Tuesday, October 8, 2013

red kanji vine

A red vine on our street ... one of my "kanji" photos (taken this morning in a gusting wind.)

蔓草   

つるくさ



Thursday, September 26, 2013

Sabrent powered USB wireless antenna without RALink Utility


If you want to run the Sabrent powered wireless antenna without running the RALink Wireless Utility on Windows, be sure that you have the error logging service running as well as the zero config service and then bridge the USB wireless to your Ethernet conx in the Windows Network connections window.

Ignore the red 'X' on the icon and enjoy being able to "standby" or "sleep" without the aggravation of resetting the wireless connection when your desktop wakes up.

You may have to click "disable" for your on-board wireless, but that is almost certainly harmless. Check status to be sure that packets are going across the intended faster wireless connection !

Antennas have improved since we were kids ... but utility companies ?



running RedNotebook journal 1.7.1 on XP and Win7


If you are trying to run the RedNotebook 1.7.1 journal / diary on a Windows desktop you may have hit the same problems which I have had to resolve on XP Sp3 and Win7 Home Premium with Sp1.

If your Win XP environment contains a PYTHONHOME variable then you must set it to something inocuous such as a dot for the current directory of the Rednotebook.

I am doing this with a call to X-RedNotebook.exe in a 3-line BAT file which I summon from a 2-line VBS script that has a shortcut on my desktop ( this keeps a daft black DOS shell window from hanging around.)

On Win7 Home Premium Sp1 I could not get 1.7.1 to run as the X-RedNotebook variant until I had dragged in copies of the DLL's of which it was complaining as missing.

If you need details, drop a note.

If your upgrade to 1.7.1 went without a hitch, I would love to know the secret !




Wednesday, September 18, 2013

PQ Marois brinkmanship lesson


As reported on the web by ABC "GO" news:

R. Bruce Josten, executive vice president of the Chamber of Commerce for government affairs, urged the House in a letter to "act promptly to pass a (bill) to fund the government and to raise the debt ceiling," and then to return to health care, tax reform and other issues.

Whatever its ultimate impact on Republican lawmakers, the letter stands as a counter to an aggressive campaign by tea party-aligned groups including the Senate Conservatives Fund, Heritage Action and the Club for Growth in recent weeks to generate support for legislation to defund the administration's health care overhaul.

We wait for insight from Pauline Marois, PQ PM.



Eugenics 2.0 redux : the drama (unhyphenated)


If the philosopher has said

"If man can be made to salivate by the mere mention of food, then anything is possible"

then Eugenics 2.0 may be the answer indeed : breed men who only salivate postprandial ! And if this first can be done for one appetite, then why not another ?

This would accomplish — with the one blow — what feminism could not do as a movement : produce men who only desire to be with a woman after The Act !




Monday, September 16, 2013

GTD workflowy freemium


I am trying WorkFlowy at workflowy.com as another freemium alternative to Trello and Wunderlist.  If has more features than the latter but fewer than the former.

So far I am very impressed.  And yes, it does have @ and # tags for tagging items.  Just type. Place cursor and type. So easy I have to remind myself not to look for HOW, but just to Do it !


Saturday, August 31, 2013

Thursday, August 22, 2013

A poem in Der Vorleser and the Venus cycle of Octavio Paz


Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink has a poem with a striking echo of Octavio Paz Piedra de sol.

What makes it ring so clear is a verse not far above the parallel verse in the Paz with el rostro and el rostro ( and that the story of Hanna begins through a doorway.

But then I would not have noticed this without the Vogelgsang translation of the Paz and his choice of Antlitz and Gesicht.



Wednesday, August 21, 2013

John Brown : historiography and poetry


I have placed a Curl e-book of Steven Vincent Benét's "John Brown's Body" at poets.aule-browser.com/svb-jbb-006.curl 

It seems to me that the varied historiography of Brown is relevant as we approach climactic crises both environmental and climatic with Harriet Tubman figures and Frederick Douglass figures and very likely a corps of instigators not unlike Brown. 

I will try to find a moment to add a facility to tag and link notes into the text and to add the relevant Whitman links and/or texts.

The Curl browser plugin is available at www.curl.com



Sunday, July 28, 2013

academic Unicode experts


Today I find an academic Unicode expert who has the very errors he warns of in his own web page and who fails to declare the char‐encoding of that page : Unicode quote marks !

