This week I will be upgrading a box to Ubuntu Gutsy with Chinese language support… and I don’t speak Chinese…

(via xkcd)
What are *.chm files? A CHM file is a Microsloth Compressed HTML Help file in a proprietary format (how retarded… no, correct that… differently-abled) for online help files.
To view chm files in Ubuntu… one option is to install this gnome-flavoured reader:
sudo aptitude install gnochm
It works!
=============================
Description: CHM file viewer for GNOME
Gnochm is a Compiled HTML Help (CHM) file viewer for GNOME systems.
Features are:
* Support for external ms-its links
* Full text search support
* Bookmarks
* Configurable support for HTTP links
* Integrated with GNOME2
* Support for multiple languages
* Support to open multiple files at once
Homepage: http://gnochm.sourceforge.net/
MP Garth Turner has the lowdown on the lowly performance on our prime minister these past few days:
Over the weekend, our country emerged as the major stumbling block to a group of more than 50 nations deciding to do something serious about climate change. With PMSH leading the charge, we prevented the Commonwealth from showing leadership, by declining leadership. We insisted on a watering-down of integrity, a retreat down from the moral high ground, and have opted once again to follow the tepid and discredited environmental lead of the faltering United States.
How much Canada has wavered, in a mere twenty-two months. Mr. Harper broke the Kelowna Accord with First Nations, the Atlantic Accord with Maritimers, the Income Trust promise with investors, the vow to control spending with his own supporters and the Kyoto Accord with the civilized world. He’s sown more seeds of division with his Quebecois Nation resolution and his electoral bill favouring Alberta over Ontario. He apparently tried to cover up key information in the Schreiber-Mulroney affair and he has made a mockery of promises to make government more accountable and democratic. He’s thrown MPs overboard who disagreed with his control-freak style and muzzled even cabinet ministers while seeking to manipulate the free press.
More here…
Michael Herr’s trippy fascinating recollection of his time as a journalist during the Vietnam War - first published in the 1970s - is not about Iraq:
Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it a secret history.
Nope… doesn’t sound like today at all, does it?
Arrrghh… Seriously… Doesn’t anyone in the high councils of war read??!! How does FUBAR keep crashing down? This is not ancient Peloponnesian War stuff… surely someone in the Bush Gang remembers something from their draft dodging days of yore…
Demilitarized Zone / head for the Green Zone / head up in the Ozone… So much for the Golden Age of Journalism…
Thumbs and toes way up… Terrific terrific read…