Doing A Celebratory Dance At The Edge Of The Fiscal Cliff

 Politics  No Responses »
Jan 022013
 

According to the news, the US politicians have finally decided not to take a running jump off the edge of the fiscal cliff and have come to some form of agreement in relation to US taxes. The markets have of course bounced dramatically because of the good news … or is it?

Firstly, this decision is late. US politicians have been trying to come to some form of agreement with regard to taxation and spending for at least 18 months; the deadline everyone was worried about was introduced to concentrate minds on an agreement. And yet no agreement was reached until the last moment. US politicians deserve to be fired for not coming to an agreement sooner.

Secondly, this decision is not a full decision at all. The agreement only covers taxation, and does not cover agreements on spending cuts. They have given themselves a further two months to agree the rest of it. And who is to say that they will manage an agreement this time around?

There are those who argue that the phrase “fiscal cliff” is scaremongering, and that it should really be called a “fiscal hill” (or some other phrase). They’re wrong.

The actual effects of going over the fiscal cliff may well be rather gradual with tax increases and spending cuts only gradually kicking in over the year of 2013. But that is ignoring the big problem.

The big problem is that the politicians in charge of the world’s largest economy are a bunch of incompetent idiots who would rather argue for partisan advantage than do their job – govern the country in the interests of all of the citizens of the US. In most circumstances, a bunch of people in charge of a large organisation who could not agree on a budget in a timely fashion could and would be fired.

Perhaps the citizens of the US should get together and “kick some ass” – point out to their politicians that they are expected to govern the country properly, and if they do not pull their socks up, they will all be booted out of office come the next election – Democrats and Republicans. It is not the fault of any one party, but the fault of both.

Getting Started With Awesome

 Computing, Linux, Working Notes  No Responses »
Dec 312012
 

This has been updated for Awesome 3.5

I have long been interested in tiling window managers, which would seem to offer the flexibility I crave. But switching is painful when you want your machine to be as functional as much as possible. On at least two occasions I have switched … and very quickly switched back when problems were encountered.

So just for the fun of it, I have decided to give it another go … in a way that can be gradually worked into functionality.

But first, what exactly is a tiling window manager? Well a conventional window manager works with overlapping windows where windows can stack on top of each other and overlap. A tiling window manager on the other hand uses tiling to maximise the size of every displayed window.

Or in other words, if you want to make the maximum use of space on your screen, a stacking window manager usually asks you to manually move and resize windows yourself whereas a tiling window manager does it all automatically. Although with a tiling window manager, you will need to rotate amongst different tiling layouts to suit.

Tiling window managers tend to be keyboard driven rather than mouse driven, but this is merely an aspect of their implementation.

A Testing Environment

The key to setting up any window manager gradually over time without losing an existing working environment, is to create a separate display which a new window manager can control. This can be quite easily accomplished with a nesting X server, which is provided by the xserver-xephyr package.

As to the choice of window manager, the title of this post gives away the secret – Awesome. Of course the same method works for other window managers too.

The first step is to install the required packages :-

sudo apt-get install xserver-xephyr awesome awesome-extra

The next step is to create a simple shell script to start the nested X server. This basically starts the nested X server with a sensible screen size, and sets the $DISPLAY environment variable so that any further X programs are directed to communicate with the nested X server. The nested X server simply starts up as a standard window within which Awesome operates. The script looks like :-

#!/bin/sh

Xephyr -ac -reset -screen 1280x1000 :1 &
export DISPLAY=:1.0
sleep 5
awesome --config ~/src/site/etc/awesome/config.lua

The sleep command in there is to wait until X has settled down before trying to manage it … without this, it is possible that awesome will fail to open the display (on a slower laptop it worked without; on a faster desktop it did not). The parameter to awesome is to set the preferred location for the configuration file (which I will describe next), although you can leave it out to use the default.

Don’t start it yet! Before doing that, copy the default configuration file to the specified location so you have something to work with :-

cp /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua ~/src/site/etc/awesome/config.lua

It’s All In The Repository

The custom configuration file I specified just happens to point to a directory and file within the working copy of a Subversion repository. Using a repository for configuration files has all sorts of benefits; not least of which is to reverse “poor” choices made along the way. Whilst describing how to get one set up is beyond the purpose of this post, it is well worth doing.

