Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 11/02/2023: Zstandard 1.5.4 Released and Red Hat Promotes Microsoft



  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Graphics Stack

      • Mike Blumenkrantz: Capped
        I Hate Pipe Caps

        Those of you who saw me at XDC will recall that I talked about my hatred for Gallium’s pipe caps.

        I still hate them.

        But mostly I hate a specific type of pipe cap: the pipe cap that gates performance.

        My Driver’s Perf: Why Is It Bad?

        In a nutshell:

    • Applications

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • KifarunixCheck SSL Certificate Expiry Date from Certificate File

        How to check SSL certificate expiration date command line? In this guide, you will learn how to check SSL certificate expiry date from the certificate file itself. SSL (Secure Socket Layer)/TLS (Transport Layer Security) certificates, are used to encrypt data exchanged between a website and its users.

      • Manuel MatuzovicDay 100: it's over, or is it!?

        OMG, I did it, day 100! 4 months and 16 days ago I published the first post and then I wrote another post every workday for 138 days straight without missing a single day. In this final post, I want to do a quick recap and give an outlook for what's coming next.

      • Manuel MatuzovicDay 99: native nesting

        Nesting in CSS is coming soon! For me personally not the killer feature, at least compared to cascade layers or container queries, but still exciting. Let’s see how it works.

      • Brad TauntDynamic Viewports with CSS

        Lucky for us there exists an awesome new-ish CSS API called dynamic viewport-percentage units: dvh & dvw. They are defined as follows: [...]

      • University of TorontoThings that systemd-resolved is not for (as of systemd 251)

        This leaves a lot of things that systemd-resolved is not for. Here is my current list, as of Fedora's systemd 250 and 251.

      • Make Tech EasierHow to Remove the Password From a PDF in Linux

        Portable Document Files (PDF) are the backbone of modern document distribution. With it, you can easilyformat any documentand expect it to be readable on various devices.

        The PDF standard also includes the ability to secure your documents through simple password-based encryption. However, this approach relies on you to keep track of every password for every PDF file that you have encrypted. This can be a problem if you want to maintain an archive of PDFs for a project or bookkeeping.

      • Linux Shell Tips8 Best ‘du’ Command Alternatives to Check Disk Usage in Linux

        Disk usage, in short du, is a standard Linux command that helps to get system disk usage information quickly. Although the output of the

      • How to Install an SSL Certificate on an AlmaLinux Server with Nginx using Let’s Encrypt

        Download a step-by-step guide for configuring SSL on AlmaLinux. Installing an SSL Certificate on AlmaLinux You will learn how to install a valid SSL Certificate on an AlmaLinux server running the Nginx web server.

      • Linux CapableHow to Install Microsoft Teams on Rocky Linux EL9 or EL8 [Ed: This is Microsoft malware. Better avoided as sometimes the way it's installed opens up a back door for Microsoft.]

        Microsoft Teams is a collaboration platform developed by Microsoft that allows organizations to connect and communicate with ease.

      • Linux CapableHow to Install QElectroTech on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04

        QElectroTech is a powerful, open-source software designed specifically for electrical engineers, technicians, and electricians. It provides a comprehensive solution for creating and managing electrical diagrams, schematics, and plans.

      • Linux CapableHow to Install Google Chrome on Linux Mint 21 or 20

        Google Chrome is a free web browser that was first released in 2008 by Google. In the years since its release, Chrome has grown to become the world's most popular web browser, with a market share of over 60%.

      • HowTo ForgeHow to compile ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors 7.3 for Ubuntu

        ONLYOFFICE desktop app is an open-source office suite pack that comprises editors for text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, as well as form creator and PDF viewer. In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to compile ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors from source code on Ubuntu using build_tools.

      • H2S MediaHow to Install Go Language on AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux 8/9

        Introduction If you’re looking for an easy way to get started with programming in a language that offers versatile features and performance, then look no further than Go! Developed by Google.

