Interstellar Anthropologist, Part 7: Not Exactly Eden

Fortis was thinking how the situation resembled a child starting life over with an adult’s awareness. “How badly was the ship damaged?”

George grinned. “Should you stay with us long enough, and tolerate the travel, you will get a chance to see it yourself. The place was not level ground, but we were too high above it for the standard thrusters to do more than slow our descent some. The landing gear collapsed on the high side, though, and the whole thing leaned into the slope. The hull was breached where it struck the rocky ground, since even such an old ship was not built to withstand much physical impact.”

Fortis remembered the business about energy emissions not working on the planet. “So the impact resistant field generator failed?”

“Completely,” George said, shaking his head back and forth. “The generator was working, but there was no field.”

Fortis was puzzled. “My own ship does not have the old thruster technology, so I assumed it used the levitation field. Am I mistaken?”

George shrugged. “Most likely your ship had the beacon’s data about the exact depth of our cloud layer here at the pole. The military surveyor who visited us last used a ship with extensive failsafe landing capabilities, as most military ships do. I suppose he made note of the depth in his update of the beacon. Departure is much simpler, because it’s not based on fields, but on something else entirely.

“At any rate, our ship landed at the edge of the desert belt girdling our planet. According to our religion, the whole thing was miraculous. We couldn’t leave because the ship was damaged and our alternative thrust system was spent. In the middle of the desert, we would have died before we could find our way to greener lands. But in the middle of the greener lands were predators we could not fight at that time, since all we had were useless energy weapons. And in the northern hemisphere it’s all small rocky islands. Our ship would not have floated. Instead, we crash landed on the one place where conditions allowed us the most time to orient ourselves to the situation.

“Equally significant was the good fortune of having the one and only retired engineer with a collection of museum pieces he wasn’t supposed to bring. Hand tools, of all things. It’s not as if nothing electronic works here. Wherever there is a close circuit for electrons to flow through solids, it’s just fine. But we can’t generate anything in the air, aside from the visible spectrum. Well, just a little into the ultraviolet and infrared, but not far enough for something like a laser, even.”

Fortis thought for a moment. “So computers work, as I’ve already noted in my ship, because they are solid nano-circuitry. And you can create heat and light, and use powered tools, but how do you generate sufficient voltage?”

George gestured at the glowing patches on the tent ceiling. “The lighting is a coating extracted from insects. What powers it is the entire tent. It’s outer surface is coated with a modified native mildew. It doesn’t eat the tent material, but consumes what little energy comes through our cloud layer. It’s enough to light the patches, heat the water for tea, and in while, help prepare lunch.”

Fortis realized he was already hungry. It was one of the drawbacks of visiting other planets, because it meant shifting his circadian rhythm, but there was no way to avoid it. “Did you have the means to generate food, as most humans do these days, or have you found the local flora and fauna edible?”

George laughed, tipping his head back. “When we left Terra, most humans were still eating plants and animals in one form or another. We had learned about advances in artificial replacements much later. Again, fortunate it was for us what grows here was compatible to human biology. However, it took many years of serious health troubles to discover the absolute necessity of eating the fish here. The lack of sunlight creates a serious deficiency which only the fish satisfy. Our forefathers found them repulsive, which is why it took so long, but it’s something we now take for granted.

“It was hardly idyllic. We had the predators, deficiencies, diseases, and were thrown back to prehistoric living without energy weapons.” George pointed to a place near the doorway. “I suppose the light from outside prevented you from noticing the archery equipment there.”

Fortis turned, held up his hand to block the light from the doorway. Sure enough, there was a curved piece of wood, pulling a line taut between the ends, and a collection of thin wooden shafts clipped together in a neat row. The fletching was not feathers, but something resembling a stiff fabric with small panels joining them across the edges. The heads were hidden by a protective cover. Turning back, he asked, “Do you also have other sorts of melee weapons?”

“All sorts of toys,” George replied with a faint smile. “Very little of it is metal. As I said, we have precious little of that here, and almost no means of smelting if we did. Because we came with rather modern technology notions, we were fairly quick to develop alternatives. We make fabrics from both plant and animal sources, but with highly advanced variations in properties. The same with animal skins, wood, glass and ceramics. We use a great many microscopic plants and animals in the process. If it grows here, we likely have done something to breed it for special uses.

