In one of my flying trips I have recently read an article, I believe it might have been in Newsweek, in which the authors defended that the Western world and its intellectuals should be somehow smarter than Al Qaeda.
They argue that the left in the western world is wrongly defending Islamism, which is an extremist and violent ideology, believing that in doing so it is actually defending Islam.
The Western Right on its side, attacks Islam, believing that in doing so it is attacking Islamism.
Both are wrong in their assumptions. the left because once again it is uncapable of adapting its thoughts to reality instead of the other way around. The right, even though this case is fortunately until now limited only to the extreme right, is once again generalizing and calling evil the actions of a minority in society, and blaming those actions on the whole Islamic society.
The authors concluded that if Western intellectuals do not get rid of this confusion now, we are headed down a dangerous path. Common people in the West will start to bundle all Muslims with Islamists, picking a potentially losing battle with one quarter of humanity. This clash of civilizations is what Al Qaeda wanted to trigger with the attacks on September 11 and the London and Madrid bombings.
All this in a time when more and more moderate European politicians are making it very clear that Muslims from certain areas are no longer welcome in their countries as they were in the past. German politicians of both sides of the spectrum have been rather outspoken lately on this issue. The election results in the Netherlands and Austria also have influenced other political parties.
The real problem is that Europe is no longer capable of defending its culture and traditions against the Muslims flocking into the old continent and wanting to bring their morals and traditions with them. As I have written before, multiculturalism has never worked in Europe and the different models have, so far, failed miserably. Should the US start looking further away for allies who will still be beside them in two or three generations? I think that in that time frame, Europe will no longer be trustworthy as an ally against the enemies of our values and culture.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Fed up with Flash
For those who know me, I enjoy Mac computers and I am writing this post on my iPad. So it is not surprising for me to actually include one of the best ideas I have seen to decrease my level of frustration with my Macmini and the sluggish performance it has had for quite some time.
The first thing I did was trash all the cache files. That helped somewhat. For months I had the feeling that Flash was actually taking over most of my processing power and grinding my machine to a complete halt.
Then I found the following post by John Gruber in his Daring Fireball blog and have followed it to the letter. I am once again a happy man, and can actually get things done with my desktop computer. I encourage you all to give it a try.
Quote:
Going Flash-Free on Mac OS X, and How to Cheat When You Need It
Thursday, 4 November 2010
Last week I mentioned that, following Steven Frank’s lead, I’d completely disabled Flash Player on my Mac. But I have a cheat, for web pages with Flash content with no non-Flash workaround. I’m really happy with this setup, so I thought I’d document it here.
Previously, I used and recommended the excellent ClickToFlash plugin for Safari. The original ClickToFlash is a plugin, not an extension. That sounds pedantic, perhaps, but bear with me. Earlier this year, Safari 5 introduced a new, officially supported extension API. These Safari extensions are much like Firefox extensions. They’re written using JavaScript (and HTML and CSS for presentation, if they present a user interface). Safari extensions are the things Apple lists here, and which you manage via the Extensions tab in Safari’s preferences window. Web content plugins are not new — they date back to Netscape in the mid-1990s. Plugins are for content formats. E.g., if you have the QuickTime plugin installed, then your browser can play embedded QuickTime movies. Flash Player is a plugin.
The original ClickToFlash was possible before the Safari 5 extension API even existed because it (the original ClickToFlash) is a plugin. It masquerades as a plugin that claims to be able to play Flash content, and overrides the actual Flash Player plugin. So when you load a web page containing Flash, the browser lets the ClickToFlash plugin handle the embedded Flash. Instead of actually loading the Flash content, ClickToFlash instead draws a box with a nice little “Flash” logo. If the user clicks that box, ClickToFlash hands the content over to the actual Flash Player plugin. Thus, Flash Player is there, and works, but it only loads after the user clicks on a Flash content box to load it. It’s a kludge, but it works well, and I’ll bet many of you are using it.