      • UNIX CopMedia Streaming with RabbitMQ

        Introduction RabbitMQ is a popular open-source message broker software that implements the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). It is used for exchanging messages between applications and ensuring that messages are delivered even if one of the applications is temporarily unavailable.

      • Trend OceansSimple and Easy way to resolve Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

        If you want to know how to remove E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1), which is printed at the bottom, whenever you try to update, install, or remove it, read this guide. E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1).

      • TecAdminHow to use the ‘find’ command to delete files modified older than X days in Linux

        The “find” command in Linux is a powerful tool that can be used to search for files based on various criteria, such as name, type, size, and timestamp.

      • OSNoteHow to Install Mono on Debian [Ed: No, do not let Microsoft take control GNU/Linux at this stack level (or any level)]
      • Net2Understanding the basic components of the Linux operating system architecture

        If you're already a Linux user and maybe even a system admin for single systems, this article is for you. We're gonna lay out the architecture of this operating system.

      • Net2Securing Ubuntu: Best Practices for Keeping Your System Safe
      • OSNoteThe Ubuntu Linux Operating System

        Ubuntu Linux is one of the most popular Linux operating systems.

      • CloudbookletHow Long will it Take to Learn Linux – Realistic Timeline

        Do you have an interest in exploring the Linux environment but are uncertain about the time and resources required to become proficient in it? This article is the solution to your worries.

    • Games

      • Andrew PlotkinA treasury of Zork maps

        That, as far as I know, concludes our tour of artistic Zork maps.

        There are of course countless line-and-box maps to be found in adventure game cheat files and hint books. (Kim Schuette's Book of Adventure Games, 1984, is dear to my heart.) I'm not going to try to catalog those.

        I am also omitting large-scale maps of Quendor. Infocom and Activision drew several of these as the Zork universe expanded, trying to put the various games into context. However, these have little connection to original Zork, beyond maybe showing "Frigid River" as a squiggly line. So I don't find them very interesting.

        If I've missed any maps, please let me know!

      • 9to5LinuxNew Steam Client Update Further Improves the Big Picture Mode, Fixes More Bugs

         The last Steam Client stable update enabled the new Big Picture Mode, the one that resembles the Steam Deck UI, by default. Today’s update improves keyboard navigation by adding the F11 hotkey to let you toggle between windowed and full-screen modes, as well as the Alt+Enter hotkey to exit the Big Picture Mode.

        The Big Picture Mode also received support for fast jumping by letter to the Big Picture Mode library, a new option to set up the initial location to show the keyboard on the desktop and in Steam overlay, a new option to enable and disable UI sounds, and support for the Virtual Keyboard in the Overlay to remember its last position.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Nate GrahamThis week in KDE: The best Plasma 5 version ever

          Plasma 5.27 LTS will be released in just a few days. And so far it’s on track to be the least-buggy version in memory! At the time of writing there are only three known regressions, down from the dozen or more we usually ship with. A focus on stability pays off!

          As part of that effort, you might have heard we did a major push to fix multi-monitor issues for this release, and so far it looks to have worked: tons of people are reporting that their longstanding issues are fixed in the beta! But there are sure to be a few more. When you do encounter an issue, I’d encourage you to read this blog post by Marco Martin before submitting a bug report. In it, you’ll learn how best to submit a bug report for multi-monitor issues and what data to gather, so that it has the best chance of being actionable.

          But that’s not all! We landed some great new features for Plasma 6 and made good progress on the 15-minute bugs, too!

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • 9to5LinuxEndeavourOS Cassini Neo Released with Linux Kernel 6.1 LTS, Improved Installer

      Coming less than two months after EndeavourOS Cassini, the EndeavourOS Cassini Neo release is here to bump the kernel version from the now deprecated Linux 6.0 series to the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS to offer you the best possible hardware support, especially for 12th Gen Intel Arc machines, which should now boot the live ISO image and the installed system.

      This release also comes with an improved Calamares graphical installer that now supports encryption when choosing the “Replace a partition” option in the Partitions screen and should no longer crash when not selecting any of the options in the Bootloader screen. The development version of the upcoming Calamares 3.3 release is used in EndeavourOS Cassini Neo.

