Ludwig von Mises on Marxian ideology

Wow, this must be the most direct criticism of Marxism and its focus on the "proletarian class" I have seen in a long time. Let me quote the closing paragraph of the chapter:

> The essence of Marxian philosophy is this: We are right because we are
the spokesmen of the rising proletarian class. Discursive reasoning cannot
invalidate our teachings, for they are inspired by the supreme power that
determines the destiny of mankind. Our adversaries are wrong because they
lack the intuition that guides our minds. It is, of course, not their fault that
on account of their class affiliation they are not equipped with the genuine
proletarian logic and are blinded by ideologies. The unfathomable decrees
of history that have elected us have doomed them. The future is ours.

You can read the rest in
Human Action
(a [3MB PDF](http://www.mises.org/humanaction/pdf/humanaction.pdf) is available), pages 76--82.

SELinux Loadable Policy Modules

A new SELinux feature which makes local SELinux policy adjustments much easier was not easy to notice
among all the complaints that SELinux is hard to use.

The `audit2allow` tool should be well-known by now:
given a snippet of the audit log, it outputs policy rules to allow all operations that are are currently prohibited.
The user is expected to add the rules to the (large) policy, recompile the policy and load it.
Finding the "right" place in the policy is not always obvious, though, and a future update of the `selinux-policy`
package might overwrite the modifications.

Now there is an alternative, very convenient especially when trying to extend the policy to handle a new daemon:
Run

> `audit2allow -M` modulename `-i` audit_log_file

This will create a binary loadable module modulename`.pp` that can be quickly loaded by

> `semodule -i` modulename`.pp`

or unloaded using

> `semodule -r` modulename

The `audit2allow` command also creates modulename`.te`, a plain-text representation of the module,
which can be edited and compiled to create a changed binary loadable module, or used as a basis for
patches to the default SELinux policy.

Fedora Translation

[David](http://lovesunix.net/blog/?p=54), while the documentation for translators is not great,
the [Translation Project](http://fedora.redhat.com/About/Projects/translations/) pages contain enough
to get you started, and people on fedora-trans-list usually respond quite quickly.

Besides [the official status pages](http://i18n.redhat.com/cgi-bin/i18n-status) there are also
[my pages](http://carolina.mff.cuni.cz/~trmac/fedora-i18n.html), where you can download the latest `.po` files.

The Elements of Programming Style

I have happened to notice our school library provides this book, written by [Kernighan](http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/bwk/) and [Plauger](http://www.plauger.com/).

I found the guidelines not as surprising as the fact that our library has a copy---the book is a classic, after all,
and often quoted. Although some of the guidelines are Fortran-specific, most of them are still valid; it was
useful to read them all in one place.

I found other aspects of the book much more interesting, though:

You can't please everyone

[Include Mono](https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-extras-list/2005-March/msg00279.html)
or [not](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=177604),
somebody will always want the opposite.

Ugly design tends to imply bugs

Quoting the `tcsh` manual page:

>

>

break

>

Causes execution to resume after the end of the nearest enclosing
> foreach or while.
> The remaining commands on the current line are executed. Multi-level breaks are thus possible by writing
> them all on one line.

>

"The remaining commands on the current line are executed".

Tomcat must have noticed my blog

... because it ruined my servlet redesign by crashing the server when a servlet calls `java.lang.Class.forName()`.

*Update*: Apparently tomcat is innocent and it is all my fault for causing an infinite recursion (by mapping
a single servlet to `/*` and trying to forward the request to `/WEB-INF/some-page.jsp`).
I'm a bit disappointed that a misbehaving application can bring the whole application server down so easily.