Just a cry for attention.

Much like poor put-upon Patty Hearst, America is generally a nice lady with unfortunate taste in friends. Over the years, we’ve thrown our lot in with dictatorial theocrats, mafia hitmen, Nazi doctors, fascist terrorists, and every other kind of nasty bastard short of Satan himself (though some would argue that assertion). As an exercise in humility, I occasionally try to point out such assholery and am typically met with pointed silence. It’s like bringing up an ex-boyfriend who once passed out and pissed himself at a party. We all know it happened, but no one wants to talk about it.

Thus, in the interest of uncomfortable remembrance, I’ll try present a running tally of people America really should have ignored. Here’s the first:

The Gehlenapparat

Around the time the US government was grabbing up Nazi scientists by the armful, it was taking its first hesitant steps toward the greatest dick-measuring contest in the history of the world. I am speaking, of course, about the Cold War. Truman and Stalin had barely finished stomping Germany a new one when they extracted their boots from Berlin and aimed them at each other’s asses.

For those of you who have never been in a dick-measuring contest (there must be a least a couple of you out there, right?) the one thing you never want to do is actually measure dicks. It’s just bad strategy. Once the flies are undone, the best you can hope for is to awkwardly stare at another dude’s junk. At worst, you find out that his is actually bigger. So instead of measuring, you posture and brag and threaten to whip it out. More importantly, you spread rumors about your manhood’s prodigious dimensions whilst simultaneously surveying your opponent’s most intimate acquaintances for insider info re: his package.

Unfortunately for the world’s newest superpower, its intelligence agencies were deeply enmeshed in Western Europe and the Pacific. The US had little to no espionage resources that would let it get a peek at Stalin’s pecker. (The metaphor might be falling apart at this point. Let’s move on.) Providence provided, however. It just so happened that a substantial spy network already existed on the Eastern front: the one the Nazis left behind.

Snazzy.

Enter Reinhard Gehlen. During the war, Gehlen was a Generalmajor, the highest rank attainable in the German army, and Hitler’s chief spymaster on the Eastern front. He managed to achieve such a lofty post despite having played a minor role in an assassination attempt on Hitler. (The one from that Tom Cruise movie. You know what I’m talking about.) At least that’s what he claimed in his memoirs. It’s entirely possible that he made it up, given that he was Hitler’s goddamn spymaster. Just saying.

Gehlen was captured by US forces in mid-1945. True to Nazi-spy form, he immediately began negotiating for his release. He turned over all of his intelligence archives, gave up his entire spy network, and even outed a few OSS officers as Communists. He was just that kind of guy. US Army Intelligence was so gosh-darned delighted that they released him in 1946 with a mandate to get back to work. Operating out of West Germany, Gehlen established his own personal network of 350 hand-picked ex-Nazis and got busy selling information to the Allies. The organization was informally known as the Gehlenapparat (Gehlen Organization) to the Germans involved. US Army Intel officially named it “Operation Rusty”, for no apparent reason.

Could it be?

“Rusty” did good business, pulling in $2.5 million a year from its inception. (This is in 1946 “movies-cost-a-nickel” dollars.) For comparison, the Strategic Services Unit (an interim agency that transitioned the wartime OSS into the peacetime CIA) had an operating budget of around $400,000. That wad of cash bought “little new or particularly valuable information,” according to the CIG (Yet another precursor to the CIA). In fact, the Gehlenapparat was generally panned by every domestic intelligence agency from its inception. The reasons for this are several, but they generally fall into three main complaints.

Firstly, Nazis adhere to Nazi philosophy (that’s why it’s called that), which incorporates concepts of racial superiority. Besides being completely dickish, the “master race” idea is not congruent with reality, leading its adherents to underestimate their opponents. For instance, German intelligence drastically underestimated the capabilities of the Soviet T-34 tank, assuming that Slavs simply couldn’t build as good a tank as the German Panzer. This is a lot like assuming that Oscar de la Hoya can’t kick your ass because he’s Hispanic. It’s just dumb. The ginormous cock-up helped stall the Germans at Stalingrad and turn the tide of the entire war.

