Crusader War College

The student body, faculty, and staff of the Crusader War College salute all those who have served in the military forces of our country.

In addition, we should go out of our way to thank those who took on the same protective and supportive roles in our civilian sector, such as Police, State Militia members, and EMTs.

And let us go our of our way to thank those who currently serve.

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Been offline due to crackers, but we're back online.

The delay had nothing to do with any difficulty in restoration: we were tied up with more important issues on another website, and were cleaning up tons of spam.

Eight months ago he returned to Israel from the United States after generating a research breakthrough that changed his life. Berzin, the founder of GreenFuel Technologies - a U.S. company that produces green fuel from algae - discovered that "green slime" contains one of the keys to the alternative fuel the world is seeking. His company is the first ever to develop and produce biofuels from algae that are bred on gases emitted by power plants.

It might sound like some sort of magic trick to put algae, CO2 and sunlight into a box and come out with fuel, but Berzin did it.

God bless the Jews and Israel! Through them, they continue to bless the world!

Hattip twobyfour via Rantburg.

An interesting article on how building roads is defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Hattip Wretchard via Belmont Club.

Comments have been suspended on this blog until further notice.

It is with pleasure that I welcome all the students of the War College back from Summer Vacation and into another activity-filled year of bias-free learning. I hope you had a pleasant and envigorating break.

While the curriculum is as tough and demanding as ever, it does appear that, during breaks, you all are amusing yourselves with the grand happenings transpiring in Southern Lebanon. Indeed, when it started, there were some fears among the faculty present that the whole affair would be over and done with via a United Nimwits resolution demanding a cessation of hostilities and the withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon before the school year started. Thankfully, no such thing has afflicted THIS Middle East conflict yet, and the faculty are enjoying remarking on the events as they transpire, as well as seeing your reactions to them.

However, it is with some displeasure that I must convey Official Disapproval of the method of hazing the new pledges by certain of the Fraternities and Sororities (you know who you are).

The Hazing of the Pledges, of course, is a tradition hoary with age, and yet distinguished by the marvelous ingenuity displayed by the current members every year. If we were not already being diverted from our work and studies by the current events in the Middle East, we would be amusing ourselves beholding what new form of humiliation you had come up with this year.

However loath we are to crimp this aged tradition, there ARE limits, which some Houses have crossed into inconvenient behavior.

Firstly, I must insist that the hazing practice of making 72 random Sorority pledges dress in bikinis and Arabic head-scarf-and-fanbelt, form a Conga Line, snake in and around the campus buildings every time a Hezbollah Terrorist is killed, and chant "Burn, Baby, Burn!" and "Die and Fry!" must be restricted to after-school hours: No matter how much it DOES express our deeply-felt feelings about those bastards, it interferes with legitimate vehicular traffic, distracts those receiving instruction in the classrooms, and is severly impacting the security of the Campus. While it may be argued that a prospective terrorist would be easily recognizable even if he donned the same attire, security personnel are taking an UNGODLY amount of time performing what should be a prefunctory inspection.

Please also limit the amount of time this practice is indulged: the pledges are clearly not getting enough study time given the gratifying number of terrorists the IDF is eliminating if 5 minutes is allocated to each one.

Now for the guilty fraternities: I have been asked by the Security Department, the Captain of the Imperial Stormtrooper detachment to the campus, AND the English Department, that those playing "Israelis and Hezbullis (SIC)", with the pledges dressing as Hezbollah terrorists, immediately cease and desist: Professor Frum is stil somewhat agitated that a definitive english spelling of the group's name still has not been decided upon, but he's damned sure it isn't "Hezbullis", having turned an interesting shade of purple the moment he read about it. While the use of paintball guns and water bottle rockets to reconstruct the current battles is an interesting twist on an honored Southern Tradition of recreating Civil War Battles, the campus security forces use REAL bullets and have an easier time determing that someone wearing an Indian headdress of fake eagle feathers is not a threat. Thankfully, they are highly trained as well, so the three pledges who got shot in the legs will be back in a couple of days.

I appreciate, in advance, your prompt compliance with this memo.

I know I haven't been posting much lately, mainly because of Vacation and other stuff. However, recent events have shown that I've progressed in a personal sense much further than I imagined. In fact, I'm doing stuff now that I knew I should have done, but never could find the strength to do until now. Quite liberating.

And also pretty obligating. The purpose of this blog is to be a record of personal research. I have been too lax in documenting that record, and the rate of change has just kicked up several notches. Thus, it's time to stop deluding oneself on what one can do, start eliminating the fluff and concentrating on the important stuff.

I probably will comment from time to time on this blog regarding current events. However, I do not need the distraction of the feeling that I need to post something periodically, and thus taking valuable time looking for something I can comment on in a brief note when it should be spent on writing more important things.

Heh. Given the things that have happened recently, just maybe I might actually comment more frequently, but more economically, than I have in the past.

I visited Squeakland and saw this interesting take on the Open Software license issue. Essentially, "Mr Cee" offered the following license:

I/We license this software to you under any license that has been deemed Open Source Definition compliant by the Open Source Institute. So please go to http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ and pick your license. Have a nice day.

he said it was tounge in cheek, but it has a big kernel of wisdom: he's putting his trust, not in a specific block of text that is called an "open source software licence", but in people and their belief in an idea. If a lawyer objects to a specific licence, you as the user can pick another. Even if ALL such licenses are judged invalid, the organization can come up with another one that CAN pass the test, and you can use THAT one.

