Noam
Chomsky:
China, unlike Europe, refuses to be intimidated by Washington,
a primary reason for the fear of China by US planners, which
presents a dilemma: steps toward confrontation are inhibited
by US corporate reliance on China as an export platform and
growing market, as well as by China's financial reserves -
reported to be approaching Japan's in scale.
...
An additional step, already being contemplated, is an Asian
oil market trading in euros. The impact on the international
financial system and the balance of global power could be
significant. It should be no surprise that President Bush paid
a recent visit to try to keep India in the fold, offering
nuclear cooperation and other inducements as a lure.
On Venezuela:
Venezuela, the leading oil exporter in the hemisphere, has
forged probably the closest relations with China of any Latin
American country, and is planning to sell increasing amounts
of oil to China as part of its effort to reduce dependence on
the openly hostile US government.
Venezuela has joined Mercosur, the South American customs
union - a move described by Nestor Kirchner, the Argentinian
president, as "a milestone" in the development of this trading
bloc, and welcomed as a "new chapter in our integration" by
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president.
Venezuela, apart from supplying Argentina with fuel oil,
bought almost a third of Argentinian debt issued in 2005, one
element of a region-wide effort to free the countries from the
controls of the IMF after two decades of disastrous
conformity to the rules imposed by the US-dominated
international financial institutions.
(Emphasis added).
Interesting bits about Cuba and Venezuela as well:
Cuba-Venezuela relations are becoming ever closer, each
relying on its comparative advantage. Venezuela is providing
low-cost oil, while in return Cuba organises literacy and
health programmes, sending thousands of highly skilled
professionals, teachers and doctors, who work in the poorest
and most neglected areas, as they do elsewhere in the third
world.
"Cuba has provided the largest contingent of doctors and
paramedics to Pakistan," paying all the costs (perhaps with
Venezuelan funding), writes John Cherian in India's
Frontline magazine, citing Dawn, a leading Pakistan daily.
President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan expressed his "deep
gratitude" to Fidel Castro for the "spirit and compassion" of
the Cuban medical teams - reported to comprise more than 1,000
trained personnel, 44% of them women, who remained to work in
remote mountain villages, "living in tents in freezing weather
and in an alien culture", after western aid teams had been
withdrawn.
On a separate note, the trend is for Mexico to elect the
progressive candidate in the upcoming elections.
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George Clooney's I Am a
Liberal. There, I Said It!:
That's one of the things that drew me to making a film about
Murrow. When you hear Murrow say, "We mustn't confuse dissent
with disloyalty" and "We can't defend freedom at home by
deserting it at home," it's like he's commenting on today's
headlines.
The fear of being criticized can be paralyzing. Just look
at the way so many Democrats caved in the run up to the
war. In 2003, a lot of us were saying, where is the link
between Saddam and bin Laden? What does Iraq have to do with
9/11? We knew it was bullshit. Which is why it drives me crazy
to hear all these Democrats saying, "We were misled." It makes
me want to shout, "Fuck you, you weren't misled. You were
afraid of being called unpatriotic."
>
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Pictures from the student
strike in Paris that took over the Sorbonne University.
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Alex today pointed me to some screenshots of the upcoming
Novell Linux Desktop, they are here.
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Joe posted
an enthusiastic description of AppArmor: a Novell technology
that uses the Linux security infrastructure to improve the
security of your system. Novell originally acquired this
proprietary product last year and included it with OpenSUSE
and open sourced the effort.
Joe links to a recent presentation at FOSDEM
which is worth watching as it explains how AppArmor
works and demostrates how you can augment the rules in
AppArmor for your own applications and how you can secure a
web site.
I once got the demo live, and it was fairly impressive as I
was given a root shell, but was basically unable to escape the
"sandbox" that AppArmor had created.
Both AppArmor and SELinux use the same kernel
infrastructure to create the sandbox. From the AppArmor
FAQ I liked this explanation:
SELinux is an implementation of mandatory access controls that
uses labeled security, ie, the application of a tag to each
data file that identifies that file's appropriate security
level. Labeled security has advantages in organizations where
secrecy is paramount, that is, ensuring that only those
authorized at appropriate clearance levels can view a given
piece of data. The labels allow the operating system to handle
data with appropriate controls, eliminating the need to store
the information on multiple computers of varying security
levels. Although this feature has value to organizations such
as intelligence agencies whose main goal is to keep secret
information secret, it introduces a significant level of
complexity and has limited value to most commercial
enterprises whose primary objective is data integrity, ie,
preventing the corruption of data.
The FAQ goes into a larger comparison with SELinux if you
are interested in that.
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If you are interested in developing with Mono using Visual
Studio, there are a number of tools that Francisco
Martinez has developed to make your experience smoother.
He created a few screencasts and a general introduction
on his blog:
- The Installing
VSPrjMake screencast shows how you install the
Visual Studio add-in.
- In this
screencast he shows how to test your Windows.Forms
application with the Mono runtime using Visual Studio.
- In this
one he shows how to test an ASP.NET application
with Mono from Visual Studio.
Today for the first time I had the chance to play with
these on Paco's laptop (he is visiting the Cambridge office
this week). He also has developed a tool to choose which
Mono runtime to use. The tool is useful for Mono power-users
on Windows (you can watch your app work better with new
versions of Mono as you go; Or you can track regressions in
Mono).