I suggest supplementing what he says with the advice on Unicode quotation in languages other than English :  wp.

But if the PC is not a typewriter – and only programmers need ASCII ` ' and " – then why not TEXT keyboards for users and APL‐style programmer keyboards for those who script, hack and program ?

As for hyphen and dash, those topics are linked in the wp article in its right‐side panel.



Friday, July 26, 2013

First Nations agglutinative languages


Is there First Nations people with an agglutinative language that is teaching Japanese as a foreign language?

Is there a school in Japan teaching Cree or Blackfoot ?



Monday, July 1, 2013

Pale Moon browser 20.2 released


Here is the list from palemoon.org
  • (CVE-2013-1692) Fix for the inclusion of body data in an XMLHttpRequest HEAD request, making cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks via a crafted web site more difficult.
  • (CVE-2013-1697) Fix to restrict use of DefaultValue for method calls, which allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary JavaScript code with chrome privileges.
  • (CVE-2013-1694) Fix to properly handle the lack of a wrapper, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code.
  • Fix to prevent arbitrary code execution from the profiler developer tool.
  • Fix for a crash when rapidly reloading pages.
  • Fix for cross-document selections.
  • Fixes for several crashes in JavaScript.
  • Fixes for several memory safety hazards and uncommon memory leaks.
The best browser for Penzu.com journals on Windows 7 ?




Sunday, June 30, 2013

configure Notepad++ for CoffeeScript


Adding CoffeeScript support to your Notepad++ editor may require a search for the user config file location.

My Windows 7 userDefineLang.xml file was in
C:\Users\*YourUserName*\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++
which was not where I expected.

The install folder has a langs.model.xml file and the ./plugins/APIs folder has many language XML files. Why not also keep userDefineLang.xml there ? A brute-force upgrading issue ?
The Notepad++ install program already offers choices with regard to AppData ...


Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Google search broken

This morning my  Google search on
Unicon coexpression HTTP 
returns NO "most relevant results" - pages of results flash up but then disappear - even the very Unicon PDF that I was looking for  - that link flashes up and then Pooffff !

#GoogleBusted #MostRelevantResults #GoogleSearch #Google #ImprovedTesting

Monday, June 10, 2013

Gnu Smalltalk st prompt


oh my gawd - I am at the >st prompt running gst !

Surely building Gnu Smalltalk is the WORST thing about moving to a new flavour of linux !

I gave up trying to get a headless St/X to run on this tiny CentOS VPS - but I still have hope for a headless Pharo.

Otherwise I am doomed to Ruby !!!  Or risk being ingested by Python !!!




Sunday, June 9, 2013

organelle, pebble, straw, plow


If, in the course of evolution, species A incorporated members of B as organelles, how is the problem thus solved different from the members of Aves species C ingesting selected pebbles or members of Corvus selecting and bending a straw, stalk or stick  ?

Heidegger's chief error may have been his faux insight into tekne (technique, Technik.) Husserl's second bit of folly was to follow Heidegger on the telescope.

Compare : a philosophical anthropology of play, dance and concept.

[ the chorus heard in response : "Heidegger was not doing philosophical anthropology !" ]

What offended Heidegger were the diesel tractors in the fields.  He took the trains to see and talk with Jaspers on Jaspers' wife's small inheritance (from a business venture?) and would one day take an aeroplane.

[ the chorus : Heidegger and Husserl were on a hike together ... ]

When the hike began, Husserl was going on a hike with Heidegger, but when they returned, Heidegger had taken Husserl somewhere the old professor need not have gone - or gone along with ( mit-fahren ) ...




Friday, June 7, 2013

MIT processing programming language for artists


The MIT processing programming language for artists has reached version 2.0 -

but I will stay with MIT Curl as a mature expression-based language with its Lisp-like features.

That said, processing is now 64-bit and OpenGL. But. Curl has great libraries, "live code" as documentation and and IDE  written in Curl itself ...

Note : expression-based Icon programming language has graphics in Icon, Unicon and ObjectIcon and Rebol will soon emerge again as rebol3 and the red programming language.




Wednesday, June 5, 2013

using a Penzu jounral for notes in Opera Browser


Using Penzu notebooks in the current Opera browser will drive you batty until you realize that new-lines must be SPACE + ENTER.