“In the past we have traded these specialties for metal and electronics. Most of what we have is wearing out, and we would like to get more soon. I know you saw the ‘bird’ circling Misty, or you would not have known where to land. That is almost entirely fabric and wood, with one tiny computer and transmitter attached. We use them mostly to harvest the hyperspace radio traffic, which can only be read above our atmosphere. The welcome signal takes quite a bit of energy, so it’s broadcast only once each lap. The bird absorbs as much energy as possible during the sun exposure, then makes that brief broadcast before having to save power during passage around the dark side.

“We have to do that because there are only three working birds. When we still had a dozen, the message was longer because we could rotate them more often. Now they have to stay aloft until the memory is about full, then it descends down while another slowly makes its way aloft. It takes a couple of our days each way, gliding and climbing the weak updraft over the marginally warmer deserts. We have winds aloft, of course, but they are due mostly to spin, since the temperature is very stable. The other problem is the mildew tends to weaken during exposure to space, so we have regrow it some each time.”

Fortis asked, “Have you never considered using an artificial satellite?”

His hands spread out in a powerless gesture, George said, “We thought about that. Bear in mind, for the first couple of centuries we were still fugitives from the Imperium. Why would we want them to find us so easily? Once that threat faded, we found it still very hard to establish regular trade relations. And while we do have a surplus for trade, it’s not enough to easily afford something like a full satellite system. We would still need the birds to ferry the data — physical closed circuits only down here.”

Fortis was silent.

George continued, “We are content for the most part. We are loathe to breach what has accomplished so very much in favor of our religion. Frankly, too much technology is the reason we feel the rest of humanity is having such a difficult time, with wars and such. It’s not as if we have no wars here, but they don’t amount to much. Our culture is the result of our religion, and our stability and peace and…” He paused and took a deep breath. “We hold to a totally different value system. We didn’t come here and gain those values because it was the best we could do in a bad situation. We had those values before we left Terra. We believe they came from God, and that it was His plan to put us here to keep them alive, because this world perfectly matched what we believed. We might not have known that so well when we got here, but the realization dawned on us as we made our way.”

His locked eyes with Fortis. “Whatever you do, Fortis, I beg you not to take any actions which would destroy what we have here. I have no doubt you are well trained in dealing with us while you are here, observing without interfering. But once you leave to take the knowledge of our world back to your galactic academic network, it would be all too easy for something in your report to precipitate a disaster.”

Sporting the Truth

Why do men love “fantasy leagues” so much? Because it allows them to assert their own human logic over something too variable to explain. We have come to the point we can reduce a player’s entire performance to statistics, as well as the coaching staff, and we can even account for the vagaries of pure luck with a certain manageable statistical variation. What we can’t account for is when a team wins against all that data. So the fantasy leagues are a way of asserting our control over that one, immeasurable factor on the field.

Almost all sports talk is nonsense. The color commentators might really know a lot of stuff, but in the long run, if you simply turn off the sound, you don’t miss a thing. Most sports writers are actually entertainers. While they know a lot about sports, it seems very few of them every really did any of the sports they write about. Being a good entertaining writer usually precludes the ability to play, and vice versa. So when a writer misses his prognostication for a game — as they almost always do — he simply changes the story to account for things he forgot, didn’t consider, or simply to justify why his loyal readers should keep coming back for more.

Even players blather on and on these days, echoing the canonical chatter about what makes a game. Have you ever read a transcript of such blather, and noticed how repetitious and empty it is? The few who are actually very bright people tend to color outside the lines, so they don’t get to talk on camera. Really good players can see patterns and react, but even they will tell you, sometimes you just can’t win.

One of the major factors within that set of improbabilities is not even the magical factor we call “teamwork” or “team spirit.” It’s something much more subtle. Within the human psyche is a place where petty conflicts between each other somehow are pushed aside. When it really works, almost no one is conscious of it. What they get on the surface is some warm feeling for their teammates that makes the game work, whether they win or lose. However, it typically means they play far better than they themselves expected. There are a dozen different names for it, but it amounts to unspoken negotiation between each other which frees each player to exert maximum effort where he’s best prepared to go. The team avoids things they do poorly. On some level below the conscious, they just interact almost as a single body. You can’t teach it, but you know it when you see it.

