Time for Press Review!

Week-end in England

Last Saturday, I went to England for the third time in my life. That was a bit strange to hear the English accent all over the place, as we only hear it… on TV here. I had the feeling I had stepped into a Channel 4 soap opera. Spooky.

The other thing is that, unlike in Ireland, smoking in pubs is allowed. This is pretty amazing how fast you get used to the non-smoking ban. So much so that whenever anyone was lighting in the pub we went to for a scampi and chips on Saturday evening (as you do), Ellen and I were looking at each other, a bit surprised.

Anyway, all that to say I had the time to read the Irish Times thoroughly for you on the plane and I thought I might share a few thoughts with you.

When Journalists and Politicians Google for Ideas

Amongst other things, there was the transcript of the speech that Mrs. Mary McAleese, President of the Irish Republic, made at a conference about the 90th^ anniversary of the Easter Rising. Something to do with good nationalism vs. bad nationalism. A very long text, anyway.

This is an interesting text politically speaking, but I was somewhat surprised to find the following paragraph:

A Google search for the phrase “narrow nationalism” produces about 28,000 results. It is almost as though some people cannot use the word “nationalism” without qualifying it by the word “narrow”. But that does not make it correct.

Sure doesn’t. When you do that search, you indeed get just below 28,000 results. And guess what? You get more than 14,000,000 hits for “nationalism”—around 0.2% of the results actually bring back “narrow nationalism”… But my point is something different altogether. In my opinion, this is a bit like trying to find the spelling of a word by typing a word in different ways and seeing which one gets the most hits. This is dangerous.

This is not the first time that I hear or read a politician, or even a journalist, quoting the number of hits on Google for such or such word, as if this was an absolute reference: “oh well, if Google returns so many results, it must be [good/correct/bad]”. The thing is, you can put any adjective between the square brackets, because you can make Google’s results say whatever you want in any context. This is why I think this is pure lack of imagination that forces journalists or politicians to open Google, type in the words about which they are supposed to write and see what they get. Same goes for Wikipedia as it also seems to be a favourite.

I just think of the papers the pupils will write in a few years. They will all be inspired by the first couple of links picked from Google and the relevant articles in Wikipedia. Marking them is going to be a very dull task for the teachers… And the Encyclopædia Britannica, written by competent authors, will be covered with a thick layer of dust. Google and Wikipedia are in the process of becoming the knowledge repositories in which people are looking for information. This is rather disturbing as they are certainly not the most accurate, nor the most authoritative in most subjects.

Unfortunate Choice of Words

Also in the same issue of the IT, an article about a firefighter sueing Dublin City Council over loud sirens which seemingly caused him hearing loss. He was not wearing any ear plugs for about 20 years and now suffers irreversible hearing damage. This is a very sad story, but the journalist probably wanted to make a good pun when he/she decided to finish the article with the following sentence:

The hearing resumes on Wednesday.

A Good Recipe

To finish with, I’d like to point out this recipe published in today’s Guardian which, surely, will make you all happy and give you all the confidence in English food you were lacking. Yum, yum, tasty!

OpenLDAP on Ubuntu

Well, it’s been a real pain…

Trying to install OpenLDAP onto Ubuntu (yep, I have made the switch recently after getting highly frustrated by Mandriva), I kept getting this error: 

/usr/lib/libsasl2.a(db_berkeley.o)(.text+0x5a): In function `berkeleydb_open’:
: undefined reference to `db_create_4002’
/usr/lib/libsasl2.a(db_berkeley.o)(.text+0x85): In function `berkeleydb_open’:
: undefined reference to `db_strerror_4002’

even with BDB 4.2. I tried a lot of things (installing BDB 4.4, for instance, but that wasn’t of much help). I reckon the problem was with the libsasl library installed…

So I proceeded to install the latest version of Cyrus SASL
Whilst compiling it, I was getting yet another error: 

saslint.h:112: error: previous declaration of ’global_callbacks’ was here

A bit annoyed, I googled the error, and came across this page which was recommending to comment out the line mentioned in the error message. Compiled the whole thing again—this time with success.

Once this was done, I tried to compile OpenLDAP again, this time with the following command: 

env LDFLAGS="-I/usr/local/lib -I/usr/local/lib/sasl2/" ./configure 
--enable-bdb --enable-aci --enable-crypt

so that the compiler fetches the right SASL libraries.

And after much struggled, it worked! Long sigh of relief.

Update: Forgot to mention. You may need to link the libsasl libraries in /usr/lib to the ones you have installed to make sure OpenLDAP picks up the right ones when starting.

2006. Doucement.

Il paraît que c’est la nouvelle année… À y regarder de plus près, les choses ne semblent pas avoir bougé d’un millimètre, mais c’est un nouveau cycle qui commence et qu’il faut acheter une recharge pour l’agenda. Dans quelques semaines, la nature va commencer à bourgeonner de toutes parts, et nous avec. Et dans quelques semaines, il faudra préparer les cartons pour partir vers de distantes contrées pour un chez nous bien comme il faut.