    • Fedora Family / IBM

      • Red Hat OfficialAnnouncing AnsibleFest at Red Hat Summit 2023

        For a decade, AnsibleFest has become the world’s leading IT automation technology event for the Ansible community. It began with just hundreds of automators gathering at a day-long conference, and has expanded into a multi-day experience for thousands of attendees to join in on major innovations in Ansible automation, from mainstage announcements to interactive labs and topical sessions. It even pivoted to a virtual experience to bring automation aficionados together, at home.

      • Red Hat OfficialRed Hat Updates Certification Exam Retake Policy to Broaden the Red Hat Certified Community

        Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced an updated Red Hat Training and Certification exam retake policy that offers candidates an opportunity to retake individual and preliminary exams at no additional cost, helping organizations fill skill gaps from Red Hat’s growing community of qualified certified professionals. New certification candidates or those who have purchased individual or preliminary exams and have not taken them yet are eligible for a retake of the exam at no additional cost if they are unsuccessful in their first attempt. Red Hat Learning Subscription (RHLS) standard, premium and developer subscribers will now receive conditional retakes for each of the exams provided by their respective subscriptions.

      • TechCrunchNew Red Hat partnerships with SAP and Oracle could bode well for owner IBM

        It’s been a good week for Red Hat, and by extension IBM, the company that owns it. That’s because Red Hat signed two partnership agreements this week, one with Oracle and the other with SAP. Those are some big players, and if it results in more deployments for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it could be a big win for IBM.

        Let’s start with Oracle, which frankly is a bit of a case of strange bedfellows. But the customer wants what the customer wants. Oracle might have been giving into customer demand, says Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, who says the deal is a win for both companies.

      • Red Hat OfficialCreate encrypted backups of your workstation with an Ansible playbook
      • Enterprisers ProjectIT careers: How to figure out what’s next
      • Red Hat OfficialAutomate Microsoft SQL Server Always On availability groups on Red Hat Enterprise Linux [Ed: Red Hat is promoting Microsoft proprietary software that does not even run on GNU/Linux]

        Back in August, we shared a preview of the enhancements to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) system role for Microsoft SQL Server that allow it to support Always On availability groups. Microsoft’s Amit Khandelwal followed up with a blog post on how to use the role to configure availability groups in Azure.

        With RHEL 8.7 and RHEL 9.1 now generally available, these features are jointly supported by Red Hat and Microsoft as part of the latest RHEL distributions and through the Ansible Automation Hub. The previous blogs gave you an idea of the scope of the functionality we’ve delivered, this one will cover how to use the functionality.

      • Red Hat OfficialAzure Red Hat OpenShift for Microsoft Azure Government Now Available [Ed: Red Hat actively promoting Microsoft, as a sort of reseller. This is betrayal as Microsoft attacks the GNU/Linux community in a lot of ways.]
      • It's FOSSVerified Flatpak Apps are Coming Soon

        Flatpak apps now have a verified badge icon, only on the beta portal for now.

      • Fedora ProjectFedora Community Blog: Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2023-06

        Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

    • Devices/Embedded

      • HackadayPi Pico Breathes New Life into Original PlayStation

        Doing the hard work is a Raspberry Pi Pico, building on the Picostation project. To that it brings a drive-shaped board, as well as a series of daughterboards for the various different revisions of the Sony motherboard. The games meanwhile are loaded from a micro-SD card.

        As single board computers have become ever faster, it’s no surprise that one would be able to emulate a ’90s CD mechanism with ease. What this does raise though is the interesting prospect that the Picostation might be adapted for other less-popular CD-based platforms. For those of us for whom games consoles in the CD era were both work and play, we hope that other consoles will receive this benefit.

      • Linux GizmosComputer Blade with PoE+ support launches on Kickstarter

        Kickstarter recently featured the Computer Blade which is an scalable ARM-based server designed to work 24/7. This device is compatible with the Raspberry Pi CM4 and it includes peripherals such as 1x GbE LAN port, 1x HDMI, NVMe SSD support, TPM 2.0 and many other features.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Raspberry PiCode along with our Astro Pi Mission Zero video

        Today we’re sharing an Astro Pi Mission Zero codealong video to help even more young people send their code into space.