Of course if you are working with a repository, it is important to remember to commit changes at every stage :-

% svn add ~/src/site/etc/awesome 
A         /home/mike/src/site/etc/awesome
A         /home/mike/src/site/etc/awesome/config.lua
% svn commit ~/src/site/etc/awesome -m "Awesome: Initial Configuration from default"
Adding         src/site/etc/awesome
Adding         src/site/etc/awesome/config.lua
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 166.

I won’t be documenting every single commit, but they are all in there!

It is also helpful (at this stage) to create a symlink between the default configuration directory (~/.config/awesome) and the working copy of your repository. The configuration directory can probably be changed, but one thing at a time!

Status Bar Size

One of the annoyances I remember from the last time I played with Awesome, was the tiny size of the status bar. It is all very well maximising the size of the main screen area, but some of us have high resolution screens and tired old eyes! Within the config.lua file (or whatever you named your file), look for :-

mywibox[s] = awful.wibox({ position = "top", screen = s})

And change it to add a height parameter :-

mywibox[s] = awful.wibox({ position = "top", screen = s, height=32 })

The exact choice of size is of course down to personal preferences! However changing the size also means changing the font would be wise :-

awesome.font = "LMSans10 10"

Making the font too much larger will result in some display oddities … at least for now.

Adding A Title Bar

In theory, there is no need for a title bar with a tiling window manager, but I guess I am a little too conventional as a window without a title bar still looks a little weird to me. Plus my shell prompts stick useful bits of information into the window title bar and I would really rather hang on to that extra information. Still, drawing title bars on windows turns out to be really simple … just find the existing code to do so and :-

local titlebars_enabled = true

Some appearance tweaks and indeed messing around with the unnecessarily large number of buttons could be usefully accomplished, but for now this is fine.

 

Themes

Of course messing around with the appearance of a window manager is probably best dealt with using themes (if they are supported). The default configuration file I worked with included enabling beautiful via :-

require("beautiful")
beautiful.init("/usr/share/awesome/themes/default/theme.lua")

It is easier to tinker with themes with a configuration file you can edit, so I copied this theme.lua to the configuration directory named as default-theme.lua, and changed the configuration :-

-- beautiful.init("/usr/share/awesome/themes/default/theme.lua")
beautiful.init(awful.util.getdir("config") .. "/default-theme.lua")

I also removed the previous section’s font setting and set the same font within the new configuration file :-

theme.font = "LMSans10 10"

To cope with the larger font, I also increased the width of each menu item :-

theme.menu_width  = "300"

Although this width does depend on having an appropriately sized screen, and not having too many levels to your menu (if it gets too wide, the extra levels don’t appear neatly).

And finally I commented out the command used to set the background … having a background image for a tiling window manager (which is designed to utilise the whole screen) is a touch unnecessary. And I don’t particularly like the default image :-

--theme.wallpaper_cmd = ...

For now I will leave the colours alone … the defaults may not be perfect but are not sufficiently irritating to spend time on right now. But the details of how to change colours of various components can be found in the theme file we have created.

Disabling Layouts

Personally I believe that you can have too much of a good thing, and choosing between the rather large number of different possible layouts that Awesome makes available is one of those. To reduce the number of possibilities, simply comment out some of the possibilities when setting the “layouts” variable in the configuration file :-

layouts =
{
    awful.layout.suit.floating,
    awful.layout.suit.tile,
    --awful.layout.suit.tile.left,
    --awful.layout.suit.tile.bottom,
    --awful.layout.suit.tile.top,
    awful.layout.suit.fair,
    --awful.layout.suit.fair.horizontal,
    awful.layout.suit.spiral,
    --awful.layout.suit.spiral.dwindle,
    awful.layout.suit.max,
    --awful.layout.suit.max.fullscreen,
    --awful.layout.suit.magnifier
}

Which you command out does not matter so much, and indeed you may very well change you mind at a later point.

A Menu

Whilst the menu built into Awesome has undoubtedly many advantages, I already have a somewhat adequate menu built up over years that relies on myGtkMenu. Whilst changing this menu could well be sensible, it does also seem sensible to keep it around during the transitional period. To do so is simply a matter of replacing certain bindings :-

 -- {{{ Mouse bindings
 root.buttons(awful.util.table.join(
-    awful.button({ }, 3, function () mymainmenu:toggle() end),
+    --awful.button({ }, 3, function () mymainmenu:toggle() end),
+    awful.button({ }, 3, function () awful.util.spawn("/opt/bin/myGtkMenu /home/mike/lib/root.menu") end),
     awful.button({ }, 4, awful.tag.viewnext),
     awful.button({ }, 5, awful.tag.viewprev)
 ))

If you hadn’t guessed, I’ve started using diffs to show the changes where it makes sense; if you cannot read diffs, this page is probably not for you.

