The New York Times reports that:

for the first time

, Qatar put the question of supplying arms to the rebels on the table, but no agreement was reached.

Well, not really for the first time. Qatar has been pushing for arms shipments to the rebels for a long time:

“If they will ask for weapons, we’re going to provide them,” the amir, who is on a visit to the United States, told CNN in an interview. [xinhua, 15 April]

And the New York Times itself has reported on the rebels receiving foreign weapons, and speculated that Qatar is one source of them.

Bruce Sterling, Kenneth Rexroth. Rexroth was columnist in the San Francisco Examiner, through the 1960s. Elegant, thoughtful, panoramic. While I don’t

quite

share Sterling’s enthusiasm (“

there are no blogs this good

“), there’s good stuff here:

Looking back, it seems now that most of our crises have been crises of talk. We have been able to take it out by abusing each other. That is just dandy. Nobody pushed those banks of buttons over the U-2. The Chinese have not invaded Laos or Taiwan. The Marines have not landed in Cuba. The Congolese seem to be tiring. The UN proved able to cope with Khrushchev.

Who knows? We may talk ourselves out of the woods yet.

I approve of this tip to make tab navigation in vim the same as with firefox. Life is too short to memorize multiple sets of commands.

:nmap  :tabprevious
:nmap  :tabnext
:map  :tabprevious
:map  :tabnext
:imap  :tabpreviousi
:imap  :tabnexti
:nmap  :tabnew
:imap  :tabnew

irccat is a bot designed to facilitate sending server messages to an irc channel

The irccat bot joins all your channels, and waits for messages on a specified ip:port on your internal network. Anything you send to that port will be sent to IRC by the bot. IRCCat – as in, cat to IRC.

Using netcat, you can easily send events to irc from shell scripts:

echo “Something just happened” | nc -q0 somemachine 12345

That will send to the default channel only (first in the config file). You can direct messages to specific combinations of channels (#) or users (@) like so:

Being always in a several irc channels, it’s helpful to have an overview of what’s going on without tabbing through a dozen windows. Fortunately I can follow the logs using inotail:

$ find /home/dan/.purple/logs/ -name "`date +%F`*" | xargs inotail -fv

This would also work with tail — the only problem is that _tail_ with so many files would put some strain on the filesystem.

Via robokow, news of plant cultivation in an old IBM typewriter factory:

The location for the first commercia nursery in the world in an office is the former IBM typewriter factory on Johan Huizinga Avenue. The large factory building has already been empty for eleven years

It goes without saying that this is an area where the cannabis cultivators have a *big* headstart

Botnets are convenient enemies, providing justification for the introduction of spyware and restrictions on computers.

Walter and Amelia have good posts on the subject, particularly in South Korea.

South Korea, it seems, is further along a path that can be expected also in Europe and elsewhere. The country’s infrastructure has repeatedly been attacked by botnet-fuelled DDoS. These attacks strengthened demand for official regulation:

Popular support is rising for a helpful Zombie PC Act giving a government-controlled authority the mandate to access and scrutinize commercial, official and private datasystems. The authortity will help the government determine if the system is infected by any potential virus. Lacking appropriate anti-virus software shall, according to the bill, lead to repercussions.

That is, there would be a requirement for official intervention in every computer. With intervention comes inspection. And thus, the threat to alarm the paranoid — a sideways approach by which governments could seize computers. Walter:

Your computer may become a target for a serach (and seizure) just because it is a computer. The cherry on the cake is of course that we also should expect governmental bodies to take enough care that backdoors installed for this very purpose will not be abused by those very nefarious people, the Zombie-operators, it aims to fight. To quote Top Gear: what could possibly go wrong?

ETA

: Amelia has another post, laying all this out much more clearly.

I often use mplayer to play all files in a directory:

mp ./*

*mp*, by the way, is simply an alias for mplayer, used to play things faster and with speed control:

$ which mp           
mp: aliased to mplayer -speed 1.21 -af scaletempo=speed=tempo

But what if I want to play them in date order? (useful to replay a stream with streamripper). I need a shell loop. A for loop will choke on filenames with spaces

:

$ for i in `ls -tr`  
do
mp "$i"
done

A while loop seems to give me some problem of mplayer reading too much from stdin:

$ ls -1tr | while read i       
do; mp '$i'
done  

So I end up using an array:

$ mp3files=( ./*mp3 )         
$ for d in "${mp3files[@]}"; do
  mp "$d"
done

phew! that was

far

too much work

He had the sense, at the moment, of groping for intellectual support, of casting about and dimly receiving a hint here, a hint there. Like a radio technician delicately picking signals out of background static, he’d learned to recognise voices worth listening to, voices that meant something distinct even when they ued hte same compulsory words as everyone else.

Here and there, people were speaking with secret passion

— Francis Spufford, Red Plenty p.65

Tatu are secretly Wobblies, aren’t they?

All About Us

hinges on a personalization of the great IWW slogan

An injury to one is an injury to all

,

transmuted into obsessive romance

:

If. They. Hurt. You. They. Hurt. Me. Too

So we’ll rise up won’t stop

And it’s all about

It’s all about

It’s all about

us

It’s not just me feeling the solidarity. This group review returns to the theme time and time again, albeit with a point-missing tendency to link it to the USSR:

You can imagine those pounding war drums soundtracking the Bolshevik revolution – there’s certainly a similar sense of collective running through the lyrics, drawing strength from standing shoulder to shoulder with fellow revolutionaries. “If. They. Hurt. You. They. Hurt. ME. TOO.”: spine-tinglingly magnificent pop moment of the year.

And more generally, you can make a case that the value of TATU is fitting their various high-pitched emotional states into a grand narrative of love and rebellion:

If you listen across their ‘Best Of’ album, you can see it unfold: forbidden love and ensuing confusion as the girls, through their transgression, are thrust beyond the bounds of the normative (“All The Things She Said”‘); the forging of a new revolutionary ethics (“All About Us”, “They’re Not Gonna Get Us”); yet more confusion as one of the girls falls for a boy (“Loves Me Not”); a Thermidorian inquest into the motives and consequences of the betrayal (“Friend Or Foe”); then finally, the realisation that the only place this utopian society can exist is in space (“Cosmos”)