      • Carl SvenssonThe Colorful Charm of Amiga Utility Disks

        It was both cheaper and more cheerful than IBM's PC machines, but it was also a machine intended very much for home use and playing games. Hard drives, for example, were prohibitively expensive, costing nearly as much as the computer itself even in very modest sizes.

        Hence, people worked from floppy disks. This wasn't quite as terrible as it sounds today, for several reasons. The major one was of course that scarcely any home user knew just how smooth things were with a hard drive: everyone was used to the speed of the floppy drive and its soothing churn when reading or writing to disk. Programs were typically much smaller than they are today and, with a bit of axle grease and a shoehorn, you could fit quite a few of them on a single disk. If you were running a big, resource hungry program, you usually didn't have enough memory left for doing any meaningful multitasking anyway - especially not when working with music or graphics.

      • Andrew HutchingsInterfacing a Raspberry Pi Pico to an SSD1351 OLED Display

        Going through my box of microcontroller boards I figured this would be an ideal project to finally try out the Raspberry Pi Pico, I’ve got several of them but not had a project to apply them to yet. I also decided that I wanted a colour OLED display, this had to be large enough to show an image, but small enough that it wouldn’t be too much stress for a microcontroller. I decided on a SSD1351 based display. It is 1.5 inches in size with a 128×128 resolution supporting 65535 colours (in RGB565 format).

      • Raspberry PiHomemade rockets

        Shunning the fins found on many a model rocket, Scout F is built around the concept of thrust vector control (TVC). “Landing a rocket requires some type of attitude control at slow speed and fins only work when the rocket is moving fast. Right when the rocket is about to touch down you need a way to keep it pointed upright, so thrust vector control seemed like a straightforward way to solve that problem.”

        To this end, Joe created a thrust vectoring mount from machined aluminium to fit around the rocket motor, rotated by servos to control the direction of thrust. He also ended up designing a custom flight controller board, Signal R2 (available from his BPS.Space website).

      • Ruben SchadeW-whoops, buying a Commodore VC-20

        The VC-20 was the West German version of the VIC-20, owing to the amusing meaning of the latter in German. Unlike the Japanese VIC-1001 that included Hiragana in lieu of PETSCII graphics, the badges are all that distinguish this machine from other VIC-20s. I’m fascinated by rebrands; check out my IBM WorkPad PDA post for another example. I’m thrilled that I have another curiosity like this.

      • Ubuntu PitSfera Labs’ Cutting-edge IoT Modules Based on Raspberry Pi CM

        Sfera Labs has developed two Strato Pi CM devices, essential IoT modules that are compatible with multiple Raspberry Pi Computer Modules.

      • ArduinoIana’s smart glove in real life

        Rainbow Six is a series of tactical shooter video games dating back to 1998.

      • CNX SoftwareRaspberry Pi Pico W gets Bluetooth support in SDK 1.5.0

        The Raspberry Pi Pico W board was launched with a WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.2 module based on the Infineon CYW43439 wireless chip in June 2022, and I wrote a tutorial showing how to connect to WiFi a few days after the launch, but nothing about Bluetooth.

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Mozilla

        • Trend OceansThunderbird: 3 Objectives For The Next 3 Years

          If you are having questions like, “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” The answer to these questions lies in the following article:

    • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • Programming/Development

      • Barry HessRails Form Redirect Not Rendering HTML

        What I discovered was all of the problems were with three forms that were supposed to be redirecting to the page that shows a user: login, sign up, and edit profile. Each of these forms were just HTML requests, but Turbo Drive takes over and submits all of these forms as the format TURBO_STREAM. In this case I had two views for the users/show page: show.html.erb and show.turbo_stream.erb. At some point in those aforementioned upgrades to Rails/Turbo had become more strict and no longer understood these basic form-redirects as HTML formats. TURBO_STREAM in, TURBO_STREAM out.

