Why you should not watch The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Published on January 22, 2012 in tv and film. 0 Comments

There is advertising for this film everywhere, so I couldn’t ignore this issue anymore. Not that I would have been silent on this otherwise, but now I want to convince people even more not to see this film in order to counter the marketing offensive. The film I’m talking about is the English version from 2011 of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; there also is a Swedish version made in 2009.

On the one hand, remakes can be worthwhile. For example, I like both Infernal Affairs and The Departed. I think The Departed contributed something substantial over the original from Hong Kong. Also, more unfortunately a remake seemed to be justified because Infernal Affairs was barely known in the West. On the other hand, while I must admit that I have not seen the English version of 2011, let me point at the scores at Metacritic. The Swedish original scores 76 and the English remake scores 71. And that’s with a $13 million budget for the former and a $90 million budget for the latter. The Swedish original was not obscure, in fact it was broadcast by a Dutch public broadcaster a few weeks ago. There is merely a gap of two years between the release of the two films. So when the quality, age or availability of the Swedish original is taken into account, there is no reason to see the remake. This is yet another effort of Hollywood to steal foreign films so they can make easy cash off fools who can’t be bothered to read the English subtitles when they see the Swedish original.

So, unless a remake makes a significant contribution in comparison to the original, let’s refuse to reward the filmmakers for remakes like this. Vote with your wallet so Hollywood learns to be more creative instead of promoting the production of shameless copies. The English remake is on the same level as counterfeit clothes.

Why Obama should not be reelected

Published on January 3, 2012 in politics. 0 Comments

It was a bit hard to figure out what Obama did most recently because two articles on my favorite Dutch news website (but other Dutch news outlets are also guilty of this) merely mention that Obama signed ‘a law’. Because the stupid Dutch news didn’t bother to mention which law it concerns I had to do a bit of searching myself, and I figured out that it is the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) (you have to love these cool names they give to their laws in the USA, we should have that in the Netherlands too). We already knew that Obama wasn’t living up to his promise to close Guantanamo Bay, but this is the nail in the coffin for the promise, which has been reneged on by Obama completely now. Maybe Obama felt himself cornered by the Republicans when he signed the NDAA, but the idea that he can use discretion in applying the Act to prevent the harm to civil liberties is not at all convincing because the damage has already been done. Sure, the NDAA was necessary because the defense forces need funding, but when these highly objectionable provisions for which you threatened to veto the Act are still in and you sign it ‘with reservations’ you lack spine.

According to the article in The Washington Post funding was going to expire on Monday 2 January, so Obama signed it on Saturday 31 December after last-minute modifications were made by Congress at the request of the White House. Seems to me like they had better done it a few months in advance instead of waiting for the last minute if you ask me, procrastinating is supposed to be something what university students like me do, not presidents. So Obama had his hands tied because the funding was about to expire, but in that case why did you wait so long? Did (Obama allow) the House of Representatives with its Republican majority stonewall the process so they could force Obama’s hand when the deadline for new funding came?

If Obama has so much difficulty with closing Guantanamo, maybe the Cubans can kick the USA off their territory? They would have good reasons to do so. At least Ron Paul (among others, of course) has a mind of his own and realizes the value of civil liberties with his opposition to the NDAA  Unfortunately I find many of his other ideas such as those on abortion, climate change and higher taxes objectionable, so I wouldn’t want him to be the next president.

Yes, of course Obama has also achieved change for the better, such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). But then again, it doesn’t make up for this unforgivable mistake he made with the NDAA. But there’s more. There’s the upcoming Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which is another great danger to freedom, but it’s unlikely Obama would veto it. While Bradley Manning rots in jail, he thinks the treatment he gets is appropriate. He might have the intention to raise taxes for the rich with the Republicans preventing him from doing so, but as I wrote earlier his government is still too friendly towards Wall Street.

Concluding, I think the Democrats and Republicans which have been controlling the government in the USA for such a long time are what we would call “regent’s parties” in the Netherlands. Meaning, they have become so used to governing that they don’t represent the people of the USA properly anymore and care more about their own position. But in the USA it’s much worse than in the Netherlands where some of the parties who were accused of being regent’s parties have been punished by the electorate. Almost half of Congress consists of millionaires who are in the pocket of the special interests. I hope Americans Elect would have the power to break this duopoly of the Democrats and Republicans.

Films seen in December 2011

Published on December 31, 2011 in tv and film. 0 Comments

First off, fuck you WordPress! When I wanted to publish this post WordPress ate over half an hour of writing! This is the first time this ever happened, maybe because I left a tab with the WordPress ‘Add New Post’ window open in Firefox for too long. Did that make WordPress lose a connection or something? Whatever it is, you should have allowed me to save my work, WordPress.

