Bollywood Moments: A highly-selective memoir

Lately I've been falling under the spell of Bollywood to an extent that has caught me completely by surprise. Over the years I thought I knew Indian films, and despite an initial fascination in my early teens, I eventually kept them at arm's length while not dismissing them outright, for to me they were amusing but quaint oddities loaded down with unusual artistic conventions and exotic cultural baggage, particularly with the earlier stuff, prior to what appears to have been an influx of corporate cash and a push to drastically improve production values. Gone are the days when I'd snicker at the unintentional humor in the same way I would (and continue to) with chop socky flicks from Hong Kong.

(A word from my inner grown-up: All filmmaking nations have their share of low budget movies that are laughable for reasons not intended by their creators. When such films originate from outside of the viewer's own society, they can be easy targets for mockery due to whatever is lost or distorted in the cultural translation. Tsk!)

I thought I knew Indian films but I was wrong. Dead wrong! And it is all thanks to one Sanjay Bhansali. But before I get to him, however, let's thread the opening reel through my South Asian film projector...

First encounters

In the autumn of 1985 I became fast friends with Rahul, a boy in my Grade 8 class who had been born in New Delhi but immigrated to Canada at a young enough age that he didn't have any sort of accent my 13-year-old ears could detect despite Hindi being his mother tongue. His father was a real estate agent and his mother worked in a jewellry store. She once told me that she really enjoyed seeing Rahul hanging around me because I didn't teach him bad words or talk dirty about girls. (I simply didn't have the heart to set her straight.)

His dad liked me too, such that he often greeted me in their house with a jovial and heavily-accented "Hello Jim!", followed by an unabashed and fatherly kiss on the cheek. Although my western lizard brain didn't know what to make of it, I nevertheless understood it to be nothing more than a heartfelt sign of affection despite my culture's efforts to train me to find all male-to-male affection suspect. In those years I was too cool to hug and kiss my own dad goodnight.

I also fondly remember the one-sided games of Monopoly Rahul and I would play against his father. (Pro tip: Never play Monopoly against a real estate agent.)

Although I had always known brown kids at school (be it in the classroom or in the schoolyard), this was my first time seeing Indian family culture up close. Also, it was my first brush with exotic spirituality.

On my initial visit to his house, Rahul gave me "the tour", which along the way included explanations of the little details, such as why it is always important to point a carved elephant towards the door. On our way upstairs for the second leg of the tour, I was struck by a smokey but perfume-like aroma permeating the upper part of the house. Following my nose (like Toucan Sam), I veered away from my tour guide and into a small room containing only a white table, upon which a stick of incense burned in front of an upright framed picture of a brown-skinned man with a dark afro and sporting an orange robe. I watched the thin curl drifting upwards from the end of the stick, and then became aware of the light cloud of smoke accumulating just below ceiling. After a moment of mesmerization I gestured towards the picture and asked who it was. This made Rahul perplexed.

"Don't point at him!" he whispered with a tone and urgency that was both a scold and a plea. "It's disrespectful!"

He then proceded to tell me how important the man in the picture was, and added that if the man contacted his parents to request a personal audience, they'd be on the first plane to India, no questions asked.

Over the course of our friendship, I got to know Rahul's family and its sense of hospitality, and as such felt like an honorary family member whenever I stepped through their door. Usually at least once a week I found myself eating dinner with them and, if it fell on the weekend, his parents would settle in for some movies, which I presume were rented from an Indian specialty store.

I was transfixed by any glimpes I had of these films before Rahul would urge me away to somewhere else in the house. For one thing, I recall up to three or four sets of subtitles, none of which were in English or French. I remember the dancing and music, the latter featuring that unique-sounding reverb that was applied to the female singers' voices. As for storylines, anyone's guess was as good as mine, as I never saw enough of them to know what was truly going on. All I knew was that the characters were liable to break into a song and dance routine without any kind of segue. Often a tense moment of high melodrama would be inexplicably punctuated by a joyful and exuberant musical number.

Say what?

There was just a certain je ne sais quois about these films that had me bewildered but fascinated all the same. Perhaps there was something in the visual langauge of Indian filmmaking that was at odds with the cinema to which I had been conditioned. Or maybe it was the generally poor image quality of what was likely a third or fourth generation VHS copy. The snowy resolution and blotchy color balance made it seem to me like these films were desperate transmissions from some distant world, and that the image breakdown was evidence of their arduous and unlikely journey across the cosmos and into a family's TV set.

I remember wishing that Rahul would simply let me hang out in the living room long enough to wrap my head around what his parents were watching. In those days, however, Beverly Hills Cop was more his style, and so perhaps he was either bored or a little embarrassed by these video artifacts of his homeland.

One other memory of Rahul and his family that has stayed with me for over 30 years is of that time his dad gave us a lift to the Bayshore Shopping Centre in his Cadillac Seville. As he waited at a stop sign in front of a ground level entrance, I heard an upset Rahul say something to his dad in Hindi from the front passenger seat, followed by his dad's quiet and reassuring response, telling him in English: "Just ignore it, son. Be the better man." I looked up from my spot in the back seat to see a headbanger standing in the middle of the crosswalk in front of the car, giving us the finger with both hands and very clearly saying "Fuck you!".

At first I felt personally insulted, wondering to myself what we did or what it was about us that made this guy so angry. And then I realized he hadn't even seen me, and that I simply did not factor into the rage being directed at Rahul and his dad.

Although I had been surrounded by white people since birth, this was my first time seeing my own culture through an outsider's pair of eyes.

TV duds and hard-to-get girls

Through the late nineties and early 2000s, the weekend broadcasts Bollywood films on a Toronto-based TV channel comprised my primary exposure to Indian cinema for that time period. There's not much to say here other than that although I tried my hardest to sit through the entirety of a film, sooner or later my attention would be drawn elsewhere, or perhaps because either the ones I saw on TV weren't very good or I simply wasn't acclimatized yet to that style of visual storytelling. Once I got the above-mentioned guilty snickers out of my system, there simply wasn't much there to hold me.

One particularly puzzling scene that has stuck in my mind was from a crime drama, and featured a tense standoff with several guns pointed in all directions, à la the climactic shootout in True Romance. Just when it seemed some jackass was about to break the tension with gunfire, the group of combatants broke into song and dance, with a pretty young girl who suddenly jumped into the frame from out of nowhere and led one of the male leads outside while singing about wanting to honor her grandparents' moral values (or some such) while playing hard-to-get and making her randy young suitor chase her around a tree. And then, once the musical number wrapped up, the girl disappeared and the suitor and the rest of the gunmen resumed their places in the standoff as if no time had passed.

For a brief moment it was intensely amusing, but I lacked the mental bandwith to sustain absorbing such conflicting narrative information for any length of time.

Meh.

Faana - things are looking up for Bollywood

By 2005 I was living in Toronto, and had heard all about the Woodside Cinemas from a fellow film buff. A theater dedicated to Indian and Tamil films? I couldn't resist, as by this point I was much more open to (and patient about) immersing myself in non-mainstream cultural milieus. I passed on whatever Tamil film was playing due to a lack of subtitles (so perhaps I wasn't feeling that open), and opted instead for Faana.

The movie somewhat stirred a renewed interest in Indian films, but the gathering itself was something to behold. Being the early bird, I was the first one in the theater, and so I found a spot near the back so as not to feel like I was on display as the token white guy. (And as the seats filled up, I would indeed remain the token white guy.) Among the first to arrive after me was a gaggle of young women who appeared to be either in their late teens or early twenties. They passed by me and then turned around and positioned themselves directly in front of me despite the theater still being mostly empty. Being within almost point-blank spitting distance, the polite WASP in me pretended to be interested in the near featureless decor, or in what I could see of the little projector window at the back of the room.