        The first step was to rediscover how to write browser tests. This is because my past self incessantly reminds me to find bugs once.

      • Julia EvansWhy does 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004?

        I realized that I didn’t understand exactly how it worked. I mean, I know floating point calculations are inexact, and I know that you can’t exactly represent 0.1 in binary, but: there’s a floating point number that’s closer to 0.3 than 0.30000000000000004! So why do we get the answer 0.30000000000000004?

      • Sean HeelanOptimising an eBPF Optimiser with Prodfiler (Repost)

        In this post I will walk through how we can use Prodfiler to unearth areas for optimisation in K2 (paper, video), an optimising compiler for eBPF. K2 is entirely CPU bound and uses a guided search technique that relies on the ability to create and check candidate solutions at high speed. With Prodfiler we can easily discover which components of K2 consume the most CPU cycles, allowing us to optimise them accordingly. The end result is a version of K2 that is 1.4x-1.9x faster, meaning it can explore a significantly larger search space given the same resources.

      • James GAnnouncing avtr.dev

        On Thursday,Aaronnoted an idea for a service that would, given a URL, return the profile photo associated with the h-card on that URL. I found the idea intriguing, noting my interest in building it. I agreed that it would be great to have an API to call to retrieve a photo, similar to Gravatar but using h-cards.

      • Andreas Schneider: Sliced bread: git-worktree and bare repo

        The git versioning system has two really nice features you might already heard about. One of them i sgit-worktree and the other are bare git repositories. This makes my life a lot easier working on Samba as often I have several feature branches I’m working on. Some features often take several month to finish. I don’t want to compile them again and again every time I switch branches. So the solution for this are worktrees.

      • Python

        • OSNoteCoding with Python Programming Language

          Python is an increasingly popular programming language that offers a high degree of flexibility and power.

        • Jussi PakkanenMore PDF, C API and Python

          Once you have the C API, though, you can do all sorts of fun things, such as using Python's ctypes module. It takes a bit of typing and drudgery, but eventually you can create a "dependencyless" Python wrapper. With it you can do this to create an empty PDF file: [...]

      • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

        • Anton SergeyevTesting shell commands in Go

          TL;DR: extract exec.Command into an interface and create a mock implementation for testing. Implement it for your SSH client too, if needed. See example code here.

          The code below assumes it is executed in a unix-like operating system where sh shell is available. This simplifies the whole enterprise quite a bit, but also brings some limitations.

        • EarthlyA Practical Guide To Linux Echo Command

          Linux is one of the most popular operating systems. It has a powerful command-line interface that allows various commands to be passed as instructions to be executed by the computer. The echo command is one of the most commonly used Linux commands.

          This tutorial will introduce you to the Linux echo command, go over its options and their usage, and show you how you can use it.

    • Standards/Consortia

      • YLE3G phase-out planned, but only in half of Finland

        The 3G shutdowns will be postponed in eastern and northern areas.

      • Ruben SchadeHappy 25th birthday, XML!

        Every day I interact with ODF, SVG, RSS, OPML, Atom, RDF, FOAF, XSLT, and/or (sigh) [redacted]. Even if that all sounds like alphabet soup, you probably use or benefit from it without even realising.

      • HackadayXML Is A Quarter Century Old

        For those of us who have spent entire careers working with structured data, it comes as something of a surprise to be reminded that XML is now 25 years old. You probably missed the XML standard on the 10th of February 1998, but it’s almost certain that XML has touched your life in many ways even if you remain unaware of it.

  • Leftovers

    • The NationMississippi Goddamn
    • Britons told to leave Denmark over late residence applications could get reprieve

      A large number of British nationals who face having to leave Denmark after missing a deadline to renew residence permits after Brexit could have their cases reassessed.

    • The Local SE'One of the cruellest countries': Briton deported after 21 years in Sweden

      British citizen Gregory was deported from Sweden to the UK last year because he was not eligible for post-Brexit residency. He tells The Local about the "cruel" process behind his departure and how his mental health suffered dramatically.