I have two projects on the back burner that I want to release for use as Open Source, but I hadn't chosen which license to use because, to be frank, I was just as bewildered about the differences as "Mr. Cee" does.

Now, all I have to figure out is if using "God Bless you" instead of "Have a nice day" in the license, would forbid the US Government from using my software if, by using it, it would be considered an establishment of religion.

It seems that the webhoster had misconfigured the e-mail reader I use for this site. I had configured the e-mail addy I use (mailto:ptah@sixie.net) during the misconfiguration so it worked okay. When they re-configured it aright, my okay configuration suddenly became a MIS-configuration, and all e-mails sent to me since October of 2005 disappeared into a black hole. It's a bit complicated, but if you grasped why Mr. Hyde could not change back to Dr. Jekyll, then something similar had happened to me.

My regrets and deepest apologies if anyone who e-mailed me after October of last year did not get a response.

I have removed "Day by Day" from my blog list, but you may click on the title of this entry to go to the site and install a link to it.

My reason for removing it is somewhat personal and complicated, and can be read via the link below:

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Bill Levinson posts the following pertinent observation at Israpundit that concisely states a problem I have as well:

I have recently received some criticism on these pages for my choice of words to refer to Islamofascist terrorists and their sympathizers. The use of epithets admittedly shows that their user lacks the vocabulary to express his view in a literate and civilized manner. This is exactly the problem; the English language lacks words that describe the behavior of the Palestine Solidarity Movement and its Palestinian handlers. It is therefore necessary to invent the necessary words, which this article will do.

Human societies develop words to describe things with which they are familiar. The Romans had plenty of words that related to war because that is what they were usually doing. There is an online joke that says, if you see an unknown Latin verb, it usually means "to kill." On the other hand, an isolated human society that had never discovered the institution of war would not have words for armies, soldiers, or weapons beyond those needed to deal with wild animals. The behavior of the Palestine Solidarity Movement and Palestinian terrorists is so alien to Euro-American society that we have no individual words do describe it either; all we can currently do is construct descriptive sentences until we invent appropriate words.

The MSM already knows this, and thus not only tries to control the invention of words and terms, but also tries to control their use.

I have decided to include the comment I made at the website below:

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If you wondered where all the posts have been in the last few weeks, you probably didn't stop by to see this temporary web page.

Although I suspected initially that my password was too weak, subsequent problems arose after I got an alternate working site and posted the temporary web page while I sorted things out. I'm not ready to voice my suspicions on-line, but I'll just wait and see what else happens.

The transition to b2evolution (b2) went more smoothly than I thought it would.

One of the built-in tools in the latest version of b2 is a converter to convert an export/backup of your Moveable Type (MT) site into a set of b2evolution entries. The tool works very well: make sure your b2 user name the same as the name used on your MT blog, then import away! It'll even create the categories on the fly.

The only thing it doesn't do is MT excerpts (text in the third big text box down from the top). Thus, I suggest that you do a test import first, then carefully review the output results and move or remove the excerpts. I never got them to work anyhow, so I used the area to hold clipboard scraps on three drafts, so it wasn't bad.

The only thing better on MT is that the page showing the list of posts one can edit is more compact than b2's. At least, you can filter b2's list, but I do miss the quick overview.

Up until the move to a commercial webhoster, this site (and others) was hosted on a dual Pentium III 1.13 GHZ server sited at my house. This was practical because I was using a dedicated Symmetric DSL line that had a high upload speed as well as a high download speed.

However, due to cost concerns raised by the Wife, plus problems with getting certain types of work-related secure connection packet types through the router, we had to re-subscribe for an ADSL Bell South line. I felt I could have gotten everything to work, but only if I learned more about the firewall that comes with Red Hat 9. I will also miss the fixed IP address assigned to the connection. Thus, the move to the commercial webhoster.

I have utterly NO complaints about my service, and will very likely sign up again as soon as our finances improve (we had several very expensive (+$1000) hits to our finances this year that we KNOW won't happen next year, and I consider it miraculous that the consequences will only be a rather "lean" Christmas by our standards: I want to start the new year off with a clean(er) slate debt-wise.)

It's been about 5 days since I repointed the domain name to the new site, so its time to cut back. I probably won't go back to hosting the site on a house server, since the new webhoster has better throughput and software facilities that would be extra cost items for me to implement, or beyond my capability to implement with little to no trouble.

Welcome to the new and improved Campus of the Crusader War College!

A few notes on the new set-up:

• I have decided that it was not practical to think that a single software solution would work for the websites that I was setting up for others, AND to use the same software for this blog. The most intuitive software that I've found is phpwcms for general websites, but the commenters at Open Source CMS said it was only good for middle sized websites and not blogs.
• The server is no longer at the Dean of Student's house. We are hosted with Ace Host, using their reseller plan. I hope, when finances improve, to buy a two-year advanced reseller plan.
• I discovered that the terms and conditions for using Moveable Type forbade use on a multi-processor system. Thus, I have moved to b2evolution.
• In my search, I have discovered that CMS software is far more complicated that it needs to be. I had considered writing my own, but I'm too wrapped up finishing two other programming projects at home to maintain a software community. (On the other hand, one thing I've discovered is that I am a good "backplane" programmer: I can set up a software design that others can fill-in and expand on their own. I probably could do this and leave the community maintenance to others.)