No sweat, guys. We got this.

Secondly, Nazis weren’t exactly winning any popularity contests in Eastern Europe circa 1946. Their personal histories left them wide open to blackmail. I don’t know about you, but when I’m trying to hire foreign espionage agents, I try to avoid the ones that are all blackmailey.

Rounding out the why-Nazis-make-shitty-spies trifecta is a little dustup some people refer to as World War II. Apparently, no one in Army Intelligence noticed it. The Allies had just finished curb-stomping these guys across Europe. Sure, Nazis hated Russian Communists, but they weren’t necessarily keen on buddying up to the Amerikaners either.

There are other reasons why Nazis were a bad choice for post-WWII American spies. If you really want to pare it down, though, all of these reasons can be reduced to one: because they were fucking Nazis. Nothing about these guys made them good spies. By many accounts, they were less like an intelligence organization and more like an alumni association. “Rusty” was a great place for German officers to maintain their lifestyle and status while simultaneously avoiding the whole “crimes against humanity” thing. Gehlen filled the group with his old war buddies, eventually commanding over four-thousand former Nazi officers. Among these were several known war criminals, including Leopold von Mildenstein, former head of the SS’s Jewish Affairs department, Otto Albrecht von Bolschwing, an aide to Adolf Eichmann who helped orchestrate his “Final Solution”, Aleksandras Lileikis, who killed thousands of Jews in Lithuania, Alois Brunner, who gassed 140,000 Jews at the Drancy Interment Camp, and at least a hundred other former SS and Gestapo members. National Archives historian Robert Wolfe summarized it thusly: “US army intelligence accepted Reinhard Gehlen’s offer to furnish alleged expertise on the Red Army—and was bilked by the many mass murderers he hired.” In short, we paid a lot of money for a bag of assholes.

Now, I know what you’re saying… “Ok, so the CIA funded thousands of useless Nazi fucktards for a decade or so, but at least they kept the Ruskies out!” You would be wrong in saying that. Idiot.

Startling similarities.

The Gehelenapparat was the least secure spy corp since ­Get Smart. As mentioned above, the political liabilities of its members made them prime targets for blackmail from Soviet agents. The NKGB had double agents in the organization before you could say “Boris and Natasha”. Those compromised agents quickly recruited Russian moles, giving the Soviets one of their first conduits into the US intelligence community. They used Gehlen’s group as a springboard to eventually infiltrate the CIA.

The Gehlenapparat was handed over the West German government in 1955. It formed the core of the newly minted German Federal Intelligence Service a year later. The best you can say about the whole scaticane (That’s a hurricane made out… aww what the hell. You’re smart enough to get it.) is that they’re someone else’s problem now.

Bang Bang — hjort nr 2 i 2009 er skutt,  Malfred fikk bukken på posten sin akkurat der han hadde planlagt ..

steike bra…… etter en lang og våt dag i skogen så er det fantastisk å høyre smellet

Eg og Fox spora dyre i ein time,  og da dyret hadde passert Geir Ove og Bengt – holdt vi på å gi opp -  men plutselig small det og der låg han …

Endeliiiiiiiig

-bilder fra jakt turen på lørdag -

da var betydlig bedre vær — og fotoapparatet var ikke så våt.

Hayatımda tanıdığım Türkçeyi en iyi kullanan kişi babam. Yazıda da konuşmada da enteresan bir titizliği var. Anneme göre aynı titilziği temizliğine gösterse dünyanın en temiz insanı bile olabilir.

/fiziksel olarak temizlik yani!/

Enteresan bir bakış açısına sahip bir adam babam. Devletini, hükümetlerin bile sevmediği kadar çok seviyor. ne şovenistliğe kaçıyor ne ümmetçiliğe, ne ulusalcı oluyor ne liberal. değişik bir adam değişik bir tür. Neyse Türkçe kullanımı diyordum. Sosyal iletişim aracının paşası msn de geçen küçük bir konuşmamızla şöyle örneklendireyim;

Baba : Oğlum, merhaba nasılsın? Okul işleri nasıl gidiyor? Vizeleriniz başladı mı?

