mardi 17 août 2004

Savagery in Burundi slows the blogging My restored sense of humour survived yesterday's Bible black sky, or so I like to think of it on the monthly day when new moon means none, and my return to the Factory. It could have frayed today, however, as the latest fracas in my least favourite part of Africa, the Great Lakes region, sparked by last Friday's foul massacre of refugees in Burundi (AFP-Yahoo), turned into the usual propaganda war. This has worried some "old hands" with prospects of yet another round of bloodletting in that accursed area, with some Rwandans and hardline Tutsis aching for a new excuse to invade eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. It's unlikely to come to that, but as copy poured in from correspondents writing in French all over the place, I felt the usual irritation at all the shit it's their job to transmit to us as news. Like everybody else in the trade, the handful of us dealing with this lot at the Factory reckon it's about time for another story to tell the Kansas city milkman exactly who Tutsis and Hutus and Banyamulenge Congolese Tutsis are. What makes all this more complicated to explain is that the usual labels of "ethnic group", "tribe" and "clan" are useful, especially the first, but remain a slightly inaccurate shortcut to get the news out. The traditional social structure in Rwanda and Burundi is far more akin to the Indian caste system. German and then Belgian colonists didn't help matters by making damned sure that the minority Tutsis stayed at the top of the heap, meaning that the nastiness began on independence. With massacres. There was more than enough on my plate today to explain all this in any depth, while our people on the ground were also working their butts off. Tomorrow, probably. The bad excuse for failing to do it today (unfortunately the story is going to run... and run) was that for reasons entirely my own, I had stuff to do here which kept me up until four in the morning. I am not making light of the massacre at the Gatumba refugee camp with a rather flip headline. This kind of event brings out the blackest humour at the Factory. Once there was propaganda mention of possible underhand Rwandan involvement, since agents of the Kigali government have their reasons to want to send troops back into eastern DRC, one possible, but of course not for publication option, was "Who helped the Hutus who-dunnit? Tutsi or not Tutsi?" How to get sacked in one easy lesson. But the serious point is that it's almost impossible to cover such insanity without feeling a bit of dark madness yourself. Whatever. If the workload stays like this for the next couple of weeks, there may have to be a return to sporadic blogging. Certainly there's life outside the Factory, especially for somebody who will never again consider his job the most important thing he does after last year's long leave-of-absence lesson. But if it's offline, please excuse me. 8:53:52 PM  link   your views? [] RealNetworks and your servant: two fingers to poke the Apple of our eyes The knives are out now that the Real people have launched an offensive against Apple in a recent development in the music download wars. "As Apple CEO Steve Jobs sits recovering from his recent cancer operation, RealNetworks has launched its most savage attack yet at iTunes Music Store market share. RealNetworks' campaign - dubbed 'Freedom of Choice' - offers US consumers song downloads from Real's music service at just 49 cents each. "Half the price of other stores, including Apple's", the company proclaims." The write-up is by Jonny Evans today for Macworld UK. I'm glad to see it myself. At the weekend, I got round to buying my first "iTune", just the one, a Harry Nilsson song to complete a collection the Kid has been making. Also I had the occasion, when a friend came on Saturday night to endure the chaos in Hotel Losserand, the smallest lodging house in the street, to be surprised by the high quality of the latest, free RealPlayer 10 for Mac OS X, which I'd installed at the end of June. She was raving on arrival about Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I could see why when we watched such generously filthy and funny delights as 'Stagger Lee', putting the player through its paces. "Apple was shocked by Real's actions, saying: 'We are stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod,' Evans writes for MacWorld. Apple is threatening legal action to block Harmony, and may change its iPod software to defend against the hack, which Real describes as following a 'tradition of innovation'." Hypocritical assholes. That pious Apple pie in the sky, I mean. When their chief executives in France are back at the end of summer, they'll get another onslaught from this corner, no longer a hotel but an arsenal. Last week, I installed Mac OS 10.3.5. After waiting three days to see what miseries others had endured. Already twice badly burned by rushing into an operating system upgrade as soon as it's out, I've learned better. This one went smoothly enough. Except that I yet again found that my excellent external DVD player was no longer accessible. By what right? Jobs, Defender of the Faith, now routinely breaks the law, certainly in this country, in what his company purports to be a bid to uphold it, by trying to prevent me from watching my very own DVDs with anything but his own software, in true Microsoft tradition. Yet again, I had to perform the hack required to get my DVD player back in action with the excellent TransLucy software, since Apple's doesn't work on my eMac, devoid of an internal player. The software people have had enough of this shit and have finally summed up how to deal with it on one TransLucy FAQ page, though they feel they have to add that "the information is offered as reference only... and is not supported by CE Software". It's supported by me. Others who have to go through the same tedious rigmarole, "downgrading" their "DVDPlayback.framework" to the one on the system install disk, with the help of the indispensable conscience-ware Pacifist, as recommended, will be relieved probably to find, as I did, that this alone does the trick. You can hack back the hack. It's unnecessary, at least with an external DVD drive from LaCie, to install the original Apple DVD player too. I guessed that it might be and didn't bother. Everything's working nicely again. On the music war, this is one of the rare occasions on which I will say, "More power to the real world!" If there are bad seeds in the Apple, out with them. And leave the poor lawyers alone. 8:07:42 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.