    • New YorkerBurt Bacharach’s Distinctive Melodic Voice

      You need to hear only a few bars of a Bacharach song to sense his singular gift.

    • New York TimesWhen Did Hospitality Get So Hostile?

      In a new era of rage, dining out has become downright volatile — with both customers and servers aggrieved.

    • Michael LynchMy Fifth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder

      Five years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company.

      For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. None of them earned more than a few hundred dollars per month in revenue, and they all had negative profits.

      Halfway through my third year, I created a device called TinyPilot. It allows users to control their computers remotely without installing any software. The product quickly caught on, and it’s been my main focus ever since.

      In 2022, TinyPilot generated $812k in revenue, a 76% increase from 2021.

      In this post, I’ll share what I’ve learned about being a bootstrapped founder from my fifth year at it.

    • ChiselStrikeWhat the heck is the edge anyway?

      Two different slices of the industry mean two completely different things by edge.

      Oftentimes people conflate it with serverless (which had its own misconceptions).

      In this article, I’ll explain what the edge is, and why you should care.

    • Counter PunchKings and Queens, Knights and Ladies — and Grammys

      Records are made to be broken.

      Especially if the record is one you never want to hear again.€  It used to be great fun every so often to snap a vinyl LP that you loathed.€  I can still remember the joy of taking a ball-peen hammer to Kenny G’s debut album of 1982, Kenny G. A final jagged complaint of protest was the most pleasing sound that that disc ever made.

    • teleSURQuake Displaces 5.3 Mln People in Syria: UNHCR

      The UNHCR is now focusing on the provision of shelter and relief items to ensure that the centers for the displaced have adequate facilities, such as tents, plastic sheeting, thermal blankets, sleeping mats and winter clothing.

    • teleSURThe Easing of the US Sanctions is Misleading: Syria

      The Treasury Department's latest decision is a copy of previous documents that only seek to create a false impression by stipulating alleged exemptions for humanitarian purposes.

    • France24‘I have no words’: One funeral after another in Turkey’s quake-stricken Gaziantep

      Four days on from the catastrophic earthquake that killed more than 22,000 people in southern Turkey and Syria, funerals for the victims are taking place in the ravaged city of Gaziantep. The loss of life is such that one ceremony closely follows another.

    • France24UN calls for 'immediate ceasefire' in Syria to facilitate bringing aid to quake victims

      The United Nations rights chief called Friday for an immediate ceasefire in Syria to help facilitate bringing aid to all victims of the region's devastating earthquakes. The death toll from Monday's catastrophic earthquakes in Turkey and Syria surpassed 23,000 on Friday.

    • TruthOutUS Eases Sanctions on Syria for Earthquake Relief
    • JURISTTürkiye lawyers call for evidence of negligence to be preserved in earthquake debris removal process

      The Turkish Bar Association called Thursday for any evidence of negligence to be preserved as earthquake debris is removed. In an open call to the Ministry of Justice, the lawyers said, “It is the primary duty of the state to take the necessary measures to prevent such disasters from happening again and to fight impunity.

    • TruthOutYears of Foreign Intervention in Syria Made Recent Earthquakes More Destructive
    • Counter PunchThe Upside Down World

      As I had written earlier, Christmas 2022 was very special for our family, especially that my youngest grandson Shadi, was with us, after€  he had€  spent€  over a month in an Israeli detention center and€  under difficult conditions.€ €  Furthermore, my oldest grandson Omar, who is a designer, was with us also this Christmas after spending sometime in the UK and the USA.€  We missed him last Christmas as he always put up a very original Christmas tree with bare leaves but beautifully decorated.€  So, this Christmas, instead of putting it in a pot, he used a hook that was in the ceiling to hang it upside down.€  He got my approval as I told him that it will certainly be in style with everything else being upside down these days.€  Be it logic, morals, values, politics, religion, or whatever.