That bit replaces the root window, but not the status bar menu :-

 mylauncher = awful.widget.launcher({ image = image(beautiful.awesome_icon),
-                                     menu = mymainmenu })
+--                                     menu = mymainmenu })
+                                       command = "/opt/bin/myGtkMenu /home/mike/lib/root.menu" })

My own menu has some issues in that it doesn’t yet have anything to control awesome itself. But is good enough to get started with.

Final Word … Or Not!

And that is it! Or at least it is enough to be getting on with.

US Lynchings: It’s Not Just About “Race”

 General, History  No Responses »
Dec 282012
 

The US has long had an abysmal record in extra-judicial execution by the mob – the lynching – which is a peculiarly US foible. It is noticeable in the linked Wikipedia article that the authors were desperately looking around for non-US examples of lynchings. And some of the examples are not strictly speaking lynchings at all.

Extra-judicial punishments have been common throughout history, but have almost always been due to the absence of legal authority, or the inadequacy of legal authority. In most cases, US lynchings are in fact a perverse preference for extra-judicial punishment where the legal authority certainly was available – many lynchings involved breaking into courthouse jails to extract the “guilty”.

There are plenty of resources out there on US lynchings including :-

Practically all of these sites concentrate on the racial aspects of lynchings, which is perfectly understandable given that lynchings were one of the many weapons white supremacists used to keep the negro “in his place”.

Yet there is another aspect to lynchings that tends to get overlooked. If you look at the lynching statistics provided by the Tuskegee Institute covering the years 1882-1968, of the total of 4,743 lynchings a total of 1,297 were of “white” people. A total of 27% of all lynchings were of “white” people. Of course that simple classification into black and white may be concealing other race hate crimes – apparently asian and mexican-american people have been classified as white on occasions.

But reading the stories of lynchings shows that the victims of lynchings were from all parts of society – men, women, black, and white. But predominantly black, although the last lynching of a white person occurred as late as 1964 when 2 white people and 1 black person were lynched.

This page tries to explain the white lynchings as either under-reporting of lynchings of black people in the 19th century, or the use of lynchings to punish white people who opposed the repression of black people (such as Elijah Lovejoy). Both of which are true enough.

But it’s missing a point – lynching is a tool used by the racists to repress the black people in the US, but it already existed as a tool (and was used) before the racists felt the need to repress and control the newly freed former slaves. Lynching is a way of obtaining “justice” when a community feels that justice is unlikely to be obtained any other way.

What appears to have happened in the US is that some communities seem to have acquired an entitlement to extreme forms of justice and they are not placated by the perfectly reasonable level of justice provided by the state. After all, in many of the examples of lynchings, the state justice mechanisms were “working” perfectly well – certainly a black person in the South was likely to be flung into prison for almost anything on the flimsiest of evidence. Yet the extremists were not satisfied.

What this reveals is that some in the US feel entitled to impose a level of control on their community that is not sanctioned by the democratic majority of the country as a whole. And a willingness to resort to violence to get their way. Whilst lynchings may be a thing of the past (the last recorded one was in 1981, although there is a case for arguing that this was merely a random killing rather than a lynching), the attitude may still be around … and having an effect on the level of violence in the US.

The anti-gun control fanatics are right to an extent when they claim that “guns don’t kill” but criminals do. If you compare the US gun crime statistics with other countries with similar levels of gun control (and there are some; indeed in Switzerland a significant proportion of the population is compelled to store a fully automatic assault rifle in their home), it becomes obvious that the US has a significant problem with violence. Gun control may be necessary in the short term, but long term the US needs to look at it’s violent tendencies.

An Alternative Method of Gun Control

 Politics  1 Response »
Dec 222012
 

Given the tragic shooting incident at a US primary school (what would be called an elementary school in the US), it is hardly surprising that the subject of gun control has come up yet again. Normally proposals suggest taking the more extreme types of guns (such as assault rifles) away, without banning all guns.