Now you can edit a page without the text being bashed around up and down the page.

On a Windows device, I use the Pale Moon variant of the Firefox browser : Penzu in Pale Moon works as expected.

Of course, Opera offers a notes sidebar, but that would require using Opera Link to sync your notes.  The point of using Opera in Windows is to get something up faster and lighter, so ...




Thursday, May 30, 2013

Nothing in OOP is obvious


Is nothing in OOP obvious to the neophyte?

Here is comment from a class named Observable declared as follows :


   public abstract shared Observable


The documentation for the class contains the following method comment  :

public add-observer

Add an observer to this object's list of observers to be notified. Typically this is only called from the Observer's observe method.


For this to make sense to a neophyte, wouldn't we need TWO variants of PUBLIC, e.g.,

  • MY-PUBLIC-FACE
  • YOUR-PUBLIC-VIEW-OF-ME

corresponding to

  • obj-public (intended for me to call against myself)
  • consumers-public (available as your message sent to me)

??

BTW, that add-observer method is declared as follows :

public  
{Observable.add-observer
    o:Observer,
    error-if-present?:bool = false
}:void


Is the issue the method name ?  Should it be 

   all-ya-all-add-observer-to-me

??

Consider :

   receive-observer

But what in a name prevents a hack ?  One idea : object procedures and functions versus messages.  In such a language, an object never sends itself a message.  If you have a local copy of an object, you can use its public procedures and functions.  If you have a pointer to an object - an object reference - you send only messages.

And what did the documenting author mean by "typically" ?



Friday, May 10, 2013

Burkina Faso beliefs


Burkina Faso is said to have no atheists (too low to be statistically reported as non-zero percentage) - but to have mutilated over 70% of all females (girls and women subjected to genital mutilation.) Is the margin of error significant for ones grasp of these two facts ?

What distinguished the remaining 24-29% ? Parental education ? Standard of living ? Level of education ?  Access to internet ?

UN Report on FGM and FGC

Religion stats

Do you have more recent numbers ?



Wednesday, April 10, 2013

HyperTalk hype


You may briefly see a resurgence in HyperCard script hype.

The script, HyperTalk, uses quasi-English as a gimmick aimed at, say, high school teachers who do not relish teaching programming and may only know a procedural paradigm.

Enter, stage left, "stacks" and "cards" without programming.

But a time comes when some text needs to be modified in accordance with some rule or pattern.

This is a teaching example :

function replaceStr pattern,newStr,inStr
   repeat while pattern is in inStr
      put offset(pattern,inStr) into pos
      put newStr into character pos to (pos +the length of pattern)-1 of inStr
   end repeat
   return inStr
end replaceStr


Can you see why the example is problematic?

No one who understood this code needs "is in" and all the rest of the quasi-English of this supposedly "non-programmer" scripting language.

So if someone tells you that your kid can build software in, say, RunRev "LiveCode" for free without learning how to program "the old way" you might ask them if that amazing thing comes complete with free money and winning lottery tickets as well.

There are alternatives out there : Rebol, Icon, Smalltalk but there is no escape from programming in software development ... not even for "mobile" or Android or iPad or "the web".

Posted with the usual apologies for not mentioning LISP in that list.




Smalltalk config candour

What follows is my reply to an exasperated Smalltalker :
CC  rider : config issues are as old as commercial Smalltalk ; I keep an entire mail bin of these (separate from 'user' or 'tips' conversations.) At least this is not
                    eclipse+CVS+Java+open-source !
I work in a very advanced commercial OOP created by MIT Lisp gurus and THAT IDE has package circularity issues that have to be addressed by developers who push beyond the pre-tested envelope.
Does the issue exist for commercial PROLOG implementations with packages ? That would be amusing .... (there had been SOUL and QSOUL projects for Squeak as well as a Prolog and then Lisp for Squeak )
I would not be surprised to find packaging issues with functors in Mozart/Oz ! And I could check the Mercury dev mailing list ... (Mercury - which can gen Erlang code ! )
The Puppy Linux folks have a real challenge in getting tools into their light Linux ... but so far so good (mostly) - I say "mostly" as I cannot get the ObjectIcon IDE to run in their JWM X ... but Icon with objects could be used to address that very config issue in a maintainable, readable fashion !!!
Practical computing : tasks which keep our sense of irony well-honed ;-) (even without management)
Needed : Pre-Factoring browsers ! ;-)
and please do keep smiling ... but only if the crows' feet crinkle at the edges of the temples ...