Where does that unity come from? Nothing we can account for in our knowledge of human nature explains it. But we do know when it’s missing. It shows up in all sorts of human endeavor. How about that EU? Who knew centralized control could be so utterly hopeless?

According to the Commissioner for Enterprise, Gunther Verheugen, the benefits of the single market are worth around 180 billion euros a year, while the cost of complying with Brussels rules is 600 billion euros. In other words, by its own admission, the EU costs more than it’s worth.

What’s missing is that failure of unity under the conscious level. The reason it costs so much is because nobody really wants to do it the way the EU has decided it must be done. So they have to pull in a vast army of enforcers. Not the kind with guns and such; that would actually be pretty efficient. No, we are all adults, and it’s simply a matter of closing all the sneaky loopholes, capture the dissembling, the lies, the niggling legalisms, and so forth.

Yeah, teamwork.

Humans will tend to self organize. Sure, you’ll have those who swim against the tide just because there is a tide. We should realize that’s generally the cost of doing business with other humans. Stop nickle-and-dime chasing. You can’t afford it. Regardless of the particular thing you are trying to get going, you’ll find it works a whole lot better when, as much as possible, the team or market organizes itself. Yes, some will need help, but not everyone needs the same flavor of help. You can’t have a team without individuals. There will always be that messy negotiation on the front side, and all throughout the process. Embrace it.

With all the vast abilities we have to ferret out the obscure details of human nature and human behavior, we still end up with that one element which makes most fantasy leagues bring different results from what’s on the ground of reality. The EU is one big attempt at fantasy league play, and it fails miserably.

Elements of Human Nature

The most fundamental characteristic of what defines us as humans is our choices. That is, it’s not what we are, or what we do, but what drives us, things to which we are committed, things from which we cannot walk away. It is best understood as the process of human development.

We have a body. It makes lots of choices, since it is little more than a bundle of appetites. They are neither good nor evil, in themselves. That body is connected to a mind through the emotions. The other end of that connection is a tangled mess.

For purely academic purposes, we can distinguish certain things. Directly connected to the emotions is a large wad of memories. It’s not so much a record of the five senses, but a thin stream of five senses wrapped by a very fat coating of emotional reactions, impressions, values, etc. Critical to understanding this fat coating is unraveling the childhood psyche. For now, it’s enough to note various parts of how we interact with the world — the decisions we make — depend on the degree to which we finished the tasks of childhood development, and in what areas of our consciousness we are able to assume an adult role. It’s pretty messy, as I said.

Insofar as any part of us has reached an adult level of consciousness — a sense of taking responsibility for the self, a sense of proportion, etc. — we can exercise a certain amount of intellectual rationality. The space where conflicts are under control, as opposed to exerting control, that space is capable of reason and logic. We are thus capable of dispassionate evaluation, a measure of objectivity, of setting aside the demands of body-emotions channel. Please note: It is fully possible to form a highly intellectual awareness of logic without any ability to use it for choices.

It is critical to understand there is a human will, a core of decisiveness, which sets humans apart from simple rational animals. This capacity to choose, to commit the self to a course of action which forms a self-consistent thread, is what gives us character, identity, a sense of self. This is the part where we “get in touch with ourselves” — we discover those things which are essential to what we are.

Thus far, we are in the territory of Gods Laws for mankind. Every human on earth has the capacity to reach that stage of development without spiritual birth. Discussing the spirit is purely an academic exercise. That element of humanity is the most difficult to describe, since it exists in the place where words are insufficient to carry the load. In making decisions and commitments, the living spirit should overrule all other considerations. It is not irrational; it is super-rational. It is above the intellect, processing priorities and commitments which intellect cannot handle. It decides often in defiance of all logic, in defiance of life itself.

The spirit knows with an entirely different logic. We can discuss it academically, but our words cannot possibly describe it, only indicate it. We can say the logic is symbolic, indicative, given to paradox, builds out from assumptions which are beyond mere deductive analysis. It is totally beyond inductive analysis, because there is nothing of types and categories — everything is altogether singular, unique to the individual involved. There are common elements which can be recognized, but which can scarcely be vocalized.

