A System Apart

rjd2 Soul Position - Right place, wrong time

asystemapart — Sun, 06 May 2012 14:43:26 -0400

rjd2 Soul Position - Right place, wrong time

The moments with you will always live on in the hearts and minds...

asystemapart — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:05:18 -0400

The moments with you will always live on in the hearts and minds of those you touched. Although some of us are struck bare with grief we will always carry you with us. I hope your beautiful and fragile soul will Finally be allowed to rest. You were to us all a beloved friend and we will cherish your memory with loving grace. I miss you <3 (Taken with instagram)

John Martin - Just Drive live at Cosmos Studios (by...

asystemapart — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:16:02 -0400

John Martin - Just Drive live at Cosmos Studios (by JohnMartinOfficial)

laughingsquid: V For Vendetta Creator Alan Moore Talks About...

asystemapart — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 09:39:16 -0500

laughingsquid:

V For Vendetta Creator Alan Moore Talks About Anonymous and the Guy Fawkes Mask

tanze, tanzen.

asystemapart — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:52:00 -0500

“I put forward at once — lest I break with my style, which is affirmative and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily — the three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see — accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to “will” — to be able to suspend decision. All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion is already pathology, decline, a symptom of exhaustion — almost everything that unphilosophical crudity designates with the word “vice” is merely this physiological inability not to react. A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one’s hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely on one’s stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things — in short, the famous modern “objectivity” — is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence.

…

For one cannot subtract dancing in every form from a noble education — to be able to dance with one’s feet, with concepts, with words: need I still add that one must be able to dance with the pen too — that one must learn to write?”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

The Above quote was taken from Nietzsche’s “Twilight of the Idols”, its still as valid today as it was back in the dark days.

The descension of Hakan the great.

asystemapart — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:21:05 -0500

The ascension of Håkan Juholt to party leader of the Swedish Socialist party, the Social Democrats, was meteoric. None of us knew of this relative insider and none of us, knew what to expect.. if anything.

Like all things velocity related, there’s a a law of nature that comes into play when the meteor hits the atmosphere of a planet. Let’s call it friction.

Håkan, a very friendly looking person and no doubt a good man to those he calls his friends, resigned the other day from his post, because he believes in the social democrats, he said.

The followup to all this, were his ramblings in the media, on all things related to his person and position, but most of all his shenanigans with certain economic issues he had take advantage of.

Now why i’m posting this is because i’ve been reading too many posts, facebook reblogs, where persons of interest are accusing the media of being slanted, the media of being against a left coalition in majority and that the opposition is rumored to be using ufo technology from the crash-landing at Kebnekaise to mind bend the former leftist voters to vote bourgeoisie.
People, there is no mustache twirling mad overlord behind the curtain, its more circumstantial than that.

Now if we take a closer look at Juholts behaviour in the media, we see a man who’s utterly devoid of any form of media training, a man who believes its his role to solve issues stemming from his own faults.
But we also see, just a man.

The greatest fault of any leader is not to listen to his employees, the lesser evil of a leader is to ignore criticism.
I actually found him wanting due to this, but he rose up and abdicated his position, because, he believed in something greater than himself.

He has a vision.

That floored me, What Sweden has been lacking for decades, is a leader with a vision. Sweden needs someone to take the reins and form a solid vision of how to take the country forward.

For anyone who is willing to take the reins for the Social Democrats, there’s a need to reform the party from within, renew the organisation and modernise the party. that is no small endeavor, and it is not. for the meek.
Whoever makes that happen, and I hope it is Johanna Graf, is the person that will make me cast my vote in favor of the party.

hat tip to Deeped for making me notice Johannas post that catalysed this post in turn.

loose canon; the swedish compromise

asystemapart — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 19:59:29 -0500

Reading forums and talking to .. well lets call them “passionate” consumers of fiction, be it tv-series, comics or books spanning entire forests, you often find them touting and challenging the canonicity of the writer/creators own “universe” of fiction.

This often due to cross-franchise entertainment like games, comics and movies made out of, say, a series of tu.. oh sorry, books.
Now this is actually fine, everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, me, I like to enjoy what I consume via the various mediums.

Take one of my favorite examples, Star Wars, early on it was a hopshod ragtaggled bunched together impression of various sources — Lucas early script was a loose impression based on Akira Kurozawas “The hidden fortress” — but today it spans a multi-billion franchise consisting of books, comics, the movies, tv-series and games.
but what most fanboys discuss is the canon and its redheaded stepdaughter “continuity” — who’s a real bitch — the inherent facts as they’ve interpreted it via one of the above sources.
Now forums on the net are a place where fanboys bunch together to continously one up eachother and earn a badge of honour for being “Correct” regarding the topic of discussion, usually it follows a pattern somewhat like this:

User A asks a question, receives a reply, someone corrects the reply, a flamewar erupts, people are rude to one another, someone insults someone’s mom, threats are made, moderators step in to calm it down, Strawmen A & B start their incessant tripe and Power User A corrects everyone, thus earning credibility.

