Willy Dobbe - politics abroad

Bush at his best, buying a vowel

Sat, 10 May 2008 00:08:27 +0200

Bush at his best.

The GPL is the GPL... for good and bad (and even Ugly!)

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:19:29 +0200

Today I got a "follow" from Podblanc on my twitter account. I get dayly followers I do not know, mosty stupid bots disguised as attractive girls that folow 5k people and have 20 followers (extreem stupid people who fail the Turning test ).

I always checkout my followers before follwing them, and it looked that this podblanc was human and ... is running a Drupal site at podblanc.com.

There are days that I feel proud. Proud to be part of a community that builds software that helps people to communicate. Proud to be in that community from the early days. So I have seen the tech communities that embraced Drupal as a tool to communicate. And then gave the media companies -new and old media- that had a good and cheap option to facilitate users. And then came the (from US PoV liberal) political parties in the US that enabled relativly unknown persons to run for president-candidate. Then the small local communities around churches, local red cross organisations and even the big ones like Amnesty. And I am proud that I was a very very small part in the world that enabled this.

But I never NEVER have been "proud" to be white. I never thought that one race, religion or sex is superiour above another. I have the luck to have old parents, who have been through what in central Europe is called "The War" (World War II) and have told me about the horrors. I have had the luck to have travelled around the world to see other people, get in touch with other cultures and to have visited Auschwitz. I know the horrors, I know the pain, I know about the waste of lifes.

I am not the hating kind of person, but somewhere deep in me, I hate people who hate people. And yes I do understand the paradox there. But I am not to keen on right winged Neo Nazi's who refuse to learn from the past, or even to accept the past.

So I am not proud that this white-site is using Drupal. I am sad that we created something that can be misused in this way. But like any tool, it can be used for good and bad. It is the person holding the knife that decides to create a sculpture or go for the kill, not the maker of the knife.

Sometime.. just like now. I wish the GPL was "a bit discriminating" for who it was legal to use and for who not. But you can not have a "bit of freedom"; you have it or you dont. And if that is what we are facing, I am proud that I am part of a freedom where stupid white (or black) people can say stupid things about (white or) black people ... using Drupal.

Proud but with a bad taste in my mouth.

Why did America go to war?

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:57:28 +0200

Why did America went to war in Iraq? To make sure barrels of oil would not be paid in Euros (as most oil countries want) but Dollars? For political purposes like a re-election? To leave a mark in history for a mad president? Who knows?

But not to find weapons of mass destruction, not to free a country and not for all the right reasons, if there are any right reasons to start a war in the first place. If you have some time to kill, checkout the videos on leadingtowar.com. Before you flame me for this posting, be sure to watch the video, in full.

The United States of America, misleading their own people, occupying a foreign country, prisoning "freedom fighters" in Cuba without trial, torturing people, legalising waterboarding.

And I thought that was in the past in another country? It is absurd that "the land of the free" seems to be nothing more then some "land". With a monkey in a white treehouse.

World's Most Influential People

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 22:58:58 +0100

World's Most Influential People in a cool painting. How many do you know?

The World as war hungry might see it

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 04:48:48 +0100

This map displays the world where the country size reflects their oil reserver and the color the oil usage. Unfortunately there is a rather strong relation with countries that the USA wants to go to war with. Especially oil countries that will decide to use another currency for a barrel then the inflation sensitive dollar. That was one of the real reasons America stated the illegal war against Iraq and it was also a warning to all the other countries not to change to Euro/Barrel.

Read feasta.org for a better understanding:

If on the other hand OPEC were to decide to accept euros only for its oil, then American economic dominance would be over.

Giving the enormous costs of the war in money and young men lifes, the fact that America has now become the illegal war-hungry country and the inflation rate of the Dollar, oil countries will switch to the Euro.

Raar kapsel ook weg

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 12:55:49 +0100

Alle media vallen over elkaar heen om te melden dat een van de eerste Google Bombs "miserable failure" naar Bush zijn homepage niet meer werkt.

Bijvoorbeeld nu.nl

De Amerikaanse president Bush kan opgelucht ademhalen. Het aantal hits op de internetpagina van het Witte Huis met zijn biografie zal aanmerkelijk afnemen nu de zoekterm miserable failure (ellendige mislukkeling) surfers via Google niet langer doorgeleidt naar zijn site, meldde The New York Times maandag.