HyperCard open source


RunRev's "Community Edition" of HyperCard is now available for download.

RunRev is prone to hype and has a rep for poor support, so caveat emptor !

This grew out of a KickStarter ( yes, kick-starting HyperCard — so as I said …

Note: this is now multi-platform HyperCard under the moniker "LiveCode".

Note : with RunRev nothing is ever as it seems : you must register to run this "open source" "community edition".

Poor support item picked at random : StackOverflow complaint ; the web abounds in such exasperated customers over the years. You may also want to add a rule to the mail account used to register so as to send the hype-mail to the bit-bucket.

Their former personas include
The LiveCode programming language (formerly the "Revolution" programming language) is a commercial cross-platform rapid application development language.
Formerly MetaCard formerly HyperCard ( which still belongs to Apple ?)



Sunday, April 7, 2013

one poem view


My response to The Toronto Quarterly blog post on Landale.

I still think [that] a better idea [would be to] use a cookie to keep [limit / restrict] user [web page visitor] to one poem at random ... more work for the webmaster, but for the many of us with cottonwoods in our past, but who are not taken with this one poem … [] 
[T]hink of a book of poems as a gallery of paintings : [consider] the visitors' paths versus the guided tour of "we only have time to let you look at this one canvas" … or with a restricted "cordoned clockwise path" for the visitor. 
Give me open gallery space ANY day.
A cat entering a space may show agreement with its feet every time.



Monday, April 1, 2013

Baudelaire edits



Small correction to « Petits poëmes en prose » of Baudelaire at http://www.aule-browser.com/books/baudelaire-ppp.curl ( Curl "Surge" RTE browser plugin 7 or 8 required ; see www.curl.com )



Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Falklands crisis averted

 
Falklands stand-off solved by Prez Kirchner : she if offering all residents used condo's in some of her late husband's gubernatorial Santa Cruz real estate ( 1 $US for lifetime rental, or until foreigner leaves rental property unoccupied for any period of time deemed significant by int'l law, or local vigilant committee.)
 

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Polanski Vian dent


the tooth of Polanski's "The Tenant" — do we find it in Boris Vian's "La vie, c'est comme un dent" ?

poem /pun

et le robinet / les robinets

it leaves me «frantic» …

calamitous langue - 舌禍





Tuesday, February 26, 2013

didiwiki save new


If you are new  to didiwiki on Puppy linux and have a half-height netbook acreen, you may be baffled if you are not experienced at saving wiki pages.

TIP: SCROLL DOWN your new  page.

Ah-Ha ! There are the hidden SAVE and PREVIEW buttons.

I really must rewrite this app in Curl ( from www.curl.com ) — arguably the easiest way to create new Puplets in RAM ...




Friday, February 22, 2013

Precise Puppy tagainijisho folies


Precise Puppy linux running in RAM on a netbook is a delight — but surely no ordinary user could have configured the tagainijisho app to run after install !

The problem was not just the absence of Qt libraries; the challenge was to configure and update the package manager so as to find them !

The chief reason to use a variant of Ubuntu linux ceteris paribus is precisely the pkg manager.

The Precise Puppy 5.4.3 ISO may have been built before the optional packages were in the respective repositories.

Had the last step in ISO preparation been an update of the pkg mgr, could this stumbling block have been avoided ?

Not entirely ... not without a menu item and with Tagaini installing elsewhere than /opt ... the user still required a script.



Sunday, February 10, 2013

useful kanji pages


The two most useful kanji pages for me at my own site are currently the Henshall sorted-by-id page and the Henshall sorted-by-UNICODE+urlencoded page.

At the moment both are just simple blank on off-white pages : I am using them so often because I put the Henshall number and the UCS value into the margins of my kanji exercise book.

The page that I use the most often is the radicals page at jisho.org

My current favourite kanji are that for 'loom' and 'elephant' - and that for a few reasons ! Do you recall anything of note about these two characters ?

 機

 象



Thursday, February 7, 2013

red PL


An improved video presentation is now on YouTube for the current state of the Red programming language.

Red is an alternative implementation of an expression-based PL, Rebol.

Red is one-level above the Red/System language that can be used for performance at a lower level.