Needless to say, its something forumgoers feel insane amounts of passion for, but normal people feel, well. indifferent towards.
it’s essentially one of those “cant see the forests due to all the tree’s” sort of deals, to me anyway.

But the way it works in a franchise license like the Star Wars franchise, is that the span is through various mediums and corporations, in that there’s even an inverted pyramid of classifications involved, relating to just canon, and more often than not this is not regulated by a writer or a creator, but by an Intellectual Property Rights Lawyer, let’s just refer to that guy as the “badguy” henceforth.
So this badguy has created a set of classes pertaining to which part of the published information is the primary source for all the lore relating to the story.
This to keep a firm grip around continuitys throat as it relates to, the canonicity of the story.

A more hands on description of this classification is a set of classes, lets call name them A all the way to D.
A - is the “do what the creator demands of us puny plebs” (the filth called pre-trilogy movies)

B - is what the Creator himself creates. i.e the mainline (The Star Wars trilogy)

C - is edge stuff like comics, books and RPG’s of the Star Wars franchise, products that contain /some/ canon that the Lucas does not pay much attention to — if at all —

D - basically, this is stuff that is not an essential part of the storyline and retains some inklings of The Canon, stuff like Games.

That’s the basics the law that people like the badguy spill forth, at least in how it relates to the Star Wars franchise.

Firefly, Star Trek and B5 has a similar dress up from what I understand, or well. not Star Trek, since Gene Roddenberry is basically the reason to why the term “Retcon” exists, but the essentials are the same.

But its even more convoluted in our modern time, not only is there a badguy, but more often than not it’s a team of them, led by what’s called an “Intellectual Property Rights Manager” who sets direction.

And this is why, Canon, isnt up to frothing fanboys on online forums.

I know i’ve posted this here and there for the better...

asystemapart — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:54:56 -0500

I know i’ve posted this here and there for the better part of two months, but in august I reached one of my goals. Now with 5 more kilos to eighty i’ve started the process of tweaking my musculature through hard training.

I’ll be refraining from weightlifting this time around ‘cept for those barbell weight things, of which I’m currently hefting 30kg on per arm.

This time, it’ll all be about getting in shape and tweaked musculature, i’ve had it with being the slow brute ;)

"Free the imprisoned Egyptian bloggers! In times when freedom of the press is supressed and media..."

asystemapart — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 06:07:21 -0500

“

Free the imprisoned Egyptian bloggers!

In times when freedom of the press is supressed and media controlled by government or other interests, the responsibility of pointing out wrong-doings, falls to the citizens. The civil journalism found on the internet form an integral engine for developing democracy in many countries. With blogs and other social media as their tools, they expose injustice and misconduct in the society, even when the media landscape is being completely controlled.

As the Arab Spring’s historical events have shown, bloggers are not only citizen-journalists. With them they carry the hope of democracy, freedom and dignity to all. Freedom of speech on the internet, has become one of the most important dividing lines between dictatorship and democracy. Here you lift injustice and wrong-doings in the every-day life, and with the might of the pen you work towards change.

In many places the situation, for those that are engaged in democratic change, has become increasingly difficult. Several countries imprison or persecute people that critize their governments openly in social media. One example of this is the faith of the Egyptian bloggers Alaa Abd El Fattah and Maikel Nabil.

Alaa Abd El Fattah is one of the main activists in the large and lively egyptian bloggoshere. In 2006 he was arrested, by the Mubarak regime, to set an example to other bloggers. Bloggers that critically discussed the things that happened in Egypt were regarded as a threat. Unfortunately nothing has changed and today the process of democratization is endangered by this.

About a month ago, Alaa was imprisoned again. This time it was the ruling Military Council of Egypt. His time in captivity is prolonged by two weeks at a time, which causes his family great concern, and especially his pregnant wife. The process against him shows that the aim is to silence an important node in the movement for democracy in Egypt, before the election. Earlier this year this movement toppled the dictator Mubarak, and it is once again taking the protests out to the streets.

Yet another civil rights activist, Maikel Nabil, has been in prison since the end of March this year, accused of distortion of the slogan ofthe Egyptian Military Council, ‘the army and the people are one hand’, at his blog. He discussed and ciritized the development after the fall of Mubarak, under the heading “The army and the people are never one hand”. This was interpreted by the regime as an attack on the system, and Maikel is now serving a three-year sentence for high treason.

Alaa and Maikel are far from alone. In addition, they are used as warning examples to intimidate others not to challenge and critisize injustice, or speak in situations where others remains silent. In a democracy-under-construction, this is a sign of a dangerous development that the surrounding world ought to react on.