Maar geen van de Nederlandse media nam de moeite om te kijken naar een Nederlandse variant. De actie om "raar kapsel" te linken naar Jan peter Balkenende zijn CV werkt ook niet meer ingoogle.nl

NB: Mijn site heeft heel lang een rol gespeelt in de saga, zoek maar eens naar raar kapsel op mijn site. Op mijn verjaardag (3 jaar geleden) melde alle media (inclusief TV) dat als je zocht op "raar kapsel" dat je naar de CV van Balkenende werd geleid. Echter door de hoge mate van "Search Engine Optimalisatie" van Drupal (het CMS onder deze site) werd de bezoeker die zocht naar "raar kapsel" op Google.COM naar mijn posting geleid. Hetgeen mij zo'n 100.000 hits extra op een dag opleverde. En dat gedurende meer dan 1 jaar.

Maar als je nu zoekt naar "Raar Kapsel" in Google.nl of Google.com, zie je als eerste "I'm feeling lucky" site niet meer JP.

Jammer. Een te meer blijkt dat Nederlandse media niet verder kijken dan het persbericht lang is.

Jammer. Maar JP blijft een raar kapsel houden.

Miserable Failure?

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:00:06 +0100

Street Artists with Balls

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 20:23:47 +0100

I must admit that I don't like most graffiti I see on the streets; it mainly ego tagging with no ideas of their own. But I do believe in street art and guerilla art; bring the art and the ideas to the people and make them think. The stuff banksy does is amazing. (I visited his Santas Ghetto in Oxford Street this year. The Tony Blair picture is killing..). But the worse which can happen to banksy and friends is a slap on the wrist..but these guys in Iran probably risk a chop at the wrist or worse to do what they do:

via Wooster Collective

Bush "getting older"

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 13:58:55 +0100

Bush is getting old. Very old. Checkout this video from a younger talented bush and the current Bush who cant finish a sentence with more then 5 words.

And while we are at it, great "Bushismes".

"Did I say those words?". No Faust, it was the devil. The devil I say you!

Kidney for sale..

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 15:26:52 +0100

one of my jokes if we come up short in the financial planning of a project is that it is not a problem because we just sell a kidney. It was an idea i picked up from the illegal organ trade and the urban myths surrounding the subject (and we got 2 of them). It turns out to be legal in Iran to sell your kidney and the very serious economist suggests that more governments should allow the sale of kidneys to reduce the waiting list and the deaths of patients waiting for the essential blood scrubber.

it seems to be very successful in Iran although the street value of 2000-4000 USD is a bit disappointing. I always assumed 25K USD as the unit price; at 2K is going to take a lot of kidneys to close the gap on some of the projects and some teams weren't big enough to cover it and using 2 kidneys per team member is not good for the productivity..the cost of an office dialysis machine would have been prohibitive.

Since I am not one of the chromosomally challenged renting out my womb had never occurred to me and it turns out to be 6 times more dangerous than selling a kidney. The stuff you learn from the internet.

update by bert boerland: I closed the comments on this thread. After deleting some 100 comments of people who will sell their kidneys and their right arm, I decided to stop this nonsense!

Bush Quotes

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 05:23:54 +0100

I always get a good laugh out of the stupidity of the most ~~powerful~~ stupid man on earth. See some of the best quotes of G "doubleyou" Bush at Wikiquote

My favourites include:

I know that the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully.
-The Washington Post (October 1, 2000)
The most important job is not to be governor, or first lady in my case.
- San Antonio Express-News, January 30, 2000
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
-Yahoo! News, August 5, 2004

Bush, official moron!

Stellingen op Kieswijzer.nl

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:37:11 +0100

Je gaat met een javascript disabled browser naar kieswijzer omdat je wilt weten aan de hand van een aantal stellingen wat je moet kiezen. Dom, want de wereld en dus de politiek is niet zo plat, maar ga je gang.

Helaas, de eerste steeling waar je het "eens", "oneens" of "weetniet" voor mag kiezen is:
Javascript is uitgeschakeld in deze browser

Lijkt me een duidelijke zaak, ik ben er mee eens! Maar ik ben bang dat 3/4 van Nederland hier "weet niet" op antwoord, het land van meningnietus, het land waar Dogma '66 net zo snel kan verdwijnen als de gekken van het Fortyn.

Youtube your Drupal Site

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 16:14:46 +0200

Having visited both the OSCON 06 Europe and the DrupalCon last week, I have lots new ideas and fresh content to blog. I'll try to post some of the ideas and most interesting sessions the comming week.

From the DrupalCon, the session about how to "youtube your Drupal install", was rather good. From the site:

Flunkarnold.com is a drupal site which allows users to upload .mov and .avi video files to the site, convert them to flash video files, and allow users view the videos using a flash video player. This site uses Amazon's s3 service to host the media content.
The approach behind this site was to keep Drupal as stock as possible, utilizing cck, ciews, and upload modules as the primary elements. A secondary script interfaces with drupal to process and move media to the Amazon service.