Now that I’ve calmed down after striking my fist at my desk a few times, let me tell you that I’ve seen two films this month, La piel que habito (2011), also known in English as The Skin I Live In and Drive (2011). This is the second film from the hand of Pedro Almodóvar I’ve seen, the first being Volver (2006). After seeing another film directed by him I can say I’ve become a fan of this man’s work. The subjects of his movies are unconventional. His last work contains some murder and rape which makes for tougher subject matter than Volver. Because La piel que habito is a film which is as least as surprising as The Sixth Sense, I can’t reveal too much about it because otherwise I would spoil the surprise. If you are going to see this, which I certainly recommend, refrain from reading the plot summary in the Wikipedia article. Or I should probably say, refrain from reading the Wikipedia article at all. Reading spoilers against my will happened to me recently when I read a summary of the sixth season of Dexter. Before I was even realizing I was reading spoilers I shouldn’t be reading I had already given in to my curiosity and the temptation to read on. I could bang my head against the wall after reading them because it spoiled the fun for me. Returning to the film, I wonder if the encounter between Vicente and Norma could be considered rape? I thought that the end of the encounter certainly amounted to that, but strangely a woman with who I was watching the film as part of our date thought otherwise, she blamed Norma for freaking out. Almodóvar is on my side and made sure that what comes around goes around for Vicente, who is punished in a most fitting manner.

Drive is a great film which didn’t deserve to be overlooked by the wider audience. It’s got Ryan Gosling, the beautiful Christina Hendricks and a few car chases. Most importantly it has the ingredients to appeal to both the mass audience and the art film audience. The Wikipedia article says that the film was initially planned to be released as a blockbuster, but that it was finally released as an independent film. But I don’t understand why? Because the director is Danish? As a consequence I had to see this film in an art house cinema, but I think that if the release wasn’t limited (it certainly was very limited in the Netherlands) and the popular cinema’s also showed it, it would have grossed a lot more. Because of the limited release the wider audience has missed it mostly, but it’s their loss if they only get Hollywood productions shoved through their eyes and ears. The film’s opening scene works wonders with suspense, similar to having a hard time with evading the cops in car chases in the GTA games, but two scenes later in the film do it even better. What I didn’t like about the film was the protagonist playing shy and mute most of the time. Like La piel que habito it’s also violent, the scene with the depiction of catching buckshot to the head is justified because it’s realistic. But a violent scene close to the finale left me wondering what kind of message the director wanted to convey, just shock? Critics have frequently placed this film on their lists of best films of 2011, which is well deserved.

Something else which I’d highly recommend for viewing (for free) are the film reviews done by Plinkett. Especially his reviews on the Star Wars prequel trilogy are great to watch and frequently got me gasping for breath after I rolled over the floor laughing. I already thought that the prequels didn’t compare well to the original, but he manages to articulate so well and in so much detail what is wrong with these films, unlike other reviewers.

What I don’t like about Shogun 2: Total War

Published on December 30, 2011 in gaming. 0 Comments

Compared to Empire: Total War it’s now more difficult to get a substantial growth rate for towns. I struggle with the financial situation when I play the more difficult clans and can only sporadically recruit samurai for my armies. But some other AI clans who should have comparable financial difficulties based on their territorial possessions can sometimes afford to field all-samurai armies (fortunately they were all yari samurai who died like flies when they assaulted my stronghold, but the AI is still a cheat)! The AI is eager to assault my castle towns at the first turn of a siege, but they horribly overestimate their chances of success, possibly because the auto resolve option for battles favors the attackers in such a situation. But if I choose to defend myself, I can easily inflict a crushing defeat on the attacking party even if they seriously outnumber me.

The game still has the telepathic ranged units, like in Rome: Total War and Medieval 2: Total War; archers outside the walls can fire at enemies within the walls who they can’t even see. And this time they can also inflict heavy casualties at archers defending the walls, which is incredulous given the very good defensive position on the walls. What changed for the better is that defenders who are climbing the walls can now expect to get riddled by arrows while they do so. In the previous games archers on walls would fire at approaching besiegers, but once they had ladders up the wall they would be out of harm’s way for a moment until they reached the top of the wall.