We, the undersigned, have all, just as Alaa and Maikel, choosen to participate in the public conversation through blogs and other social media. We hope that more people wants to raise the issue of the importance of free speech, and show the surrounding world that we take notice and that we care. Freedom of speech and thought must be respected, and all bloggers that are being imprisoned because of their opinions must be freed immediately!

Our message is clear: Free the champions of free speech!

”

net1 and the use of permissive software

asystemapart — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:19:23 -0500

One of the basic tenements of network security is the first principle, networks are non-permissive enviroments.

What this means is that every system that you introduce into the enviroment, you take good care to lock down to avoid outside operators gaining access.

The standard operating procedure for introducing new systems into an operating enviroment is trial by vetting and standardisation.

Net1 is a broadband isp, utilizing the old NMT(CDMA) network in Sweden, they do this at a low monthly cost to the consumer and with several different gateway router solutions.

After noticing that my d-35 router had the PfSense logo as a favicon — the icon you can see on a tab in chrome, or in your adressbar on firefox/ie — i started looking around and i gained root access to the pfsense telnet console from an external ip-adress.

So i decided to go the full length and check out the D-40 series model as well, and not only does it have an open telnet port facing all network interfaces. You also telnet into it, without typing in credentials, and gain access as the superuser.

After doing this, i was greeted by the openwrt banner and realised that there’s quite a few things that you can add to the D-40 to enable it to do more. If this was intentional by Net1 I do not know, since they have yet to reply to my week old email regarding this.

so to anyone reading this and being a net1/ice.net customer, please get your linux toting geek friend to lock down your router. there’s potential for lots of nasty stuff happening to your router if you do not.

M A S S I V E new trailer for the Syndicate game...

asystemapart — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 15:23:04 -0500

M A S S I V E new trailer for the Syndicate game remake.

Syndicate Announce Trailer (HD) (by syndicate)

"We, too, have mobilized. We come from near and far, by any means necessary, some on private jets,..."

asystemapart — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 15:18:59 -0500

“We, too, have mobilized. We come from near and far, by any means necessary, some on private jets, others on extremely large private jets. But you will not find us sleeping in a park and waiting in line at a Burger King to urinate. Have you heard of Mustique? Because that’s where we have mobilized. Don’t bother trying to Google Earth us, though, because we have proprietary military software that prevents you from doing so.
We are the 1 percent.”

- John Kenney: “We Are the One Per Cent” : The New Yorker

on books and genres.

asystemapart — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 17:06:00 -0500

Having had the wonderful oppurtunity to work via the internet for most of my career also means i’ve spent an ungodly amount of time socializing via the net, meeting new people, goading nublets on support forums and well, forming relationships with people on the other side of the globe.

One of those friends is a guy in Germany, Falk — no really, that’s his name — he’s an astute, alert, detail oriented person, which means he’s almost always anal about pretty much everything.

I remember that time when I was digging through kernel source for linux 2.6.18 and trying to nail down a bug, all the while being encouraged by Falk — for you non-germies out there it’s also Swedish for Hawk — with words such as “do you really know what you’re doing” “did zey cover zat at ze marketing Kurze” well, yes. its a spurr alright.

Or that time we were discussing a bleepin’ game and he went into details about WORLD BUILDING as in, writer, as in setting. not level-editor. me? i just wanted to know if the game was good.

By now you’re probably wondering why i’m writing this. Well, as it turns out, i have this thing for sci-fi books. they make my nipples hard.

But when I asked him for a few hints he pushed me in the direction of several titles of which i’ve ploughed through more than 20 books.

Now to me, Sci-fi implies hard-sci nerdery or like in the case of Games Workshop’s Warhammer universe “the rule of cool”, Horror implies something supernatural and Vampire-werewolf-old-myth-goes-tits-up implies something at the beginning of that line.

So to you Germans out there, look. I like sex, or well sometimes I don’t.. well yes I do.. Ok. But what i do not want to read, is sex-disguised-as-$BOOKGENRE.

shenanigans

asystemapart — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:56:00 -0500

The Occupy movement has by the the time of writing been an ongoing display of gusto aimed at the financial oligarchies around the world. Private Military Contractors were sent in to deal with the Occupy camp in phoenix, Paramilitary groups have been spotted besting about other cities, police in NY, Oakland, San Francisco and Seattle have at several times brutalised the Occupy activists.

Now the Federal boys in blue have agreed that its time to shunt this party, and well their pals over at the Heimatslandsicherheitsdienst have also weighed in.

This, at a time when the US State Department are criticizing the dictatorship of Syria, for their use of secret police and paramilitary forces to quell ~~arrest, assault~~ democratic rights activists. not to mention dissappearing ~~murdering~~ said activists.