So what this basically says is:

Let users upload video files in different formats
Transcode these video's to flash
Put the flash videos to an external webservice for cheaper bandwith and storage
Create a thumbnail of the video and store this in a browsable gallery
Integrate the video into your Drupal site
and optional, let the admin or the user manage the content in the normal Drupal way (e.g. add taxonomy or free tagging, rating of content or users etc)

My (current) employer did something like this for a site we host; volkskrant.nl. We use IFRAMES for running the flashplayer (which is so 90ies) and an opensource flashplayer detection, so I hope we didnt charge money for this part of "the player" and it took us 3 weeks to implement it (which was compared to competitors still rather fast) but the project while working isnt finished at all, there is a lot to be done underneath the visable layer!

While using Drupal for this, should have been extreem simple. In fact, there is a "howto" online which a savy Linux administrator / Drupal implementer should be able to implement within 2 days. And it would have been better, since all content is stored at Amazon's S3 service. While I was rather sceptical about using this service as a corporation, I am a Believer now! The terms and conditions are good; one owns the content and can even use encryption so Amazon sysops cantsee it. It does have a high uptime, it is sort of global load-shared (not balanced!), can be bittorrent enabled and EXTREME cheap. Storage costs are $0.15 per GB-Month of storage and bandwith use $0.20 per GB of data transferred. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost and all the services need to access the data are open, well documented and have standard implementations to "mount" the S3 service. So yes, I am a big believer when it comes to using services like this, not just for webservices but also for on the fly SAN capacity for office automation, you just cant beat the price!

So the Howto Youtube your Drupal site (like we need another youtube ) descibes

how users can upload files using an AJAX form (users can see the progress unlike regular HTTP POSTS),
how one should do the automatic transcoding using ffmpeg,
how you can move the files to the S3 service with webservices authentication preventing hotlinking the videos,
embed the video in a flash player (for example use this or this player,
and then embed the content in your Drupal site like any other node. So you can use voring or taxonomy/folksonomy for tagging and searching the video archive as well as generated thumnails

All in all this is great stuff and shows the "platform" bit in "Drupal, the best opensource content management platform". He3nce, you can use the platforms capabilities for access control and content management and expand it using videos in just a couple of days, nearly out of the box. You just need to use a set of modules like CCK and for example views. Great stuff and a very good presentation! See this example site on where this Youtubbing your Drupal site will get you!

There is more information online as well.

Now a couple of (former) colleagues just quited their job to start selling what they call "the flash player" and I wish them the best of luck. With Drupal being able to do all they want and way more, they will find that this market -while booming- is so commoditized with opensource products like Drupal being able to deliver nearly out of the box, that they will have a hard time selling "the player". But still, best of luck! (you need it! )

YADS corruption in US

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 00:13:59 +0200

Yet Another Drupal Site; Beyond Delay. A site dedicated in opening up the corruption factor of congtres man. And it's doing very well, as are the corrupt congresmman. Good to see Drupal being used in a way to make the workd a better place.

Moby bashing George Bush

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 00:42:26 +0200

Moby is right! Using Drupal for is site, flipping the finger to GWB: moby.com
"you are probably the worst president that the united states has ever had to endure."

From the view of the RoTW, yes. Bush is the worst thing that could happen to America and the Work in general.

dear president bush,
stay out of new york.
you don't like us and we don't like you.
90% of us voted for john kerry in the last election. we don't trust you, and we believe, based on your record, that you've been a terrible president.
you're supposed to come to new york city today.
you're not welcome here.
you only come to new york city when you need to bolster your poll numbers.
you came here after 9-11 even though you ignored warnings of terrorist attacks and cut funding to anti-terrorist programs.
you came here for the rnc convention even though your policies have made america less safe.
you are not welcome in nyc.
go back to texas where you can cut wood for the tv cameras.
or go back to washington d.c where you can watch dick cheney run the country.
you are a liar.
you are inept.
you are probably the worst president that the united states has ever had to endure.
you are not welcome in nyc.
we are not your cheap whore, to use whenever your poll numbers are in the toilet.
we are not your crappy prop, to use when you're worried that you might have to deal with the consequences of your failed policies.
you suck, and we don't want you here.
everything you've done has gone wrong. you are in the pocket of the oil and defense industries, and the poor idiots on the religious right actually sometimes believe that you care about them and their agenda.
you only believe in issues that will keep your corporate backers happy.
you are an awful, inept, corrupt, and tragically incompetent president.
and i'm sorry that you've chosen to come to new york city on 9-11.
we didn't vote for you and we're not in any way happy that you're here.
go home, gw, and let us just get on with living our lives in the city that was attacked
due to your pre 9-11 ineptitude and incomptetence.
-moby