Even worse is that my bow ashigaru standing on a notable hill don’t have a greater range than the enemy bow ashigaru not standing on a hill. I still remember playing Medieval 2: Total War as the French and placing my Scot’s Guard (or any other faction or any other units which have ‘long range missiles’) on the slope of a very high mountain. That was possible if you attack or get attacked by an enemy force near mountains. In extreme cases if you were placed on a much higher elevation and the enemy at a much lower elevation, your ranged units had a very extreme range of maybe one-third of the battlefield. While the enemies would tire themselves with moving uphill they would meet a hail of arrows or crossbow bolts and they would be dead before they could even get close.

Like in previous Total War games (with the exception of Empire, where it didn’t bother me) units are still marked with the very bright color of their faction to identify them, which makes them look silly and unrealistic. It’s not necessary at all to identify which units are yours and which are enemy, Europa Barbarorum and other mods don’t do it and there it never caused problems. Again a mod is needed to fix it I guess. While researching technologies in Empire made sense because that game is situated in the 18th century, the ‘Mastery of the Arts’ stuff which is essentially the same in Shogun 2 does not because the Sengoku period did not have such technological and intellectual advances. The peasant foot soldiers, the ashigaru, are cannon fodder for the samurai in this game, even though Wikipedia tells us that they could vary from having no armor to very heavy armor. The developers must have some kind of obsession for snow, when the winter season arrives the whole of Japan looks like Siberia. But in reality snow cover only lasts in northern Japan and higher altitudes. In Tokyo ‘snowfall is sporadic, but does occur almost annually’: with the average high and low in January being respectively 9,9 °C and 2,5 °C it should melt quickly. Glad I paid no more than € 15 for this game.

Videogames I’ve played in 2011

Published on December 30, 2011 in gaming. 0 Comments

I haven’t written about videogames for a long time, so in this post I’d like to give a summary of the videogames I’ve played over the past year or so and my thoughts on them. In general I don’t play much different videogames, even though I buy interesting games on Steam a few times a year if they can be bought very cheaply when there is a discount. For example, I bought Civilization IV, Bioshock, Dead Space and Fallout 3 many months and even years ago when they were heavily discounted, but I haven’t even played them once so far. Because other games such as Counter-Strike: Source and Left 4 Dead 2 still keep me occupied, even after playing these games for years. I guess this is a testament to how great these games are, I simply do not need any other games to have fun, but the discounts are effective to seduce me because the discounts are temporary. Who wants to risk paying more later for a game you think is interesting?

I finished playing all three games of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. Maybe the best way to describe it would be a combination of Oblivion (because of the openness of the game) and first-person shooters. But what sets it apart from the competition most is the creepy atmosphere set in the East Bloc. It’s one the few games which made me feel fear, with all the mutants lurking in the dark buildings and in the open field at night. What is also notable is that it was made by a Ukrainian developer, GSC Gameworld. Unfortunately this developer has closed its doors due to financial problems, which is a great loss for the gaming industry. On Rock, Paper, Shotgun they have already described very well what makes this game series good. If you decide to play these games, take a look at the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Complete mod or all of the three titles in the series. This mod fine tunes so many aspects of the games that it takes them to the next level.

The Witcher 2 is in my opinion the best game of 2011. This is game is ‘ploughing’ awesome, as anyone who has played it will understand. The Witcher 1 had an interesting plot, but the action was utterly boring with it’s constant chaining of combos with a mouse click. And if a group of enemies attacked you would just use group style to kill everything surrounding you. The sequel solves this by introducing a far better combat system which requires skill to execute combos. It’s not obvious at all in the game, but I mean that you can attack more efficiently if time the strikes right. And unlike the first game, groups of enemies are now very dangerous. I thought that that the first group of enemies in the game that you fight without help were easy, but I got my ass kicked badly. Even later in the game mobs of enemies frequently killed me, the mobs of Nekkers and Drowners around Flotsam for example.

This brings me to the difficulty level. The Witcher 2 does it the other way around, as you progress the game gets easier because you become more powerful. Some people don’t like this because they expect the beginning of a game to be easy and the end to be difficult. There is something to be said for that, the Quen sign you can use later in the game for example can damage enemies as they attack you and you can keep it up more or less continuously, which is a bit cheap. But it’s great that becoming powerful makes you feel really powerful for change. Oblivion would be the total opposite of The Witcher 2. Even if your level is super high in that game, monsters and town guards adapt their level as well and can wipe the floor with the all-powerful player. In a sense that makes it effectively pointless to become more powerful. It came as no surprise then that some mods (Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul being the best example probably) for Oblivion returned to fixed levels.