Confusion sets in when you see that there also exists a “ClickToFlash” extension for Safari 5 — a project by Marc Hoyois that duplicates most of the features of the ClickToFlash plugin using the new extension API instead of the long-standing plugin API. It looks interesting, and some DF readers have emailed me to endorse it, but I haven’t tried it personally.
Here’s what I did last week.
First, I disabled the Flash Player and old ClickToFlash plugins. On my system, Flash Player was in the default location: /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/. I moved “Flash Player.plugin”, “flashplayer.xpt”, and “NP-PPC-Dir-Shockwave” out of that folder and into a new folder I created next to it named “Internet Plug-Ins (Disabled)”. All you need to do to disable them is move them out of /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/. I also moved ClickToFlash (“ClickToFlash.webplugin”) to this disabled plugins folder. (ClickToFlash, if you have it installed, might be in the Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ folder in your home folder, rather than at the root level of your startup drive.)
After logging out and logging back in to my user account, Flash Player is no longer available to Safari or Firefox. This is more or less the state Mac OS X is now shipping in by default. To me this is better, and in some way more honest, than using ClickToFlash. Without Flash installed, Safari effectively tells websites you visit, “Hey, I don’t have Flash installed”, which allows the sites to send alternative content. Static images instead of Flash for ads, for example. With ClickToFlash, Safari is effectively telling websites you visit, “Yes, sure, I have Flash installed,” but then not actually loading Flash content. I see far fewer “Flash missing” boxes in web pages now than I did with ClickToFlash.
As per Frank’s recommendation, I’ve installed the excellent YouTube5 Safari extension by Connor McKay. With this extension installed, embedded YouTube videos are modified to use the HTML5 video tag rather than Flash Player for playback. This is possible because behind the scenes, all YouTube videos are encoded using H.264.
For the vast majority of my surfing, this new setup works great. I prefer it over my previous setup using the ClickToFlash plugin because Flash Player is never left running in the background because of a background Safari web page on which I clicked to load Flash content hours (or even days) ago. It also means that the Flash plugin never gets loaded into other non-browser apps that happen to use WebKit — eliminating the number one source of crashes for many of these apps.
CHEATING WITH GOOGLE CHROME
But that doesn’t mean I never run into Flash content I wish to view but for which there is no HTML5 alternative. Google Chrome offers a workaround — Chrome includes its own self-contained Flash Player plugin. Removing Flash Player from /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ prevents Safari and Firefox (and almost all other Mac web browsers) from loading Flash content, but not Chrome.
So, whenever I hit a page with Flash content I wish to view, I open that page in Chrome. As soon as I’m done watching it, I quit Chrome, which ensures Flash Player isn’t left running in the background.
I’ve also added a shortcut for opening the current Safari page in Chrome quickly. First, if you haven’t done so already, enable Safari’s Develop menu. (It’s a checkbox in the “Advanced” panel of Safari’s preferences window.) The Develop menu contains an “Open Page With” sub-menu, which lists all the web browsers you have installed on your system. Using the Keyboard Shortcuts section in System Preferences, I set a custom menu key shortcut for the command to open the current page in Google Chrome. Whenever I’m on a page in Safari with Flash content I wish to view, I hit that shortcut, and boom, Chrome launches and loads that page. (Hint: when you create the custom shortcut, and are asked for the name of the menu item, just use “Google Chrome” or “Google Chrome.app” (whichever appears in your Open Page With sub-menu).)
THE COMING OF HTML5 ANIMATED ADS
Whenever I mention the performance and battery life gains to be had by disabling Flash Player (like this eye opener from yesterday), I get a few responses via email and Twitter pointing out that if advertisers switch to HTML5 from Flash for obnoxious animated ads, those performance gains may vanish, and, perhaps worse, it won’t be as easy to block unwanted HTML5 animation in this hypothetical future as it is to block unwanted Flash animation today, because HTML5 isn’t rendered through a specific plugin.
My answer: We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. As of today, there are significant performance and battery life gains to be had by disabling Flash Player on Mac OS X.
Unquote.
The first thing I did was trash all the cache files. That helped somewhat. For months I had the feeling that Flash was actually taking over most of my processing power and grinding my machine to a complete halt.
Then I found the following post by John Gruber in his Daring Fireball blog and have followed it to the letter. I am once again a happy man, and can actually get things done with my desktop computer. I encourage you all to give it a try.
Quote:
Going Flash-Free on Mac OS X, and How to Cheat When You Need It
Thursday, 4 November 2010
Last week I mentioned that, following Steven Frank’s lead, I’d completely disabled Flash Player on my Mac. But I have a cheat, for web pages with Flash content with no non-Flash workaround. I’m really happy with this setup, so I thought I’d document it here.
Previously, I used and recommended the excellent ClickToFlash plugin for Safari. The original ClickToFlash is a plugin, not an extension. That sounds pedantic, perhaps, but bear with me. Earlier this year, Safari 5 introduced a new, officially supported extension API. These Safari extensions are much like Firefox extensions. They’re written using JavaScript (and HTML and CSS for presentation, if they present a user interface). Safari extensions are the things Apple lists here, and which you manage via the Extensions tab in Safari’s preferences window. Web content plugins are not new — they date back to Netscape in the mid-1990s. Plugins are for content formats. E.g., if you have the QuickTime plugin installed, then your browser can play embedded QuickTime movies. Flash Player is a plugin.
The original ClickToFlash was possible before the Safari 5 extension API even existed because it (the original ClickToFlash) is a plugin. It masquerades as a plugin that claims to be able to play Flash content, and overrides the actual Flash Player plugin. So when you load a web page containing Flash, the browser lets the ClickToFlash plugin handle the embedded Flash. Instead of actually loading the Flash content, ClickToFlash instead draws a box with a nice little “Flash” logo. If the user clicks that box, ClickToFlash hands the content over to the actual Flash Player plugin. Thus, Flash Player is there, and works, but it only loads after the user clicks on a Flash content box to load it. It’s a kludge, but it works well, and I’ll bet many of you are using it.
Confusion sets in when you see that there also exists a “ClickToFlash” extension for Safari 5 — a project by Marc Hoyois that duplicates most of the features of the ClickToFlash plugin using the new extension API instead of the long-standing plugin API. It looks interesting, and some DF readers have emailed me to endorse it, but I haven’t tried it personally.
Here’s what I did last week.
First, I disabled the Flash Player and old ClickToFlash plugins. On my system, Flash Player was in the default location: /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/. I moved “Flash Player.plugin”, “flashplayer.xpt”, and “NP-PPC-Dir-Shockwave” out of that folder and into a new folder I created next to it named “Internet Plug-Ins (Disabled)”. All you need to do to disable them is move them out of /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/. I also moved ClickToFlash (“ClickToFlash.webplugin”) to this disabled plugins folder. (ClickToFlash, if you have it installed, might be in the Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ folder in your home folder, rather than at the root level of your startup drive.)
After logging out and logging back in to my user account, Flash Player is no longer available to Safari or Firefox. This is more or less the state Mac OS X is now shipping in by default. To me this is better, and in some way more honest, than using ClickToFlash. Without Flash installed, Safari effectively tells websites you visit, “Hey, I don’t have Flash installed”, which allows the sites to send alternative content. Static images instead of Flash for ads, for example. With ClickToFlash, Safari is effectively telling websites you visit, “Yes, sure, I have Flash installed,” but then not actually loading Flash content. I see far fewer “Flash missing” boxes in web pages now than I did with ClickToFlash.
As per Frank’s recommendation, I’ve installed the excellent YouTube5 Safari extension by Connor McKay. With this extension installed, embedded YouTube videos are modified to use the HTML5 video tag rather than Flash Player for playback. This is possible because behind the scenes, all YouTube videos are encoded using H.264.
For the vast majority of my surfing, this new setup works great. I prefer it over my previous setup using the ClickToFlash plugin because Flash Player is never left running in the background because of a background Safari web page on which I clicked to load Flash content hours (or even days) ago. It also means that the Flash plugin never gets loaded into other non-browser apps that happen to use WebKit — eliminating the number one source of crashes for many of these apps.
CHEATING WITH GOOGLE CHROME
But that doesn’t mean I never run into Flash content I wish to view but for which there is no HTML5 alternative. Google Chrome offers a workaround — Chrome includes its own self-contained Flash Player plugin. Removing Flash Player from /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ prevents Safari and Firefox (and almost all other Mac web browsers) from loading Flash content, but not Chrome.
So, whenever I hit a page with Flash content I wish to view, I open that page in Chrome. As soon as I’m done watching it, I quit Chrome, which ensures Flash Player isn’t left running in the background.
I’ve also added a shortcut for opening the current Safari page in Chrome quickly. First, if you haven’t done so already, enable Safari’s Develop menu. (It’s a checkbox in the “Advanced” panel of Safari’s preferences window.) The Develop menu contains an “Open Page With” sub-menu, which lists all the web browsers you have installed on your system. Using the Keyboard Shortcuts section in System Preferences, I set a custom menu key shortcut for the command to open the current page in Google Chrome. Whenever I’m on a page in Safari with Flash content I wish to view, I hit that shortcut, and boom, Chrome launches and loads that page. (Hint: when you create the custom shortcut, and are asked for the name of the menu item, just use “Google Chrome” or “Google Chrome.app” (whichever appears in your Open Page With sub-menu).)
THE COMING OF HTML5 ANIMATED ADS
Whenever I mention the performance and battery life gains to be had by disabling Flash Player (like this eye opener from yesterday), I get a few responses via email and Twitter pointing out that if advertisers switch to HTML5 from Flash for obnoxious animated ads, those performance gains may vanish, and, perhaps worse, it won’t be as easy to block unwanted HTML5 animation in this hypothetical future as it is to block unwanted Flash animation today, because HTML5 isn’t rendered through a specific plugin.
My answer: We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. As of today, there are significant performance and battery life gains to be had by disabling Flash Player on Mac OS X.
Unquote.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
It's all in the soup!
It's all in the soup!
I have recently read an interesting piece about one of my favourite foods, Campbell's soups. I consume them nearly on a daily basis, unless I have homemade soup around.
It seems that its Canadian subsidiary has rolled out a line of soups certified as halal, meaning that they are prepared according to Islamic dietary laws, thus broadening the market to consumers of that faith.
Blogger Pamela Geller started calling for a boycott on her blog which is titled Atlas Shrugs. And other bloggers have followed and joined in the call for a boycott of such products.
All the fuss seems to be that the products are certified by the Islamic Society of North America ( ISNA) an organisation that US government prosecutors linked to the terrorist group Hamas in a 2007 conspiracy case. Hamas has been named a terrorist organization by the US State Department, and the Islamic Society of America could have funneled money to them. It also seems that it has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist political movement founded in Egypt in the 1920s, and that is not included in the list of foreign terrorist organizations.
In any case Geller and the other bloggers seem to have an issue with who is doing the certifying and are not suggesting that Campbell pull their line of halal foods, which are not going to be sold in the US anyway. The controversy has come in the wake of the Muslim prayer center near Ground Zero from a few weeks ago.
This controversy also highlights the problems of perceptions. Muslims tend to come over to Western democracies and try to impose their habits and " cultural" ways of life, instead of adopting the values and rules of the societies that host them. This has been a constant with Islam since its foundation. As a matter of fact, if one reads certain passages of the Qran, it clearly states that Muslims should do what it takes to prevail in the society in which they live.
Multiculturalism, one of the "brand" policies of the socialist left, does not work, as we can see in Europe. Two different models have gone miserably wrong. In the UK and the Netherlands, it has meant isolation for immigrants in their own neighborhoods, with their own media and satellite TV, promoting hatred towards the societies that host them, and possibly leading to violent episodes like the terrorist attacks in July 2005.
