Dan O'Huiginn

EU Observer, via Crooked Timber:

Louis Michel, the Belgian former EU development commissioner and current prominent Liberal MEP has shocked his home nation and its one-time central African subjects by calling King Leopold II, the Congo’s colonial master responsible for between 3 million and 10 million deaths, a “visionary hero.”

“Leopold II was a true visionary for his time, a hero,” he told P-Magazine, a local publication, in an interview on Tuesday. “And even if there were horrible events in the Congo, should we now condemn them?”

er…Yes. Yes, we really, really should.

FWIW, Louis Michel is also a former Belgian foreign minister, and has been deeply involved with the Congo at a national and European level.

on that keylogger thing….seeks the showkey utility will do everything I need, with considerably less faff and higher reliability. yay!

That TV series pilot we released last week? With the $6000 budget and the cast of unknowns? More popular than True Blood and Doctor Who combined.

yeah, ok, some obvious caveats apply

Yet another linux trick I keep on forgetting…
To display a notification on the desktop from the command-line:
# apt-get install libnotify-bin
$ notify-send “hello world”

obv. “from the command-line” really means “from a script”, unless you’re in some Evil Dead situation of independently-mobile hands

[reason for looking: trying to get xmonad+dmenu to notify me when I mistype a command, rather than just failing silently]

Since I’m spectacularly dim, it never occured to me that I can run markdown from within vim. Select your text, run !markdown, and wham! bam! everything is replaced by its technicolor HTML twin.

I’ve been trying to find (for entirely legit reasons*) a decent keylogger for linux. The pickings are surprisingly slim – as one upstart option puts it:

Novice users, however, are usually limited to a narrow set of the following tools: lkl from 2005, uberkey, which appears dead, THC-vlogger, made by a renowned group of hackers, and PyKeylogger. All these tools have their pros and cons. Lkl, for example, sometimes abnormally repeats keys and its keymap configuration is rather awkward for a range of users. Uberkey, which is just over a hundred lines of code, also often repeats keys and what is worse, it makes your mouse move abruptly, loosing any sense of control. PyKeylogger, on the other hand, while very feature rich, only works in X environment. Finally, there is vlogger, …umm…, about which I cannot say anything specifically, only that it is receiving low score all around the web and it only logs shell sessions.

I’d add that lkl managed to crash my system within 5 minutes of using it, requireing a hard reboot to get things back up. So I’m currently deep in thinking surely it can’t be *that* hard?

• reason: I find it useful to have statistics on my activity. Counting keypresses is pretty useless as a direct way of measuring productive work — but it’s a pretty good early indicator of when I’m getting too sleepy or too hyper.

Modern Arab/Arabic fiction — any recommendations? Ideally not something too downbeat or unrelentingly political, and available in translation.

Habermas and Europe — Crooked Timber:

A very considerable part of Habermas’ intellectual project over the last few years has been exactly to come up with a form of patriotism which is distinct from nationalism. Habermas dubs this “constitutional patriotism” – and while it is not intended to overcome existing forms of nationalism, it is intended to temper them, and to make them non-exclusive.

& back to Henry F as himself:

he moment when (if) an actual European polity will be created, will not be the moment when European publics, led by their elites, realize that they are actually Europeans. It will be the moment at which self-interested political parties, rather than arguing and picking petty squabbles about whether ‘we’ should all be Europeans or not, start arguing and picking petty squabbles about what kind of Europeans ‘we’ should be.

WaPo:

Like Washington’s go-go, Baltimore Club exists as a regional sound relatively unknown outside the mid-Atlantic. The music blends the repetitive boom of house or techno with hip-hop’s aggressive posturing and full-frontal frankness (one of the most popular B-More singles is DJ Booman’s “Watch Out for the Big Girl”). What B-More lacks in subtlety it overpowers with shouted hooks, uncleared samples and chest-rattling bass patterns that induce dance-floor euphoria. Baltimore Club allows hip-hop heads to get their rave on.

Still can’t figure out if I like bmore at all, or if it’s just Donna Summer. Suspect the latter

Reddit longform seems bizarrely invisible to search engines. Search ‘reddit longform’ anywhere and you won’t reach it; wonder what happened?

For the record: there are few corners of the internet that I loathe as completely as I loathe twitter. If I love you very much, it’s possible I may still read your tweets. But it’ll be through gritted teeth, with constant frustration at the impossibility of having a decent conversation there, and I’d much, much rather follow you to almost any other online forum.

Often I hate the hoops we jump through in order to provide the illusion of security:

Amazon CloudFront HTTPS delivery can be used to transfer inherently sensitive objects to your users, to avoid security warnings that some browsers present when viewing a mix of HTTP and HTTPS content, or for anything else that needs to be encrypted when transferred. [email from Amazon today, announcing the new service]

Yes, I know that every step along the way here is reasonable. It just feels wrong, y’know?

A bit of Debian lore I always forget: finding which package is responsible for a certain file:

$ dpkg -S filename

e.g:
$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/lintian
lintian: /usr/bin/lintian

Diaspora politics is identity politics in its purest form. Struggling to maintain and demonstrate identity in a foreign land, migrants adopt symbols and political doctrines from their hoemland. These are exaggerated to fill the gaps left by other forms of identity, and lack the pragmatic restraints that could come from actually living in a place.

A long article in the New York Review of Books considers the growing division betwen Zionists and liberal Jews, both in Israel and the US. It touches on the diaspora politics overall, but also connects to the impact of personal experience, memory, and generational divisions:

When he probed the students’ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, “they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.” These young Jews, Luntz explained, “resist anything they see as ‘group think.’” They want an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, “young Jews desperately want peace.” When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled “Proof that Israel Wants Peace,” and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, “some empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.” When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends.