Adam in Bama

or

Myanmar and The Fine Art of Political Correctnessing

What do you call that country in South East Asia where the streets are filled with monks in red, protesting 45 years of military rule?

Do you call it “Burma” and reveal yourself as a post-colonial, pseudo-imperialist aggressor who deep down thinks that it would have been better if the Brits had been allowed to stay in power, but since they weren’t, the least we can do is use their name: “Burma” it is.

Or do you say “Myanmar”, to demonstrate your respect for the peoples of the world, acknowledging that naming something is to exert power over it, and that it should be every people’s right to be their own “Adams” and name themselves: “Myanmar” it is.

The development in the newspapers over the past few weeks has been interesting: in the beginning, it was “Burma” — of course: that’s the name we all know. Eventually, there were more and more “Myanmar”s. At first, I thought it was a major city or something, but then I realised that it was actually the “correct” name of the country. By saying “Burma”, I would actually reveal myself as an imperialist pig. OK, so I translate it mentally to “Myanmar”, and everytyhing is fine.

Or is it? Whose Adam’s right to name is it that I’m acknowledging? Not that I’m an expert in South-East Asian politics, but here’s what I’ve gathered:

  • “Burma” is the westernized version of “Bama Pyi” (Pyi = country), the everyday word for the country, now and in the past.
  • “Myanmar” is the short form of “Myanmar Naingngandaw”, the etymology of which is uncertain, but which has been used as an official name in elevated style since the twelfth century.
  • In everyday language, the difference between the two is smaller than the written names might indicate: “bama” v.s “myama”.
  • The military see themselves as heirs of the empires of the three great Burmese warrior kingdoms: in the eleventh, the sixteenth, and the eighteenth centuries.
  • It was the military government who in 1989 changed the official name to the more lofty Myanmar.
  • The opposition has never acknowledged the new name, since they don’t recognize the military as rightful rulers, and hence not their right to rename the country.

So we can ask again: what are we actually doing by succumbing to PC-ness and translate to Myanmar? Who are we actually showing respect?


Sources: Genesis 2. 19–20; Wikipedia.org: Burma (redirects to “Myanmar”); weekendavisen.dk

KDE help — give me a break!

I use KDE, the most usable Linux desktop environment. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I love KDE, but I couldn’t live without it either.

Except on those certain days, that is. When I want to look up something in a help file. This is one of those days.

Frankly, and no offense, but the help system in KDE is disastrous. I should have known by now — I’ve virtually stopped even considering pressing Shift-F1 a long time ago. Mainly because it annoys me no end.

(Edit: In fact, it’s so long ago that I’d forgotten it’s ctrl-F1. Shift happens, as they say.)

I will pass lightly over the fact that many programs don’t have proper documentation. Disclaimers such as “under construction”, “this part needs to be written. Volunteers?” and the like — I don’t mind them, it’s an honest matter that time is scarcer than ideas.

I will also merely mention that to find things in the “Khelpcenter” can be an ordeal in itself. Loads of categories to search through, some of which are ordered alphabetically. And I’ve never been able to search the help files en bloc. There is an option to build a search index of all the application manuals, but every time I’ve tried it, on several different systems (Ubuntu, Mepis, Archlinux, etc.) and with many different versions of KDE, I always get the error message “htdig failed”. A google search reveals that I’m not the only one, but it’s been unresolved for so long that I’ve stopped considering it.

But even when it’s there, it’s usually less than useful. They must have some kind of help file template at KDE central derived from a statistical analysis of most frequent entries in Windows help files. Pages upon pages of things like “File -> Open… (Ctrl+O): Search the file system to open an existing file.” OK, I suppose it needs to be there, but surely there are more important things to spend time and diskspace on?

This mass of trivialities becomes close to ridiculous when compared to the advice one can get elsewhere. I once had the pleasure of asking a non-trivial question at the mailing list of one of the KDE apps. I was greeted with the traditional RTFM (Read The F.\{3,6} Manual), and a list of eleven pointers to places in the manual where my question was answered. Only it wasn’t. Some of them were references to other, developer oriented KDE applications which could be used to accomplish the task in a roundabout manner, others were of the general, non-informative kind above, and others again were of the kind “write a script to do it”. (The whole answer — and the ensuing discussion — was soaked with sulky consternation that I had suggested a Windows program did this better and easier. Proof of point, if I ever needed one.)

In other words: what’s lacking is the middle ground between trivialities and programmers’ tricks. Here, there is something to learn from vim, the uber-geek editor par excellence. I once tried to make a syntax highlighting scheme for Kate, the advanced KDE editor. Nothing fancy, I just wanted to be able to start a line with “;” and make them appear in red to use them as headers in text files. I managed in the end, but it took me forever and a while. Compare it with vim, where it’s done with a couple of lines of easily understandable code.

That‘s user-friendly: it enables me to do what I want to and assumes I am smart enough to understand it, as long as I’m willing to follow some links in the manual and read some very precise but clear instructions. An average KDE help file doesn’t: it tells me what I already know (that I can open a file with ctrl-O), and some things I can’t really use (that this can be done if I’m a programmer), but I don’t get the steps in between, which is where most “users” will be, after all.

Phew. I just needed to get that off my chest. Feel much better now. Think I’ll go and make a syntax colouring scheme.

Browser stats, day #3

Can you tell me what is strange with this picture, which shows the browsers that have been used to view the pages on this site during the three days since I moved?

browser stats

If you say: “That Firefox has almost 50%, and more than IE”, you’re part right. On the other hand: it is not surprising, is it? After all my plugging for it here, one would really have to be a n00b to use IE, right?

It is not either that “Lynx” is represented, with a whopping 0.6%. Lynx is a text-based browser, quintessentially retro, which is fine for a site like this one and great for quick lookups, because it starts immediately — no need to wait for a modern browser to load all its bells and whistles if all you want to do is check for new updates at Things Twice, now, is there? (the only surprising thing is that it’s Lynx and not one of its more capable cousins, like Links or Elinks).

No, what’s really surprising here is the number at the bottom: that Opera is used by 0.3% only of my visitors — even less than Lynx! — that’s a surprise. I know these numbers are not statistically significant or anything, but nonetheless: Opera is the best browser of them all, really: 50% faster than Firefox and 100% faster than IE, according to recent studies; comes with an email program and a newsreader as well; is even more standards compliant than Firefox; works on all platforms, Linux, Mac, and Windows; and has some features that others don’t. The only reason I’m not using Opera is the Vimperator extension to Firefox, which I can’t live without, but if it wasn’t for that, I’d be on an Opera any day.

So, you might ask, if Opera is a such a damn good browser, how come nobody uses it?

Opera is one of the casualties of the Free/Open Software war where Firefox is the true winner. Opera actually used to be a program you’d have to pay for — fairly unthinkable today, and that didn’t last so long either: you could soon get it in a free version with a banner ad at the top which you couldn’t remove. Fair enough, it was still the fastest browser around, and the most configurable one, and banner ads are all over the place anyway, so one more or less . . .

Then even that disappeared. Today’s Opera is totally free of such commercial bindings, and we’re back to the mystery again: why is the fastest and most able browser out there stuck at 0.3%? Well, in the meantime, Firefox had had its tremendous success and had more or less exhausted the field of “Alternatives to IE”. Besides, even though Opera is Free as in beer, it is still not Free as in speech — the source code is not open. For most people, that is completely irrelevant — who has ever looked at the source code of Firefox, other than geeks and software developers? — but ideologically, it apparently makes a difference.

But 0.3% . . . Let’s put it this way: if you’re looking for a blazingly fast, small browser with excellent functionality, I suggest you try it out.

Luciano

“Well I really wasn’t such a Johnny Ace fan,
But I felt bad all the same”

I don’t think any death in the classical world could have touched me as much as this one, without there being any specific reason for being touched, since I wasn’t really into this particular kind of popular hawling of opera into the marketplace. Strange.

Perhaps it’s just that he was a great singer with an obvious presence and something as old-fashioned as love for what he was doing.

Damn, he’s gone now. I miss him already.

Luciano Pavarotti, 1935–2007

A Norwegian Bestseller

Agora: Journal for Metaphysical Speculation” — sounds exciting, right? If one is not thrilled by the prospects of 450 pages of metaphysical speculation, it may make it more interesting to know that well over 300 of them are about Bob Dylan. . .

Agora is a scholarly journal of philosophy, which in my early university days was a major source of inspiration. It was therefore a great honour to be asked to write an article for it for an upcoming special issue about Dylan. Now it’s out, and apparently it is sold out already, at least in the Oslo area.
I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but it looks good, with articles about the lyrical project in the Basement Tapes; about the borrowings from Ovid on *Modern Times*; Dylan’s relationship with various American poetic genres (blues, Allen Ginsberg); his voice; his meandering path around folk music; and about the reception of “his” tradition in Norway. There is also an article by Christopher Ricks in Norwegian translation, and translations of the Playboy interview from 1966 and of some song lyrics.

All in all a very nice collection of essays. The bias towards lyrical and “sociological”(-ish) analysis is somewhat balanced out by the article about “Dylan the Musician” by yours truly.

Thus, if you can read Norwegian and want something to lighten up the September evenings, this might be it.

If you can get hold of a copy, that is.

A New Home

The blog has been down for a while. How long, I don’t know, and that’s embarrassingly revealing of my recent neglect of the site. In any case, I decided to move the whole thing to my own webspace, and it seems that the transition has worked out nicely.
Not that I was dissatisfied with the former home. From the day that I registered dylanchords.com and left the old, catchy hem.passagen.se/obrecht/backpages/chords, and until I decided to take down the site, around Christmas 2005 because of the threats from the recording/publishing industry, the site has been hosted nicely from a secret location in Gothenburg — may thanks, Oskar! — and the blog remained there until today.
But since I already had this other domain, I figured I might as well use it.
A change of hosting and domain name doesn’t necessarily mean that the contents will have to change, but I do take it as an opportunity to be more general in what I write about. That was the original intention, but somehow I ended up writing mostly about Dylan anyhow. My intention is to go back to the original concept, of a blog about culture, music, opinion, and the political and human aspects of technology.
But not to worry: there will be some things here about Dylan too.