This spirit cannot be awakened by any human effort at all. However, to envision some clear line of departure, some concrete threshold, would be missing the point. Humans can approach this thing by degrees, but it requires a tremendous success with the previous level of maturity. The path of approach is called all sorts of things, usually in an attempt to dismiss the importance. However, an accurate and popular term is “mysticism.” A lot of junk hides behind the term, but in a broad sense, without the ability to know things which cannot be handled by the intellect, there will ever be some things in this universe which will evade explanation. Fathom all the mysteries of life, the universe and everything with science; there will always be some things which cannot be reached that way, cannot possibly be explained fully.

Interstellar Anthropologist, Part 6: The Story

Fortis was surprised the tea was so hot, when the cup was simply warm. It looked and felt like ceramic, but was hardly thick enough to explain the insulating effect on his hands. Another question he would ask later.

Taking a sip, George gazed into his cup, then his gaze drifted to the open tent door. “We would like to claim our religion has been around as long as mankind, but they all claim that, and none can prove it.” He turned back to Fortis, who was thoughtfully sipping from his own cup.

“What we can document is a group of families separated themselves somewhat from the established organized religions of their day shortly before the first serious attempt to bring all humanity under a single government. You may recall that attempt unraveled before it was even fully engaged. Had it succeeded, that might be the end of the story. One element in that first Terran world government was the plan to force all religions to unify under a single institutional authority. The government policies clearly rejected the very thing which distinguished our religion, which was the insistence mankind was not merely body and soul, but there was a distinct third element, a separate faculty we called the spirit. Our religion was largely an attempt to cultivate that other faculty as a means for determining how men should live.

“We managed to establish an existence which did not withdraw us from all human contact, but limited it some while we built a different life. The degree of separation was the major source of conflict with any government we faced. Because our community was so small, we initially escaped much notice. But whenever things grew unsettled, our numbers surged. At that, entry was never easy. Our covenant of community was quite demanding compared to the world around us in those days. At some point, tensions with secular governments grew along with our numbers.

“During that first Imperium, things went well for us because His Majesty was too busy worrying about the mere mechanics of asserting control over basic resources. Humans had already begun interstellar exploration, with many colonies across the galaxy. Life on Terra had become almost unbearable as the result of pollution and social breakdown, so we began acquiring ships. They were, of course, the most primitive sort. Still functional, they made spartan accommodations, indeed. When we were almost ready to leave was about the time imperial policy began implementing all sorts of bureaucratic controls on colonization. We were caught in a bind, not quite enough ships for all to leave, but a strong sense we could not wait any longer.

“We held a council. You have to understand, a critical element in our religion is self-denial. In this case, it meant we did not have to struggle to find volunteers who would sacrifice and stay behind. Rather, it was a struggle to convince our strongest leaders to go, among other things. The logic of our choices would probably escape you, but the process of choosing very nearly took too long before someone had to take the reins and make it happen. A very strong leader rose up and gave orders, which is not something easily done under our religion. But it did save the day. The group left behind was small enough to hide in one of the few places left on Terra which was fairly safe.

“We took some risk packing them temporarily into standing room on the ships, slipping them up into the Artic zone, then departing the planet as quickly as possible. The Imperium was not happy, naturally. They rescinded our negotiated plan, and placed troops on our destination, one of the few remaining colonies as yet uninhabited. We found out later the troops all nearly died as the place was marginally livable, at best. The group we left in the Terran Arctic was better off than those troops, by far. Given this situation, we simply stopped for a time near the edge of the galaxy quite a ways from any star system, and held another council.

“To avoid easy detection, we resorted to primitive means. We linked the ships physically and exchanged personnel until enough elders could gather for a quorum in the largest ship, speaking face to face. I suppose it was altogether fortuitous one of our engineers, a convert who had served in the military, insisted we then unlink the ships — ‘just in case.’ That case arose when imperial targeting drones popped out of hyperspace. Those ships weren’t armed, of course. We knew they wouldn’t simply destroy our ships and kill us all; they wanted our military aged members for the war they had just declared. This would have been unconscionable for us, and we would have willingly died to a man to prevent it. No soldier fights so hard as a genuine pacifist avoiding war, even if he seeks to avoid killing.

“The only escape was immediately entering hyperspace, but we had to turn off our navigational instruments. On those primitive ships, the instruments would, in effect, broadcast our intended destination. Each ship simply grabbed space and fled. That was the last they saw of each other.”

