Epistles to the Corkonians

Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians is proving to be very interesting.
Wait, no, that’s not the phrase, it’s “Christ almighty, what the f*ck is wrong with these people??!”

Altemeyer is a psychologist who specialises in the study of authoritarianism. To quote his introduction:

Authoritarianism is something authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders cook up between themselves. It happens when the followers submit too much to the leaders, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want — which often is something undemocratic, tyrannical and brutal.

But I thought apart from a few isolated balm-pots, we’d seen the last of them, what with the defeat of Hitler, the fall of the USSR, etc. etc. Apparently not - they’re alive and well in that great bastion of democracy, the US (and elsewhere, but particularly there.) Altemeyer and others have performed hundreds of experiments on the authoritarians (the followers, mostly), and it’s riveting stuff.

For example, take the following statement: “Once our government leaders and the authorities condemn the dangerous elements in our society, it will be the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out the rot that is poisoning our country from within.” Sounds like something Hitler would say, right? Want to guess how many politicians, how many lawmakers in the United States agreed with it? Want to guess what they had in common?

Or how about a government program that persecutes political parties, or minorities, or journalists the authorities do not like, by putting them in jail, even torturing and killing them. Nobody would approve of that, right? Guess again.

It’s also quite funny, he has an entertaining writing style, so one minute you’re chuckling, the next, shaking-your-head-in-wonder.

I say we nuke the planet from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

The actual text of Section 29.4.11: the constitutional amendment voted on in Ireland yesterday:

• “No provision of this Constitution invalidates laws enacted, acts done or measures adopted by the State that are necessitated by the obligations of membership of the European Union referred to in subsection 10 of this section, or prevents laws enacted, acts done or measures adopted by the said European Union or by institutions thereof, or by bodies competent under the treaties referred to in this section, from having the force of law in the State.”

..which would seem to reduce the Irish Constitution to a piece of bog roll when faced with anything — anything — from the EU.

I wasn’t there to vote, but they must be fecking joking.
(I have to admit it was a nice attempt by those cynics in Leinster House at slipping a carte blanche in there, though!)

The BBC has an article on how the water here in Barcelona needs to be shipped in - the first tanker arrived yesterday. Spain is undergoing its driest 2-year period since records began.

The article features the Sau reservoir where a medieval village was submerged when they flooded a valley to create the reservoir back in the 50s. Here’s some pictures I took when I was there in November 2006 when the water levels were already very low:

As you can see, the church spire is visible - normally it’s well submerged but things were dry even then — but we were heading into winter so everyone assumed that the reservoir would be refilled.
Unfortunately not - two bone-dry winters later, you can now walk to that church and even wander around inside it:

As they used to say on The Fast Show, “Scorchio!”

There was fairly heavy rain last weekend. In 2 days, more rain fell on Barcelona than over the previous 5 months of so-called “winter”.
Well, the locals thought it was heavy rain. I thought ’twas like a “Soft” Summer’s Day in Ireland

Update: See also article in The Grauniad.

(Photo of church shamelessly swiped from the Beeb.)

Update 14-June-2008: Well, the last four weeks have seen a substantial amount of badly-needed rain, with the result that the Catalan reservoirs are back up to 50+% levels - you’ll need a boat and diving gear to visit that church again!

Dan Frakes over at MacWorld reviews FinderPop - a very kind review too, 4.5 stars. Nice to be appreciated!

As I said to someone earlier, his review shows the difference between a ‘real’ writer and a butcher like me - he has distilled what FinderPop is mostly about into a page, whereas my manual blathers on for page after drivellish page :-/

You can download the latest version of FinderPop here (2.1.2, Universal, MacOS 10.4+)

Very amusing — this must be the very definition of prescience! From The Onion — Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’ written all the way back in January 2001 has a spoof cover of President Bush’s inauguration speech:

Bush swore to do “everything in [his] power” to undo the damage wrought by Clinton’s two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.
[...]
Continued Bush: “John Ashcroft will be invaluable in healing the terrible wedge President Clinton drove between church and state.”
[...]
“For years, I tirelessly preached the message that Clinton must be stopped,” conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh said. “And yet, in 1996, the American public failed to heed my urgent warnings, re-electing Clinton despite the fact that the nation was prosperous and at peace under his regime. But now, thank God, that’s all done with. Once again, we will enjoy mounting debt, jingoism, nuclear paranoia, mass deficit, and a massive military build-up.”

An overwhelming 49.9 percent of Americans responded enthusiastically to the Bush speech.
[...]
Bush concluded his speech on a note of healing and redemption.

“We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two,” Bush said. “Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there’s much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation’s hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it.”

“The insanity is over,” Bush said. “After a long, dark night of peace and stability, the sun is finally rising again over America. We look forward to a bright new dawn not seen since the glory days of my dad.”

Finally version 2.1 “A pint of Plain is your only man”, available here.