En ce qui concerne l’agenda, je ne suis toujours pas parvenu à résoudre la difficile question de la conservation des feuillets des années précédentes. Pour tout vous dire, j’ai la sinistre réputation en mon logis d‘être un hoarder (je crois que c’est quelque chose comme une fierté mal placée qui m’empêche d’utiliser le « vrai » terme de bordélique) – ce qui tombe relativement mal, puisque ma colocataire souffre de ce problème également. Mais étrangement, ce n’est pas n’importe quoi que je garde précieusement, entassé dans des cartons que je remue de temps en temps, pour être sûr que tout est bien encore là, quel que soit l‘état. C’est le papier.

D’aucuns diront – peut-être les plus psychologues d’entre vous – que je suis atteint d’une forme de dégradation psychologique très avancée aisément reconnaissable à cette manie relative au papier. Sans aucun doute. Le fait est que j’aime à me tourner vers ces choses du passé (puisque c’est bien de ça dont il s’agit : de la nostalgie) et que quand je me tourne vers le futur, ben, je n’y vois pas grand-chose. Mais alors qu’est-ce qui me pousse à conserver des journaux que je n’ouvre jamais ? Ah, bandes de petits coquins, vous aimeriez bien savoir ! Je ne sais goutte. Mais j’ai quelques spécimens dont je suis particulièrement fier, comme ce Libé barré d’un énorme NON lorsque le premier tour des dernières présidentielles s’est achevé, ou le premier numéro du Guardian nouvelle formule, ou même des Ouest-France datés de Mathusalem annonçant la mort de Ceaucescu (oui, c’est une manie qui date un peu…)

Pour en revenir à mon problème, i.e. la conservation des anciens agendas, je n’ai pas trouvé de solution acceptable. L’idée pourrait être de racheter un filofax complet tous les ans, avec tous les accessoires aussi inutiles qu’encombrants, mais ça me paraît être une onéreuse opération. Alors je les garde, encerclés par des élastiques pour garder un semblant de cohérence chronologique qui finit par voler lorsque je réalise mon brassage de carton annuel.

Cependant, ce qui me tracasse, c’est que pas une seule fois je n’ai ouvert ces anciens agendas pour savoir ce que je faisais en ce 17 mars 2001 ou à la Saint-Glinglin 2002 depuis que je compile religieusement mes délirantes activités. Ce qui, quelque part, signifierait que cette conservation est strictement inutile et que je pourrais aussi bien tout envoyer dans le fond d’un sac poubelle (sac vert, bien sûr. Au recyclage !).

N’empêche, si un historien venait à se pencher sur mon cas un de ces quatre, ça lui faciliterait grandement les choses, non ?

Virtual Host/WebGroup Not Found

Ever come across that error in WebSphere’s logs?

Servlet Request Processor Exception: Virtual Host/WebGroup Not Found : The web group /favicon.ico has not been defined

This error is thrown when you access the admin console directly (bypassing the HTTP server) and can be solved by installing a war file containing the favicon mentioned.

This is explained here

L’Enfer

Last night was the closing night for the French Film Festival. I went to see L’Enfer by Danis Tanovic, which is due to come out next year in Ireland. Simply brilliant: an amazing cast, with Emmanuelle Béart, Karine Viard, Marie Gillain, Jacques Perrin, Guillaume Canet, Carole Bouquet… and the list goes on. The three sisters cope with the drama that happened in their childhood in their own way, certainly having troubles in their relationship with men. Very dark, but pretty well filmed. I won’t go into an analysis—I still haven’t finished Dante’s Inferno—but I must admit I enjoyed it.

Caché

I went to see Caché by Michael Haneke at the IFI last night. The theatre was packed: that is pretty amazing how successful French films are here.

I really enjoyed the film. Very dark and filmed in away that makes you feel that there is something wrong in that couple, that the apparition of the tapes ends up revealing. I must admit the violent scene which becomes the peak in the crescendo of the film was a bit of a schock, and you could feel that the audience was really stunned. But, thinking back, it did make sense and everything was leading to that point where Georges (Daniel Auteuil) could not escape his guilt anymore.

I’ll probably have to watch it again some day though, to fully understand every single details.

Laziness!

You know what? I have decided to be totally lazy, those last few days. It’s been almost a week since gloolg sent me an email reporting that comments could not be posted anymore on Weblogism.

To be honnest, I am almost… relieved! I have been spammed with hundreds of comments praising my website before inserting an interesting link about how to enlarge my Mars and Venus. I was therefore spending a long time trying to get rid of those comments, deleting one or two comments of interest in the process. So I think I’ll let things be this way until next week-end. It will leave me time to finish The Big Bang by Simon Singh (The Code Book, etc.) that I have started yesterday on the train.

I would also like to greet So who, out of pitykindness, added Weblogism to her links. I really think that the content which has been posted in here lately deserves such honours, but I am quite happy anyhow! But don’t worry, things are about to change as I told you.

So, let’s say I’m on blogolidays—I wish I was in real life, though—and this bug will remain a bit longer. Feel free to complain by email.¶

Undergoing a Makeover

Weblogism is about to undergo a major face lift. One of the main change is the switching from bBlob to Textpattern to allow guest stars to come and post here. The design will also be… less blue!

Be patient!