The boss fights in The Witcher 2 deserve a special mention. Like some of the monster mobs the Kayran and to a lesser degree Letho iced me many times before I managed to defeat them. It almost got too frustrating after trying more than ten times to kill the Kayran, but you know what? It was justified, harsh but fair. After some practice I could kill the Kayran and come out of the fight unscathed, as is demonstrated on some YouTube videos.  It’s good to have a game with a challenge since most games nowadays are way too easy. The Witcher 2 is still nothing like Nintendo Hard, which I think is unreasonably hard (I like a challenge but I play games for fun after all). I played the game on normal difficulty, anyone who goes for easy because they can’t win lacks a healthy dose of perseverance, or to say it less diplomatically: is a coward. Plough you!

What is also notable is the massive upgrade of the graphics compared to its predecessor. Flotsam is beautiful, if wasn’t surrounded by Scoia’tael and monsters I’d sign up for a holiday there, maybe a river cruise? And the scene in the Elven Baths will certainly be remembered in the history of gaming! That scene contributes quite a bit to the mature character of this game. While The Witcher 1 wasn’t very child-friendly either, its successor has an even greater dose of maturity with plenty of blood and sex. It is interesting to note that both The Witcher games are rated 18 but that Battlefield 2 was rated 16. Yet that game doesn’t even display blood if anyone dies. So a game rated for 16 is very tame (I can’t see why it wouldn’t be suitable for the age of 12), but in a gap of just two years you can get the full dose of maturity. Go figure.

To finish this and prevent me from rambling on about how great The Witcher 2 is this whole post, let me conclude that there are a few more things which make it great besides the combat system, the difficulty, the graphics and the mature content. The plot and writing is good, even though the last chapter is not as good as the first and the second. The game has attention for detail, for example the drunkard singing a song near the fireplace outside Loredo’s mansion in Flotsam. Choices matter, different choices made can warrant another playthrough because the paths of Iorveth and Roche are so different.

Then let’s finish with discussing mods. I’m following the development of XreaL closely, which aims to revive Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory with a more advanced game engine licensed under the GPL and free content licensed under the Creative Commons. I think Broken Crescent is a great mod for Medieval 2: Total War, but it’s not cool that the AI cheats. The game generates huge AI reinforcements out of thin air to compensate for the AI’s stupidity, which certainly makes for interesting battles but also makes the game too difficult. I’m looking forward to the release of Black Mesa most, I’m convinced that mod will be an awesome remake of the original Half-Life but it’s a pity that it takes forever to release and that they don’t give much news updates. Europa Barbarorum 2 shares the first place, just like Black Mesa it’s a mod with a gargantuan effort and an extremely dedicated team behind it.

Unfortunately some of the latest titles such as Battlefield 3 don’t have modding support. EA Digital Illusions CE (DICE) has roots in the modding community since it hired some of the developers of the Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942, so it’s ironic they can’t manage to make modding tools available. DICE says that they don’t support Battlefield 3 modding because it’s too difficult for modders, while at the same time keeping the option open that modding support might still come in the future. It’s the same issue with Total War: Shogun 2, the developers of The Creative Assembly say it’s too difficult to offer good modding tools due to the complexity of the game. Even if I believe them – and I tend to think they are honest and it’s not a conspiracy for selling downloadable content – it doesn’t change the fact that good mods are not (yet) possible for these games!

For me the fact that Battlefield 2 has mods like Project Reality, Point of Existence 2 and others greatly extended my interest in that game. And I even thought a mod like Europa Barbarorum was necessary to fix the flaws of Rome: Total War, the original game is nothing compared to that mod. This means that I’m not going to buy Battlefield 3 or Shogun 2 for the full price. Concerning the full price, it seems that EA takes their customers for fools. For a direct download over their Origin platform, they ask € 50 and an additional € 15 for the Back to Karkand extra content.But I can buy Battlefield 3 for € 32 in the store, and the Limited Edition which includes Back to Karkand for € 41. And then I get physical DVD’s and I don’t have to let my PC download the game overnight. Steam also charges more than retailers on some occasions, but EA easily trumps that. I’ll wait until Battlefield 3 is discounted before I consider buying it. When Shogun 2 was discounted on Steam for € 15 or so I decided that was cheap enough to buy it, I’ll give my opinion about it in the next page because this post is getting to long.

My post-installation guide for Fedora 16

Published on December 17, 2011 in software. 0 Comments

Because problems with KMail and Plasma’s crashes were driving me mad I decided to kick Kubuntu off my desktop PC and install Fedora 16 after being impressed with F16 and GNOME 3.2 on my laptop. As I said earlier, I might not have experienced as much problems with Kubuntu 11.10 if I had chosen to do a clean install instead of a messy trajectory of updating from 11.04 (or 10.10?)  through development releases, but I like to distro hop once in a while.