Kulak : iii baba ya nolsun yua hocalar filan işte vizlerdede zıplıyoruz yerimizde işte puhahah..
Baba : Oğlum! Hayvanoğlu havyan! Neden böyle baştan savma yazıyorsun? Neden dikkat etmiyorsun?
Kulak : ok baba daa dikkatli olcam sonrakine söz
Baba : Eşekoğlu eşek!

tabi böyle babalar internetin arka planı güvencesiyle arada şaka da yapıyor misal;

Baba : Merhaba Kulak’ ım ben annen. Nasılsın?

Hadi ordan ya. Annem o kadar imla kuralının dilimizde olduğunu bile bilmiyor. İlahi baba güldürdün beni.

Babam bu denli Türkçeye önem verirken, ben paso ingilizce çalışıyorum gelecekte hiçbir bok işime yaramasa o yarar diyerek. Tabi babam inanılmaz sinirleniyor, “Ha! Yani Türkçe’ nin bokunu yedin kaldı İngilizce öyle mi oğlum?!” titizlik ve kibarlığıyla. Ama tabi biz milenyum gençleri olarak,

/yani her boka el atan ama hiçbir bok olamayan!/

uvzumuzun dikine gitmeyi çok seviyoruz.

/bayan okurları tenzih ederim!/

Aylarca çalıştığımız KPDS’ nin meyvelerini almak üzere sınav olacağımız ağaca gittik bugün abimle. Sorular çok bomba kazık tabi. Ben daha sınav başlamadan kendimi hazırlamıştım kazık soruyla karşılaşırsam atıp geçecem diye. Sınav 1 saat önce bitince sınavın baya kazık olduğu çıktı meydana. Sınavdan çıktım abimin sınav olduğu sınıfa şöyle bir göz attım ki abim, cevap kağıdıyla soru kitapçığı arasında süzücü hızda geçişler yapıyor. Mevzuyu hemen anladım tabi, abim sınavı yetiştirememiş.

Hayırlısı diyip kadersel bir yönelişten sonra sınav herkes için bitti. Abim çıktığında suratındaki sinirsel mimikler tezimde ne denli haklı olduğumu gösteriyordu. Hani baştan korkar gibi oldum da sonradan soruverdim, Abi sınav nasıldı diye. “Yürü yetişmedi!” deyince yüreğime su serpildi.

/ne bencil adamım onu da görün bak!/

Sınav berbattı. Babam haklı ben ki 45 Türkçe sorusundan 25 neti zor çıkarmış bir öss genci. Neyime benim ingilizce sınavı. Ha çok biliyorsan bulursun sokakta elinde “loonly planet” kitabıyla iki turist. Aşağıdaki kalıpları kullanırsın. Etrafında da havanı atarsın. Öyle sınava girip kendini cümle aleme “ulan hani bu kabakulak ingilizce biliyordu!” diye rezil etmezsin.

Bunlarda yukarıda, aşağıda dediğim ingilizce temel kalıplar;

-hello hav ar yu?
-wer ar yu from
-so farrr
-way kam to hiyır
-oh griiiyyyt
-evriting is gud?
-veri vell, nays tu mit yu. si yu.

İdda ediyorum bu kalıpları sırasıyla kullanın tam bir iletişime geçmiş sayılacaksınız. Bütün turistlerde işe yarıyor. Sınavlardan uzak durun. Havanız olsun yeter..

sdfasdasd

The South Africans are training the presidential guards, marines and intelligence agents and providing security in some of the country’s mines.

The South Africans have also escorted considerable quantities of military equipment bought from Ukraine and smuggled into Conakry in defiance of an international arms embargo against Guinea, the sources say. .

They allege that OSS is being paid in gold and other mineral resources and that all the South Africans are armed and are acting as a special independent sub-unit of the presidency. That is creating tensions between them and the leadership of the Presidential Guard. Guard members have reportedly arrested some of the South Africans.