George was quiet, and mood was decidedly somber. He sipped his tea a moment.

“The ship with the elders ended up in this star system. Prior to the attempted council, we had balanced the ship assignments so each could have formed its own miniature colony, if necessary. In the bargain, the ship which arrived at Dalorius was short a few engineering specialties, most of our former military converts, and a few scholars. While the last group we could replace for the most part, the first two made all the difference in the world.

“Supplies were short because no one expected to be in those ships that long. The beacon was not directly line of sight, but the presence of its signal bouncing off the planets made everyone nervous. Since it said the fourth planet was habitable, but offered no details, it was decided to blindly land. Even if we did turn on our scanning equipment, a risk of broadcasting our location to the beacon at least, we would have gotten nothing back, as you know. So the pilot simply estimated the surface depth below the clouds and brought the ship down. He barely had the means to maneuver once inside the atmosphere and they bumped the ground rather hard. No one was hurt severely, and we disembarked.

“That was several hundred years ago.”

Interstellar Anthropologist, Part 5: A Different Place

Dr. Fortis Plimick hesitated a moment at the doorway of the tent, blinking. There was artificial lighting inside, but it still took a moment for his eyes to adjust. His attention was drawn to the odd luminescence in patches on the inside face of the sloping tent roof.

“Our eyes seldom encounter direct light on Misty, so we are quicker to adjust to to low light conditions. When you feel comfortable, please have a seat.” The shadowy form waited for Fortis to sit first. The chair was some sort of fabric stretched over a hard frame. It gave just enough, and seemed slightly springy, yet altogether comfortable in conforming to his own shape. It held his weight easily, but the frame was obviously very light. His hand touched something rare among places he had visited — natural wood grain. He would have to pay at least a month’s salary for such a chair back home, if it were available at all.

As Elder George Manley eased into a matching seat almost facing him, Fortis saw a man somewhat older than himself. Unlike the almost generic olive-toned skin of blended races he was used to seeing, the lanky robed man was naturally quite pale where his skin was exposed. George composed himself slowly, then turned to face Fortis.

“I suppose your ship can find it’s way out of this cloud envelope?”

Fortis half smiled. “The computers say they can’t see anything, but would have no trouble reversing the last maneuver, which should be safe, since it was above the orbital plane of your star system.”

George’s eyes sparkled merrily in the light spilling through the tent doorway. “Isn’t it strange how we continue to apply the ancient Terran standards of polarity? Technically, we sit at the very bottom of Misty, but it could as easily be the top. Then it would seem our rotation was normal, instead of retrograde.”

Fortis nodded his recognition.

George continued. “I suppose your ship told you something about Misty?”

It took only a few seconds for Fortis to recount the few details, noting it was just a bit more than what he already knew.

George shook his head with what Fortis felt was exaggerated humor. Suddenly, the elder’s face went rather serious, with a wrinkled brow. “I dare say, your automated systems didn’t really read that from the planet itself.” Fortis raised his eyebrows in question. “You are aware at one time it was necessary to plant beacons for interstellar navigation?”

“Yes; my ship noted one just outside your star system,” Fortis replied.

George half-smiled. “Just before the last war started, a military survey ship stopped by, warning us things were heating up. He also told us he would update the beacon’s records of nearby inhabited worlds. In those days it was considered highly encrypted. I suppose, given the nature of things, such encryption has been long broken.”

Fortis wasn’t even aware of any encryption schemes, but noted his ship’s computers had no trouble reading the ancient beacon. He was surprised it still functioned.

“And I suppose you didn’t perform any directed scanning, but simply allowed the automated system to do its work?” George seemed to be on the verge of delivering a punch line for a joke.

“No. I’m not even sure I would know how,” Fortis replied with a shrug.

George nodded sagely. “I’m willing to wager your ship simply told you what it had collated from the beacon.” He waited a moment, then stared directly into the eyes of Fortis. “Aside from the visible light spectrum, nothing penetrates Misty’s clouds. Nothing. Your energy weapon is utterly useless here. Feel free to carry it, but you wouldn’t need it.”

For just a moment, butterflies tickled Fortis’s stomach. But his fascination with the subject pushed them aside. “You can’t even transmit radio waves?”