France on the other hand, advocated integration, disregarding origins, culture and religion and promoting a new " citizen" denaturalized and extracted from their roots, causing tensions leading to the episodes if recurring street violence. Spain, which has no real immigration policy or strategy, also suffered from terrorist attacks in March 2004. So doing nothing to curtail cultural imposition by immigrants doesn't work either.
Multiculturalism can only work both ways: host societies should be prepared to accept those who come to us looking for a better life, and respect religions, culture and traditions; but those who arrive, should not try to impose their habits and culture on the societies they now live in. Promoting gender equality is not something decadent and racist. Defending our individual rights, not limited to women of course, is something we should do every day. And we must be vigilant with those who, in the name of respect and tolerance, demand from us a change in our way of life.
Campbell's soup probably will not change much now that they have a halal line of products. I can live with that. Halal foods, with the possible exception of turkey salami, can actually be rather tasty and even healthy. I will still enjoy my soup, and they will make more money by broadening the customer base. As long as I have a choice, I am prepared to accept that others also have theirs.
I have recently read an interesting piece about one of my favourite foods, Campbell's soups. I consume them nearly on a daily basis, unless I have homemade soup around.
It seems that its Canadian subsidiary has rolled out a line of soups certified as halal, meaning that they are prepared according to Islamic dietary laws, thus broadening the market to consumers of that faith.
Blogger Pamela Geller started calling for a boycott on her blog which is titled Atlas Shrugs. And other bloggers have followed and joined in the call for a boycott of such products.
All the fuss seems to be that the products are certified by the Islamic Society of North America ( ISNA) an organisation that US government prosecutors linked to the terrorist group Hamas in a 2007 conspiracy case. Hamas has been named a terrorist organization by the US State Department, and the Islamic Society of America could have funneled money to them. It also seems that it has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist political movement founded in Egypt in the 1920s, and that is not included in the list of foreign terrorist organizations.
In any case Geller and the other bloggers seem to have an issue with who is doing the certifying and are not suggesting that Campbell pull their line of halal foods, which are not going to be sold in the US anyway. The controversy has come in the wake of the Muslim prayer center near Ground Zero from a few weeks ago.
This controversy also highlights the problems of perceptions. Muslims tend to come over to Western democracies and try to impose their habits and " cultural" ways of life, instead of adopting the values and rules of the societies that host them. This has been a constant with Islam since its foundation. As a matter of fact, if one reads certain passages of the Qran, it clearly states that Muslims should do what it takes to prevail in the society in which they live.
Multiculturalism, one of the "brand" policies of the socialist left, does not work, as we can see in Europe. Two different models have gone miserably wrong. In the UK and the Netherlands, it has meant isolation for immigrants in their own neighborhoods, with their own media and satellite TV, promoting hatred towards the societies that host them, and possibly leading to violent episodes like the terrorist attacks in July 2005.
France on the other hand, advocated integration, disregarding origins, culture and religion and promoting a new " citizen" denaturalized and extracted from their roots, causing tensions leading to the episodes if recurring street violence. Spain, which has no real immigration policy or strategy, also suffered from terrorist attacks in March 2004. So doing nothing to curtail cultural imposition by immigrants doesn't work either.
Multiculturalism can only work both ways: host societies should be prepared to accept those who come to us looking for a better life, and respect religions, culture and traditions; but those who arrive, should not try to impose their habits and culture on the societies they now live in. Promoting gender equality is not something decadent and racist. Defending our individual rights, not limited to women of course, is something we should do every day. And we must be vigilant with those who, in the name of respect and tolerance, demand from us a change in our way of life.
Campbell's soup probably will not change much now that they have a halal line of products. I can live with that. Halal foods, with the possible exception of turkey salami, can actually be rather tasty and even healthy. I will still enjoy my soup, and they will make more money by broadening the customer base. As long as I have a choice, I am prepared to accept that others also have theirs.
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