Programming in Red does not require C or C++ or D expertise and Red retains the strengths of Rebol.




Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Quips against racialism in poetry


But I did not use the words "boycott" or "picket" even once ! That would be what? A Sartre-complex ( the one-man boycott of the Nobel ? ) Oh — no Simone ?

Pass me that next batch-a-leaflets, will-ya ?

***

The TEXT is in a baseball glove on the wall of the East Wing of the Annex Gallery of Galley Connexion located in The Fredericton Playhouse. The phrase in qustion is in a poem:
 " ... an East Indan cobbler ... " 
about the fate of a baseball glove - but where? In New Germany, Nova Scotia ? The author appears to be the Jordan Trethewey of www.vagabondtrust.com and winner of a STU "Robert Clayton Casto Prize in Poetry" - so a poet. I hung the gloves on the wall as a volunteer for AG and GC, but only heard the TEXT read at the vernissage - and walked out. And according to a poster you may have seen, am a member of the selection committee ... but where are the minutes of THOSE meetings ? Ah - I see, so THAT's how it works ( I'm from away, you see ... )

***

Do ex-pats from Zimbabwe still say that they are from "Southern Rhodesia" in 2013 ? Do some of them call themselves "East Indian" here in Canada ? In Toronto? In Memphis, TN ? Or are they only called that in some parts of the US and Canada by certain others with old habits ? Which of our old lexical habits is contemporary poetry bent on preserving here in NB ? Just a free-for-all of art-for-the-heck-of-it take-it-or-leave-it ? So why have editorial readers at The Fiddlehead and The Malahat Review ?

***

In 2013, which current Canadian poems or critical reviews in English refer to Gérald Godin (1938-1994) as a "French-Canadian" poet ?

***

In 2012, did Americans ask if Natasha Trethewey was "East Indian" ?

***

vagabondtrust.com reports that one of the two writers hung in the Annex Gallery is now on the board of Gallery Connexion - but is not, I believe, the author of the baseball-gloves piece on the east-side of that public gallery.

***

It is not personal.
 I did not invent Canadian English usage - but I take notice.
 'Halfbreed' was there before me.
 But in 2013, when speaking to us of someone we do not know,
how is "East Indian" any better than "halfbreed" ?
 What could that epithet's place be in "found art" in a public gallery ?

So the shoe-repair guy was no shoemaker ... what does his being one of "them" have to do with this art ?

***

a text for the Annex of Gallery Connexion in Fredericton ?

"Hell no, she's not !" he retorted - and so loud that everyone on my bus must have heard him. "Take another look. See ? She's East Indian !"

and we all know what the elision is in the above snippet, don't we ... because this is Canada and no one in Freddie thinks that Annex Gallery text's 'cobbler' was Mi'kmaq ...

***

If the "cobbler" of the text posted at Annex Gallery proves to be about someone from Trinidad, will the text change to "West Indian" ? What would "Caribbean cobbler" have conveyed that
" our cobbler (some former cricketer?) " 
had not ? Does it "lose" or just "drop" the issue of skin tone ? Is not the point that this leather worker was unfamiliar with baseball gloves ? That the child did not explain himself clearly ?

***

A 4-city map problem for most Canadians: Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore.

If Kolkata is in West Bengal, why was the East India Company "founding" a city there (Sam Pepys was still living ... but a company was no longer a conspiracy to evade royal taxes ?) ?

***

What is the Chandrasekhar Limit ? Is it where the railway stopped in Lahore? But if the expansive system didn't begin in Tamil Nadu in East India (excuse me, South India, east coast) ... (a tale of the largest white dwarf and ...) Dates: 1930, 1937, 1953

***

How close is Scotland to naming a Singh or a Gupta or a Park or an Ng as Scottish Makar ? Or do they deny that those who came after the Picts were immigrants ? And the Orkneys ? The Okinawa of Scotland ? Nations and national identity - so far from the vision of Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland, the very flawed Hermann Hesse ...