Got my hands on a 10.5 prerelease. FinderPop didn’t work on either PPC or Intel. Oh dear.
Spent 3 days grovelling around in gdb, nm and otool.
On the plus side, made up some new swear-words.

• Now works on 10.5 Leopard Intel and PPC. Lots of gnarly low-level code was completely rewritten…
  

The gory details:

• 10.5 PPC patcher needs to be setgid procmod. Hence FinderPop for Leopard PowerPC now asks for the admin password on first install (like Intel on both 10.4 and 10.5.)
  
• 10.5 Finder no longer calls _ContextualMenuSelect, so I patch an internal system routine instead. Happily this internal routine is also called from 10.5 Cocoa apps doing their contextual menu selection. However that routine may have other non-contextual uses so I could end up inappropriately adding FinderPop stuff to non-contextual menus! If this happens anywhere, please let me know.
  
• Because the 10.5 Finder no longer calls _ContextualMenuSelect, I have to cons up what “the Finder selection” is. This should be exactly the same as on the 10.4 Finder, but there may be differences…
  
• Completely rewritten ‘386 patcher to get around dyld’s hissy fit “I’m not loading a bundle with a setgid executable. So there.”
  
• New Project Builder / XCode 3 is very pretty but incredibly slow. An advertisement for the ‘Speed of Cocoa’ it is not. One of my C files has about 2500 lines (I know, I know) and XCode cannot keep up with my typing as it attempts to syntax-colour on the fly. It’s like being on a 9600-baud terminal again. The colours are nice though.
  
• I’m seriously thinking of going back to 10.4 on my (1.42GHz PPC, 1 GB RAM) Mac Mini. Some things are prettier on Leopard, but it also seems noticeably slower. I’ll play with it some more before deciding…
  
• New FinderPop support forum here.
  

Edited Weds Nov 13 to refer to latest prerelease and ask about IB3.
Edited Sun Nov 18, Weds Nov 21, Sun Dec 9, Mon Jan 14, Sun Feb 3, Sun Feb 10, Sun Feb 17, Sun Feb 24 to refer to latest prereleases.

Having acquired a copy of a recent OS X 10.5 (Leopard) beta, it comes as little surprise to find that FinderPop doesn’t work. They’ve changed almost everything! Having the PPC patcher be setgid procmod I half-expected as Intel OS X has been like that since 10.4.4, so it was easy to fix. However, Cocoa apps no longer directly call _MenuSelect which means no clicking-in-unused-menubar for Cocoa apps. Neither do they call _ContextualMenuSelect directly. What’s far worse is that the Finder also no longer calls _ContextualMenuSelect, which kind of puts the kybosh on FinderPop extending contextual menus.

A bit of a bummer as that’s FinderPop’s raison d’être.

So it looks like a fun weekend with otool and gdb ahead!

FinderPop 2.1 PR2 now available — only minor tweaks since PR1.

• Tiny UI tweak where one text box was too small, causing clipping of descenders.
  
• FinderPop now properly parses ID3 frames to get MP3 file info.
  
• Can now display JPEGs embedded in MP3 files (ie - album artwork) when Cmd-Option-ing. Preview also works as you’d expect.
  
• No longer delete the “Most recent items” list when FP quits. This means your most recent items will always be available, even after a restart!
  

Back in Barcelona again!

• As usual, this is a BETA release so please don’t notify MacUpdate et al.
  
• Reorganise UI slightly. We now have a control-free-popup-delay slider (see above!)
  
• When control-clicking a single item, that item is now added to the contextual menu even if it’s not a folder. It’s boldified and separated so you can see it easily. You can then Get Info or Preview the item right away.
  
• Downgraded the Show Invisible Items checkbox from the Options panel to a mini checkbox in the Appearance panel.
  
• New checkbox in Options panel - Show only applications which can open the selection - if you control-click an item, the only apps that will display in a resulting FinderPop menu are those which claim to be able to read the item. If you control-click multiple items, then only apps which can open the alphabetically first item in the selection will be shown in FP menus.
  
• Some people don’t like the lack of whitespace to the left of FinderPop menus. Use

  defaults write com.finderpop.finderpop addMarkColumn -boolean true
  to reinstate the whitespace (technically, the mark column.)

• FinderPop 2.0.3b1 is now available here.
  

Thanks Tony!

Two Irish hunters went on holiday to Canada and got a pilot to fly them to the wilderness to hunt moose. They managed to bag 6. As they were loading the plane to return, the pilot said the plane could take only 4 moose.

The two lads objected strongly.

     “Last year we shot six. The pilot let us take them all and he had the same plane as yours.”

Reluctantly, the pilot gave in and all six were loaded. However, even on full power, the little plane couldn’t handle the load and went down.

Somehow, surrounded by the moose bodies, Paddy, Mick & the pilot survived the crash. After climbing out of the wreckage, Paddy asked Mick, “Any idea where we are?”

Mick looked around. “I think we’re pretty close to where we crashed last year.”