to mask the smell of
outright lies, what’s underneath is a large part of the
population who used to be able to afford a reasonable standard
of living, no longer being able to do that; and a very small
part of the population who have made (or are making)
stunningly large sums of money from morally repulsive
activities.
In Len Deighton's spy novel Horse under Water
(the title refers to cocaine retrieved by a diver), the
pro-Nazi baddie reminds the spy to bring a message to his
government: ‘Don’t destroy the middle classes!’ Neglect
of this simple mantra lies at the core of the current set of
defections from decency. It's not important that ‘middle
class’ in the USA means something slightly different from
‘middle class’ in the UK, nor that in many cases the
phrase in fact better describes the rural poor or the urban
working class rather than the newly-dispossessed white-collar
classes. What’s significant is that it’s a lot of people who
are very pissed-off at being forgotten about, while the
politicians and those able to take advantage of them are
treated as if they were important.
It’s unclear if the US Democrats have even begun to
realise that their perpetual underhand dealings, from the
rigging of laws to the use of political correctness to mask
Federal expansion, actually upset a lot of people who then
didn’t vote for them — or indeed for anybody. Nor has the
equivalent thought occurred to the UK Conservative or Labour
parties (with, apparently, the exception of Jeremy Corbyn,
apparently the only MP left with any shred of decency). And you
may be sure than when Marine Le Pen wins in France, it will be
for the same reasons, and her competitors will have missed
that particular cluetrain as well.
So what of our own locally-trained collection of gobshites
and jackasses in Ireland? Again and again they and their
appointed minions attempt to circumvent normal standards of
behaviour in order to preserve the continued employment of
their venal, criminal, or incompetent colleagues or
subordinates. They then attempt to cover up their misdoings,
and inevitably botch the job (remember, I said
‘incompetent’), so the Press gets hold of it, it all gets
officially denied, often via a ludicrously expensive Enquiry,
the miscreants are free to return to their troughs, and the
people originally affected are left by the wayside.
So why do those who remember the last time allow it all to
happen again? The answer seems to be selective memory. Those
who remember are not in positions of power; those who are,
don’t remember. The reasons could be chemical, genetic,
sociological, or David Icke’s 9' green space lizards — we
don’t know. We do know how to fix it, though: as
we don’t do wholesale slaughter of the ruling class any more,
we have to use a vote. So it comes back to politics again: if
what has happened in the last year offends or upsets you, as
it does me, remember that enough people voted for it to make
it happen.
Friday 2017-02-10 13-27-42 
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Online technical books need constant curation |
OK, so it’s been a year since I put finger to keyboard on
this. Mea culpa. Trying to reconstruct a life
after so long with my head below the parapet took over 12
months, far longer than I anticipated.
Anyway, back to business. Kindles suck. Yes, they were
among the first; yes they look pretty; yes, if all you want to
do is read a novel (or any continuous text), they work pretty
well. If you write tech doc, they suck.
First, there’s the binary file format. It used to be Mobi,
now it’s KF8, and it’s not unmanageable, but the EPUB3 zip is
way easier to handle, leaving aside the DRM (Digital
Restrictions Management), which I’m not involved in.
Next, the HTML. It’s like writing for a late 1990s browser written
by a student on acid. Not just that the devs never read the
spec (hey, the Mosaic devs never read ISO 8879 either), but
that they picked and chose what to support as if they weren’t
going to have time for all of it. Like there’s soooo much in
HTML?
Then there’s CSS. Version 1 by the look of it.
Bold, italic, maybe both. Spacing? A little. Selectors? A
class if you’re lucky. Size? Within limits. Yes, we know the
syntax sucks, and it would have been so much easier to do it
like Panorama, but browsers didn’t parse HTML properly either,
so why expect Amazon to do so?
Gripe over: not my circus, not my clowns. Calibre does a
reasonable job of transforming my EPUB3 code into a MOBI, and
the file size is acceptable. Kindlegen does a slightly
smoother job, on first appearances, but then drops the ball
with a splatt on monospace blocks of code, links, font
changes, embedded images, and — worst of all if you’re
writing about LATEX —
no control over raising and lowering, nor on tighter kerning.
I suppose that’s a step too far for a system that can’t even
hyphenate properly.
So LaTeX it will have to be for Kindle folks (including my
emulator on the Note). Mac users, of course, have jam on it
with the Apple eBook Reader, and even the otherwise fairly
crummy selection for Android manage to represent most of the
content. Now if there was just a version of the Calibre Reader
for Android, I could toss the Kindle in with the cipíní and
watch it burn.
Sunday 2016-04-03 22-15-20 
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