***

Now ask yourself where in Western Canada I would say "Ukrainian cobbler" ... Yorkton? Canora? Kamsack? Are there still men called "Ukrainian farmer" in Saskatchewan ? Have the the descendants of the Irish and Scots in Yorkton ceased to mock those who arrived later? And in Edmonton? Winnipeg? Montreal ? Oh, you don't know where to get off the metro in a traditionally Ukrainian-Canadian ethnic neighbourhood in Montreal's Rosemont ? ( My ethnic Chinese MD in MTL was from Vietnam and our very dark-skinned pediatrician was from North Africa - not West Africa - and our "black" obstetrician was from Trinidad, not Africa.) That British mathematician whose daughter is a Canadian MD and who always remembered the birthdates of my chidren ... what could induce me to put him into a poem as an "East Indian logician" ? Whatever would I be saying - as a western Canadian from the parklands of Saskatchewan ? As a software developer with so many years with developers in and from India ? What would I be saying ? What would that MD in Fredericton conclude ? My pharmacist ? What are THEY to call ME ? Was Michael Hallett at McGill "that White British" philosopher of mathematics ? So as not to be confused with whom ? Who calls whom "East Indian" where and why in Canada ?

***

Which Canadian poet has said the Neil Devindra Bissoondath is an East Indian writer ? Does he "cobble together" his texts ? Which art exhibit currently hanging in Fredericton is "cobbled together" ? What makes a New Brunswick taxpayer who repairs shoes an "East Indian cobbler" ?

***

Fredericton Playhouse fears to censor the arts - so that Fredericton art lovers can benefit from unedited poets placing text in supposedly "Found Art" - so I ask again : what was the birthplace of the "East Indian cobbler" ? Who all is "East Indian" in Canada ? Someone from Dhaka ? Someone from Trinidad whose parents are from Dakha but were born in India? A Canadian-born Jain ? A Canadian-born Sikh ? Any member of staff or board of either Gallery Connexion or Fredericton Playhouse ? Who among the people of Fredericton fled Uganda ? Or fled Bellingham, WA ? No one in New Brunswick? Or was it that supposedly inept shoe repair person ... and when will the director of the Playhouse apologize to their spouse, children or grandchildren for this supposed work of art mocking someone who was an NB taxpayer and who are themselves NB taxpayers and whose taxes support the Canada Council Corporation ?

***

Would Fredericton PlayHouse object to the text on the wall of their Annex (Gallery Connexion) if what it said was "some immigrant" instead of "East Indian" ? What does the racialist epithet add to the text other than inviting "our" [ read, real New Brunswicker ] agreement ? Why not "some hapless cobbler" ? "that inept cobbler" ? But was he even a "cobbler" ? Did his sign say "Shoe Repair" or "Shoemaker" ?
"There stood a carpenter (see, that one has a hammer); there stood a cook ( see the spoon ? )" 
[From an old saw often heard in a western CDN province of immigrants as small farms failed and the rail lines were torn up to make way for Cargill trucking to crumble the roads which had run along the great social success of rural electrification ... ]

***

Is that shoe repair person who is libelled in the Annex Gallery "poem" still living in Miramichi (?) or even closer to Fredericton ? Will a member of his family come to Annex and "read" this item ? Who will explain to the "poet" that gloves are not used in cricket such as are used in American baseball and softball ? That a shoe repair person may not be a shoemaker ? That glove making was a trade ? That tack is not used for fishing, but for riding ?

***

Is Rajasthan in East India ? Is Tata an East Indian computer programming out-source company ? Uninformative epithets and why poetry matters to culture ( very old word, "culture" ... enough to make you "furrow" your brow ... ). See : Zoroastrians on the subcontinent and the wandering musicians of western Europe (into and out of India ?) See: Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA for clines and clades in human populations and human migrations. The East India Company and Amerigo Vespucci : whose Indo-what ? Proto-Indo-European language(s) and mounds of culture.

***

Last year a STU professor read a piece at Molly's one Sunday in which we heard in a tale from Regina, Saskatchewan that "a big Indian sat down beside me" - I asked her whether she had learned from him if he was Lakota or Cree or from an Albertan tribe. I say asked. It was a challenge to her. At least one friend of hers pretends not to know me now. Kind of prominent local poet. So it goes. I should have asked if that "Indian" was from south India or north India ( and if you know about THAT bias on the sub-continent ...) Oh, narrative voice ... and government grant and sabbatical funds and ... perpetrating discourse. At least it was "big" and not "drunk" or "fat" or "dumb".
"A big man sat down beside me - he may have been Cree, maybe Lakota. I didn't bother to ask ... I look Scots with my freckles anyway .. and is he going to ask about my grandfather from Danzig and the red hair?"
Imagine your own variant. That is the key. Get past the frozen language of racist discourse.