“We once tested a visible light transmitter system, but it won’t bounce off the clouds. The lack of range, and lack of usefulness, didn’t justify what for us was a high investment in materials we can’t obtain natively.” He allowed that to hang in the air.

Fortis was able to capture a moment with his intuition. “Then you don’t have much metal and petroleum here?”

Gesturing with his hands around the tent, George replied, “What you see here is some of our highest technology. It won’t appear much immediately, but we have several centuries of careful development of what little we do have.” He paused a moment, shifting forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I feel certain your questions will be answered best by the narrative of how we came to colonize Misty.”

George stood, a fluid motion, unhurried, yet somehow quick. “Let me offer you some tea. I have a special blend which seems to please visitors from off planet.”

Vista Not So Bad

Okay, coming from a mostly Linux/BSD background, with some limited Windows experience, I’m surprised so many people whine about Vista. Granted, it’s apparently slower than Win7 on most recent machines. However, I found the UAC default settings to be tolerable. I rather like being notified if something nasty is playing games with my system. For the most part, once stuff is install and permissions set on things which require it, I don’t see the UAC at all.

I’m a little annoyed there’s no Slate theme, and I’ll get sick of this baby blue. Otherwise, things are tolerable. The desktop widgets are pretty cool. The display is better than anything you can get from an X server. I’m still getting used to not having the mouse clipboard, but I’ll get over it. Naturally, I’ve enhanced the experience by bringing on-board some great freeware.

Firefox and Thunderbird, of course. I’ll use IE where it’s required by MS for official website stuff, but otherwise it stays in the closet. I also use Opera solely for email and sites I visit regularly with logins. For sites I don’t quite trust, there’s always Lynx text-mode browser.

Lynx can be gotten in several versions, but I found a copy of 2.8.7 which runs fine. After extracting, I moved it under the regular 32-bit “Program Files”, fixed up the lynx.cfg as I would under Linux, as well as the lynx.lss. Then I simply linked the executable to the desktop and set the proper icon. It seems to work best in WinXP compatibility mode, and I set the fonts bigger, and the screen at 80×50.

I also have PuTTY for SSH to my static website. I took the time to install that under the 32-bit “Program Files” as well. It logs in just fine and all works as it should with proper setup. I can also run Lynx and Elinks from that server over the SSH link.

For text editing, I keep two different applications. Plain text formatted files and HTML works best in Cream/Gvim. I got it setup as a standard right-click option in spite of it being 32-bit running on 64-bit Vista. Sometimes you need a file formatted without line-wrapping, and I got Emerald Editor (formerly Crimson Editor) for that. Both have spell checking as you type, which is good for catching typos.

That pretty well covers almost everything I do. All in all, it’s worth running Vista until the Win7 upgrade kits arrives.

Win64 Poorly Supported

On the one hand, 64-bit Vista and Win7 appear to run just about any 32-bit app just fine, aside from stuff too tightly wound into the system and kernel. So while you have to get 64-bit AV protection, you can run any office or browser you like. Which is a good thing, because nobody seems interested in offering a Win64 version of anything.

A few projects sponsored by Google have produced Win64 binaries, such as Vim. No, not Gvim, this is the console version. Compare this with Linux/BSD land, where just about everything you can get at all can be had in 64-bit. Opera makes a Linux 64-bit version, but can’t be bothered to do it for Windows. OpenOffice.org folks, last time I checked, whine about the SDKs being hard to get or something. I’m not really sure, but they said they weren’t really interested. Sun, who is backing OO.org, did mange to make a 64-bit Java for Windows, but can’t be bothered to do it with StarOffice, which is OO.org with extra stuff added. This is the same Sun which came out with their own 64-bit hardware and OS a long time ago.

The problem comes, of course, because Win64 has a hard time assigning default apps to open certain files if the app in question doesn’t have a 64-bit handle. Of course, lots of hardware issues also arise, since the drivers would be 64-bit, and anything hooking into hardware drivers has to have a 64-bit handle. And then, if you run an app for handling really large files, bigger than 2GB (happens these days), it requires 64-bit addressing.

I suppose we are at that stage back when Windows first came out. Getting folks to move from 16-bit to 32-bit was long in coming. Today we have tons of developers who think in 32-bit because that’s where they start. Anything 64-bit is a port from 32. Nobody is starting with 64 from scratch as a fundamental design factor. Maybe someday soon they’ll quit dragging their feet.

