2020 Hindsight

Global Guerrillas

I've been reading John Robb's Global Guerrillas weblog without a mention besides a link in the blogroll. It's very smart, avoids a partisan us-them, I always learn something, and in the coupla months that it's been going (started in March 2004), he's attracted quite a following, both in terms of hits and highly-placed readers.

Today he writes:

Global Guerrillas has proven to be an invaluable analytical resource on the fast moving world of international terrorism. To wit: the recent attacks in Saudi Arabia should have come as no surprise to the site's readers. Thanks again to the thousands of current readers who have made this effort worthwhile.

Religious Policemen

I may have mentioned it before-- the blog from inside Saudi Arabia: The Religous Policeman, but it's worth mentioning again. It's brilliant, brilliant.

He wants to sell advertising on the national 404 page ("you can't go to whatever page you requested because we won't let you") and retire.

He wants to start a new lottery:

Every week, Saudi citizens could buy a 10-Riyal ticket with a number from 0 to 20. Then, following the weekly terrorist "surrounding" and shoot-out, those whose number matches the number of escaping terrorists, win a cash prize. It's topical, it's exciting, and no other country could imitate it.

It's a must-read. (but it updates more often than blo.gs realizes, so it doesn't rise up to the top of my blogroll as often as it should)

Economist on America and the Middle East

From the print version of the May 29-June 4 issue, a coupla excerpts from an article reviewing America's role in the middle east; these excerpts come from the "gee I didn't know that but once stated, why, it makes a lotta sense" department.

On brokering peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict. In 2002, Bush proposed a forum to promote Palestinian peace. After the war, he settled down to work, "to urge progress."

A year on, there has been none, and the appearance of failure on both flanks of the Middle East has become self-reinforcing. In just the way that many Americans see no distinction between the terrorirms of al Qaeda and the terrorism of the Palestinian intifada, so many Arabs see no distinction beteen Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and America's occupation of Iraq. Both conflicts are portrayed on Arabic satellite channels as similar dramas of national or Islamic resistance.

And from the conclusion of the article,

America could do more in Palestine. After Iraq, it needs to more than ever. Note, though, how many of the people who believe that it is impotent in Iraq also assume that it is all-powerful when it comes to ending a conflict that has perplexed the great powers for a century.

(We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog-drivel; this Memorial Day weekend attempt at seriousness now draws to an end.)

Iraq and the Arab illusion

Zayed at Healing Iraq posts a translation of an article by Dr. Shakir Al-Nabulsi. The illusions that the Arab World held about itself with the end of colonialism....and, instead the realities, and how the illusions are carrying forward in viewpoints held by Arab intelligensia about Iraq. It's a provocative read.

I'm trying to find out more about the author. A google search reveals that he's Jordanian, president of something called the American Association of Jordan (which may be a publisher?), and lives in the U.S.

Illusion remained the major player of the incredible Arab scene. Illusion remained a drug that allowed us to sleep in delicious numbness until the information revolution exploded and exposed the Arab situation. The Arab world was classified in all fields at the bottom of the list of the world's nations, as revealed in UN reports for 2002-2003. The Arab world was shocked for living under a false illusion.

Religion did not lift us from the bottom.

Pan-Arab nationalism did not lift us from the bottom.

Our glorious ancestors did not appeal to prevent us from falling into the pit.

Our Hamasa and heroism poetry did not save us from falling.

Our Friday prayers sermons which assure us that we are "khaira ummatin ukhrijat lilnas" (the greatest nation brought out to people) did not save us.

The fiery speeches of leaders immortalised in the collective Arab memory did not save us.

Sorcery, magic, djinn, Sufi hymns, Darawish prayers, fatwas, and blessings of saints all did not help save us from falling into the void.

MacOsX: Print to PDF to make "commentable" pdf docs?

So I'm talking w/ Doc M about pdf files and commenting. "Oh, you can enable comments in PDF documents," I say. So we're doing tests now, using whatever JPL installed on his powerbook. (Adobe Acrobat Reader 6)

Here's what Acrobat's Help says,

In Adobe Reader, you can add coments only if the creator of the Adobe PDF document enabled commenting. If commenting is enabled, you can place comments anywhere in the cument, and you can determine the style and format of the document

How do I create PDF documents which enable commenting?