***

If someone from Bangalore or Hyderabad or Chenai or Fiji or Trinidad wants to call themselves "East Indian" in Canada, so be it. The rest of us can take time to learn who people are and drop the racial epithets. The shoemaker in question may have been from Chile. If in doubt, read the travel journal of a famous Canadian writer in the South of the USA. A writer chooses some words with care. Most people in India are as Causasian as most western Europeans who call themselves French or English. For real bias, see the current Japanese attitude to genome studies. For a breath of fresh air, see the effort of Brazilian artists to use genome data to get past skin colour stereotyping in the marketing of entertainment. The Poles will one day use the genome to acknowledge the Polish citizens who as Jews passed for Lithuanians and Silesians and East Prussians and ... and now live as Catholics in Poland two and now three generations later.

***

"East Indian" is not an expression that most Canadian writers can use in good conscience. End of story. Nor "West Indian". Nor "Indian". Not unless that is who YOU say YOU are. To pretend otherwise is to live in serious denial - and a country cannot afford to fund writers who are in denial of obvious, painful, social reality - or just ignorant, of say, the Bellingham WA affair and the "East Indian" community of Vancouver. Ignorance and sloppy linguistic choices account for a good deal of strife in the world. Writers need not contribute. Liberal, democratic societies need not fund it. When we choose to promote work, we endorse that work. Or is racism an idle controversy?

***

Racism is not about flawed individuals. It is about language and social life. You don't have to be a racist to make a mistake in your choice of words. But words, published in the public forum, can be in need of retraction. In this case that poem needs some white-out until the poet can find the words that do not perpetuate a social practice - or introduce me to his family from Fiji or Trinidad or India or Pakistan or Bangladesh - and is that shoemaker still living? Where is he from? Who are his children? Was it a man? Was he gay? Was he born in Canada ? In New Brunswick?
 PS Most shoe repair people are not cobblers able to make a shoe on a last - my last cobbler ( stretched my left shoe on his last in Minnesota ) was from the old country.
 Schuster, bleib bei deinem Last !

***

Polite Canadian racism? What, in New Brunswick, is an "East Indian cobbler" in a poem posted in a Gallery Connexion "annex" show at the Fredericton Playhouse? Clearly "P*k-y" would not past muster - or "P*lack". Who is "East Indian" on a Canadian street? Someone from Lahore? From Dacca? From Malaysia? From Fiji? From South Africa? What is at the heart and core of polite Canadian racism? "Indian" ? From people who do not even know that our language is Indo-Germanic? That "Hindi" is not "Hindu" ? Remember the killings after 9/11 of those who "looked Arab". What committee approved Canada Council and NB Arts and City of Fredericton Funding for this? Why not "stupid Indian cobbler" ? Ah, because in NB people at least know in French what THAT means. Put that in your cobbler - before we take to the cobblestones. Or are we idle yet again? Oh - but who was that "East Indian lawyer" ... who was "East Indian" only when in South Africa or when in ... ?

Every Métis Canadian who has been called a "P_k-y" on a Canadian city street and every Métis Canadian who passes for White knows EXACTLY what I am talking about. I certainly do. If you have a a friend or neighbour or fellow passenger who looks "Indian" - ask them who they are. They may just be Torontonian. Period. Or they may be from Goa and not from Delhi. The Brazilian pop stars who do this have had some surprises in the name of ending racist musical marketing and the ignorance of human variety and the diversity of human culture.



THAT text


The TEXT is in a baseball glove on the wall of the East Wing of the Annex Gallery of Galley Connexion located in The Fredericton Playhouse here in the province of New Brunswick, Canada. 

The phrase in question is in a poem: 
" ... an East Indan cobbler ... " 
about the fate of a baseball glove — but where? In New Germany, Nova Scotia ? 

The author appears to be Jordon Trethewey of vagabondtrust.com and winner of a STU "Robert Clayton Casto Prize in Poetry" - so a poet. 

I hung the gloves on the wall as a volunteer for AG and GC, but only heard the TEXT read at the vernissage — well, opening — and walked out. And according to a poster you may have seen, am a member of the selection committee ... but where are the minutes of THOSE meetings ? Ah - I see, so THAT's how it works ( I'm from away, you see ... )

The Freddie Playhouse is home to Theatre New Brunswick and a regular venue of The Atlantic Symphonia. The next big show on stage is The Atlantic Ballet. 