However, a lot of work needs to be done to change the brand new installation of any Linux distribution from its state of tabula rasa into something which is customised to your own taste, has all the software you need and lets you work efficiently. A quick search with Google revealed to me that there are more of this kind of guides, like these. But I feel most of them contain too much unnecessary stuff or miss things and wanted to create my own, which I share with you.

Right after the installation I decided to download all 251 updates first, through Activities → Applications → System Tools → Software Update. Meanwhile I set Nautilus to use single click to open stuff, the default setting is to double click which I feel is unnecessary. Having worked with Dolphin for quite some time which also has single click as the default setting contributes to that. I’m also used to delete selected files in a file manager with the Delete key, but someone thought it was a good idea to change this and let the Delete key do nothing. Fortunately the behaviour is easily changed. I set search keywords in Mozilla Firefox for the Google and Wikipedia search engines, so that entering w <search term> in the location bar searches for that search term on Wikipedia. I added some extensions for GNOME Shell to address some issues I have with it. These include an extension to show the option to power off the computer in the status menu and an extension to hide the accessibility menu.

After the update I decided to download the proprietary drivers for my Nvidia GPU. Unlike Kubuntu, Fedora doesn’t want to ship certain proprietary stuff and it doesn’t provide any means to download them automatically. So you have to do it yourself, for which the RPM fusion repository can be used. There are easy instructions on how to add the repositories. Then the instructions here need to be followed. The free software nouveau driver doesn’t implement power management completely, so the fan on my GeForce 7800GT kept making noise like a vacuum cleaner. The proprietary drivers keep it quiet, so the this step is quite essential as nouveau is not an option for me. Of course you can also get the proprietary AMD drivers if you have one of their GPU’s.

After this I installed all the extra basic software I need. LibreOffice is probably too big to include on the GNOME Live CD. The missing GStreamer packages which are required to play non-free audio and video formats are proprietary so they’re not shipped by Fedora, but are included in the RPM fusion repository. Flash is also proprietary (free alternatives like Gnash aren’t good enough) and can be downloaded from a repository provided by Adobe, for which instructions can be found here (just installing the flash-plugin package sufficed, the other packages mentioned in the instructions were not necessary for me). The GNOME Tweak Tool. The latter is useful to decrease the font size used by GNOME, which is too big for me by default, among many other things. I like the Google Droid fonts more than the default fonts used in GNOME. Because some websites need Java I need the IcedTea browser plugin.

yum install libreoffice libreoffice-langpack-nl gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-bad-nonfree gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-ffmpeg flash-plugin gnome-tweak-tool google-droid-sans-fonts google-droid-sans-mono-fonts google-droid-serif-fonts icedtea-web

Fedora’s default font rendering can be vastly improved by installing the patched freetype packages of Infinality. A Fedora package repository is provided with instructions on how to add it there.

LaTeX with XeTeX support, the Memoir document class, the biblatex package for bibliographic facilities with support for the APA style and the Linux Libertine font is a must have for me. However, again it is better to add a separate repository to get a more recent version of TeX Live 2011 with the most up-to-date packages instead of TeX Live 2007 which ships with Fedora 16. Take a look at the info here on how the repository can be added. I installed the whole texlive-collection-xetex package, which downloads 251 packages worth 90 MB. That way you probably won’t miss any useful packages, but you also get a lot of useless stuff like Thai fonts for example (unless you need support for Thai fonts, but I don’t). Installing just the package texlive-xetex and texlive-memoir would have probably pulled in all necessary dependencies without the bloat. After having installed all this my LaTeX documents compile without problems, so no need to install packages manually because that package is not packaged for Fedora 16 or because the packaged version is to old. This is not like Kubuntu where I did have to hunt for the latest version of specific packages. Jindrich Novy who is working on packaging TeX Live 2011 and wants to introduce it to Fedora 17 rocks!

yum install texlive-xetex texlive-collection-langdutch texlive-memoir texlive-biblatex-apa texlive-libertine

I have taken a look at other GTK 3.x and GNOME Shell themes on GNOME-Look.org but none of them were better than the default in my opinion. At the moment installing themes is troublesome not only because there’s no option for it in GNOME 3.2 (yet), but also because some key applications still use GTK 2.x and have not been ported yet. These include LibreOffice, Mozilla Firefox and GIMP. This means that if you want to install the popular Zukitwo theme for example, which has matching GTK 2.x. themes, you need to install additional theme engines. This is an extra hassle. Yet after doing all this, I’m not entirely satisfied because GNOME needs more work in general (in bringing back certain options) and Evolution is frustrating to use, but more about that later.