Eventually one of them turned around, looked right at me, and said quietly to the friend beside her, "Like, omigod!", and with that they all got up and found seats on the other side of the room down near the front and I spent the next 15 minutes feeling awkward and small.

Thanks, ladies.

As the start time approached more and more people filed in and I noticed something about the room's demographics, and that is that all age groups were represented, from newborns in baby carriages to the elderly pushing walkers. This seemed truly like a community event. In a way I felt like a stowaway at some large family reunion.

While I found this a little puzzling, particularly given the atomization of western film audiences, it wouldn't be until after the film that it actually made sense.

As for the film itself, a four-hour opus about a blind girl who falls in love (and eventually conceives) with a terrorist, to me it was actually a two-in-one affair, given that it was bifurcated into a lighthearted boy-meets-girl romcom for the first half, and then afterwards a dark and tragic action film as the new bride learns of and comes to terms with just who she ended up marrying. (As if to underscore the difference, the first half, from what I remember, featured ample sunshine and bright colors, whereas the second half was colder, with the bluish tinge commonly associated with man cave fare. In short, it was as if a different diretor and cinematographer had been assigned to each half, such as Amy Heckerling and Tony Scott respectively.)

To be honest, as the first half was wrapping up I was expecting to be going home soon, as all of the plot lines were being neatly tied up and everyone seemed to be dancing into the South Asian sunset. Suddenly, while the male lead is out of town while his wife receives an operation to restore her vision, we learn he is a terrorist. "What kind of ending is this?", I muttered to myself, when suddenly the word "Intermission" appeared on the screen in multiple languages and the house lights came up.

An old Sikh gentleman sitting directly behind me must have noticed consternation beaming out of me like a distress signal, as he tapped me on the shoulder, leaned forward and informed me there was still another two hours to go. As my jaw dropped he laughed. "In India," he said, "audiences expect a movie to last at least four hours. If you showed them a two-hour movie they'd be tearing up the seats!"

The movie itself was fantastic, even if the stark dichotemy created by the first and second half was jarring to the point of distraction, and served to keep me from suspending my disbelief. Also, the production values were light years ahead of what I'd experienced at Rahul's house or on TV. The film would have played well with most any North American audience had its two halves been screen separately from one another, even given whatever other Bollywood idiosyncracies were contained therein.

In any case, upon reflecting on the film's dual romcom/action nature, the film's structure made total sense in light of the generation-spanning makeup of the audience. Perhaps I'm wrong, but the first half was intended to be particularly kid-friendly, while the second half was for the parents and grandparents once the younger set had dozed off or were ferried back home.

This approach to film structure was alien but illuminating and, particularly when it comes to ticket sales, a stroke of genius. In this manner, the film could be most things to most people, but without one extreme diluting nor compromising the other.

Padmaavat - a grand reawakening

While Faana certainly did stir up my interest in Bollywood, it was too wierdly structured for my liking. And given that the next film I saw at the Woodside was okay but forgettable (all I remember of it was a soldier firing a gatlin gun), I was interested in seeing more Indian films if not actively searching them out.

That all changed about two weeks ago when I went on a movie date to see Padmaavat, a large canvas opus by director Sanjay Bhansali. An historical romance and war film, unlike Faana this movie presents the romance/action extremes so that one extreme heightens (rather than compromises) the other despite co-existing simultaneously rather than being segregated into halves.

This isn't a review, and so I won't go into much detail about the plot other than to say it features a tragic love triangle between a Rajput king, his titular queen, and a Muslim sultan obsessed with seeing her beauty for himself. Also, the film was extremely controversial while it was still in production, entangled as the story is in domestic Indian politics, an area in which I don't even pretend to have a reliable working knowledge. Therefore, I'll leave it to you to read up on the fuss and draw your own conclusions.

I will say, however, that in my estimation the generally lukewarm reviews it has received seem to be unfairly colored by the above-mentioned politics. It would appear that Bhansali could have cured cancer by making this film and his critics on both sides of the Hindu/Rajput and Muslim divide would have said "What took him so long?".

Despite claims that the film drags on and on, at just under three hours I found it to be an engrossing thrill ride with top-notch production values that could easily go head-to-head with anything out of Hollywood. It had me in constant amazement and begging for the director to lay on the Bollywood as thick as possible. (In addition to the requisite dance numbers, the characters spend much of their time either speaking in parables or phrasing their thoughts almost as poetry.)

The ending, in which the maidens of the Rajput fortress march headlong into a gigantic flaming woodpile rather than risk being defiled by the sultan and his men, is devastating and difficult to watch, especially given the close-up shot a maiden holding her distended pregnant belly as she strides towards martyrdom. While this was extremely challenging to my Christian sensibilities surrounding life and death issues, I think there's value in being confronted with (and thus being made to think about and process) cultural practices that are outside the norm. (The film begins with a series of disclaimers, one of which states that the filmmakers do not endorse the practice of jauhar, or group self-immolation. Nevertheless, by depicting the practice as the "heroic" last act by the film's titular character, by default the filmmakers are indeed glorifying it, disclaimers notwithstanding.)

There was not a single moment of unintentional yuks nor any sense of quaintness - my date and I were so completely swept up into this world that the experience left us stunned and speechless as the end credits rolled. Our brains were lit up in ways that would take hours of conversation to unpack. I'm not sure if a North American or European film has ever done that to me, which is a polite way of saying that no such film ever has, period.

And now, in the wake of Padmaavat, I am left craving more! In the past few weeks I have been checking out more Bollywood flicks from the library, starting with Bhansali's previous film, Bajirao Mastani, which may blur your recollection of Padmaavat if viewed too soon afterward, as they are very much the same type of movie and feature some of the same cast. (It is as good as or even better than its successor, but with a less morally-challenging ending.)

For now I have three films in the "on deck" circle for this weekend, including an historical epic (Chaar Sahibzaade: Rise of Banda Singh Bahudur), an underworld crime flick (Once Upon a Time in Mumbai: Dobaara!), and Bangistan, a comedy I chose due to the irresistably dangerous tag line ("Two aspiring terrorists. One identical plan. No damn clue!") as my own way of laughing in the face of "war on terror" paranoia.

Postscript

After getting the idea for this piece I hunkered down and followed the rough outline as jotted down in my notebook. With the section describing a friendship from more than 30 years ago, I found myself unexpectedly touched by certain memories and the process of reliving the emotions associated with them, even if there was a bittersweet element.

And even though my original intent was to hew as close as possible to talking about the films themselves, I soon realized that I was tapping into so much more, as by chronicling very selective stops on this cinephile's journey, at least a few points along the way were inseperable from my personal life.

As an addendum to the experience in the car with Rahul and his dad, I should say that even though I quickly realized that the racism on display was not being directed at me, and despite the racist in question not even knowing I existed, the gnawing in my gut and the redness in my face while writing about it was evidence enough that those profane and unwarranted taunts still sting like a personal insult all these decades later, as a sin against one is a sin against all, regardless of whether the one in question is a stranger or a close personal friend.

OpenBSD 6.2 + CDE: Solaris 10 color scheme and a high five for HP

Numbers don't lie

Never in my wildest dreams did I think that a post about an "antiquated" desktopenvironment would go viral (by this blog's modest standards). Less than two months later, it has attracted almost 24,000 pairs of eyeballs, followed by the next most popular post, which comes in a distant second at just over 2,000 hits after twenty months. The lesson here, I believe, is that if you target a drastically underserved readership (in this case, those of us enthralled with museum pieces like CDE), you may be pleasantly surprised by what the resulting analytics have to say.

Regardless of how "ugly" or "outdated" (and therefore not "newsworthy") you may think CDE is, it is now just a few years into its new life as an open source project, and may see tweaks and improvements that never would have occurred had it remained strictly a commercial product on life support.

Setting all that aside, the sudden readership spike noted above speaks for itself, with no justification required for CDE as a "current" software news topic in 2018.

SUN Also Rises (on OpenBSD)

As you may recall from that last post, one of my first orders of business was to create a custom color theme to reproduce the UnixWare 7.x default theme (minus that system's unique desktop switcher). In retrospect, making an OpenBSD system resemble a product once owned by the patent-trolling SCO is akin to making Black Lives Matter activists go to a demonstration dressed in Archie Bunker costumes.

Before long, however, I was creating yet another custom color theme, this time based on Solaris 10, an operating system that is much, much closer to my heart than UnixWare will ever be. (My fondness for UnixWare's default CDE color theme notwithstanding, don't ever let anything with SCO DNA close to your heart. In fact, change your phone number and take out a restraining order.)

In this case, the shortest distance between Point A and Point B was to start with selecting "Crimson" from CDE's out-of-the-box color schemes, which as you'll see gets you 90 percent of the way to a faux Solaris 10 box:

Standard "Crimson" color theme

The offending portions of the Crimson color scheme (from a Solaris 10 point of view) is the light green on the front panel and Style Manager background, and the light blue Style Manager - Color window and the Terminal menu bar. This is easily rectified by selecting one of the inaccurate colors from the color palette within Style Manager - Color, clicking on Modify, and then Grab Color in the resulting Modify dialog box - doing so will give you a crosshairs cursor with which to click on the desired color (if its visible anywhere on your screen). This was the process I followed to create my UnixWare-styled color theme, for which I simply used some screenshots of that system to get the desired shades of blue and orange. In the case of getting your Solaris 10 theme up to snuff, the light green and blue in the palette should be changed to light grey, as shown here:

Custom "Solaris 10"  color theme

Besides getting the colors right, the one remaining order of business (assuming you want to go all in on the Solaris 10 aesthetic) is to select Solaris10 from the Style Manager - Backdrop dialog box, which in this particular case was my starting point.

Giving HP VUE its due

As a reader correctly pointed out in the comments under the original post, many people are accustomed to thinking of Solaris (pre-11.x) as having been the de facto CDE implementation, forgetting that CDE itself began life as a fork (or continuation) of HP's Visual User Environment (VUE), which was subsequently rechristened the "Common Desktop Environment" (or CDE) once Sun, IBM and others joined in. In fact, looking at screenshots of VUE, it is apparent that HP had already done the heavy lifting prior to bringing on collaborators. Unfortunately, I've never used VUE nor even seen a video of it running, so I personally have no idea what changes (beyond visual teaks to the Front Panel) went into CDE.

HP Visual User Environment (VUE). (Wikipedia)

Nevertheless, as I said in my reply to that reader, "...I'm guessing that most people associate CDE with Sun because Sun CDE was much more available to the average person during its "strictly proprietary" years via Solaris due to it being available for x86 machines. Unless I'm mistaken, HP-UX has always been dependent on HP architecture. Add to that the fact that Sun may have had more of a "cool" factor due to many of its innovations (Java, zones, ZFS, etc.) that served to boost its own profile and in turn that of its CDE implementation.

"As for me, I know I have been guilty at times of thinking of Sun as being the de facto CDE vendor, that may also be because I've been a Sun fanboy for quite some time."

Bug alert!

I started writing this particular post as an html file in vi, and for reasons unbeknownst to me that terminal window kept crashing. Therefore (and at the risk of contributing to the usual UNIX text editor religious war), my finishing laps were done in Emacs, which gave me no stability problems whatsoever.

OpenBSD 6.2 + CDE

If you've noticed a disruption in the time-space continuum recently, it is likely because I have finally been able to compile and install the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) in a current and actively-developed operating system (OpenBSD 6.2 in this case).

This comes after so many attempts (across multiple platforms) that ended up with the build process prematurely stopping itself in its own tracks for a variety of infinitesimal reasons that were beyond my comprehension as a non-programmer, or when there was success it was not without some broken parts. As for the latter, I've been able to build CDE on OpenIndiana Hipster, but with an end product where I'm unable to change the color scheme in dtstyle (because "useColorObj" is set to "False"), with a default color scheme that is low-res and unpleasant. As for changing "useColorObj" to "True", I tried every recommended trick I could find online, but nothing worked.

My recent attempts at installing CDE on OpenBSD (version 6.1) saw the process stop due to a number of errors that are pure gibberish to these naive eyes. While disappointing, it was par for the course within my miserable experience with trying to build this particular desktop environment. As I wrote in this space in November 2015, in the course of explaining part of my imperitive for installing Solaris 10:

And so I have come to think of building the recently open-sourced CDE as being akin to a coffee mug I saw many years ago. One side of the mug read "Turn the mug to see how to keep an idiot busy." On the other side, it read "Turn the mug to see how to keep an idiot busy." I'm through feeling like an idiot, which is partially why I'm on this one-week journey with Solaris 10.

While I thoroughly enjoyed running Solaris 10 on my ThinkPad T61p, and felt a devilish thrill at using it out in the open at my local MacBook- and iPhone-infested Starbucks and causing general befuddlement and consternation among the occasional prying yoga mom, I never felt like I could do much with it beyond explore the SunOS 5.10 command line and watch YouTube videos. While still supported by its current corporate owner (whose name I don't even want to type), it is no longer actively developed and is thus little more than a retro toy. I hated the idea of installing anything else over it, but productivity beckoned and it was time to tearfully and reluctantly drag myself off the dance floor.

In any case, just last week I noticed that the Sourceforge page for the OpenBSD build had some 6.2-specific notes by way of a series of four patches, and so I decided 'what the heck, let's give this puppy another whirl'. After an initial abortive attempt at a build, I surmised that I hadn't applied the four patches correctly. A day or two later, I took a deep breath and tried again, this time resolving to not proceed with the time make World build command until I could see some sign of a successful patch process. (This time around, I downloaded the patches and moved them into the directory containing the CDE makefiles, and issued each patch command as patch <filename.patch and then reading the output carefully to determine which file in the source code was to be patched, and entering the filename when asked.)

Once I had the thing up and running, and with a mind bursting with fruit flavor, I started messing about. The first order of business was to create a custom color scheme modelled after the default color scheme in UnixWare. (Despite any baggage that system carries from its previous ownership under SCO, I adored the aesthetics of UnixWare 7.1.4 two years ago when I installed the free one month trial version on my ThinkPad. For reasons that escape me now, I named my newly-created color scheme in honor of UnixWare 7.1.3.)

Like a proud papa, I immediately tweeted the above screenshot and risked irritating a Linux kid or two in the process, given SCO's anti-climatic anti-Linux patent trolling from way back when. (I'm not out to irritate penguinistas, I just sure like this color scheme.)

Final Thoughts

It may look a little clunky at first, and may be a little bling-challenged, but the more I use CDE and adapt to it, the more it feels like an extension of my brain. Perhaps this is because it has a lot zip and behaves in a consistent and coherent manner. (I don't want to go too much further down that road here, as OSnews's Thom Holwerda already gave a good rundown about ten years ago.)

Now that I have succesfully paired my absolute favorite operating system with a desktop environment that has exerted an intense gravitational hold on me for many, many years, I don't anticipate distrohopping any time soon. And as I attain a more advanced knowledge of CDE, I'll be chronicling any new discoveries here for the sake of anyone following me from behind as I feel my way around this darkened room.

OpenIndiana Hipster: Console workaround, revised audioctl script, and an extended middle finger to Oracle

This year has turned out to be one in which I've been happily knee deep in OpenBSD (6.0, 6.1 and -current), only venturing into illumos territory on the rarest occasions, either as a quick sensory fix via the OpenIndiana 2016.10 snapshot live DVD or a two- or three-day fling with Tribblix. Otherwise, I've been using OpenBSD on this machine (a Dell Inspiron 1525) on a steady basis for productivity and creativity with no sense of missing apps or features. (So there, Linux!)

This all changed recently with initial unconfirmed reports of Oracle having gutted its Solaris team down to a skeleton crew for maintenance purposes, which had been interpreted in some quarters to mean that this awesome operating system - and the de facto "official" UNIX for those on x86 hardware - is being left to wither on life support just long enough for current support contracts to run out, rather than being actively developed and improved. After almost two weeks of keeping mum on the issue, Oracle has finally confirmed the layoffs via a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filing in California. As The Register also reports, Oracle has revised its product roadmap to show that Solaris.next (which will mean further Solaris upgrades occurring in a rolling fashion along the 11.x stream) will not be unleashed until 2018, rather than 2017 as originally planned. El Reg further speculates that this future vision of Solaris may entail it being relegated to an emulated cloud offering, or some such.

Um, okay.

I'm somewhat allergic to all that corporate "cloud" blither-blather, as well as the notion of surrendering as many computer services as possible to a remote host, so Oracle's latest cloud rah-rah session doesn't make me feel confident about Solaris' future as a freestanding operating system.

And so, as my way of extending a middle finger to what I initially felt was (and may still prove to be) Oracle's further mishandling of Solaris, I decided to spend some quality time with illumos, the community-driven successor fork of Sun's OpenSolaris, whose throat was slit by the meanies at Oracle, post-acquisition. Over the past week or two, therefore, I've been vacillating between OI Hipster and Tribblix, both as a way of commemorating the venerable Solaris while also showing contempt for its neglectful foster parent. I don't have anything substantively new to say about Tribblix other than it's a total gas to work with, and so for now I'll limit my comments to OI Hipster.

Workaround for system crash when exiting X11 to console

I have no complaints whatsoever about the OI Hipster implementation of the MATE desktop, though if I had my druthers it would default to the Nimbus theme out-of-the-box in honor of its OpenSolaris lineage, but that's a microscopic complaint. (Being a grown-up, and given that changing the theme is beyond effortless, I'm okay with my current state of drutherlessness.)

On the other hand, I start to twitch and then break out in hives if I can't exit to the console every now and then to experience the spartan beauty of UNIX sans all that GUI goop. Unfortunately, when you enter the appropriate command in OI Hipster (pfexec svcadm disable lightdm) on my particular machine, the system exits MATE and simply hangs before getting to the console command line. This also happens when exiting twm, so the issue is with how my particular graphics driver and adaptor handle an X11 shutdown, rather than being specifically a MATE issue. (See my bug report for more details.)

In the meantime, a reasonable workaround is to enter the above command for exiting MATE and let the system crash, and then do a hard shutdown (in my case by holding down the power button until the machine stops writhing and goes limp), and then once you've rebooted add mate-session to your .xinitrc file, which means you start MATE at the command line with startx rather than the graphical login screen. This also means exiting MATE (or any X11 window manager or desktop environment) simply by becoming root and then issuing the reboot command. (From MATE you can either issue the poweroff command or select Shutdown from the System dropdown menu in order to turn off your computer. In a barebones X11 window manager like twm, you're stuck with the former option.

Revised crank script

Some time ago I wrote about the lack of (or otherwise lukewarm) mouse-driven audio control in OI's MATE implementation. My solution then was a workaround via two shell scripts, which I christened crank (for increasing the volume to 100%) and ucrank (for returning the volume to 50%). This time around, I decided to streamline the workaround by condensing it to a single shell script (still called crank) with the following lines:

read a
audioctl set-control -d /dev/sound/audiohd:0mixer volume $a
audioctl set-control -d /dev/sound/audiohd:0mixer headphones $a:$a
audioctl set-control -d /dev/sound/audiohd:0mixer speaker $a:$a

So rather than the bludgeon-like all-or-nothing of crank and ucrank, the user can fine tune the volume with a single command and enter the precise volume level. (I've got an unhealthy lust for tinnitus, so I never settle for less than 100.)

Parting thoughts

I have used OI enough over the past three years (151_a8 and Hipster) that I have developed a deep affection for it, and thus even though OpenBSD remains my natural habitat I can't resist brief or extended sojourns with the operating system (along with its illumos brethren) that carries on the innovative spirit of Sun Microsystems far more than Oracle ever could (or should I say would ever want to).

While projects like OI may suffer from having far fewer developers than the various operating systems based around the Linux kernel (because, after all, there is no "Linux operating system", contrary to what the lazy and careless penguinistas in the media would have you believe), I believe the future is bright for illumos if those overseeing it continue to improve and innovate on the OpenSolaris code and continue to show what's possible with business-led open source projects.

Another factor that may pay dividends for illumos in general is Joyent's acquisition last year by Samsung. Given that one of Joyent's high-profile offerings is SmartOS, a specialized illumos distro, it's hard not to see how the support of a behemoth like Samsung wouldn't trickle down to the overall illumos project.

Chinatown (Sunday morning)

All photos © 2017 James Deagle. All rights reserved.

Tribblix m20: Getting started and performing a minor upgrade

I've been taking Tribblix (version m.20) for a spin for the first time since writing about it in this space last year, when it was version m.16. I was very impressed by the speed and simplicity of installation and use, particularly for a SunOS 5.11-derived system. My only real complaint at the time was that some of the packages were a little unfinished, particularly that ugly duckling of a desktop environment known as CDE, with whom I am inexplicably smitten. (It's kind of like that odd-looking girl you fell for in grade 9 but were too nervous to approach. All these years later you search out her yearbook picture from that year, mall bangs and all, and wonder to yourself, "What was I thinking?", only to find yourself tossing and turning in bed at 3:46 a.m., obsessing over what could have been. That approximates how I feel about the Common Desktop Environment.)

Four upgrades later, some of the packages are a little more finished (or else are imported directly upstream from illumos or sideways from OpenIndiana). In my previous Tribblix fling I didn't use it (on the technical level) as extensively as I could have, opting merely to poke and prod around the perimeter and simply get a general feel for it. This time around, however, I decided to wade a little deeper in.

Installation

Nothing substantively different to report here from what I've written about previously, other than to say that rather than entering ./live_install.sh -B c1t0d0 kitchen-sink to commence installation, I instead did ./live_install.sh -B c2t0d0 x11 x11-extras retrodesktop. (The difference is due to the "kitchen-sink" option now automatically installing a graphical login that takes you straight to Xfce4, which is fine if that's what you're into. I'd rather have just a plain ol' text login. Also, c2t0d0 is the label Tribblix gives to my Dell Inspiron 1525's hard drive, as opposed to the ThinkPad T60p I was using the previous time.)

Housekeeping

Akin to Solaris 10, the Tribblix install process doesn't give you the opportunity to create a new user until after you boot into your new system. In this case, your initial post-installation login credentials are the same as for the live DVD, which means logging in as "jack" with an eponymous password, and switching to root with "tribblix" as the password. Therefore, my first order of business was fourfold:

1. add myself as a user
2. assign root privileges to myself,
3. create a password for my own account, and 
4. change the root password.