In his blog entry, he has other screencasts showing how to
run the same application with different runtimes (.NET CLR and
Mono). Check it
out.
Pretty much these tools do most of what we had discussed in
the past in terms of Visual Studio and Mono integration.
The next step would be to integrate this with a VMWare
player with a OpenSUSE OS image to have all the Mono
development tools and test applications directly from Visual
Studio into the VMware image.
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We have been exploring for some time the new Infocard
identity framework from Microsoft. If you are interested in
this new identity system being developed, check the Microsoft
web site here.
Thanks go to Mike Shaver for getting us in touch with Kim
Cameron and Mike Jones:
Kim:
The Zen of this is that we cant change it by ourselves.
Microsoft can be part of that.
>
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Chris points out in his blog entry that
Xgl is a lot of work:
[...] The big thing about the AIGLX approach is that it's
incremental. The path to get from here to there allows us to
leverage the strengths we have, allow people to participate as
their hardware allows and work iteratively with vendors to add
support to cards. Simply put, AIGLX presents us with a hill
instead of a cliff. That's the big difference.
But it is not an academic discussion anymore about the
complexity of getting from here to there. We are already
there, and the code is already on CVS and we have already
climbed the most difficult part of the cliff.
Anyways, Chrisl, what about addressing the comments on the
Fedora Wiki to reflect David's comments? There is a link
added, but there were no "architectural" changes developed in
private.
Anyways, more power to the Red Hat folks with AIGLX, am
sure we will have a combination of both in various machines
and am just happy to be able to use both depending on the
hardware I have available at my disposal.
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Dave Winer observations
are interesting:
I love the political storm President Bush is caught in over
the UAE port managers, because it is totally unfair, as he
says it is. Of course they're perfectly qualified to manage
the ports. They're not terrorists. They employ
Americans. There's no extra risk. I love it because it's
exactly the kind of dirty trick Bush uses, the same kind of
dumb emotional illogic, and like his opponents he's left
stammering like an idiot, caught in the headlights, explaining
how it's not really an issue. It's the Swift Boat logic turned
back at the master. It's as if Karl Rove was working for the
Dems. I love it because it's funny and it's justice.
>
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Raffa was funded by Google during the Summer of Code. He
implemented a PHP compiler for Mono and .NET. After a small
pause, he has resumed work on his compiler and has now started
a blog here:
Other .NET assemblies can now be accessed directly from within
PHP scripts. Like that you can i.e. build GUIs with PHP using
the Gnome libraries. I've already created two interesting
examples including events and Drag&Drop features. You can
import namespaces and types from other .NET assemblies with a
spcial "using" syntax similar to the one known from C#. After
doing so the imported types are avialable in the same way as
classes implemented in PHP.
>
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I just found out about Moosy a blog on Novell
Linux Desktop-centric happenings.
I believe its someone at Novell, but I could not find any
contact info.
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David Reveman, has posted his thoughts on the Xgl/Aiglx
debate here:
One of the points that I particularly like is:
An important goal with X on OpenGL is to make it easier for X
to keep up with the advances in graphics hardware. Eliminating
the custom 2D acceleration code will reduce the development
burden and make this easier. This can probably be achieved
through AIGLX as well, I know that the people working on AIGLX
have discussed putting some of the acceleration code I have in
Xgl inside Xorg with AIGLX and that would be a step in that
direction. However, I strongly believe that going all the way
to an X server completely on top of the OpenGL API is the best
solution in the long run.
In particular I like his comments on the criticisms of
Xgl, they all boil down to "It is a lot of work":
I think the arguments made by nvidia to why X on OpenGL would
be worse than the current driver architecture can be debated
on until forever. I think it all boils down to if we want put
some more effort to it and take the big scary step to
something new or if we want to stick to the old well
known. Not too surprising, we have people who are in favor of
both and we'll likely have development being done on both,
which I don't think is that bad after all.
So far I haven't heard a single argument for why X on
OpenGL is a a bad idea other than that it's a big step and a
lot of work will have to be done. If that would stop me from
working on Xgl, I wouldn't have started working on it in the
first place.
Finally, David sets the record straight on the Xgl
development, to refute the claims made on the Fedora page:
"We've been working on the AIGLX code for a some
time with the community, which is in direct contrast with the
way that XGL was developed. XGL spent the last few months of
its development behind closed doors and was dropped on the
community as a finished solution. Unfortunately, it wasn't
peer reviewed during its development process, and its
architecture doesn't sit well with a lot of people."
I've been developing Xgl in the open since November
2004. Only the last few months have been behind closed
doors. I can agree that this wasn't the best thing but no
architectural changes have been made during this period, just
a lot of hard work implementing missing functionality,
tracking down and fixing bugs in xgl and various other places
in the x server tree. We didn't drop a finished solution, we
dropped a much improved version, that's all.
Anyways, more details are on David's post
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Ted has posted some updates on Open Audio: Ogg formats are
comming, he discusses high/medium qualities, why they chose
the format they did and the music they use. His post is:
Next Steps for Novell Open Audio.
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Novell has started a podcasting
show.
On the first show they talk with Brady Anderson and Calvin
Gaisford from the iFolder.
Since iFolder is built on top of Mono, you should listen to
this right away.
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