My issues with Fedora 16

Published on November 27, 2011 in software. 0 Comments

After testing the beta of Fedora 16 a while I decided to do a fresh install of F16 on my laptop instead of simply updating everything because I wanted to keep it ‘clean’. It is my experience that bugs from the alpha or beta versions can spill over into the stable version if you update to that. This in turn would make reporting bugs more difficult because you might encounter bugs which might not have occurred if you would have done a clean installation instead. The extent to which it can make a system dysfunctional is illustrated well by the Kubuntu 11.10 installation on my main PC for production use, I was inpatient while 10.10 was still in alpha status and upgraded months before the stable version of 10.10 saw the light of day. As a consequence Plasma throws error messages when I want to shut down my PC more often than not. These error messages prevent the execution of the shutdown, so every time I shut down I have to watch and verify it gets turned off, or else click the ‘OK’ buttons on the error messages to make them go away.

That aside, the fresh installation of F16 gave me a motivation to get bug hunting and reporting. It seems that F16 is plagued by some minor but very annoying issues which are easy to notice, which makes me wonder how the issues were not noticed by Fedora’s QA. And Epiphany is still not usable as an alternative to Firefox, which is a pity considering all the good work that has gone into it. I’m not very confident in the developer’s attention for bugs because a bug report I filed a few months ago during the alpha stage of F16 about the corruption of the Yum database (doesn’t occur anymore) was never even triaged. Yes, that happens often with some other free software projects too, but it still bothers me. One more thing I don’t get is why they can’t fit LibreOffice on their GNOME Live CD, if Ubuntu can do it why not Fedora?

  • Bug #757487: the grub menu shows up even if Fedora is the only OS which is present, which is unnecessary.
  • Bug #732058: after pulling in a new kernel through the updates, grub kept booting the old kernel which came with the installation.
  • Bug #742584: a minor feature request because it would make more sense to encrypt the entire system, but it would be nice if the /home partition could be decrypted when the user logs in. I.e. without an extra passphrase if that’s the only encrypted partition, which is how Ubuntu does it AFAIK.
  • Bug #742584: the Java plugin doesn’t work with Epiphany.
  • Bug #664285: thanks to Adobe the Flash plugin doesn’t work in Epiphany because they haven’t ported it to GTK+3 yet.
  • Bug #664915: Epiphany uses wrong fonts to display websites, but I’m not sure if this is a bug in Epiphany or in Fedora.
  • Bug #664915: I constantly have to turn off the Bluetooth hardware in my notebook because it’s enabled by default as soon as I log in to F16, unlike other distributions I’ve used on my notebook.

Life in a Day

Published on November 9, 2011 in tv and film. 0 Comments

Just a moment ago I finished watching Life in a Day. It’s a free crowdsourced documentary showing various events all over the world on a single day, 24 July 2010. At first it seems like this film is social criticism because it is so full of contrasts. A Western man is seen starting his Lamborghini while in the next scene we see a man from what appears to be the Middle East in who has almost nothing save his children and a roof above his head. One man, possibly an African, has nothing in his pockets, as opposed to two Western women who carry around handguns to feel safe. A sequence of scenes is related to food, which starts with a Western man buying his food, totally detached from the process of gathering it. After that we see his poorer fellow humans on another continent who gather their own food, and then we see a cow being killed in a slaughterhouse.

It is a film about love and loss, joy and sadness, hope and despair, comfort and fear, serenity and hustle. It shows both the bright and dark side of humanity. The film succeeded very well, and after giving it some thought I don’t think it deserves to be characterized as social criticism. Of course the producers were selective in their inclusion of the material made available to them, but all they do is portray what happens on a normal day in the life of humans, just as they claim to be doing.

My highlights? The Korean man who is a true citizen of the world and is the only recurring person in the film. The boy who doesn’t want to be filmed but is convinced by his parents to cheer up. The beautiful woman who loves the strange very abstract word. The parachute jumpers. The woman who waited for something amazing to happen that day but got disappointed.

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Published on October 30, 2011 in literature. 0 Comments

This book was written by  Dale Carnegie and first published in 1936. It was one of the earliest bestselling self-help books. Not only the content of this title is magnificent, its title is too because it’s so lovely to the point. As the title suggests the book helps you learn how your social skills can be improved. It still remains popular today, which is not surprising given that its topic of elementary human behaviour has not changed much over the course of history. What makes this book so special compared to other books I’ve read is that the core principle of every chapter is summarised at the end in one sentence. For example, the core principle of the first chapter is summarised as ‘don’t criticise, condemn or complain’. This makes the message simple, compact and powerful.

