La Salle Debain

Morgen das Sonnensystem!

In the spirit of magnanimity, here's some leftist poo-flinging. Though I was in the area at noon and there was only one forlorn protestor there. I guess now the economy is improving the protestors all have jobs or something.

Apparently noted LKML loon Jeff Merkely has found a new field to make dumb statements in according to something I read on Aneesh Kumars' blog. Jeff said:

> Interesting trivia. Krishna in hindi means "all attractive". The Greeks
> took the word and over time it was corrupted into the word "Christ" which was
> later used for Jesus of Nazereth. I lot of people probably don't know his
> last name actually came from the Vedic culture.

Uh no. Krishna isn't Hindi it is Sanskrit and means "black" or "dark." (Referring to His skin color.) Christos is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word Moshiach meaning "Anointed one". There is no etymological relationship between the two whatsoever. Perhaps a minor thing, but it drives me up the wall.

This year Linuxworld is moving from New York to Boston. If you are local to the Boston area and you would like to help out at the booth, let me know and join the debian-events-na@lists.debian.org mailing list.

If you would like to help maintain the Debian webmin and usermin packages which I orphaned a couple of month ago, get an account on alioth and let me know so I can add you to the pkg-webmin project. You don't have to be a developer but a good knowledge of perl will help as that is what this software is written in. A mailing list has also been set up for coordinating maintenence.

...and a web page.

Our little boy is to be called नीलग्रीव (Nilagriva. By the way if you couldn't read the characters to the left, install the ttf-indic-fonts package .) Actually strictly speaking, in Sanskrit it should be नीलग्रीवा But the long vowel makes it sound like a girls name so we'll just say it is in the vocative case or something. The formal naming is tonight.

I've discovered I can sleep standing up.

Birthdate and time: 10:07pm EST, November 13, 2004

Height: 19.5 inches

Weight: 5 lbs 9 oz.

Rashi: Vrshchika

Nakshatra: Vishakha

Both mother and baby are doing fine. We still need to pick a name though.

Today is Diwali and tomorrow is the first day of Vikram Samvat 2061 (Durmukha naama samvatsara) Best wishes to all my readers and their loved ones and here's hoping you stay happy and prosperous (and free!) in the coming year.

For those keeping track of the baby situation, the doctors had managed to persuade him to stay put for a while but now he's making another break for it. We're going to the hospital now. Lets see what happens...

Update: It looks like tomorrow will be the day.

I am embarrassed to say I actually ended up not voting. I have a good excuse though, my wife had to be rushed to the hospital as it seems our son may be born prematurely. Had I voted, I would have cast my ballot for George W. Bush. (Not that it would have mattered too much in heavily Democratic Hudson County, NJ.) As I write this, it the majority of my countrymen have also picked Bush who will remain president.

Not that GWB is someone I'm necessarily jumping up and down for. In fact from a conservative point of view there are plenty of reasons to be appalled by his track record. for instance the unprecedented increase in the national debt, the expansion of the federal government, our inept handling of the liberation of Iraq which should have been a cakewalk. Although I've tended to vote Republican since I became a citizen, I genuinely considered a switch this time.

And at first the Democrats didn't disappoint. Any candidates displaying any incipient signs of progressivism (Kucinich, Dean) were swiftly shown the door. I would have preferred Lieberman myself. He would have also appealed to the Evangelical Christians who are the Republican core (the most philo-semitic and pro-Israel constituency in US politics.) However today, ant-semitic views are most likely to be found amongst the hardcore left, Blacks and Hispanics -- core Democratic supporters so that wasn't going to fly. I was as surprised as anyone when Kerry got the nomination mostly by hiding in a corner while the others destroyed each other.

That was a winning strategy for the primaries but people want a president who stands for something. To some people what Bush stands for might be scary but at least you know he means it. Why is there always such a cloud over Kerrys opinions? It is a function I think of the state of the Democratic party since the sixties. They stand for nothing. They are just a loose conglomeration of whiny special interests that have nothing in common beyond disliking Republicans. Kerry couldn't have taken a stand on anything even if he wanted to without annoying one faction or the other. If the Kerry of the debates had shown up three months earlier, he may still have had a chance instead he just couldn't shake the flip-flopper label.

The other major factor turning voters off Kerry was his supporters. Bush will not go down in history as the greatest president but the attacks on him reached frightening levels of hysteria. From the Goebels-like manipulation of Michael Moore (apparently currently being channelled by Osama bin Laden,) the blatant partisanship of the media to the shrill shrieking of the newly-minted political experts of the Film Actors Guild Bush was turned into Evil incarnate. If "the people" were so fed up with GW, why did their "grassroots" movement have to financed by an international billionaire financier? Voters were savvy enough to realize that the opposition were every bit a part of the oligarchy they claimed to be rebelling against.

Aging flower children were also out in full force. Iraq was to be the new Vietnam. The spectre of a draft was raised. (never mind that itwas Kerrys' plan that was more likely to require a draft.) The tired old tropes of class warfare were trotted out one more time. They even dug up the corpse of Joan Baez at one point. For those of us who have only experienced the sixties on MP3, it was not impressive.

Despite P. Diddys direst threats, the vote did not get rocked. Young people love liberal comedians for the zingers the throw at President Bush (who lets face it is particularly zinger-friendly) but inadvertently this has caused them to think of politics as just another entertainment spectacle. This election shows that rumors...(pause)...on the inner'nets are a piss-poor match for old-fashioned and boring organization.