But what do I know? I’m just a computer user.

Roman Roads of the Modern World

In New Testament lore, we all recognize the importance of Rome. First, it was the model for the Beast of John’s Apocalypse. It was the major barrier to men knowing and obeying the Laws of God, and it was an even greater barrier to the gospel message. Not that it was able to stop the gospel, of course, but it was a barrier Christians had to cross.

Rome was, at the same time, the chief enabler of the gospel mission work. In order for Rome to operate, she needed a single set of policies, fairly uniform across the empire. She needed a single currency standard (though not necessarily a single currency), and a single language for routine business (Greek, since it was already in use). For purposes of quick movement of troops to trouble spots, the road system was created — the famous Roman Roads. You may know there are places in Europe where they still exist in usable condition. I’ve seen them, walked on them.

The thing which makes any government the greatest threat is what makes it also weak against those threats. That’s the nature of things. Those Roman Roads were a primary symbol of how Paul got around so well. In actuality, it was the whole package of citizenship. He was free to travel as much as anyone was, protected from certain legal hassles, and in particular, protected from the wrath of his own nation, Judah.

In modern times, there are things which we can share, things which offer a common path we all take. These things make us somewhat vulnerable to manipulation, but they also provide us an opportunity to communicate without much loss.

I would not have chosen English as the global language, but it seems to have taken that role. Almost everything requiring global cooperation is done in English. The currency issue is in flux, as the dollar is being killed, but that will settle out soon enough. Business requires it. Moving our individual bodies has gotten pretty easy, but it’s amazing how little we need that any more. I have several very close friends I’ve never seen face to face, nor even been in the same country. Internet protocols make this possible. Basic industry standards for computers make this possible.

On the one hand, the standardization of MS Windows has created a world of problems. What’s wrong in one place shows up everywhere. The basic simplicity of the user experience encourages carelessness. Any decision made behind closed doors of a very cruel and heartless corporation affects everyone who owns something they produced. The licensing is just about as immoral as it gets. But you know what? It’s like a Roman Road. That almost everyone uses it makes it easier to exchange things. You don’t have to worry if their computer can do this or that, because they all have access to pretty much the same stuff.

This may well be the end of era for me. There are things coming down the road which force me to choose, and none of the choices please me. Still, the ultimate reason for all of it is tied up in my religion. The things I do, things I would do if it meant my death tonight, will require me to spend less time on stuff which gets in the way of that calling. There is less and less which matters the way it used to, because I no longer have time to fool with it. Doing so will hinder that calling and service. In a few days, I hope to have my free Dell Windows 7 Upgrade Kit for this machine. Chances are, if I install it and get it working satisfactorily, I won’t be writing much about Linux or other alternative OSes any more. It’s not an ideal answer, but it may be the one with the fewest barriers to what I have to do.

Building Xiphos on openSUSE 11.2

Given past performance, it’s quite likely someone will package Sword and Xiphos for SUSE 11.2, but I wasn’t willing to wait. For those of you eager to try this at home, I offer this outline. It is terse, but should be sufficient for those with enough experience to try it.

1. Make sure to get basic build stuff (install by group) and basic GNOME build libs (by group). YaST > Software > Software Management. Near the upper left-hand corner, click the button marked “Groups” and change it to “Patterns” and scroll down in the left pane to “Development.” Click on “Based Development, then the button below there “Install All.” Do the same for “GNOME Development.”

2. Add the following packages: icu, libicu-devel, clucene-core-devel, libcurl-devel, libMagick++-devel, and mozilla-xulrunner191-devel. Dependencies will be added automatically, of course.

3. Download latest Sword source: ftp://crosswire.org/pub/sword/source/v1.5/.

4. Download latest Xiphos source: http://xiphos.org/download/.

5. Move sources to a build location; I prefer /usr/local/src/

sudo mv sword-1.5.11.tar.gz /usr/local/src/
sudo mv xiphos-3.1.1.tar.gz /usr/local/src/
cd /usr/local/src/

6. Build sword. First, we fix a bug. In sword-1.5.11/utilities/emptyvss.cpp we need to add one line. At the top of file, insert this line:

#include <cstdio>

right above #include <iostream>. Then build:

sudo ./configure --with-icu
sudo make
sudo make install

When finished, make sure Pkg-config knows about Sword: sudo cp sword.pc /usr/lib64/pkgconfig/