                                                                             
                               
  SAPS officer ‘training Guinea mercenaries’
   November 18 2009 at 07:22AM  

By Peter Fabricius Foreign Editor

Several South Africans, led by a former SA Police Service officer, are working for a Dubai-based security company in Guinea, providing protection and training to the military junta which seized power in a December coup and has been ostracised by African organisations, security sources say.

South Africa’s director-general of international relations and co-operation, Ayanda Ntsaluba, said yesterday the government’s information also suggested that the South Africans allegedly working for the junta were employed by “companies operating largely through Dubai”.

Ntsaluba declined to name the company, but intelligence sources said the South Africans had been in the turbulent West African state for at least a month, working for Omega Strategic Services (OSS) to provide security and military training for the military junta headed by Captain Moussa Dadis Camara.
 

UN diplomats have corroborated the reports of mercenaries helping the junta
The contingent in Guinea is headed by Daniel Oosthuizen, the OSS director of operations and a veteran of 18 years’ service in the SAPS, according to the sources.

Ntsaluba said the South African government was trying to verify French media reports about the presence of South African mercenaries in Guinea, providing training for the junta’s soldiers and securing imports of weapons from Ukraine.

UN diplomats have corroborated the reports of mercenaries helping the junta.

South African intelligence sources said the South Africans had started arriving in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, on October 13 because Camara feared that he might be himself be toppled in a coup.

The turbulence increased dramatically after September 28 when Camara’s troops attracted worldwide condemnation by firing on protesters against the junta and killing about 150 of them, according to the UN, though the junta itself puts the figure at about 50.

Oosthuizen is heading the OSS operation in Guinea
According to its website, the founder and CEO of OSS is Zachary L Venegas, “a West Point graduate with a degree in classical Arabic and Portuguese languages” who “served with distinction as an infantry officer in a wide variety of conventional and special assignments before leaving military service as a captain”.

It says the director of operations is Oosthuizen – “an 18-year veteran of the South African police force, including more than a decade in the Violent Crime Unit. Oosthuizen led investigations and testified in a variety of high-profile criminal cases, and was selected to lecture to candidate detectives.

“Prior to joining OSS, Oosthuizen was the chief operating officer of a specialist security firm providing polygraph, canine and investigative services. He completed the National Diploma in Police Administration and also holds a diploma in Psycho Physiological Detection.”

According to the intelligence sources, Oosthuizen is heading the OSS operation in Guinea. The sources have named nine other South Africans, mostly ex-SAPS officers, also working for OSS in Guinea, but say there are others involved. Some reports put the number as high as 50, but other sources say OSS has failed to recruit as many as it wanted, and that the actual figure is between 20 and 30.

The South Africans are training the presidential guards, marines and intelligence agents and providing security in some of the country’s mines.

The South Africans have also escorted considerable quantities of military equipment bought from Ukraine and smuggled into Conakry in defiance of an international arms embargo against Guinea, the sources say. .

They allege that OSS is being paid in gold and other mineral resources and that all the South Africans are armed and are acting as a special independent sub-unit of the presidency. That is creating tensions between them and the leadership of the Presidential Guard. Guard members have reportedly arrested some of the South Africans.

Ntsaluba suggested on Tuesday that the government’s concern was that if South Africans were involved, they were being used to prepare the junta for a violent ethnic clash. He said the South Africans would be training militias recruited largely from the ethnic group which supports the junta to prepare them for an expected negative reaction to the junta in the run-up to elections.

After seizing power in December last year, Camara had given the understanding that he would not run for office in the elections. But that had later changed, and civil society had reacted negatively, leading to the “carnage” on September 28, Ntsaluba said.

The military leadership, however, still seemed determined to run for office, and was expecting further negative reaction. “This is how the issue of the South Africans comes up. It is very significant for us. We love our country and we would not like to see it involved in nefarious actions, especially when those run counter to the policies of the African Union and would undermine our own foreign policy.”

The revelation about the South Africans embroiled in Guinea follows shortly after President Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea released British-born Simon Mann and four South Africans, including Niek du Toit, who had been jailed for long prison terms for trying to topple his government in a coup attempt that went badly awry in March, 2004.