All this means Americans have by resounding margins put their trust in George W. Bush. Both houses of congress have also increased their Republican majorities. Any illusions liberals may have that they represent America may be considered crushed.

Predictably though the libs will start wringing their hands over why the "sheeple" have let them down once again. Good old reliable Adam Kessel has already blogged about how Bush may have stolen the election . If that's the kind of thing that will tide you over for the four years until President Giuliani is elected, knock yourself out. You might try a new tactic: personal responsibilityand respect for your country and its people. Ironically Bush would have been vulnerable on that front but the American left in its present condition can never make it stick.

Is November. participants have 30 days to write a novel atleast 50,000 words long. I'm going to try it. My novel is a science fiction story provisionally titled "Man's Best Friend." A time traveller arrives in the distant future where men and dogs are basically the only species left. Humanity has evolved to incredible levels of intelligence but a side effect is a total inability to concentrate. Meanwhile dogs' empathy has evolved to a kind of telepathy. Being more practical, they rule society but due to the lack of opposable thumbs are forced to keep the humans around. Then something happens (I guess I should think about this quick!) to upset the balance of power and only the man from the past can save the day.

Ubuntu Linux 4.10 was released yesterday. I installed it and have been playing around with it. The most notable thing about it from my point of view is that as it contains GNOME 2.8, it has good support for Gujarati (thanks to the Utkarsh team.)

As you can see it is not perfect. Some parts are still not translated.and if you look at FireFox, it is mangling jodaksharas pretty badly. This is an upstream problem so I don't blame Ubuntu for it.

Overall I'm impressed with Ubuntu, so much so that I'm considering "sidegrading" my laptop which runs sarge to it. Though The stumbling block is I prefer KDE to GNOME. So I will have to investigate how good KDE support is first.

Why would a Debian developer prefer a derivative over Debian itself? The current Debian release process is utterly dysfunctional and the project has too much inertia to fix it (even if there was a will to do so which there isn't.) It remains to be seen if Ubuntu can actually follow through on its promise to make timely releases but if it can, those of us who don't think of operating systems as ends in themselves will find it most welcome.

The last book of Neal Stephensons "Baroque
Cycle" trilogy entitled "The System of the World" is coming out soon and I realized I hadn't read the second book yet despite having enjoyed the first volume "Quicksilver" immensely. So last week I borrowed "The onfusion" from the New York Public Library. Although it's been out for a while for some reason this book was still on the one week book express shelf. And weighing in at 800 pages, that's a lot to read in one week. I managed it but I really will have to read it again sometime as I'm sure I missed some bits.The plot is as densely packed as in Quicksilver.

I'm going to try not to spoil the plot for those who haven't read it yet but I must mention "Half-cocked" Jack Shaftoe, who at the end of Quicksilver was raving mad from syphilis and bound for North Africa as a galley slave, turns up sane in Algiers. (The pox having been purged from him by the desert sun.) He and some of his fellow slaves concoct a daring escape plan which eventually takes them around the world with many ups and downs along the way.

In 1693, one of the places Jack ends up in is Gujarat brought there by one of his companions named Surendranath. That detail rang a little hollow as Surendranath is not a typical Gujarati Vania name. We find him in Ahmedabad which Stephenson notes was also named by some Guerdabad -- the place of dust. Today it is one of the most polluted cities in India. He is a living insect trap at an hospital run by Brahmanas for the relief of sick animals. There's another mistake. Those hospitals (They still exist.) are run by Jains.

He travels to Div which was then a Portugese colony passing en route through my ancestral land of Kathiawad. (Stephenson spells it Kathiawar. Actually in Gujarati it is a retroflex sound somewhat like saying r and d together with a little l mixed in.) This period, the last days of the Mughal empire, were something of a golden age for the area. Trade with European outposts (Div and Daman were Portugese. Surat which was a bit further away was English.) was making a lot of people rich and there was peace and plenty in the land.

All this would change a generation later when the Mahrattas would begin dismantling the Mughal empire and setting up their own which alas failed to achieve an equivalent amount of stability. It was that time when the founder of my family Kai. Shri Jagannath Vyas was staying in the house of a minor chief on his way back from performing some religious ceremony and was murdered for the gold he was carrying. Eventually it got so bad that the British East India Company which hitherto was only interested in making money behind the scenes began taking over the functions of government thereby beginning the British Raj. Though interestingly Kathiawad was never officially part of British India. Up until 1947, it was in the hands of some 202 local kings (well that's a kind way to call them. The Gujarati term rajvi or "princeling" more accurately describes the situation.) Of course there were British "advisors" at each court to ensure they didn't get out of line but atleast nominally they were independent. Of course there is a lot more to the book than this. Stephenson again provides many fascinating glimpses into the trends that began the modern world like how the English and the Dutch overtook the French as world powers by moving to a cash-based economy. And he drops a few amusing anachronisms here and there. (Somehow I don't think synergy is a 17th century Armenian word do you?) There's sex, treachery, revenge, and reunions. All in all it was a really good read and I look forward to the concluding volume.

Now I have one week to read "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell" by Susanna Clarke. It's another "England is secretly full of wizards" type book. I've heard it being described as Harry Potter for grownups.