While the message is simple, applying the theory in practice can be difficult. Sometimes we’re prone to exhibit behaviour that is counter productive to social relations and breaks the principles which are advised in this book. Let me give you a personal example.

As you might know from my earlier posts on my weblog I visited the Desktop Summit in Berlin in August of this year. At the conference there was a door in the back of the main conference room which offered the shortest route to all the other smaller conference rooms. At the start of the conference the organisers told the public that the door was not supposed to be used when presentations were given and that it would remain closed then. This way people travelling to other conference rooms couldn’t disturb presentations in the main room and they were forced to take a detour. I’m not sure, but maybe they also told that opening the door would trigger a fire alarm for the whole building. Whether they had or hadn’t told it, I didn’t know about it. A few days later during the conference a presentation in the main conference room just finished and I and some people were still in the room, chatting or working on their notebooks. Then someone appeared on the other end of the backdoor which was still closed. The guy asked us to open the door, some people said the door was not supposed to be used (even though the presentation was already finished and from a distance for which the message might not have been audible for the person behind the door) and ignored him while the guy was still asking for help.

I thought this attitude was not social and walked over to the door. The guy asked me if the door could be opened, which I was hesitant to do. I told him he needed to take a detour, but he told me he couldn’t find the way. With no one else helping and not wanting to ignore this guy, I decided to open the door. The door handle moved, the door wouldn’t open but the fire alarm did turn on. Ouch. I went to the organisers and explained and apologised for triggering the alarm. It would take some time to silence the alarm again. There was nothing I could help with to alleviate the problem, so I went back to the conference room. There one of the guys who had ignored the guy behind the door started talking to me. He asked my why I tried to open the door, I explained myself. This man was clearly incapable of empathy and started a verbal battle to condemn me. Even though I told him I had wanted to help the guy behind the door, he told me a had done him a bear service, disregarding my good intentions. Of course it was obvious he broke the principle not to criticise and condemn, he had made angry. The discussion ended when I told him I was done with talking to him. Had I observed the principle to quickly and emphatically admit my mistake, meaning I would have agreed with him about the bear service, the conversation probably would have taken a very different turn. Had I agreed with him, there no longer would have been a reason for him to condemn me, and we could have reconciled. Yet in this case I my feelings of contempt got the better of me, and I think many others would have responded in a similar way. This example illustrates why it can be difficult to strive for harmony instead of giving in to the urge of anger.

This shows that this book is not a title you read once, you re-read it and you work consciously to improve your social skills. Even before I read the book I knew that principles such as being a good listener and making compliments are important in social interactions. When these principles were explored I still learned something new due to the way the principles are elaborated on in the book. Some principles were also new for me, such as remembering the names of other people. That’s something I do very badly and which I try to improve quite consciously since I’ve read this book. The contemporary and historical examples given in the chapters to explain the principles can feel a bit dated because of the title’s age or American-centric because the author is an American. Sometimes the advantages of applying the principles can be portrayed in a manner which might come across as too enthusiastic, but if necessary the enthusiasm is parried by adequate nuance. This could be the most important book I’ve read for a long time and I’d highly recommend it to anyone. The only disadvantage is that this book is not in the public domain even if it was published in 1936.

I have a lot of respect for the author, Dale Carnegie. My edition of How to Win Friends and Influence People also included an afterword which told his life story. His life was very difficult during his youth, yet he managed to succeed later in life and lived the American dream. I noticed the troubles he had during his youth also served as inspiration for his book, he gives similar examples of other people who became very successful in later life after a difficult youth. His knowledge of social skills didn’t come natural to him, he became knowledgeable only after making mistakes and gaining much experience. Indeed, Thomas Edison’s phrase ‘genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration’ completely applies to him.

The problem with capitalism

Published on October 23, 2011 in thoughts. 0 Comments

On Wednesday the 19th of October the documentary Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) by Michael Moore was broadcast by the Belgian Flemish channel Canvas. In its subject matter there are similarities with the documentary Inside Job (2010) I mentioned earlier, but the style of both documentaries is quite different. The makers of Inside Job took a serious, objective approach, interviewing people and explaining events in the history of the financial world. Moore does the same but broadens the subject. He isn’t objective but subjective, polemical and demonstrates a great sense of humour with a lot of sarcasm and cynism. What I dislike are his silly antics to grab attention, such as him driving a truck for money transport to the banks to demand the return of the taxpayer’s money.

