Over at Teekay’s

Here’s something not even our friends in Paris and Berlin could shrug off:

Europe condemns Iran call to wipe out Israel

Reuters, 27 October 2005.

US against establishment of third entity in Bosnia, envoy says

HINA news agency, Zagreb, 26 October 2005

Germany’s Election Result Unlikely To Stimulate Steel Production

From the monthly European Steel Review.

Shlomo Avineri of Hebrew University in Jerusalem proposes in Thursday’s issue of conservative German daily Die Welt that Iraq be partitioned. “The problem,” he writes,

is not the constitution as such, but the idee fixe that Iraq is a sustainable, modern nation state.

Based on that diagnosis, Avineri continues:

Let’s be honest: Iraq is following the same path of dissolution Yugoslavia took in the early 1990s. Despite all traditional diplomatic rules on the territorial integrity of states this should be recognized and ultimately welcomed. Constitutions can only work if all sides are interested in living within that framework, which is evidently not the case in Iraq.

The appeal to honest realism is a trope found in much partitionist writing (Chaim Kaufmann, John Mearsheimer et.al.); I’m prepared to admit that in Avineri’s case it may be mixed in with regret, but that doesn’t make it any more “realist,” or compelling for that matter. Partitionists tend to be romantics — adherents of the idea that there are quasi-natural nation states — and utopians: they believe that the ideal of the pure nation state can be achieved. Of course this is nonsense. Anyone trying to partition Iraq will find that millions of people would end up on the wrong side of whatever lines will be drawn, not to mention the problem of groups other than the Kurds, the Shia, and the Sunni Arabs. (The problem of individuals who, for whatever reason, do not want to identify with any one group we may also leave aside here.)

Take Bosnia, which Avineri brings into the debate as an example of a futile attempt to artificially prolong the life of a country that shouldn’t even exist, according to this logic. But where would you draw the lines? How would you separate the people? What are you going to do with people who don’t want to leave their ancestral villages — or even just a place of their choosing, where they want to live? It is certainly true that we need to take a long and hard look at whether Bosnia, or Iraq, can survive in their current make-up. If the Serbs and the Kurds (groups with very different histories within their former and current countries) want to leave, what justification does anyone — but especially we, as outsiders — have to keep them? But simply drawing lines in the sand will not solve the problem of either country, and of either group. Just ask the Cypriots.

After the Nobel committee has just reaffirmed that it intends not to make political statements through its decisions and wants to stay out of fads and fashions, it has now announced that this year’s prize will go to Harold Pinter, no doubt well-known to readers of this blog as an indefatigable freedom fighter (the freedom of Slobodan Milosevic, that is). Go figure.

Never having worked for Reuters, I, too, wanted to try using those scare quotes. Feels good!

The guy who ran Lebanon as a personal property of the late President Asad has just blown his brains out, according to wire reports and CNN. He gave an interview to a Lebanese radio station just hours earlier in which he said this might be his last statement in the matter of the assassination of former Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri earlier this year.

Ghazi Kanaan was one of the country’s most powerful men and a feared presence in Syria’s colony Lebanon, from which it was evicted following an outburst of grief and anger after Hariri’s assassination in a massive bomb blast.

He had just been questioned by a senior UN investigator in the matter.

He ran Lebanon between 1982 and 2002 as head of military intelligence. He was appointed interior minister in 2004, overseeing Syria’s police intelligence services.

He may have felt the UN was coming too close and chosen a more honorable way to end his life than rotting in a prison. Or he may have been “persuaded” to commit “suicide,” persuasion being one of the specialties of Syrian intelligence, by people who knew he knew. It’s all speculation, but it’s not looking good for Hafez al-Asad’s kid son who’s running the country now.

It’ll take the boys at the stock exchange a few hours, or maybe a day or two, to realize what’s going on here (hence the dip in Apple’s stock), but Steve has done it again: just a few minutes ago he presented a new VideoPod with which Pixar shorts (CEO: Steve the Man) and music videos can be played, and output to TV (or a new iMac, which now has a remote and would replace any TV). But these movies cannot be burned — you need the Pod to play them. Stroke of genius! And, the iTunes Music Store offers TV series as of now. (No new PowerBooks though — the current line-up is getting a bit stale, especially after I dropped my 17″ at Stuttgart airport a few weeks ago.) There was a bit of disappointment on chatrooms such as fscklog and macprime, but I think it makes a lot of sense commercially — and the kids were happy once they heard they could get Desperate Housewives off the iTunes MS a day after it’s broadcast. (Only in the U.S. though.)

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The Observer ran a story at the weekend about a split within the committee awarding the Nobel Prize for literature this year, suggesting the row was over Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk faces charges over comments he made about the Armenian genocide.

But what caught my eye was the following quote:

Pamuk is widely acclaimed but, at the age of 53, is considered on the young side. ‘The Nobel Prize must never go to the book of the season. It exists to reward a life’s work,’ said poet and literary critic Eva Ström.

This is interesting for two reasons. First, it’s preposterous to suggest that Pamuk has ever written the book of the season. Second, I’m not sure Ström actually suggested this in the first place. The reporter, one Alex Duval Smith, probably asked her a general question about how these decisions were made and about how the committee dealt with newcomers, and then simply juxtaposed her general comment with a sentence about Pamuk. This should never have passed editorial review — then again, maybe some of the folks in Stockholm really do consider Pamuk’s work a fad.

Technorati tag: orhan pamuk

Faithful readers of this blog, all two of them, will remember that one of the main reasons why I haven’t rearranged my entire workflow around LaTeX implementations or even Mellel is the fact that I often need to draft text with others, comment on other people’s work, or use Word’s track changes feature. In other words, I’m not an island unto myself. I collaborate with others.

This issue came up last week in a little project I’m involved in, where a group of four people need to draft one document. One of the participants suggested doing it the traditional way, by sending around Word documents as e-mail attachments. The other three agreed that that’s not the way to go, and we’re now setting up a Wiki for that purpose.

However, in recent months a whole bunch of collaborative environments have sprung up all over the place. There’s at least four that I’m aware of:

• Jotspot live
• Writeboard
• Writely
• gOFFICE

All of these, with the possible exception of gOFFICE whose webpage is so badly done that it’s impossible to get any meaningful information without signing up, allow several people to work on the same document; the doc is stored on their servers. No more track changes that someone forgot to turn on, no more person A editing draft X while person B works on draft Y. Neat and simple — except for the fact that you have to relinquish a level of control since your doc is on someone else’s server, and it might potentially be slow over a dialup connection. In fact, what happens when I’m in the middle of an editing session and the damn phone line dies? (I’m not saying that people designing such services should design them around people who have to rely on legacy technology. But it is a fact that especially in eastern and southeastern Europe most folks still dial up.)

Of these, unsurprisingly given their other products, Writeboard looks like the most thought-through and well-implemented. A very promising Open Source app that, howeverm, doesn’t seem to be ready for prime time yet is SynchroEdit.

All in all, without having truly tested any of the above services, this is an extremely welcome development.

Update: There’s an article on ZDNet about why web apps may replace desktop apps in the long run, with lots of links. Check it out.

Update 2: Check out this post and discussion over at the Read/Write Web.

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