Partly as a result, in 2006 the South African Parliament passed, and then-president Thabo Mbeki signed, the Prohibition of Mercenary Activity and Regulation of Certain Activities in Areas of Armed Conflict Act, making it illegal for South African citizens to serve in foreign armies or security forces abroad without first receiving permission from the South African government.

But legal experts say that even though the legislation had been signed, it had not come into effect as it had not been properly promulgated and no regulations had been published to implement it.”

When Prometheus stole fire from Zeus to help the beloved mortals he fashioned out of clay, Zeus punished him by having him bound to a rock while a great eagle ate his liver every day only to have it grow back to be eaten again the next day.

If Prometheus would have taken that raw passion, done better planning in identifying the needs of the stakeholders (there are always more than meets the eye) and infected them with the same passion would the Board, I mean Zeus, repeatedly attempt to kill his enthusiasm for innovative technology?

Leaders need vision.  Passion is the fuel that sustains vision.  The BIG mistake that I’ve learned when brining the fire of Open Source applications to an Enterprise Organization is that ALL of the STAKEHOLDERS HAVE NEEDS.  Not just C-Level leadership.  Not just IT.  Not just end users. Not just department sponsors.

For example, here are just a few additional players and things to consider:

Open Source Software is typically supported by an international community, and core developers which tend to form consulting groups. A lot of them can’t accept payment the same way commercial software vendors and consultants can. Accounts Payable has preferred methods of paying vendors.  Legal has specific types of contracts and agreements which may need alteration. What training resources are available and how do they prefer to work.  Is there supporting documentation or tech writers if not? The list goes on. . .

There is a complicated web – a string of relationships that all need to be prepared for Open Source.

Before a solution can be presented with confidence and certainty all of these factors must be considered.  Then and only than will all of the parties involved see how this new way of doing business will not only save money and increase productivity but BRING THE FIRE OF INNOVATION INTO THE RUT THAT CAN BE THE SAME OLD SAME OLD.

Though I have long been away I still live and wheeze. The weeks drag and life goes on.

On the OSS front, I have upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 and after fixing the mess they made of Pulseaudio in their distribution, I am very happy with it. The tools it gives me rock hard. I just turned some video into a video DVD quickly, cleanly and without error. The same process when in Windows land required $100 paid to Nero, triple the transcoding time, and many wasted discs. DVDStyler is great. I just wish I had found it before Nero had sucked up my cash. It also works in Windows. I have no idea why the Nero program took 90 minutes longer than DVDStyler to transcode, but the improved speed was great. My only issue was that I used text as chapter buttons in my project and it didn’t anti-alias that so I got “jaggies.”

Now I am looking for a good IDE and enough motivation to overcome my fear of C++. Any suggestions world?

Peter Yared wrote recently a BusinessWeek guest blog post called “Failure of Commercial Open Source Software.” Not surprisingly his post caused a lot of angry replies from people who work for COSS companies. “The emperor is not naked” they argued.

I believe that the COSS emperor is openly naked. And the discussion shouldn’t be whether COSS is a complete or a partial failure just because there are few successful exits that Peter neglected to mention. At the end of the day Peter’s comment that “selling software is miserable” is true. Every sales rep involved in selling COSS would agree (I’m interviewing many of them now). Selling COSS is no easier than selling any other form of software.

Any company using the word “open” should be able to explain the true cost of delivery (this is one of Peter’s points). And there is an obvious litmus test of openness of COSS companies: One that I would call “open pricing.” COSS companies should openly publish their price list and clearly mark what’s free and open and what’s paid and closed. Otherwise OSS is just a bait-and-switch to a familiar proprietary software tactic of customer lock-in. This is what OSS was supposed to get rid of in the first place.

Let’s take a look at some of COSS companies in the Business Intelligence space. The bait and switch is in a full swing here:

Jaspersoft: https://www.jaspersoft.com/jaspersoft-business-intelligence-suite-0 Let us prepare a custom quote for you.

Pentaho: http://www.pentaho.com/products/buy_bi_suite.php Request a Quote

Talend: http://www.talend.com/store/talend-store-inquiries.php A Talend account manager will be in touch shortly to provide information and/or a detailed quote.

