Older blog entries for bolsh (starting at number 29)

I think I'll call this the Bush strategy...

Why I hate US politics

So - there's no getting away from it. It's an election year in the US, and you guys over-pond get to pick the next Lord Protector of the Free World in a few weeks.

I was going to be positive, but I've just read some stuff on some US politics sites, and I haven't got the heart to.

If you were to believe the way the campaign is going now, the top 3 issues are:

• Who did what in the Vietnam War?
• Who is the "strongest" leader?
• A distant third, who is best for the economy?

I may be getting these wrong, simply because I'm just getting a window on the campaign, but the key phrase coming out of the Bush campaign now is "flip-flop". Bush & Co. have worked out that the flaw in Kerry's character is that he changes his mind in the light of new evidence (or new political realities, whichever you choose to believe). It seems to me that the Republicans are being allowed, as so often happens, to dictate the agenda for the campaing.

So I got thinking - why do people think Bush is so bad outside America? And why don't Americans see it that way? And how is Kerry different?

So here's the top 3 reasons Bush is not liked outside the US

• He went to war on Iraq, when everyone was telling him he shouldn't (in fact, Saddam had agreed to let UN inspectors back into the country in the days leading up to the war), and lied to his own people about the reasons for that war.
• He doesn't care about anything outside the US borders (except maybe oil fields) - he has spurned the International Court of Human Rights, the Kyoto Agreement, and hasn't moved an inch to remove protectionism of American farmers. On top of that, he has acted unilaterally in the face of overwhelming international opposition on Iraq.
• He has hijacked the attacks of September 11th to advance a personal political agenda, and is moving towards a police state in the US.

So what Kerry needs to do to distance himself from Bush is call Bush on these things - he lied, he abused his power, he has obliterated long-standing alliances, and explain to the American people how he will be an improvement.

The hardest thing to do is say what he would do, when elected, in Iraq. There's going to be a mess there for years whatever happens. But he needs to stick to the punchlines - Bush lied to the people, he abused their trust, he cost America friends.

Instead, what do we end up talking about? Bush would be a stronger leader, Kerry's bogged down in Vietnam. We end up talking about how Edwards's country origins go down in the South and mid-west, how Bush is doing in the latest polls (since when are polls an election issue?), and of course we talk about flip-flopping. But when is the Kerry campaign going to start calling Bush on why people think he is so bad? Or are they already doing that, and just not getting the news cycles?

I wouldn't say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one.

Brian Clough, funniest football manager ever. RIP.

The maint is dead, Long Live the maint!

Are you a new GNOME user who would like to get bug mails about your favourite application, but don't know who to ask? Are you a developer who has been waiting for 2 weeks for someone to get around to adding you to a list alias? Are you a sysadmin who is snowed under with work, and has better things to be doing than checking out mysterious CVS modules to add a user to an alias? Then this blog entry is for you...

A subtle, and mostly untrumpeted, change came in with the GNOME Bugzilla upgrade - the ability to watch other users. It is possible to get all the bugzilla mails they get, as well as your own, by simply adding them in your e-mail preferences page.

This has brought about a change in policy for the Bugzilla *-maint mail aliases, which is great news for anyone who has ever waited for days or weeks to be added to one because someone was on holiday, busy or otherwise occupied. Each product (and on request, even modules) can have their own "dummy' bugzilla account, created by bugzilla-maintainers. This account will be a bit-bucket, rather than a mailing list. And the users who want to "follow" the bugs of a product or module simply add this -maint user to the list of users they are watching.

No more shall you wait for a sysadmin intervention! No more shall new users need to get to know the maintainer to get on a -maint alias! Power to the people!

Jamin: Show-off. ;-)

jamesh: In the version of STV that I know, there are a couple of differences to that which you describe.

The main one is that surpluses are not distributed as you describe exactly. It would be more accurate to say that 80% of campd's votes would be distributed at 100% strength. You cannot have partial ballots.

Another minor difference is that if a candidate gets pushed over the quota by someone else's surplus or elimination, then only the votes which pushed them over the top get examined for surplus redistribution. This is a pretty controversial practice, which almost certainly changed the result of at least one constituency in Ireland last time around (Dublin North Central, IIRC).