This may be a mistake given the US Constitution and opposition to changing it. The relevant clause of the constitution reads :-

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed

There are a number of interesting things that this does not say :-

  1. There is nothing in this statement about the right to bear arms to defend yourself (at least from criminals).
  2. There is nothing in this statement about the right to bear arms to go out shooting defenceless wildlife.
  3. Although the statement includes the right to “keep” arms, it does not say where such arms should be kept.
  4. Although it does not explicitly say so, it is very clearly defined that a person’s right to bear arms is in relation to a “well regulated militia”; in other words one does not have a right to bear arms unless under orders to do so.

So rather than restrict what kind of arms a US citizen can own, perhaps it makes much more sense to restrict where arms can be held and how they can be used :-

  1. Any three or more individuals are free to establish a militia for the defence of the state or some other suitable purpose.
  2. The state is allowed to appeal to a court in the event of a militia it feels is set up for nefarious purposes.
  3. A militia must establish an arsenal which may not be a personal home. An arsenal must have an appropriate level of security.
  4. A militia or member of a militia is allowed to purchase any reasonable weapons, but they must be stored within the militia’s arsenal.
  5. Weapons may only be used by the members of the militia during training or during an operation sanctioned by the militia.
  6. No weapons may be used by an individual without supervision by another two members of the militia.

Of course the real test for a proposal on gun control is whether the NRA like it or not. If they do, it must be wrong!

Aren’t Those Key Legends Dumb?

 Keyboards  2 Responses »
Dec 222012
 

Take a good hard look at your keyboard. Right Now.

Ignoring the symbols themselves, although there’s a good long rant as to just why the pipe symbol (‘|’) has to be a shifted key, there’s quite a few oddities on the keyboard. At least if you get a chance to think about it. Not so much in what they do, but in their names.

BackSpace
If you are old enough to remember typewriters, printing terminals, or even certain exotic terminals which implemented “backspace” properly, this label is always a bit grating. Why? Because a backspace does not delete anything, but is a way of overwriting symbols to generate other symbols – you could always write a cent symbol by entering ‘c’ followed by a backspace and finally a ‘|’ to get a ¢What we see when we press the backspace key today could be more accurately described as ‘delete last character’, or rubout (as used on some old keyboards). So the backspace key should really be the “Rubout” key.

Delete
And whilst we’re in the region of deleting characters, what about the “delete” key? What is it supposed to be deleting? The character under the cursor ? The word under the cursor ? The line? The next line? Well we know what it is, but that is no reason not to make the key legend more explicit.What about “Delete Next” ? This gives an alternative for “Rubout” as “Delete Prior”.

Enter/Return/Carriage Return
Again, if you go back to the distant past and dig out an old clunky typewriter you will find a large key at the right of the keyboard that would cause the roll containing the paper that the letters were printed onto, to shoot back to the right [corrected] and move up one line. This was the carriage return. And of course it makes no sense for our modern keyboards to have a key labeled after a physical action that no longer exists.Some have a key labeled “Enter” in addition to “Return” (or sometimes instead of “Return”), but what does that mean? Enter what? The next line? There have been keyboards in the past with a more sensible “New Line” key, but that trend did not take.

Does it not make more sense to label the key after what it does rather than it’s historical purpose? What do we use the “Return” key for these days? Well it’s either to start a new paragraph, or to do the command we have just typed (into a command-line shell). So what about “New Paragraph/Do” ?

Alt Gr
Also known as Alt Graphics which originally was a key for composing box graphics, but is now used for producing alternate graphemes from the keyboard such as ©, ™, Ä, etc.
Or perhaps more explicitly, it produces symbols that be produced by the keyboard normally not available.So why not simply label the key after what it produces? Such as “Symbols” ?

The “splat” (Windows)
There are two problems with the Windows key. Firstly why is it an icon when the rest
of the keys are text-based? It is not as if the other non-symbol keys do not have suitable “icons” such as ⎇ for Alt. Use either icons or text; personally I prefer text.Secondly there is the problem that the Windows key is specific to Microsoft Windows; even within Apple’s perfumed prison, the tendency has been to move from vendor-specific (open Apple symbol) to generic (“Command”).

That is not to say that it is a poor idea in general – there is a lot to be said for a key to be used for generating short-cut commands to control the computer as a whole. A “computer command” key as opposed to an “application command” key (or “Alt”).

There are a few other oddities too, and it is quite possible that I will get back and update this post with incoherent rantings about those too.

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