      The moment I mentioned “upside down,” I recalled that many years ago, and in the early days of “Sabeel,” the Palestinian Liberation Theology movement, Rev. Naim Ateek led us in reading “The Upside Kingdom” by Donald Kraybill.

    • Counter PunchCharles Austin Beard, a Racist Historian?

      Controversy about Charles Austin Beard began in 1913 when he published An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. He turned thirty-nine that year. Until then, his books had appeared to widespread praise within the profession and to the benign neglect of the general reading public. A highly successful teacher at Columbia University and a prolific author and reviewer of books on English and American history, he advanced swiftly in the profession. As a sign of his professional promise, the top journal in his field early sought him out to serve on its board of editors.

      The normal professional ascent of a talented, energetic and ambitious academic suddenly shifted its trajectory in 1913. It did so sharply in two directions. Socialists and progressive liberals hailed Beard for his realistic analysis of the Constitutional Convention as the birthplace of a national government intended from the beginning to serve as the political adjutant of the country’s economic elites. For the left, Beard became and remained a heroic figure and an avatar for the way critical history should be written. Conservatives, however, never would forgive Beard for his portrayal of the Founding Fathers as an assembly of politicians—however brilliant and learned–acting of necessity in the aggrandizement of the elites who had sent them to Philadelphia in 1787, more or less setting the pattern of American politics ever afterward. For making such an argument and documenting it, he became the most famous and influential historian in the country, but also the most notorious and controversial.

    • Modern DiplomacyAfter horrific earthquake: Lift sanctions on Syria – help people!

      The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) calls for the immediate lifting of sanctions on Syria to allow for more humanitarian aid and disaster relief following the horrific 7.8 magnitude earthquake that has left tens of thousands injured or dead. Current U.S. sanctions severely restrict aid assistance to millions of Syrians.

    • France24Dutch police open probe of anti-Semitic text projected on Anne Frank museum

      Dutch police said on Friday they were investigating the projection of an anti-Semitic laser message onto the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam -- an incident the prime minister condemned as "reprehensible".

    • Hong Kong Free PressHong Kong anti-graft police hunt Tesco toy supplier and buyers accused of decade-long US$900k bribery scheme

      A court has issued arrest warrants for two buying managers and a toy supplier who are wanted by Hong Kong’s anti-graft body for allegedly accepting and offering bribes totalling over US$900,000 (over HK$7 million). Zsolt Gergely Kovacs, 46, and Ladislav Gajdos, 43, were buying managers for supermarket chain Tesco in the UK and its local […]

    • SpiegelThe Earthquake in Turkey and the Question of Guilt

      After Monday's devastating natural disaster, people in Turkey are living in tents and the mayor of one city is running his office out of a van. Hundreds of thousands of people are just trying to cope. Meanwhile, President ErdoÄŸan is facing critical questions as a result of the massive crisis.

    • New YorkerA Life Begun Amid the Ruins of a Syrian City

      A baby rescued from the earthquake’s rubble was named Aya, meaning “a sign of God’s existence.” But what is the life ahead of her?

    • New Yorker“I Owe Turkey, Because I Was a Refugee”: A Young Syrian on the Earthquake’s Devastation

      A first-person account from Serbest Salih, a twenty-eight-year-old photographer in a border city.

    • Ministry starts call center for unattended children after the earthquake

      Ministry of Family and Social Services announced that 162 unattended children are now being treated in hospitals, and 101 more were placed in ministry institutions after their treatment in hospitals following the Feb. 6 earthquakes. 18 children have been handed over to their families after their family bonds were confirmed.

    • Miners rescue young girl from 8 meters below after 90 hours

      The miners used a method that is also used in the mines to rescue the young woman from 8 meters below in the wreckage.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • composer's daily journal

        I am really not sure if this could work. See, at the moment I'm struggling with some depression and especially with consistency and accountability - namely if I want to achieve my goals, I need to stay persistent and show up everyday, and this is an action at which I failed so many times before. So my current idea is to simply write a daily journal which is focused on this goal, or is at least contextualised as such: composition, music production. Composer-programmer Journal.