This was accomplished the old-fashioned way at the command prompt, using my own credentials for the sake of demonstration:

$ su
Password: tribblix
# useradd -d /export/home/jed -m -s /usr/bin/ksh -c "James Deagle" jed
# usermod -P "Primary Administrator" jed
# passwd jed
New Password: __
Re-enter new Password: __
# passwd passwd
New Password: __
Re-enter new Password: __

(That last step, "passwd passwd", is the command for changing the root password.)

The only other housekeeping matter that I would normally take care of so soon after first booting into a new system is to create my own /bin directory for storing any scripts or programs written by Yours Truly: 

$ pwd 
/export/home/jed 
$ mkdir bin 
$ cd bin
$ pwd 
/export/home/jed/bin

Packages

I'm not going to rewrite my instructions on using this system's handy-dandy package manager (called zap), because then I'd have no reason to force you to read my previous post on the topic. I will say, however, that I highly recommend you install the pkgsrc overlay (courtesy of Joyent), as it will give you an additional boatload of packages (albeit some duplicates of native binaries from Tribblix/illumos). Just how many? That's a great question...let's ask UNIX:

$ pkgin avail | wc -l
16066

Onwards and up(grade)wards...

I don't know if this counts as a proper segue, but the zap package management utility is also used to carry out binary upgrades of the system itself. As explained on the Tribblix home page and paraphrased here, the steps are as follows:

# zap refresh,
# zap update TRIBzap-upgrade
# zap upgrade list (to see if an upgrade is available)
# zap upgrade m20.1

And to boot into your newly-upgraded system:

# beadm activate m20.1
# init 6

Final Thoughts

Especially considering that this illumos distro is the work of just one man, Tribblix is a beauty to behold, and also serves as Solaris in a Hurry for someone who isn't into putting their entire life on hold in order to get an OS installed. (The older I get, the more I fall into that category.) The fact that some of the packages still have some rough edges is entirely a moot point - Tribblix provides a framework and proof-of-concept for the idea of an OpenSolaris derivative that is small and fast, and makes an excellent starting point for those wishing to spin their own distros, whether along the same lines as Tribblix or off in some new and unforeseen direction.

Support: https://www.paypal.me/JamesDeagle

Formal complaint to Toronto Sun: Khadr editorial amounts to unlawful accusation

The following is a formal complaint submitted to the Toronto Sun on July 12, 2017.

_____


I am writing to submit a formal complaint regarding your July 9, 2017 editorial, Khadr payoff a slap in the face to all who serve, and will escalate the matter to the National NewsMedia Council should the results of the current complaint submission process prove unsatisfying.

In the editorial in question, you refer to Canadian citizen Omar Khadr as "(an) expert bombmaker and the killer of U.S. Army Sgt. Christopher Speer." Nowhere does this piece mention that there were no eyewitnesses to the alleged crime, that the process by which Mr. Khadr "confessed" to the killing of Sgt. Speer involved intense physical and psychological torture (including threats of anal rape), nor that the tribunal in front of which he was tried without legal representation has since been discredited. Furthermore, the editorial neglects to mention that Mr. Khadr, who was 15 at the time of Sgt. Speer’s killing, was indeed a child soldier according to internationally-recognized guidelines, for which the threshold is 18. Also, the editorial omits the fact that Mr. Khadr was raised by a family with direct jihadist involvement, and thus grew up subject to what can only be called brainwashing, which itself is psychological abuse of a different sort, and the key ingredient to the making of any child soldier. (Although he was 15 at the time of his alleged crime, one can only assume that his inculcation began much earlier, and that even if he wanted to leave such circumstances he likely didn’t feel like he had a lot of say in the matter.)

For the reasons stated above, and given that the way in which Mr. Khadr’s detention and tribunal were managed would have had the case thrown out in any other circumstances, I believe Postmedia is engaging in unlawful allegation by labelling Mr. Khadr a “killer” without any attempt at providing a reasonable context, and thus also misleading readers to unwittingly assume that Mr. Khadr was convicted in a process that would satisfy the threshold in our own domestic legal system.

I consider this conduct unlawful on Postmedia’s part, not to mention an abuse of its power as a nationwide media conglomerate, and as such I would like to see your organization issue a retraction of the above quoted passage, as well as a formal apology to Mr. Khadr and to readers who deserve more responsible behavior from their news media.

OpenBSD 6.1: XFCE 4 posing as MATE, the joys of syspatch, doas mount and no-fi connectivity

About seven months have elapsed since the last time I shared any episodes from my ongoing UNIX adventures. This prolonged silence, methinks, was probably due to the fact that I was on a single installation (OpenBSD) almost the whole time, which is quite a feat considering my distrohopping tendencies. I was so busy using UNIX for my own day-to-day tasks, rather than endlessly reinstalling and tweaking entire systems, that I simply felt like I had nothing to say, UNIX-wise. (The important thing to note here, for those who are quick to write OpenBSD off as some "security only" distro with no desktop potential, is that I have been getting along just fine using it as an all-purpose desktop system for tasks that were often multimedia in nature. So there!)

Within the past few days, however, I had succumbed to some old bad habits, and took OpenIndiana Hipster for a spin after an extended absence. I installed from the 2016.10 iso and then was able to patch it up to whatever was current as of July 2. And while some bugs and hiccups (not to mention a lack of some of my favorite multimedia apps) sent me scurrying back to OpenBSD before long, I nevertheless enjoy the overall feel and aesthetics of that system's iteration of the MATE desktop environment (which itself is a successor fork of Gnome 2).

OpenIndiana Hipster's default MATE desktop, as shown 

from a 2016.10 live DVD session

Once I had OpenBSD (version 6.1) back up and running, I installed the XFCE 4 desktop environment with the intention of going for the default configuration (as usual), but after an errant mouse click found myself faced with the prospect of configuring it from scratch, one panel at a time. Still longing for OpenIndiana's aesthetic, I proceeded to see just how much I could tweak XFCE 4 until it bore a passing resemblance to OI's default MATE desktop configuration. (One essential part of this task included downloading and installing the "Nimbus" window theme. It also helps that the default typefaces for xfce4-terminal, Monospace Regular 12-point, is the same as that for mate-terminal.) After a few hours that felt more like 20 minutes, here is the fruit of my labor:

OpenBSD 6.1 running XFCE 4, tweaked to somewhat resemble MATE.

Akin to an Elvis impersonator, the above looks like like Solaris/OpenIndiana MATE if you squint your eyes and don't look too closely at the applications button. (I should note here that I haven't tried installing MATE on OpenBSD yet, as I'm not 100% certain yet that a polished version is available on that system. Nevertheless, it appears to be in the "work-in-progress" stage.)

And for anyone who has fiddled with Oracle Solaris 11.x, all it takes is a simple change of background wallpaper to make the above look even more familiar:

And the "Desktop Least Likely To..." award goes to OpenBSD 6.1

pretending to be Oracle Solaris 11.3.

The above pic is the exact configuration of my XFCE desktop as of this writing. The visual aesthetics of Oracle Solaris crossed with the speed of OpenBSD is sending conflicting information to my brain, though not in an entirely bad way. (File under "Recreational High".)