GC only recently became a not-for-profit after years as what ? A co-op of sorts ?  The Canada Council can explain THAT ! 

Former GC board members include such as Terry Graff, currently CEO of Beaverbrook Gallery, a provincial art gallery in Fredericton.  The current Executive Director of GC is the talented painter John Edward Cushnie.

The current show at GC-proper is that of Maryse Arsenault which itself touches on the history and construction of race, ethnicity, language, craft, memory and identity.



Linguicide


Both Soviet and post-Soviet Russia and both Imperial and post-Imperial Japan used refusal to admit census categories to suppress two language groups: Hokaido-Kurile-Sakhaline and Okinawa-Ryukyu languages.

The fate of two languages within Japanese territory now appears sealed unless UNESCO, UNICEF and others intervene.

Japan began with invasions and then moved to disgusting practices of humiliation that surpass what Saskatchewan did and what was done in Wales.

But who will speak up on the world scene when mere island ownership is in question ?




Racialist Text as Art NOT


Another facebook post on a racialist text as art in a Fredericton public gallery:  follows here:

a text for the Annex of Gallery Connexion in Fredericton ?

"Hell no, she's not !" he retorted - and so loud that everyone on my bus must have heard him. "Take another look. See ? She's East Indian !"

and we all know what the elision is in the above snippet, don't we ... because this is Canada and no one in Freddie thinks that Annex Gallery text's 'cobbler' was Mi'kmaq ...

Edit that cruft :  Fredericton Playhouse  ;  Gallery Connexion  ;  ArtsNB  ;  NB Arts ; L-G




Monday, January 28, 2013

rebol r3 builds


Here are two links for current rebol r3 activity:

builds (but no 64-bit Windows)

wiki (to some extent incomplete as compared to rebol.com)


Rebol2 言語 at Rebol DocBase ( for  プログラミング言語  see ja.wikipedia.org)




Friday, January 25, 2013

Michel Winock 1997


What Michel Winock missed (or avoided ?) in his brief treatment of the French intelligentsia and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouges after April 1975 was that the intellectuals of THAT disastrous "adventure" turned to slaughter were formed in the politicized universities of France.




Thursday, January 17, 2013

Patent Troll Abuses


The appalling but legal attack on Laminar Research by a software patent troll.

Is Austin Meyer targeted because his company is too small to have a legal department but profitable enough to be able to pay the ransom ?

Holding innovation to ransom : the new pirates are trolls.




Saturday, January 12, 2013

Java JMX MBean flaw


CERT says
Due to the number and severity of this and prior Java vulnerabilities, it is recommended that Java be disabled temporarily in web browsers
http://www.us-cert.gov/current/#us_cert_releases_oracle_java

http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/625617

http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/TA13-010A.html



Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Dwarf spheroidal galaxies


Dwarf spheroidal galaxies - a fascinating topic for a first course in philosophy of science.

The options that remain open as of January 2013 are remarkable : dark matter, revised Newtonian laws, …

Related : the galactic rotation problem; formation of barred-spiral galaxies

Web astronomy of related interest : the Sloan digital survey's colliding galaxies as categorized by the GalaxyZoo social astronomy image project.




Tuesday, January 8, 2013

GIF animation loop once


Set GIF animation to loop only once.

GIMP can set the animation loop value when you do File export; it will only come up on the second menu dialog.  The only loop count option on the menu is a checkbox to turn off infinite looping.




Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Puppy linux CJK font


My kanji pages refused to display their Japanese characters even though SeaMonkey browser had the requested fonts set as options !

Restarting x-server was to no avail.

Finally ignored advice to install huge WQY font package and opted for xfonts-wqy PKG with WenQuanYi Bitmap Song CJK font and no dependencies to install.

But what an ordeal : unix font horrors, decade after decade ... while we have Logtalk for any PROLOG and a Unicode OOP Icon PL for success/fail config app's ... but no, we go with "What Has Worked For Years" - even in Ubuntu -even in otherwise excellent Puppy Linux.

This issue? Occurred in a RAM-loading GRUB Puppy on an Eee PC netbook running off a USB slot SD chip.  You know ... chosen for ease of use and convenience.