December 2008

Civil War 2?…or America will survive.

You’ve gotta wonder sometimes….especially when even trusted and respected news sources like the WSJ print articles like this without any kind of rebuttal on some obviously ridiculous, almost parody-like silly comments. Let me give you a brief synopsis. According to some ultra-right wing Russian nationalist the US will dissolve into several disparate states at some point in the next 2-3 years…Take a look at the map at the bottom of the article to full appreciate the stupidity of this former KGB analyst’s theory, and his obvious complete lack of understanding of the geo-political climate here inside the US.

First off I think the esteemed Professor Panerin completely lacks even a basic understanding of the American culture. This is a culture that is strongest when there is massive internal disagreement. The whole concept of American freedoms is based on the concept of diversity. This is an idea you never fully understand until you are immersed into it. And it is a concept that will guarantee the cultural dominance of America for many centuries to come. Governments of Russia, China, Japan, and other homogeneous cultures do not have the ability to adapt, grow, shrink, and otherwise change on short order like that of America. Case in point, after a 12 year politically conservative dynasty who drilled “Just Say No” into our subconscious we elected a man who admitted to smoking pot to the White House. After 8 years of moderate left wing political rule under the Clinton administration we elected a fundamentalist right wing Christian to the White House. Even after he was given the opportunity to show us his true right wing, hawk colors in the first 4 years of his administration we sent George W back for another 4 years. This last November we pulled a complete 180 degree turn and sent a man to Washington who bears a name in the style of the culture we have been politically and media trained to hate, Barak Hussien Obama. No where else in the world could this happen. Even our closest sister nations like Canada and the UK the opposing parties are very much just different shades of socialism.

Think of the diverse political and culture beliefs internal to the US as those of a functioning household. Siblings, all the states and communities within those states struggle and strain against one another to sit at the table with all the others. Many times there are fights between these siblings and ideals collide dramatically. But it only takes the mere shadow of an outside threat to unify the house against the external threat. Like the big brother who teases and tortures his little sister every day will instantly drop all regard for his own personal safety to defend her against a neighborhood bully so did the men and women of every state within the US rush to military recruiting depots in the year after 9/11 to go to Afghanistan.

If you know me, or have read any of my previous posts you will know that I am no fan of the federal government. But things are a long way from all out civil war, and if China, or the EU or Mexico, or Russia has any designs on absorbing, annexing or otherwise influencing how the US will look in the next decade they have another thing coming. The whole problem inside the US today is the feeling of outside control…outside our own communities the last thing that will happen is for the people of Alaska or Texas, or Oregon to replace Washington D.C. with Russia, Mexico or China. And to allude that anything like this could ever be possible demonstrates that Professor Panerin’s credentials on the U.S. are fictional. With analyst and intel like this is no wonder the Soviets are dead.

news/politics

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State of Linux laptop wireless love and trust

About 3 months ago I  had some budget become available for a couple new laptops at work. My old laptop is still very capable. It is a Thinkpad T61p 2.4GHz CPU, 4GB of Ram, 200GB HD. A very nice machine but when budget becomes available I have to move on them. So I was going to buy myself a new one and pass mine down to one of my co-workers.

Most of the people in my group run SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP2 on their laptops. It is super stable and generally has decent hardware support. And most importantly most of the Novell services we still support in our office run really well on SLED10, ie: GroupWise, GWMessenger etc…plus we get phone support from Novell on it.

The problem is…I have found it impossible to buy a new high end workstation class laptop today that isnt using either the new Centrino2 wireless chipset or one of the dreaded Broadcom wireless cards. I have worked with HP, Dell, and Lenovo to spec a laptop that is supported by SLED10 and hours of effort have been completely fruitless. The problem is I cannot find an enterprise class laptop that isnt shipping with either the Centrino2 Intel 5100/5300.

The Intel 5100/5300 wireless chipset is now supported under the newest versions of the Kernel, 2.6.27+ I believe. But SLED10 sports the older more stable 2.6.16 code.

Intel actually released the firmware for these cards but try as I might I was completely unsuccessful in getting anything compiled that would work on my SLED10 laptop. So then I resorted to NDISWrapper but my attempts to use the XP driver for the Intel 5100 card were fruitless. The install would go completely normally and seemed to modprobe without errors but the link light would never come on and iwconfig never saw the card. So then I read somewhere that it would only work with the latest version of NDISWrapper but I was unable to get that compiled and running on SLED10 either, I was having all kinds of gcc problems among other things. I was starting to get to the end of my rope…

I decided to open a support ticket with Novell. I mean our organization pays a lot of money annually for Novell software and support and all I really needed was a real software engineer to compile/backport the already open sourced firmware and drivers for the SLED10 kernel and send me the rpm! Well after some trouble and whining and moaning to my support team I finally got an email from a very paitent support engineer who let me know that someone on their team had finally backported the drive to SLED10 SP2! After about 3 months of no wireless on my new Thinkpad W500 I am finally in business. I have tested this driver pretty extensively with WPA2 Personal keys and it has so far worked flawlessly with great range and signal strength.

So for anyone out there who is in the market for a Centrino 2 based laptop but was worried about SLED10 not supporting it here is the link to the firmware and driver.

Install the iwl5000 ucode, iwlwifi and the mac80211 for your kernel and you should be good to go. Aside from a very occassional shutdown hang my new Lenovo Thinkpad W500 is now an awesome Linux laptop. But beware, on my T61p the integrated fingerprint reader worked out of the box with libthinkfinger the new fingerprint reader isn’t compatible though. If anyone has any tips on getting tf-tool working with the new Lenovo fingerprint reader hardware please let me know.

geek

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Say hello to the new boss…(probably) same as the old boss

One of the scarier articles I’ve ever read. 15,000 troops on active deployment here domestically in the US. I am pretty sure this will be just the beginning. How 15,000 soldiers will be better equipped to defend us against domestic terror threats than an additional 15,000 US Marshals or ATF agents or FBI agents or local law enforcement agents is so fucking far beyond me it isnt funny. This whole thing is just an excuse to suspend Posse Comitatus again. Bush tried to use Katrina to take care of it a few years ago but got some pushback…so now we just need to wait for the next President and a terrorist attack for it to be taken down again, maybe permanently.

I’m sorry but honestly I’d much rather see those funds spent on beefing up local law enforcement and emergency response systems in the specific communities. Sheriff depts, city police forces and local paramedics are people who live and work every day in those same communities they are responsible for. They know the people, the know the culture and they know the area much better than some scared 20 year old from 1000 miles away in a flak-vest toting an M-16. Trust me, I’ve been the kid in the flak vest so I’ve seen this situation from both sides. This plan represents a level of security whose cost in liberty is too high.

news/politics

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