Odds and ends

syspatch - As of OpenBSD 6.1, you can use the syspatch command to scan for system patches (syspatch -c) or to simply let 'er rip and apply all available patches (syspatch with no options).

doas mount/umount - While running OpenBSD 6.0, I had been using hotplug-diskmount for mounting and unmounting of usb drives/devices. This time around (after reinstalling from scratch with 6.1 DVD iso), I somehow couldn't get that utility to work, but came across a simple method in an excellent online article, Installing OpenBSD 6.1 on your laptop is really hard (not). The steps, as shown by that author and followed by me, are to first append the following lines to /etc/doas.conf (or create a new file with those lines if it doesn't yet exist)

permit nopass jed as root cmd mount
permit nopass jed as root cmd umount

Next, create a directory from which to access your USB content (in my case /home/jed/usb), and then mount or unmount as follows:

$ doas mount /dev/sd1i /home/jed/usb
$ doas umount /dev/sd1i

Brother, can you spare a compatible wifi card? - I love my current laptop, but the one blind spot is that it uses a Broadcom BCM4215 wifi card which, as far as I can tell after much Googling, only works with Microsoft Windows. (That may not be entirely true - it appears Ubuntu has a driver, firmware-b43legacy-installer, but my particular card may not be covered.)

Support: https://www.paypal.me/JamesDeagle

Don't burden Wonder Woman with American jingoism

The following is a letter to the editor of the New York Post.

_____

 
Dear Editor,

Maureen Callahan's appraisal of the upcoming Wonder Woman movie (Why 'Wonder Woman' is less American than ever, June 1, 2017) seems to center on the extent to which it fails to be a propaganda exercise for the cause of American Exceptionalism. In the process, she betrays the national insecurity and defeatism at the heart of mindless flag-waving for its own sake.

America is already great in many ways, even if its sons and daughters have been repeatedly deceived into harm's way in the name of (or within the highly-charged milieu of) patriotism. Think of the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" that was fabricated by elites to lure unwitting Americans into the Vietnam war (which didn't actually have anything to do with "stopping communism"), or the "pre-emptive" oil war in Iraq that was waged by George W. Bush under the false pretense of the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" that were already known not to exist.

When will more Americans realize that the sense of "patriotism" they've been trained to feel is actually a form of mind control that keeps them supporting people and causes that are diametrically opposed to their own interests? When will they stop offering themselves up for manipulation by politicians such as President Trump, whose numbskulled appeals to patriotism of the most jingoistic variety were designed to turn the crowds at his campaign rallies into arenas full of angry barking dogs?

Patriotism in and of itself is a complicated and contradictory affair, and so I do not share Ms. Callahan's dismay that today's Wonder Woman doesn't honor her roots as wartime propaganda with an hourglass figure.

Finally, Ms. Callahan concludes her piece by asking "Why can't Wonder Woman make America great again?", which inadvertently amounts to the author bashing her own country. Looking at the bigger picture, a country that is truly great doesn't need to constantly preen and flex its muscles for the benefit of the rest of the world - it simply needs to let its actions speak for themselves.

James Deagle
Ottawa, Canada

Tory leader right to give Jack MacLaren the boot

The following is a response to a news article comment on lake88.ca.

_____


Firstly, Patrick Brown is not the Premier, and so the Province of Ontario is not "under Patrick Brown", nor is it a "dictatorship". (By definition, the Leader of the Opposition doesn't have the authority nor ability to make the Province a dictatorship. All he can do is heckle the Premier and hope for the best.)

Secondly, the "PEOPLE" of Carleton-Mississippi Mills chose Jack MacLaren as their MPP, and in that particular job he remains until the next election. Mr. Brown has simply revoked Mr. MacLaren's party affiliation - otherwise, the same person continues to represent the "PEOPLE" in question

Although we have a party system in Ontario, you vote for the person, not the party, even if your candidate's party affiliation factors into your choice at the ballot box. (Furthermore, becoming a given party's candidate is a matter of selling more party memberships than one's competitors, which isn't quite the same thing as the "PEOPLE" speaking their mind.)

On the other hand, any party has its own disciplinary process, and any party has the right to strip any of its MPPs of their party affiliation, particularly if that MPP is conducting themselves in a way that is detrimental to the party's political viability. While some of Mr. MacLaren's comments (regarding French rights, women or sexual abuse) may be met with rounds of applause from the more redneck corners of his riding, they nevertheless hurt the party's brand overall. If Mr. MacLaren's statements are not in line with the party's own philosophy and world view, then they are right to give him the boot.

Party affiliation is a two-way street.

Blessed St. Xenia of Petersburg Cathedral

I snapped these pictures yesterday of Blessed St. Xenia of Petersburg Cathedral (Russian Orthodox Church Abroad) in Kanata, Ontario while waiting for the bus. This is definitely an old-school Russian church, as it has no pews in the sanctuary (though there are benches along the back wall for those who need to sit), and services are mostly in Russian.

Construction began in 1996, with the inaugural service being held in February 1997.

Denial

I recently posted an art video on YouTube entitled Denial, which is a visual meditation on the Armenian Genocide in particular, as well as religious persecution and unacknowledged genocides in general.

All work on this video was done in OpenBSD 6.0 using Blender, GIMP and Audacity.

Openindiana Hipster 2016.10: Field notes from a fresh install

The past month or so has seen me flit back and forth between OpenBSD 6.0 and OpenIndiana Hipster 2016.10 since getting my hands on a refurbished Dell Inspiron 1525 for next-to-nothing from a computer repair shop. (The invoice didn't include any line items on the software end, but for such a wickedly awesome low price I am quite confident I evaded the Microsoft Tax on the Windows 7 installation, whose hours were bound to be so severely numbered once in my possession.)

I probably would have hung in there with OI Hipster on a more continuous basis if it weren't for some irritants, including:

• The inability to exit MATE to console mode. I have no problem with MATE itself, and am eager to get to know this Gnome 2 successor fork better. However, sometimes I just have to get in some quality time with the command line, or enjoy the utilitarian beauty of twm. Unfortunately, when I entered the command to do so (# pfexec svcadm disable lightdm), the system would exit out of MATE and then hang, leaving me with a grey cursor blinking in the top left corner of a black screen. No fun. No fun at all.

• Rolling upgrades that would make a butcher wince. The first three or four reinstalls of 2016.10 saw rolling upgrades (via # pfexec pkg refresh --full followed by # pfexec pkg image-update -v) resulting in a newly-upgraded boot environment (openindiana-1) that was unbootable. While I can't remember the messages on the screen, I had to reboot with Ctrl-Alt-Delete, whereupon I was able to select openindiana from FreeBSD Loader and get back to the out-of-the-box BE. (Despite the aggravation of a botched upgrade, being able to simply turn back the clock in such a situation illustrates the inspired thinking and innovation exemplifed by the engineering talent at Sun Microsystems back in the day. To those people, wherever they have ended up, thank you.)

I had it in mind to submit a bug report or two - initially for the botched upgrade and then a subsequent one for the MATE exit hang, assuming such a problem would have persisted post-upgrade. But with the OpenBSD 6.0 DVD iso looking at me seductively after a prolonged absence from that spartan (by which I mean beautiful) system, my energies were thus spent elsewhere.

I'll be blogging about OpenBSD 6.0 sometime soon, but for now let me say that it is easily the most polished system I have used. Ever. While it doesn't come off-the-rack with many of the bells and whistles of its more GUI-centric rivals, everything it does have just works. Beautifully. I'll save any further gushing for some other time, when I can offer up screenshots or even a screencast or two.

In any case, whatever annoyances I had with OpenIndiana Hipster 2016.10 were drastically outweighed by my interest in seeing it succeed on this machine. And so, just yesterday, I resolved to reinstall it and then proceed with whatever bug reports were needed to help make it live up to its potential. I had decided that my first post-install tasks would be to load it up with whatever apps and extras I could think of, including the sfe.opencsw.org build of LibreOffice. (Any such apps installed prior to upgrading are carried over into the new BE, and so if the next upgrade is to prove disastrous, at least you can roll back to the previous BE without having to waste time reinstalling anything.)

