Where are the frikking WMDs?

Yes, where are those Weapons of Mass Destruction that the US was warning everybody about? Those same WMDs that were used as some of the primary excuses for violating Iraq have not popped up yet, it seems. Funny… In related news, this article reports that there was a certain pressure by the US administration on the intelligence services to generate reports that would help to convince the public that attacking Iraq was urgent business.

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The American Propaganda Machine

Most of us outside the borders of the USA know this, but nothing we do or say will probably have any kind of effect on the status quo: The American government is supported by an extremely efficient propaganda machine that ensures that the majority of its citizens will support it in its most barbaric of ventures. The big problem is that this propaganda machine consists primarily, contrarily to tradition, of “independent” media entities.

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Where should that dang button go?

So, here we have the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines (i.e. the MacOS-X user interface guidelines), the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, the KDE User Interface Guidelines and of course the Microsoft Windows Official Guidelines for User Interface Developers and Designers (I came back in January of 2018 to fix this link — also interesting is the section on margins and spacing). Apple says that “The default button for dismissing a dialog should go in the lower-right corner.

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Het boek, de pen.

Jeroen sent me links to two interesting web pages dealing with the important question of the relationship between the gender and article of Dutch nouns. Enlighten yourself by going here and here. Thanks Jeroen!

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Cygwin CVS EOL problem solution

At this very moment, you might be wondering why, if CVS is such a wonderful piece of version control software that even offers to soothe your cross-platform end of line woes (*ix: eol = lf, macos: eol = cr, windows: eol = crlf), it’s suddenly breaking the end of line checkouts on the *ix side since you’ve been committing your ports on the windows side with CVS from Cygwin. The answer is fortunately far shorter and simpler that the previous sentence.

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An eventful weekend

Much happened this weekend. Because many readers have fantastically short attention spans, I’ll break my report up into clearly marked sections. Is my laptop hard drive defective? My laptop has done this once before: after the laptop is switched on, the hard drive refuses to start. It’s usually very quiet, but definitely audible at startup. This weekend before we left for Belgium (more on this later) the laptop decided it was time for the “the hard drive can’t be bothered to start up” trick again.

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The most useless software of the year award

As we all are aware of the frighteningly high editorial standards of freshmeat.net (ha ha), I have to wonder how MumabAs was accepted. This MULTI-FUNCTION software is a GUI (graphical user interface) for, wait for it, “configuring which mailboxes mutt should watch for new mail”. Aaaaarrrggggghhhhh!!! For those of you who don’t know, mutt is a MUA (mail user agent) with a text-based UI. Usually, “configuring which mailboxes mutt should watch for new mail” is a question of editing one (1) line in the config file.

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