In the Netherlands we also have some problems with greed, even if it’s not as bad as in the USA. In the Netherlands there is a rule that public administrators and servants shouldn’t be paid salaries higher than that of the prime minister at € 188.000 a year, the so-called Balkenendenorm, named after the prime minister who was in power at the time when the rule came into existence. Recently it was revealed that Nurten Albayrak, the director of the COA (the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers), thought that the rule didn’t apply to her. She enjoyed a salary of € 273.000 and tried to get an Audi A8 to replace her old car, which is against the rules because that car is too expensive. Fortunately this fraud was unmasked by journalists and now she’s on suspension, likely to be fired after an investigation. The inconvenient truth for me is that this despicable person is also a member of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, the VVD. As readers of my Dutch weblog can relate I’ve already figured out that a relatively large percentage of the members of my party are prone to greed.

Now another example from the corporate world. During March this year the troubled Dutch bank ING was heavily criticised because it wanted to pay bonuses again to its top executives while it still hadn’t paid back the Dutch state for its bailout. The CEO Jan Hommen thought a bonus of € 1,25 million on top of his salary of € 1,35 million would have been adequate compensation for him, but he and his cronies who have an insatiable lust for money backed off after public outcry. Had there been no complaints they would have went ahead, why should they care about the massive inequality of their income with the average Dutch person? That was March, but I’ve got a good memory. As soon as my bank account at ING is no longer free when I get my master’s degree (yes, it’s free for students) I’m going to switch to a more ethical bank like Triodos Bank or ASN Bank as soon as possible. Remember, like Moore said the masses can change the game when they think enough is enough, vote with your wallet!

When Moore started comparing the Christian view on capitalism with the practices of Wall Street we saw a fragment of a banker calling Wall Street holy ground, but I had something different in mind. I still remember that CEO of Goldman Sachs which reminds me far too much of Dr. Evil, Lloyd Blankfein, saying in an interview that he was doing God’s work. Later Goldman Sachs dismissed it as a joke, but had the interview been published while Moore’s documentary was still in production, it’s inclusion would have been priceless.

It’s a pity these people with their extravagant salaries do not have any notion of frugality, like Cincinnatus, Jesus or Gandhi had for example. Currently in the USA CEO’s of large companies earn 364 times as much as the average worker. Not too long ago the difference was much smaller. The USA should start taxing the rich more again, which would have already happened if the Republicans would not have blocked Obama’s proposals. In Europe  we’re tougher on executive compensation, and we already hear complaints from European banks that it’s harder for them to attract talent because the rules are not so tough elsewhere. Ideally, we could fix this by imposing a tax rate of 100% for, say, all income above € 500.000 a year. I know that’s not going to happen any time soon and the idea might be a bit too leftist for a liberal like me, but I don’t see any other solution when the current distribution of wealth in the world is a far cry from justice.

On the other hand, I’m not sure if I would be opposed to high (but not disproportionate) salaries if a person is actually ‘worth’ his or her salary. This is a difficult issue, but take a look at this article (Dutch, English people could use Google Translate) for example about presenters working for the Dutch public broadcasters earning higher salaries than the Balkenendenorm I mentioned earlier. On the one hand you could say that it’s not principally right that a presenter employed by a public broadcaster makes more than the prime minister. On the other hand, if you’d consider the increased income generated with advertising due to the work of the presenter and this income minus the salary of the presenter turns out to be more than the income generated by a presenter with less skills who is paid much less, then it’s easier to see why it would be justified.

As a concluding remark, I don’t think capitalism is necessarily a problem. Everything should be enjoyed in moderation, it only becomes a problem when an economy is in imbalance on the scale between capitalism and socialism, or in other words the scale with completely free market economy being one extreme and a completely planned economy on the extreme. The USA leans more towards the free market, while most European nations are more balanced mixed economies. There does not seem to be a correlation between these observations I just mentioned and the placement of the USA and European nations on the Human Development Index, which the USA scoring higher than the majority of European nations. However, when we look at the comparisons with the Gini coefficient and the Human Poverty Index we see far more difference. To continue my comparison, the statistics for homicide by country show a similar correlation. Statistics aside, we don’t have neighbourhoods as bad as in the USA in the Netherlands, we have much less poverty and we never had evictions on a scale like in the USA when the crisis hit us. That’s why I think the mixed economies of many European nations are superior in to the economic system of the USA.