      • Album #173: British Steel

        I try not to read other reviews and opinions before going in to albums I don't know so that I can listen without any bias. I gave up when 'Breaking the Law' came on, and made me laugh out loud. It seems this album is the tipping point between a harder Judas Priest and a bid for the mainstream. Those bids for the mainstream are so dated now that the better tracks have already faded from my mind.

      • Matilda

        This post will probably contain some spoilers. It's just too hard writing about stuff like this without spilling a few beans.

        Today I took the train into Seoul with my six year-old daughter to see a Korean adaptation of the Matilda musical. It was actually very good, much better than I expected it to be. I had seen the film version of this musical, which came out somewhat recently, and while it is enjoyable in its own unique way (with some special qualities I will soon mention), I didn't exactly fall in love with it. It is a nice movie, and the deviations from the original story are interesting, but perhaps I am just too attached to the original film adaptation which came out when I was a child. Anyway, seeing it live was such a wonderful experience. I'd like to say some things about it, and share some thoughts about the film version and about Matilda in general.

      • There are no Simple Answers

        I'm going to start with some background on my position. My SO is a dispatcher for the sherriff's office in a semi-rural county in a midwestern state of the USA. I realize that our experience doesn't align on all fronts with the experience of a minority in a large city, fully acknowledge that, and have spent a lot of time thinking about the ramifications of what that means, and yet I still am bothered by a lot of attitudes.



        [...]

        Now I'm going to try to be fair in my portrayal here and say that the sherriff's office wasn't always a shining beacon. Sherriff is an elected position, for whatever reason, and the previous sherriff left things a mess. Frankly there was rampant corruption. I couldn't begin to guess whether the sherriff was part of it or just bad at his job, but in any event the turnover in the current sherriff's first year in office was illuminating as he savagely weeded the ranks. I believe he's a good man. I don't agree with all of his politics, but from what I can see his politics are not his driving factor, which is as it should be. We're probably very lucky.

        Going further, I would characterize the highway patrol as a bunch of assholes who exist only to write traffic citations, and the interactions that the deputies have had with some of the city cops that I have heard about don't paint a great picture of their level of training or professionalism.
      • Processing Grief Is Complicated

        Your dog was obviously a close family member, and from the sounds of it, you were closer to your dog than you were to your grandparents. No shame in that. So you're obviously going to feel that loss a lot more keenly. I've been through the grieving process a few times, and one thing I've noted is that grieving isn't primarily about the person who is gone. It's about the person who remains, and the loss that they feel.

      • All that is solid melts into air

        “How consoling in the depths of affliction!” was Lincoln’s reaction to the old Persian proverb “this too shall pass” (also found in Solomon folklore as a ×’×–×´×™ seal, which makes the Marx quote “all that is solid melts into air” an unintentional pun since without the gershayim mark, it would mean “gaseous”). His take was that when things are good, it’s chastening because it can get worse. If things are bad, it’s consoling because it can get better.

      • 🔤SpellBinding: FITOPRL Wordo: DOVEY
      • Balance on a penny farthing bicycle

        A couple of months back my employer wrote a blog post where they interviewed me to ask me some quick questions. It is actually part of a series of such posts, with several of my colleagues featured in the own post with the idea being to help our users get to know us better.

    • Technical

      • Keeping Tech Fun, More Music, Mythical Man-Month

        I've started realizing that my view of the direction tech is heading has been getting pretty pessimistic lately. There's just lots to be worried about it seems. Over-centralization, needless complexity, reckless AI adoption, government overreach... shall I go on?

        I love tech, I just need to find more ways to keep it exciting for myself. I was talking about this on Mastodon when Akseli showed me Hackaday which features cool little hardware projects. It's things like that that remind me how fun and exciting tech really is.

      • Programming

        • On Nim

          This is a precursor to a longer post about a project I've been working on - but I'd just like to say Nim is the only programming language of the last twenty years I have nothing but good things to say about. The best way I can describe it is Modula-3 cosplaying as Python, and that is a good thing to be.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



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