MacOS X has this lovely feature whereby you can print any document to a PDF file. We did a test out of MS Word print to pdf. Opened it up in Adobe Reader, looked at the Document Properties. This is what it said:

Document Security:

• Security Method: No security
• Can be opened by: All version of Acrobat

Document Restrictions

• Printing: Allowed
• Document Assembly: Not Allowed
• Content Copying or Extraction: Allowed
• Content Extraction for Accessibility: Allowed
• Commenting: Not Allowed
• Filling of form fields: Allowed
• Signing: Not Allowed
• Creation of Template Pages: Not Allowed
• Submitting Forms: Not Allowed

So here's what I want to know: Is there any way inside MacOS X to change the default prefs for created pdfs to make Comments allowable? Can one hack the contents of the pdf itself to change that?

Macworld reviews of Acrobat 6.0 Standard and Acrobat 6.0 Pro state that

Reviewers must have Acrobat 6.0 Standard or Professional to read and annotate these files. (Adobe Reader can't even open them; its modest annotation tools can be used only by plain-vanilla PDFs.) When the reviewers have finished commenting, they export their annotations, which Acrobat sends back to you. [emphasis mine]

also, from Planet PDF on Adobe Reader 6.0:

Good news, bad news for Mac users. Long-time Mac users may well be disappointed with the lack of browser-integration for Acrobat 6.0 and Mac OS X which means that online commenting is off-limits for Mac users. But they'll be happy to see their old friend, Acrobat Search, back in action. But it gets worse for Mac classic users, they don't get any support at all.

Dang. I guess not. (Plus, the Adobe Acrobat Reader 5 for Linux doesn't allow commenting either). I'll check out what happens with an older copy of Acrobat that's on a computer elsewhere, to see if something works, but I'm guessing that Doc M can't create pdf documents using existing tools that'd allow his workgroup to comment on 'em--other than printout and paper scribbles.

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is a Manhattan sunset

(or sunrise). It's the Manhattan equinox, the day that the sun's rising and setting is perfectly aligned with Manhattan streets in a kind of latter-day skyscrapery stonehenge. [via q daily news]

Spitzer: a new baby planet (image by Bryce)

By baby, they mean young-- less than a million years old. One of the better parts about this story is looking at the image accompanying the article and seeing that it credits R Hurt. That's Robert Hurt, an astronomer who's been a talented Brycer from way back.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has found signs of a planet less than one million years old, which could be the youngest planet detected.

The possible planet is in the constellation Taurus, 420 light-years from Earth. One light-year is 9.5 trillion kilometres – the distance light travels in a year.

Well, if it took 420 years for the infrared waves to reach us, then the planet is 1 million, 420 years (give or take), I guess.

Wet eyes of the soul

You know you've been working at home too much, crouched in front of the keyboard for too many hours, when the thing that strikes you most vividly, upon getting out of the house to go to a Vroman's Bookstore booksigning of Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul and numerous other titles (something like 15 in the last dozen years), and who is now on a book tour promoting his most recent book, Dark Nights of the Soul, and you find the man's discourse good and deep, moreso the back and forth discussion with the articulate audience, you look at the other people with curiosity because, well, you haven't been out and here is a roomful of people you've never seen before, and you observe their dress and hair and glasses and that woman with the slouchy ballcap and the man with the well-curled moustache, but what strikes you the most as you glance about the room (is it a trick of the lighting?) is the wetness of their eyes. This is not a roomful of people about to cry. This is a few dozen people on a Wednesday night, each of whose eyes are lubricated from tear ducts, the same as your own. They shine, they reflect. You've seen it before, of course, without noticing it. And instead of shaking your head and glossing (!) over it and thinking that you've been inside way too much (which is true, of course), you think that it's an odd enough observation that needs to take centerstage for a bit. And so you blog it.

Summer is upon us

Daniel Morris from Behind the Wall of Sleep describes what it's like in Slidell, Louisiana now that spring creeps toward summer:

We'll long for rain, and we'll get it, usually in the afternoons. The sultry air will soak up our morning sweat, and the evening clouds will wring it out on us, still hot.

Read it all.

Screenshot tricks in MacOS X

Capturing full or partial screenshots in OS X. I saw (and can't remember) a little shareware utility (OS 9 only) that will create a screen capture of an entire browser window (long page? long image, w/o multiple scrolls, and merging images together).

Anyone know of such a beast for OS X?