Assuming I had my bug reporting cut out for me, I completed the upgrade from 2016.10 to the December 9, 2016 snapshot only to find (much to my delight) that it then booted into openindiana-1 with no difficulties whatsoever. Then, with a bit of trepidation, I opened a terminal window and issued # pfexec svcadm disable lightdm and felt euphoric at suddenly finding myself at a text-only login screen.

Sweet!


With all of that resolved I decided to throw my brain at finding a solution for a more trivial matter, which is getting the audio cranked much higher than the current OI Hipster build of MATE will allow. Although the GUI tools for controlling the volume remains decidedly meek as of this writing, I came across a command line workaround in the OI Hipster bug tracking portal, as suggested in Nikola M.'s initial bug report, as follows:

# audioctl set-control -d /dev/sound/audiohd:0mixer volume 100

# audioctl set-control -d /dev/sound/audiohd:0mixer headphones 100:100

# audioctl set-control -d /dev/sound/audiohd:0mixer speaker 100:100

While the above works like a charm, it is nevertheless a ton of typing just to turn up the volume. This being UNIX, however, means that any series of commands can be saved in a text file for ease of use. In this case, I saved the above three commands in a file called crank (as in "crank up the volume") in my personal export path (/home/jed/bin in this case), and so since executing # chmod +x crank I now have a one-word command that can run either in MATE or other desktop environments/window managers lacking volume control tools of their own. Therein lies the beauty of text-based solutions in UNIX - a workaround for a problem in one environment (MATE) can serve as a great solution in other environments (such as twm).

(It should be noted here that while my crank script works just fine in twm, the sound isn't as much of a joyously eardrum-shredding experience as it is in MATE.)

If I'm going to have a script for turning up the volume, I thought, then why not have one for turning it back down? And so I copied the contents of crank into a new file called ucrank, for "uncrank", but rendered as a nod to umount, a UNIX typo that quite endearingly has been around since the very beginning, and as such can't really be considered a typo. For ucrank I simply replaced each instance of "100" with the default level of "75".

Alright...now what?

The only remaining pebble in my shoe as far as OI Hipster goes is what appears to be a lack of support for my wifi card, a Broadcom BCM4315 (according to the OpenBSD 6.0 /var/run/dmesg.boot file). In fairness to the OI team, it appears that support for BCM4315 is a futhermucker outside the Windows walled garden. If/when I find a way to make wifi work on this laptop, I'll document the solution in a future post. Also to be discussed in a future post will be how this system handles video playback from my digital camera's SD card.

OpenIndiana Hipster 2016.10 booting with FreeBSD Loader

UNIX news roundup, with apologies to Tic Tacs

Here is a brief selection of UNIX and Unix-like headlines that have caught my eye, along with some commentary (or fanboy smarm passing itself off as 'commentary'):

• Now that the U.S. election season has reached its painful conclusion (and like the proverbial gift that keeps giving, there is sure to be residual pain to come), Computerworld's Sandra Henry-Stocker provides what could be a novel alternative the next time around in her latest opinion piece, Why scripts are better than politicians. As you work your way down her 20-point list, you'll notice the central proposition becoming less and less absurd. If I had to add my two cents to the list, and because I'm simply not wired to resist the temptation, I'd say scripts are better than politicians because you have nothing to fear if and when they reach for your Tic Tacs. (Audience groans, comedian apologizes.)

• The PC-BSD project has rebranded itself TrueOS (TrueOS Succeeds PC-BSD Desktop-Friendly Unix OS). While I've read additional material from other sources (including the project's home page), I have yet to come across an explanation for the reasoning behind the name change; my own inkling is that while hardly concealing the system's FreeBSD base, there may nevertheless be a desire for the project to present itself as something much more than just another distro. If you've ever gone with a vanilla install of FreeBSD and tried to make it more desktop-friendly from there, and then taken PC-BSD for a spin, you'll have no problem agreeing that it is indeed more than just FreeBSD with some extra goodies thrown in. Personally, I think the name change is befitting a project that works so hard at making FreeBSD so user-friendly that even your grandmother would find it intuitive. It is a complete operating system in its own right in the same way as Mac OS X, which also just happens to be powered under the hood by BSD. Beyond the fresh moniker, it should also be noted that the project now follows a rolling release model. Kudos to Kris Moore and the rest of the team.

• The OpenIndiana 2016.10 "Hipster" release has now been unleashed (OpenIndiana 2016.10 Unix OS Migrates to FreeBSD Loader, Adds MATE 1.14 Desktop), which I hope to try out as soon as absolutely possible. While I've been aware for some time of the switch from the Gnome 2 desktop to its successor fork, MATE 1.14, I was happily surprised to learn of GRUB being replaced by the FreeBSD Loader. Yes, my UNIX bias is showing - the use of GRUB by Solaris and most of the OpenSolaris descendant forks has always left me feeling like those systems were trying to come across as Linux-like, as if replacing CDE with Gnome 2 wasn't self-debasing enough. (Ah, let the flame war begin...)

Dear Ann Coulter: Bullying has never made America great

It has been speculated that Ann Coulter's 2015 book, ¡Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole, provided what would become the blueprint for Donald Trump's election platform. In that tome, she advocated certain views on immigration that should seem familiar to Trump-watchers by now.

Whether or not Trump cribbed his policies from Coulter, each are akin to the worst kind of person you knew in high school - except that while most of those faces from the past went on to outgrow the very qualities that made them hard to be around, malevolence for personal gain (be it wealth, political power, or readership numbers) is something that continues to define Trump and Coulter in their professional lives. And in certain ways, the two are spiritual twins.

Their shared knack for body-shaming is but one example.

Trump has by now well-established himself as a pig who views each woman as a sex object, and can't resist letting the world know it by publicly insulting female critics on the basis of their physical appearance or even their menstrual cycle.

Conversely, as Coulter recently tweeted on the topic of the post-election anti-Trump demonstrations, "Without fat girls, there would be no protests." (This from the same woman who feels the need to present herself as Republican Barbie® on the covers of her books, perhaps as some Pavlovian attempt to condition would-be readers to salivate at the ugly content within.)

For all the gushing Coulter has done over Trump, is it possible that she has failed to realize that many of the women who comprised Trump's base may have had less 'perfect' physiques than hers? Does it even matter to Coulter that many women, especially those in their teens, may have feelings of anxiety that are triggered by such public comments? (Empathy is a tall order for any sociopath, so I can't imagine Coulter meeting such a question with anything more than a vacant gaze. Someone of her ilk is only concerned with their own notoriety, and will get it wherever they can, no matter how low the road nor how easy the target.)

Boiled down to her true essence, Coulter is nothing more than a bully working on behalf of those too powerful to need defending in the first place. Put even more succinctly, she is simply a fascist.

For all the nastiness he exhibited during the primaries and the general election, Trump at least seems to have a human side, which gives me hope (however faint) that he may surprise his critics by accomplishing something in the course of this term that is truly an evolutionary step forward for his country.

As for Coulter, it is hard to imagine her even wanting to use her pulpit for bringing about positive change in anyone's life other than those who would have the middle and lower classes continue to be turned against their own interests.

If America is indeed great, it is because of people who do things that are innovative, courageous, or otherwise transforming - it is certainly not because of high-profile misanthropes buzzing like flies around the dung heap of America's worst instincts. And so in body-shaming her sisters of a different political bent, Ann Coulter has shown us all that she has earned her wings, fecal stink notwithstanding.

