Bush Quits Playing Golf · 15 May 2008, 16:02 by trickykid
So once again Keith Olbermann says it direct and right to Mr. Bush. I don’t even think we should even call him Mr, he certainly doesn’t deserve any type of respect from any American.
Anyways, there’s a new commentary by Keith Olbermann from MSNBC linked from Truthout.org about how President Bush claims he quit playing golf out of respect to the men and women who have died in the Iraq War.
I have the same feelings as Keith does. I was appalled someone in his position would say something like this. Golf, you quit playing golf cause the War you started is killing Americans?
“Mr. President,” he was asked, “you haven’t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?
“It really is. I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died, to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as – to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”
I don’t even know what to think about this but it gets worse as Bush is nothing but a phoney liar.
“Mr. President, was there a particular moment or incident that brought you to that decision, or how did you come to that?”
“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man’s life. And I was playing golf – I think I was in central Texas – and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, it’s just not worth it any more to do.”
So he gave up golf. That’s his answer to people dying in a War he started. Instead of taking any other type of action, Bush gives up golf out of respect to soldiers getting wounded and dying.
But here’s the truth of his statement from the truthout.org article quoting Keith Olbermann:
Apart from your medical files, which dutifully record your torn calf muscle and the knee pain which forced you to give up running at the same time – coincidence, no doubt – the bombing in Baghdad which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello of the U-N… and interrupted your round of golf, was on August 19th, 2003.
Yet there is an Associated Press account of you playing golf as late as Columbus Day of that year – October 13th – nearly two months later.
I seriously doubt Mr. Bush has not played golf since 2003. This is a President who’s displayed by his own actions and words that he doesn’t care about anyone but himself and his buddies. His statements that claim that if a Democrat gets into office after his term is up will lead to more attacks. Let me remind you Mr. President that September 11, 2001 was during your term as President, after you set the record for the most days on vacation by any President in the first half year after getting elected. Perhaps we got attacked cause you were off playing golf instead of doing your job to protect us.
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Einstein Letter Up For Sale · 15 May 2008, 10:58 by trickykid
The Guardian.co.uk is reporting that a letter that Einstein wrote to Eric Gutkind mostly about his views on religion is up on the auction block.
It’s quite interesting to see the view of one of the best known scientist in the 20th century when it comes to science and religion.
I really like how Einstein portrays religion(s), “incarnation of the most childish superstitions.” Here is the full English translation of the letter since he wrote it in his native language.
“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.
In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the privilege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolization. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.
Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evaluations of human behavior. What separates us are only intellectual ‘props’ and `rationalization’ in Freud’s language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.
With friendly thanks and best wishes
Yours, A. Einstein.”
Open Source Software No No's. · 13 May 2008, 12:30 by trickykid
Today there was a huge security bug for Debian which made private SSL/SSH keys guessable. What caused this mistake? Well, some developer over at Debian changed some code in OpenSSL. You see, Debian developers like to touch everything that goes into their distribution to make it more suitable for them. They’ll even change the name of a program if they don’t like the application developers staking copyright and trademark names to use and redistribute. Which is perfectly legal when it comes to GPL software but in my opinion a time waster.
Anyways, this security bug has been around for over a year. Ouch. If someone did that where I worked they would have been fired. This is one of the many reasons I don’t touch or use Debian. Their little developers have to put their hands on everything, which then causes crap like this cause they might not know what they’re doing.
You can read more about the bug here: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.security.announce/1614
This is another reason I like Slackware. Patrick makes his distro work in harmony without changing the original source code. He just writes scripts and packages it all together to work with the existing system. To me, changing and leaving alone has it’s pros and cons but personally, leave the code changes to the guys who maintain it, clearly they know their product better than you do.
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Mavs Fan For Life · 28 April 2008, 15:37 by trickykid
So I’m a Dallas Mavericks fan. It’s probably the only sports I watch ever nowadays. After this season took a turn for the worse after the Jason Kidd trade, which I kind of expected since it’s like swapping out quarterbacks for your team, I was only hoping they would maybe get past the first round but that’s not looking good now since their down 3-1 in a 7 game series against New Orleans.
But anyways, on to the point of this entry. In the past few days I was introduced to the site fireavery.com, a site dedicated to the Mavericks and really the purpose of bitching about Avery Johnson in hopes to see him get fired as head coach.
Personally it seems most of the people that comment on the site are delusional and post only on emotion of their favorite team losing, I call it fan rage. I think they are making drastic conclusions of what needs to be done to fix this team. If any fan really thought the Mavericks were going to win the championship this year, you are truly stupid and shouldn’t be allowed to talk about sports. For those that aren’t aware, the Mavericks traded a few players for Kidd. After the trade, the Mavericks only beat teams with a winning percentage .500 or better twice and they’re the 7th seed out of 8 in their conference.
Trading for a new point guard mid-season means one thing, we are just gonna have to wait til next year to see the outcome and full effect of such a trade. Give them the off season to adjust and rebuild.
As for the site mentioned, this inspired me to create mavsfanforlife.net to post more constructive criticism about my favorite NBA team.
MySQL Negative Direction · 18 April 2008, 08:57 by trickykid
So when MySQL was bought by Sun, it was more of a negative feeling than positive. Honestly I feel MySQL is a good database for small PHP web applications. It sure is the highly popular choice and it’s hard to not find a blog, CMS or any other thing written in PHP that doesn’t support MySQL. It’s harder to find one that can use PostgreSQL or any other database for the backend.
Now this is something I expected from Sun. If you haven’t already read it, MySQL is now planning on closing some of the source by placing features into the Enterprise product you buy from them. Have a read here.
These features will not be included into the Community Edition they offer, which usually is the same, just lacks the support, etc.
Honestly though, if you have to pick a database for a personal website, MySQL is fine and will do the job. If you need something more commercial, go with PostgreSQL if you need a free open source alternative or if you choose to purchase, there’s Oracle, DB2 and plenty of others.
There is also Firebird which I’ve heard good things about but also heard it’s a nightmare to manage or implement. I guess you could compare it to choosing Qmail over Postfix or Sendmail when choosing an MTA.
Honestly though I would love to switch my own site to use PostgreSQL but not sure if TextPattern supports it. Perhaps it could be a project to convert. I think with the direction MySQL is heading, PostgreSQL is starting to become a more viable option for PHP and other developers that use a free open source database.
I guess I could try to pressure Patrick Volkerding to start bundling PostgreSQL with Slackware, it’d be nice addition to have a choice over MySQL.
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