So everyone knows KDE is a mammoth. And that it's very configurable. The problem is when you have to configure something for which there isn't a gui. For all I know, KDE's system of config files is completely sane and reasonable, but as a user I've never known how to understand it or where to read the explanation.

One thing that has always annoyed me across operating systems is mime types/file associations. You need some kind of mapping between file types and associated applications, and it always ends up being a kind of registry that's a pain to maintain. KDE is like that too.

Here's what I've found out. The application entries that appear in that gui are defined in .desktop files that live in /usr/share/applications. So to get your app in there, you clone an existing .desktop file and edit. In my case, I like to play all video media in mplayer, the non-gui version. Because it's non-gui, it's usually not set up through the package. Instead gmplayer, which I don't want, is. So I've made my own mplayer-nogui.desktop file.

[syntax,mplayer-nogui.desktop,bash]

Now, to make your app appear under the file types you want, you just put this in the .desktop file. Once you've done that, you have a reusable mplayer-nogui.desktop that you can push into /usr/share/applications on any distro that fails to set up mplayer without a gui.

The next step is to make MPlayer nogui the preferred app for every file type that it's associated with. This is stored in ~/.kde/share/config/profilerc. The file is easy to figure out, and ideally I'd want an easy way to just select all and then override with MPlayer nogui. But to do that I'd have to write a parser, and it's frankly not worth the effort. So I just go through the list of video filetypes and manually move MPlayer nogui to the top. It would be nice to automate this.

In terms of maintenance, linux is not the jungle that Windows is, which means apps you install later won't generally try to steal the preferred status. But they might. So again, it would be nice to automate reseting that (or maybe locking down the preferences somehow).

It would be nice if the KDE guys came out with a gui that made it possible to set up your file associations in 30 seconds, but until then this is the best I got.

It is classic Hitchens to examine the unexamined. He says of his endeavor to investigate the life of Mother Teresa that he would rather judge her reputation by her words and actions than to judge the words and actions by her reputation.

It would seem culturally counter intuitive to so much as suggest that Mother Teresa, a Nobel Peace Prize winner for starters, isn't entirely equal to the admiration she received in her lifetime and continues to receive posthumously. Hitchens has an explanation for this. He argues wealthy people living comfortable lives in rich countries want to believe that somewhere out there there is someone who is doing something for the poor.

Mother Teresa was self proclaimed for this role, of course. Hitchens paints a picture of a person so consumed by the conviction that for the poor there is glory in suffering that her whole organization is dedicated to enforcing it. Her clinic in Calcutta is void of appropriate medical equipment, despite the fact that through the numerous donations to her cause she would have amassed the funds to upgrade it.

Essentially, Hitchens says that Mother Teresa is using the poor and the suffering to power her operation, a sort of "poverty in practice". Her aim is not to empower the poor to propel them out of poverty, or even to end their suffering, but rather for them to endure their poverty and suffering, for such is the will of god. All the while preaching the strictest of Catholic doctrine. We know that Jesus devoted his end to suffering, although whether he was a real person or merely a philosophical character is not established. Mother Teresa, then, was dedicated to a reenactment of sorts through the poor in her clinic, who had no power to refuse.

It is a rather different view on the world renowned character, for which Christopher Hitchens unsurprisingly received much criticism. Is it because he is twisting the facts or because we in this world are so unwilling to blemish the image of someone who was supposed to be through and through noble?

So I've been sitting here all this time, twiddling my thumbs. Obama or McCain, tough choice. I was waiting for a sign. A sign, you might say, from god. It came. Obama and McCain both had rallies in Pennsylvania. McCain canceled his, Obama didn't.

"A little rain never hurt nobody", said Obama, as McCain headed the stampede to the nearest shelter. Damn right, Barack.

Europeans, take notice. Rain is water. Most of your bodies are water already. You're carrying around water bottles to counter balance dehydration. Stop being so schizophrenic.

Disclaimer: I am not a special interest contributor to the Obama campaign. Obama merely chose to point and laugh at people who are scared of rain for the fun of it.

The Netherlands, a paradise for bikers. Twelve million bikes on seventeen thousand kilometers of dedicated bike paths. And a country so flat that you'll never be pushing your bike uphill because the hill is too steep - there is no hill. There's basically no corner of the country that isn't accessible to a biker, the place sometimes looks like a bike track with a country attached to it.