The Effigies' Haunted Town

Lately I've been stumbling across some old gems for my Why haven't I heard of this before? file. One such example is The Effigies, a punk outfit from Chicago that has been active on-and-off since 1980. I've been repeatedly listening to Haunted Town, their 1981 debut, for a few days now. This 12"vinyl  EP has basic (but solid) production values that stay out of the way and allow this furious sonic assault and its constituent voices and instruments to burst forth with heft and clarity. What follows are just my initial impressions, and not a review, per se.

Beyond the above I don't know a whole lot about The Effigies - all I have to go on is the sounds on this awesome EP. The opening, Below The Drop, kinda/sorta reminded me at first of Warsaw by Joy Division, though in an increasingly tenuous way now that I've given the latter a fresh listen for the sake of comparison. (The two songs don't really sound alike, but something in the energy made me perceive some sort of sonic resonance between the two.)

Next is Strongbox, which may be the fastest cut of the five, and as such it comes the closest to being true 'hardcore'. (I'm not quite sure what exactly the "strongbox" in question is, but then with a firecracker like this, lyrical interpretation trails well behind jumping around, smashing things, or getting a speeding ticket.)

The title track slows things down ever-so-slightly with some sort of narrative about urban decay, and provides some bona fide lead guitar melodies that act as a welcome counterpoint to the relentless drive of the song.

On Mob Clash the lead vocals are vaguely reminiscent of Joe Strummer of the Clash (oddly enough.) A less metallic rendition of this strident tune may not have been out of place on London Calling, the album on which the Clash showed how punk energy and sensibilities could be 'tamed' and channeled into making the greatest rock n' roll album, ever. Needless to say, this is my favorite cut off Haunted Town.

And finally, We'll Be Here Tomorrow appropriately closes out this brief set, perhaps intended as a calling card of sorts at the time. Nothing much to say about this one other than the reverb-soaked vocals have a certain quality that places  the track well within the milieu of late 70's/early 80's punk and new wave. (I don't mean this to say that it makes the song dated, but rather that it imbues it with the distinct aroma of its time, a time for which Yours Truly is quite nostalgic, musically.)

Election 2016's true losers: a tale of two establishments

It's a little soon to say with any finality what exactly went wrong with the U.S. presidential election that someone like Donald Trump could so thoroughly break every conventionally-accepted rule of politics and still end up trouncing his eminently more-qualified opponent. Trump's strategy seems to have been one of donning helmet, elbow and knee pads and roller skates and simply plowing gracelessly through anything resembling opposition, while insulting and alienating anyone along the way who wasn't on side. In the roller derby rink that was this election, the track is littered with bruised competitors of both party stripes who never saw it coming.

Am I happy with the idea of Trump's boorishness being validated with what is arguably the most powerful job in the world? Hardly. But at least some of that disappointment is tempered by the prospect that Trump's victory represents something that eclipses either of the candidates, and that is the defeat (for now) of the establishment elites in both parties.

While it's a little late now to engage in the parlor game of pondering what could have been if Bernie Sanders had carried the populist torch for the Democrats, it remains a fact that the party's brass conspired against Sanders during the primaries, as revealed in leaked emails that saw Debbie Wasserman Shultz resign as chair of the DNC. From outward appearances, it appears the primaries were rigged, to use a Trumpian term. Sanders, like Trump, was able to look 'beyond the beltway', as it were, to the America that the elites would rather keep hidden, as it betrays any notion that globalist capitalism is working for anyone other than the investor class. Also, Sanders was getting by on donations from ordinary citizens, rather than engaging in the usual big ticket fundraising or depending on support from super pacs.

Perhaps this was the reason Sanders was shunted aside by whatever tactics the party's upper echelon could get away with. Meanwhile, the conventional wisdom being espoused was that the party needed Hillary Clinton, as she was much more 'electable' than Sanders.

On the other side of the aisle, Trump never seemed to have the full and unconditional support of his own party's establishment. While also being guilty of Sanders' sin - admitting that there really is an underclass being left behind by big business as usual - Trump was rude, crude and (supposedly) self-funded. In this way, he was Bernie Sanders' evil twin. Right down to the wire, Trump never did capture any sort of full-throated endorsement from House Speaker Paul Ryan.

So looking at the results through the above lens, Donald Trump captured the highest office in the land despite the tepid support of his own party's establishment, and Hillary Clinton failed in spite of what appears to have been an unethical leg-up from hers.

Furthermore, the positive lesson here is that if you acknowledge legitimate anger and give voice to those who are otherwise ignored, forgotten or taken for granted, very good things can happen. The downside of this Mobius Strip is that it took a campaign as malevolent as Trump's to finally make the point.

UPDATED! Solaris 11.3: Firefox, Flash, and the distant dream of gcc

After a prolonged spell of flitting about with various distros, I have taken up once again with Solaris 11.3 as my main desktop, this time with an eye to satisfying two modest goals:

• upgrade Firefox from the out-of-the-box 31.0 to something with fewer flies buzzing around it, and

• a working Flash player for said upgrade to allow for audio streaming and use of websites that do fun stuff.

As for the first goal, the answer was under my nose for longer than I'd care to admit. As written about in this space previously, the good folks at UNIX Packages provide Firefox and Thunderbird binaries free of charge. I had gushed quite profusely at their Firefox 38 package on my last install of Solaris 10, but more recently had revisited their offerings, and saw no Firefox/Thunderbird options for Solaris 11.x. The available systems were for OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 (and older). Hmmph!

And then it hit me: Solaris 11.3 may be binary-compatible with (what had been) OpenSolaris, and so I took a whack at installing that package to this system.

As for the installation, simply download the package for Firefox 45.4.0 (the latest as of this writing), and then within the Nautilus file manager, right click on the downloaded *-pkg file and select "Extract here". Once it's extracted, use Gnome Terminal to get yourself to your Downloads directory (or wherever it lands in your system), and enter:

# pkgadd -d fire*-pkg

It goes without saying that you should adjust the wildcard as necessary if you have other files starting with "fire". (This moment of patronizing didacticism has been brought to you by the Ford Motor Company. Find the right Ford for you at www.ford.com. )

Problem solved.

To make it run by default (at least when clicking the little Firefox icon in the top taskbar in the Gnome 2 interface), I right-clicked on said icon, selected "Properties", and changed the "Command" field to read: /opt/sfw/bin/firefox %u.

Akin to the goal of upgrading Firefox, a solution to my Flash woes had likewise been lurking about just beyond the perimeter of my patience and reading comprehension. Over previous sojourns with this OS, I had come to understand that Adobe had dropped Solaris support for Flash altogether (which it has), and that mummified versions of Flash were available in their archives, which is also true, though with God as my witness I was sure that said archives were now unavailable. Silly rabbit.

Once you have downloaded and extracted the files (be sure to look for version 11,2,202,223), you'll need to move libflashplayer.so to /opt/sfw/lib/firefox/browser/plugins. (I had to create the plugins subdirectory myself, as it wasn't there by default after installing Firefox.) Check here to confirm that it is working.

All-in-all, I'm quite pleased with Solaris 11.3 this time around, and am now readying my mind to tackle the real challenge, which is getting gcc installed after previous botched attempts. As it turns out, the gcc versions I've found so far can't be installed in this system due to licensing conflicts or some such, which is a drag because I'd like to then proceed with building packages from NetBSD's pkgsrc project to allow for at least a bit more variety of applications.

But that can wait for another day.

_____


October 23, 2016 update: Eureka! The dream of gcc has now been realized! Install it as follows:

# pkg install developer/gcc-45