7. Build Xiphos.

sudo gunzip xiphos-3.1.1.tar.gz
sudo tar -xvf xiphos-3.1.1.tar
cd xiphos-3.1.1
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

It will take awhile before GNOME notices it, so you’ll need to run it from the commandline at least once. Just type in xiphos and play with it a bit. At some point, it will be added automatically to the menu system.

openSUSE 11.2 on Dell Inspiron 545 MT

It appears the kinks have been mostly worked out of the RC I tried previously. About the only reason I even considered turning away from Ubuntu/Xubuntu was because it could not properly communicate with my DVD-RW. I couldn’t play music CDs without lots of struggle, and could not burn anything at all to CD or DVD. Those are essential to my work, so it caused me to check openSUSE after the full release came out.

As you should expect, on this machine it was quite ready to go to work. I had to burn the DVD ISO on my wife’s Winbox, but it was worth it. The installation was pretty much finished and ready to use in about a half-hour. It took only a few moments to fight YaST over how to use my harddrive. I didn’t want to preserve anything but my separate Home partition. Once that speed bump was passed, it was pretty smooth sailing.

The first thing to fix was sound. As with Ubuntu, and just about any current distro and the Intel HDA onboard sound chipset, it required digging to find the proper incantation in the ALSA configuration. The canonical HOWTO is part of the SUSE Support Data Base: SDB:Intel-HDA sound problems. I find it somewhat foolish to bury the bundled documentation in the kernal source package, when it should be in the ALSA documents. So I had to install the kernel sources and inspect /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sound/alsa/HD-Audio-Models.txt. I already knew the codec was ALC888, found under the heading “ALC882/883/885/888/889″ in the file. Similar to Ubuntu, there was a specific driver for the recent Dell Inspirons: 6stack-dell. To get this added in the right place, it was simple enough to use YaST > Hardware > Sound and edit the sound device listed there, adding that bit of information to the line for “board model.” Once I had that, YaST restarted the sound server automatically. As before, this took care of the issue of speakers playing when headphones were plugged in.

openSUSE didn’t have the problem with the GUI crashing when I played Aisleriot. I never did understand what the problem was with Ubuntu, nor did anyone else seem to know. I can also play music CDs without the struggle. Naturally, not all the nifty packages are available as with anything based on Debian, but I can build pretty much anything I want. You may want to check my previous test on the RC release on how to include extra repositories.

As noted with the RC of this release I chose not to accept the typical route to getting the extra codecs and Flashplayer, since I still see no reason to tolerate the reflexive jump to plastering 32-bit on a 64-bit OS. There are few bugs still, such as autowrap not working in Gvim, but I’ll get over it. Also, migrating my Thunderbird configuration meant renaming the folder from ~/.mozilla-thunderbird to ~/.thunderbird, but the version with SUSE works better. I note Ubuntu had crippled the Spidermonkey development package; you had to remove Firefox to get it. I prefer to have what little ECMAScript is implemented in building Elinks, and SUSE’s Packman does it right.

Otherwise, on this particular hardware, openSUSE 11.2 appears to be a keeper. I’ll surely report if something breaks down the road.

Update: One minor issue is Aisleriot no longer contains the original “bonded” card set, but is limited to some ugly stuff I can’t see clearly. I chased down the SVG file from an online source directory someone had open to the public, and downloaded the bonded.svg and copied it to /usr/share/gnome-games-common/cards/. Then, to make sure, I ran gconf-editor and modified the choice — apps > aisleriot > card_style — and changed it to “bonded”. Then when I opened the game, I got the old style cards back.

I use the Dirty-Ice color theme, and while I don’t care about using the underlying CleanIce engine, I get tired of error messages. So I chased down a source RPM to build it myself. It’s not to hard to use the standard /usr/src/package directories with rpmbuild -bb package.spec to get anything for which I can find an SRPM.

I’ve also built Xiphos, and that will be detailed in another post.

Update 2: I find Gnome-screensaver is broken every where I’ve tried it. This time it allowed my system to go down far enough it refused to wake up when I hit the keyboard or clicked the mouse. Sorry, GNOME, but it’s not a laptop. I killed and changed the command call in the start-up list to Xscreensaver.