We announced GoodData pricing earlier today and I would actually argue that we are a more open company than any of companies listed above. Our customers know exactly what service they get and how much it will cost.

We stick to our company motto: GoodData = BI – BS. And at there is a lot of BS going on in COSS space. It may actually be its biggest failure.

Full disclosure: I have been a big believer in open source since we opensourced NetBeans more than 10 years ago.

Tim O'Reilly, Ray Ozzie

Tim O’Reilly created a bit of a stir last night in the tech world by writing a thoughtful essay entitled “The War for the Web.” He’ll be expanding on his thoughts in his keynote address today at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. From the essay, here’s the core argument:

“[W]e’ve grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we’ve been readying ourselves for one dominant social network. But what happens when a company with one of these natural monopolies uses it to gain dominance in other, adjacent areas? I’ve been watching with a mixture of admiration and alarm as Google has taken their dominance in search and used it to take control of other, adjacent data-driven applications.

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. [emphasis added] Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

… P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

The coda there, with the Microsoft prediction, is what fascinated me – so much so that I mentioned it on Twitter. Tim immmediately responded, “Thanks. I should write a followup explaining the logic that got me to the PS.”  While we wait for that, though, here’s my prediction – with a bit of inside knowledge – today Microsoft begins to live up to Tim’s expectations with several announcements at our Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2009 in Los Angeles.

If you want to see the future of Microsoft, and the future of the web and computing as we see it, watch live as Ray Ozzie lays it out in his keynote address, streamed live today at 11:30 eastern time, 8:30 am Pacific, over at http://microsoftpdc.com/.

Oh – and if your Latin is rusty, my title above comes from the phrase ”Si vis pacem, para bellum” – the classic doctrine of maintaining peace & deterring war by being better armed and prepared. It is generally attributed to Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, a fourth-century AD Roman military scholar whom I consider the Sun Tzu of the West. I’ve known many fans of his philosophy in the Pentagon.

Now it may turn out that, whether they know it or not, Microsoft techies are building new ways to avoid a war on the open web. As Sun Tzu wrote,  ”To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue an enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” Watch our PDC this week to see examples of what I consider the modern technological acme of skill.

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La meilleure gifle du monde…

from nowhere, violente… et avec la morale qui va bien!

Je suis fan… Mon fils aura droit à la même au moins une fois dans sa vie… quelque en soit la raison!!

The Fourth FLOSS Workshop will take place in Jena (Germany) on July 1 and 2, 2010.

The call for papers is available at http://floss2010.pbworks.com, and can be downloaded at http://floss2010.pbworks.com/f/Call+for+Papers.pdf.

The theme of the workshop will be “Business models, social networks
and collaborative knowledge development”.

Two special guests will give introductory lectures about their research in that domain: Jürgen Bitzer will present his research on “Returns to Open Source Software Engagement: An Empirical Test of the Signaling Hypothesis”, and Rebeca Méndez-Durón will present her paper “Returns from Social Capital in Open Source Software Networks”.

Information about Jena is available on the workshop’s website (links at the top). Jena is a very pleasant and very old university town in what used to be East Germany. It is very well linked by high-speed trains from Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich.

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I dag etter jobb ska vi alle ansatte møte på apoteket å kose oss med gløgg og kake og noe førjulshandel Blir koselig, e gler me!

I går begynte det å snø, og det har fortsatt idag Litt koselig med kvit natur, men for mye av det trenge ikke komme.

Gültepe Halkevinde ilk okullara türkçe, matemetik, ingilizce  ders destek ve liselere yönelik ÖSS hazırlık Etüt çalışmaları başlıyor. Çalışmalar, haftasonları cumartesi-pazar günleri; lise öğrencileri için ise hafta içi akşamları olacak. Ayrıca Gültepe Halkevi bünyesinde kurulacak olan tiyatro ekibinin kayıtları devam etmektedir. Tüm kayıtlar Gültepe Halkevinden yapılmaktadır.

I dagtidlig kl.06:00 i bekmørket blei hundane og e vekt av reven som bjeffa og ulte rundt husveggen.