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Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
Quite a week, indeed. Congratulations to the freed POWs. Everything I can think of to say or add seems moot tonight. So I think I get some sleep.
Wow. It's been quite a week.
Wednesday was a historical day. I sat on the front porch and drank my morning coffee. The sun was warm; the breeze was soft and pleasant. Oh yes, and Baghdad fell ;-)
The coalition forces have indeed conducted a brilliant campaign. Perhaps too brilliant. The implications of what has occured over the last three days are vast, complex, and more than a little significant. Imagine, if you will, a country with a population the size of Canada -- 24 million people. And imagine that population had lived under military dictatorship for 24 years. Now -- almost overnight -- remove all vertiges of government. Local. Regional. All of it. Gone. Like I say, it boggles the mind. Where do you start? Obviously, order is the first priority. But how you establish that order becomes a very thorny problem.
The US military are in a no-win situation. Clearly force must be used to restore order; to control the looting. But if you shoot the looters, you shoot the very people you have purportedly come to liberate. Furthermore, miltary forces -- for the most part -- are not trained to be policemen. They're trained to capture and hold ground. To quell resistance. To shoot things. To blow up buildings and bridges. And histroy has proven if you don't give the military reign to do what they're trained to do, you invite a quagmire. Think Vietnam.
And that's just one small part of the Big Picture. Government needs to be established. In order to do that, you have to somehow get three distinct population groups sitting down at the same table and agreeing on the direction said government should take. Oh, and by the way, those three groups of people have been fighting amonst each other for 5,000 years. Oops.
And how about food and water? And what do we use for currency?
That's just Iraq. It's no secret the Middle East is a powder keg of epic proportions. The Turks want to crash the party in the north. Syria sits to the west watching, waiting to see how things will unfold. I don't think Iran is going to get involved in any significant way, but who knows?
And god would I love to be a fly on the wall in the back rooms of St. Petersburg. How would world order shift if, say, France, Germany, and Russia form a "coalition of the unwilling"? Mmm.
My mind is awash in speculation. The unknown is almost larger than the know these days. Interesting times indeed...
We live in a turbulent, complex, and dynamic world.
Is Saddam dead? Does it really matter? From my perspective, it matters not who the "titular chief" of Iraq is right now. What matters is how the country will evolve. Others, however, want to know -- definatively -- his status. Mmmmm. Guess what? We might never know. Can you spell DNA? Get over it. Think anew.
Next problem: Who will control the "new" Iraq. Long term? Short term? or does it matter? Mmmm. Much more difficult question. Obviously, the country has "run amok". So it needs a controlling force. Democracy does not happen overnight. So who should that "controlling force" be? The UN? Not. The UN has mis-managed everything to do with Iraq for 10 years. You really want them to control the nation? But who? The "world" doesn't trust the US. What will sway World leaders? Nothing. Because we're talking politics. Difficult and complex. A war layer on top of politics.
Was Abu Dhabi targeted directly? Al Jazzira (sp?; sorry)? Dunno. Hard questions. War is a not a nice neat mathematical equation. It has many divergents. Some of which (see above) we'll never know.
So where do we do from here? A difficult and complex question.
Me? The water continues to run in the street. A good sign, but certainly not cast in stone.
More as I ponder.
Yes indeed, it did warm today. And yes, the snow is melting rapidly. But it ain't over til it's over, as they say, and it ain't over. Witness the heavy snow forecast for upper New York and parts of the Midwest today... On more than one occasion this winter I laughed and poked fun at the weather others were experiencing -- not today.
There's a new Samba advisory out (see the Samba site for details; sorry don't have the advisory URL handy). Second in a month. Not good, but not catastrophic either. Jeremy Allison et. al. do a pretty good job of auditing their own work, and 90% of the time they find the problems before anyone else. This one got by them. Interestingly enough, it's been floating about for 6 or 7 years. Digital Defense just stumbled upon it today. There's a patch out already. Go forth and do your due diligence. The vulnerability is not an issue for me for two reasons. One, my Samba server hums quiety behind a firewall. IMHO, the SMB protocol is not designed for "public" consumption (that is, Internet exposure). Two, I'm running Samba 3.0 (and have been for almost a year now ;-) and it's not affected.
Let's see... what else is new around here...
RH 9 is currently running on THREE systems here at Syroid Manor. Not bad for a product that was just "officially" released today. It started off as a test and "kick the tires" on Leah's system last week. I liked it so much, I put it on a spare partition on the front of my notebook (essentially to see if it would detect and correctly configure my wireless card; it didn't, but I liked it enough to leave it in place). And yesterday I threw on a spare partition on kronk, again, just to see how it would configure itself and perform on a dual Athlon system.
Red Hat 9 is not perfect, but my hat's off to their engineers in Raleigh -- it gets a little better with each iteration. It's got a lot of subtle but significant changes under the hood, and overall it just feels more polished and refined. Anaconda got everything perfect first shot on two of three machines. It stumbled on my wireless card, as noted, but that's a toughie. After all, it took me three months of hacking to get everything right under Gentoo. And 9 is pretty. Damn pretty. Between KDE 3.1, anti-aliased fonts (Moz too), and some nice desktop themes, RH 9 looks every bit as good as my Gentoo desktop -- and again, it took me months of tweaking and twiddling to get it so.
It's not enough to sway me from my beloved Gentoo, though. Probably never will be. As an ex-mechanic, I like to tinker and "tune my carbs". And I'm completely enamoured with Portage -- both in functionality and concept. But it's nice to have a distro on the shelf that I can toss on a system for a friend that I know they can use and maintain without a lot of hand-holding. RH 9 gives you that.
Here's a nifty little tool for you to bookmark: www.squish.net/dnscheck. Feed it a DNS record and it will traverse the DNS tree from the 'root' and back again. Very handy for finding errors in your records (or the records of others).
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