Joshix

I’m not sure about supporting in Simplish the eventual threaded comments in WordPress ≥ 2.7. The threads feature is fine enough, but so is a simple theme that doesn’t load any JavaScript.

After a week of political, um, let’s call it tone poetry, back to more pleasant business with:

A revision of the sp theme for Habari versions ≥ svn revision 2808 (aka 0.6-alpha) is available over at the testing server. This updates for newer Habari methods in date/time and has some css cleanups/organization changes.

UPDATED: An important change in 0.6.1 that I forgot to mention was the patch from Anonymous that shaved the header background image down to 1/10th its original size, leaving it just a slender 261 bytes.

“A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them…. To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of “government”; they create a desolation and call it peace.” — Calgacus, in speech to the assembled Britons, from Tacitus, The Agricola

Some words from John Prine:

“I wish you love, and happiness
I guess I wish you all the best
…
If you felt just the way I did
You’d probably walk around the block like a little kid
But kids don’t know - they can only guess
How hard it is to wish you happiness
…
Say you drive a Chevy
Say you drive a Ford
Say you drive around the town until you just get bored
Then you change your mind for something else to do
And your heart gets bored with your mind and it changes you
It’s a doggone shame
It’s an awful mess
I wish you love, I wish you happiness
I guess I wish you all the best.”

I’m excited, I’m proud of my country, I’m happy to be an American.

For President Obama, I hope simply that he’ll be a good man. That difference from our current appointed President alone will be enough to mark this as the moment we awoke from an eight-year nightmare.

For George W. Bush, no time of departure can take him from us soon enough, and there is no punishment on earth or in hell fit for his crimes. Even Jesus would never forgive what you do.

A failure to prosecute Bush and Cheney for their theft of the office, and the war crimes they committed while wrongfully installed there, will spell the repetition of those crimes. While our electoral system has swung back into relevance by choosing President Obama to tend the future, it will require the concerted effort of a restored legal apparatus to cleanse the awful past, and to punish those responsible. Making the choice to pursue this seriously, assiduously, and as fairly as the trials at Nuremberg, with, one can only hope, the same outcome, is a choice every bit as important as the one we made tonight.

Linux turned UNIX into a free alternative, something people who should probably be using Windows, or who don’t need a computer at all, turned to when Ubuntu arrived, and now I get questions about Linux like “where do I click to turn on the wireless?” and answers like “Click the system preferences menu item, then click networking, then…”

I’m not really old enough to feel this way - I’m merely idiosyncratic - but I can’t help but think that GUIfication brought very little to the practice of running UNIX systems, except taking them backwards in time to the far-less sophisticated Macintosh user interface. Once, both the documentation and the procedure were much easier to perform, and made sense, to boot:

$ modprobe wireless-driver
$ ifconfig en0 192.168.1.14 255.255.255.0
$ ...

UNIX used to be literate. Fortunately, its scion systems, even Ubuntu, can still be used in this expressive, legible way — but it’s really only the old UNIX hands doing that. New users use them — click-click — like Windows, and never get a chance to see why “old,” textual UNIX is a different, far more proven, better way, rather than just a free knockoff to ease the pain of the abuse they’ve suffered at the hands of Microsoft.

Re-implementing the Windows desktop, and competing with it for users, is a seemingly intrinsic goal of so many free software developers (looking at you Gnome, KDE). I just don’t understand it at all. How dull. What’s the point? Especially when the development is conducted with an X11 toolkit that guarantees the results will be clunky, stuttering, and weaker than the GUI on either WIndows or Mac OS X.

“The X server is the biggest program I’ve ever seen that doesn’t do anything for you.” - Ken Thompson