Correction: It was Dublin Central. When Joe Costello was elected by transfers from Jim Mitchell, the surplus distribution favoured Dermot Fitzpatrick, even though the total vote for Costello would have favoured the more left-leaning Keho. The fact that the surplus came from Mitchell, a center-right candidate, skewed the next preference down.

There is also a GPL application to handle STV counts, which would make the task easier: pSTV. So perhaps the idea of having people do the 2004/5 election using the existing system, but specifying preferences as a test-run of STV, would be an interesting experiment.

Sed tip

A friend was recently looking for help with a problem, and that gave me the chance to freshen up my sed a bit.

His problem was the not uncommon one of wanting to replace a two-word string which might go over line-breaks. He wanted to keep the newlines in the replacement.

Most people are unaware that sed can do multiline edition with the commands N, D, P, G and H. Here's the script which did the job in the end (assuming I want to replace "I hope" with "we expect"):

sed -e '
N
s/\<I\([ \n]\{1,\}\)hope\>/we\1expect/g
P
D' input.txt > output.txt

N adds a new input line to the pattern buffer, the s replaces I hope in that pattern buffer, saving the thing which separates I and hope (spaces or a newline), and inserts it between the we and think in the output, P prints up to the first newline, and finally D deletes up to the first newline, and forks back to the N if there's anything left in the patter buffer. The last line, which is the active pattern buffer, gets dumped when the N command fails (that is, when there is no more input).

I'd forgotten how much sed rocks.

Just back from holidays, two computerless weeks (apart from 1 hour) of sun, sea and sand (and driving - all in all, I drove 3600 km). Still catching up with all that's happened while I was away.

It's a pity time doesn't stand still while you're on vacation, since a large part of the good feeling you build up while not working ends up getting sucked into the hole of built-up work the day you get back.

Anyway, the Irish almost had no influence on the olympics, until the last two days, when we won a gold, and a madman may have lost another one.

Just don't think about where it comes from...

For the coffee lovers among you, I present Kopi Luwak, $1000 per kilo. (French article).

What's new in the GIMP 2.1

I saw Edd's blog entry about the fashion show, and was wondering why he'd left off the GIMP. So I asked him. And he asked me what was new in the GIMP.

So here it is - a list of the 5 biggest changes in the GIMP since we branched the 2.0 maintenance branch back at the end of April.

1. Shortcut editor

   You can now edit your shortcuts in a dedicated dialog, as well as continue to use the little-known dynamic shortcuts feature (which has been there since 1.2).

2. Interoperability and standards support

   You can drag & drop and copy & paste image data from the GIMP to any application which support image/png drops (currently Abiword is the only one we know of) and image/xml+svg drops (Inkscape support this one). So you can copy & paste curves into the GIMP from Inkscape, and then drag a selection into Abiword to include it inline in your document.

   Patterns can now be any GtkPixbuf supported format, including png, jpeg, xbm and others.

   We can load gradients from SVG files.

   Drag & drop support has been extended. You can now drop file and URIs onto an image window, where they will be openes in the existing image as new layers.

3. Plug-in previews

   We have provided a standard preview widget for plug-in authors which greatly reduces the amount of code required to support previews. David Odin is currently working on improving functionality of this widget (or rather, providing another widget which wraps the existing one) to allow arbitrary zooms and pans on a preview image. Very cool.

4. HIG conformance

   A lot of work has been done on HIGifying the GIMP's interface. Most dialogs now follows the HIG to the best of our knowledge. We'd love to have a GUI review for HIG compilance done, actually...

5. GTK+ 2.4 migration

   - Menus use the GtkUIManager to generate menu structure dynamically from XML data files - GtkFileChooser is used everywhere in the GIMP - Support ARGB cursors when they are available on the system

There are a few others which are either too small to list, or are not yet finished and might not get into 2.2.

It is now possible to run the GIMP in batch mode without an X server. We have a GIMP binary which is not linked to GTK+ at all. That's pretty cool.

The big possible feature is color management support (including soft proofing and display filters). There is quite a lot of infrastructure in place already, and since someone is now working on this, I am hopeful that this will be one of the headline features in 2.2.