And yet, something is wrong. Very wrong.

You might think "Hey the Dutch are nuts about biking, I bet they have great bikes over there!". You'd be wrong. The bikes in use in this country are something out of an old Soviet factory. Single speed, pedal brake, black paint (or painted a bright color to conceal rampant corrosion), with a regular chain for locking. Often you can hear them coming, wheels spinning unevenly on the axle because the rims are slightly bent, lights fastened poorly and about to fall off, crank screeching against the panel that conceals the chain. Not surprisingly, bike repair is a thriving business in this country, repair shops are everywhere.

In fact, these old bikes are so dominant that it's difficult to find a bike that isn't one of these historical exhibits. Furthermore, bike theft is so widespread that people don't even want to own anything worth stealing. (A guy once told me he loses roughly one bike per year to theft.) Dutch people love to joke that the lock usually is worth more than the bike is. That's true, I just don't see why that is supposed to be funny. I wouldn't want to live in a house where the lock on the front door is worth more than the house itself.

Then there are the bike lanes. Yes, they are dedicated to bikes, and yes they are separate from motorized traffic. What you probably don't expect, however, is just how boring it is to ride on them. They are completely flat, they have their own traffic lights, and even indicators for traffic going in different directions. It's no wonder bikes don't have any gears, there's no way you could build up any speed before you have to stop at the next light. It is the experience of urban biking with the added bureaucracy of driving a car

Not only that, traffic regulations for bikers not only exist, they are enforced. That means you have tax collecting traffic cops just waiting to write you a ticket for any number of trivialities, like riding on the sidewalk (even when it's void of pedestrians), riding a light when there's no traffic, or riding without lights. Lights which, of course, will be stolen unless you obsessively remove them every time you park the bike. (Unless the whole bike gets stolen instead.) It's almost a wonder you don't have to fill in a form every time.

Then there is the terrain. When you're not biking in a town, which is about as much fun as driving a car in heavy traffic, you will find yourself somewhere on the grid of bike lanes that connect towns, out in the great outdoors. What fun! Well, at least until you realize that every slice of the country looks almost exactly the same, and the only thing there is to see anywhere is grasslands with canals crossing them. If you're lucky you might spot a forest, but they are very uncommon. And it's completely flat, so not only is there nothing to see here, you're well aware of the fact that 10km down the road there's also nothing. Scenery wise, this country is as close as you get to a desert.

The Dutch response to all of this? "Biking was never supposed to be fun, it's transport." Well, there you have it, it doesn't get more depressing than that. "Music an art form? We just needed a beat the soldiers could march to."

A conspiracy thriller with a redneck in the lead. An unusual angle, but worth a try. The story is he was a sniper in the army, then he got called in for a very special job with the FBI: to plan the assassination of the president cause they believed someone else was going to do it and they wanted him to tell them how it could be done.

Not a great story, but not a bad one either, there is enough to work with no doubt. But that's kind of where the positives end. Mark Wahlberg in the lead.. not bad frankly, but for a role like this you need an actor who can be sensitive, someone who can express the turmoil that he's going through, and Mark just isn't it, the best he can do is look serious. If you think that is revealing, you're onto something. The big problem with this movie, nay disaster, is casting. The casting is horrendous, to the point that not a single actor is right for his/her role.

There is Danny Glover, so admired from the Lethal Weapon epic. For some reason he doesn't even have a voice to speak with, barely producing the words. But he's one of the better ones. The eager detective Nick Memphis who just started at the FBI. Eager yes, but playing a detective like you would a bartender, no feel for it. Swagger's female friend looks like a contestant for Miss America, dolled up like she's going shopping, lives on a farm. Again, no personal drama that anyone would buy. And so it goes, the standard FBI/police war room personnel in a movie like this, all of them misfits, badly cast. Same goes for the bad guys.

I felt the first half of the movie was going somewhere, but the ending is crying out for a rewrite. When you're doing a plot like this you can win the viewer over by building up to something. It's a matter of trust, you tell a story that captures the viewer's interest, and based on that you make a promise to deliver something later on. I'll agree to hold my judgment and go along with you. That's why you have to deliver at the end, you can't just walk out, or the trust is broken. A feeling of betrayal ensues.

A good director could have taken this plot somewhere, maybe even with the ending as it is. But the casting is unbelievably bad.