What do these two have in common? the constant is criticism aimed towards the ruling oligarchy. And the people of both countries, are asking one simple question: “why are the rich getting richer?”

personally, all I want is a political party that has the stones to stand for something, something similar to a) maximise individual liberties b) protect the bleepin’ commons. c) a minimalisation of the various coefficients of a nationstate. Now I realise all of my wishes are orthogonal to one another, but that’s what negotiations are for. But I know that my wishes are miniscule, mostly due to the “Batten down the hatches” approach of any party involved in the ruling ~~oligarchy~~ goverment

Photo

asystemapart — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 23:56:11 -0400

HP to pull the plug on WebOS devices

asystemapart — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 23:44:00 -0400

jIn addition, HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.

- HP.com Pressrelease

it’s sad to see one of the few real contenders to the iPad/iOS platform throw in the towel but two months into the game.

Three months ago, someone was slamming the WebOS cowbell pretty damn hard:

In the tablet world, we’re going to become better than number one. We call it number one plus

- Eric Candor, veep of something-or-other, HP

Strategic decisions like these are in organisations like HP not sudden. This has been planned, probably as a last bet on the platform.

But by spinning off the PSG Business Unit they’re not only getting rid of the Palm brands and products, do not forget, that Palm has a lot of intellectual property in the form of Patents.

you’ll see Nokia/MSFT, Apple and Google bidding on it.

“Plus one” ladies and gentlemen, plus. one pretender laid by the side of the road.

Separation

asystemapart — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 08:43:51 -0400

Separating is never easy on anyone involved.

Me and Catherine have went our separate ways and I ask people to respect this and I ask that you respect our privacy and let us handle this on our ends.

Sincerely,
Robert

G , not your regular cup o' joe

asystemapart — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:30:01 -0400

I’ve been putting far too much time into google , over the course of just a few days, i’ve managed to send out over 400 invites and hitting the proverbial roof.

First off, the UX of the interface is minimalistic and easy to use, the whole ui has a “no guidance needed” feeling to it.
To add friends, Google sources your current contacts and frequent email correspondents.
But the thing with this is, they’re not “friends” in the facebook sense of the word, but blends it with the Twitter “follow” concept.
Google introduced a concept they call circles, which like in real life, enables you to share your thoughts, content and other bits ‘n’ pieces with those you know might be interested in what you’re sharing.

When you first explore the ui, you notice a constant updating river of news scrolling past in realtime. this is something that Dave Winer has talked a lot about in regards to rss readers and facebook.
To navigate this flow of information, you can always click-drag the scrollbar, but if you’re an old unix geek like me, old VI shortkeys work ;)

Through and Through, I definetly prefer the overall feel of the service — did I mention the lack of spammy apps? — it’s very lightweight and brings together the best parts of twitter and facebook.

The sneaky bit is this, Google mentioned in a recent blog post over on the google blog that this round of invited people are the ones with large social graphs, i for one would like to know where they sourced it from.
Also, inviting your friends is all nice, but some people do not use the Google mail service or any of the other services, well aside maybe from google search. so inviting your friends means helping google get more customers.

Luckily there’s now google takeout that Eli’s tipped me about, which helps you export all your data from google and shunt it.

"What if the US government subpoena ‘Reality check network corp’ for all information stored on their..."

asystemapart — Fri, 20 May 2011 14:38:20 -0400

“What if the US government subpoena ‘Reality check network corp’ for all information stored on their servers about my IP address, cooke, or UID? Lets think even more simplistic, what if a party to a divorce case subpoenas for that data to prove a partner was visiting certain sites at certain times? Assuming this data is recorded by ant.com on their server rpc.ant.com in New York (and lets face it, why would they send such data with unique identifiers if it were not recorded?), my entire browsing history is there laid before the subpoenaing court or government. Every site I visited. Every page I looked at.”

- via The Brooks Review

Ok i’ll say this once, use chromium or safari.

A Case in point of Anger's ability to change us.

asystemapart — Wed, 11 May 2011 01:56:08 -0400

Anger and resentment can easily stops you in your tracks and after watching and enduring many difficult situations, that’s what I know now. That it needs nothing to scald but the air and the life that it can swallow and smother.

It is real though, the fury, it’s real. It changes you, it turns you, it can transform you and mold you into someone you’re not.

The only upside of all of this, then is the person you become and hopefully the someone that wakes up one day, on the right side of the bed and realizes that they’re not afraid of their future and past journey anymore. Someone that knows that the truth is, at its best, is already a partially told story. That the situation might not be the same as anybody else, but the feelings are. Anger, resentment, bitterness, sadness. But all of those, like growth, comes in spurts and tantrums and then in its wake, it leaves a new chance and acceptance. The promise of calm and your happiness.

You forgive, not to forget, but to go onwards.