The Inferno

Ye gods, what a terrific slab o’ wax!

The new Nile album was released on Nov 3rd and I got it on Nov 6th. After spinning it nonstop from then until now, I feel I’m qualified to write a review.

The album starts with Kafir!, which is Arabic for “Nonbeliever” or “Infidel” or some other quaint concept. An excellent intro riff, with some standard Middle-Eastern sounding chants, juxtaposed with Nile’s typical brutality. The refrain of “There is No God but God” is taken from the Koran and is probably meant to symbolize the Islamic takeover of Egypt. However, this happened thousands of years after the Pharaohs, so the conection is tenuous at best. Either way, the song is a crusher, if historically inaccurate.

Hittite Dung Incantation and Utterances of the Crawling Dead have sinuous main riffs that get your foot tapping. At blistering speeds of 400 mph, the rhythm section weaves like a wounded tiger in the long grass. Great stuff.

The title track is pretty strong, with a fairly typical Nile-esque refrain.

4th Arra of Dagon wins points for the Lovecraftian reference. The ending, starting 5:29 is simple but very effective, easily the catchiest part on the whole album. Where does Karl come up with these riffs?

Permitting…. is the speediest song on an album with no slow parts. Some very fine technical brutal death metal, for you novitiates. A marked contrast to Yezd…., which is all slow drums and meant to be some sort of funeral drum dirge. Melancholy and making full use of those chants again, stuff like this is Nile’s trademark.

Kem Khefa Kheshef is solid, merrilly drilling its way into your brain as it winds its way to completion. Kollias is a monster! The Eye of Ra is another blistering track, none of that soft stuff on this track.

Iskander D’hul Karnon is a very strong finish to a monstrous album. “Alexander in Karnak”? I don’t know, maybe no one does. We have the little hammer off at the end of a riff, followed by a slower part that slowly speeds up and gives us an excellent end to a bodacious album. If the long slide reminds you of Annihilation of the Wicked, well, that’s a good thing, right?

4.5 stars out of 5

Until I was 21, I too stood at attention, sombrely mute as the poppies rained. Then I asked myself: Why am I doing this? What’s the point of this?

Any endeavour can be judged by the measure of its success. So, what are the goals of Remembrance Day? I’ve been asking around and several people say several things, but there are two recurring major themes: commemorate the dead, and make sure it never happens again.

So let us deal with both these issues one by one. First, the second:

“Never Again” is a joke. It, and by it, I mean disastrous, calamitous war will happen again and again. Our mammalian brains are too small to figure out that killing everything that stands in our way isn’t the best way to get to the end of the road. That aside, by any definition of “Never Again”, this goal falls well short. If you mean the “Never Again” of the Holocaust, well, we found a way around that. When it turned out that what was happening in Yugoslavia was genocide, we coined a new term for it: Ethnic Cleansing. Presto, it’s not the word genocide, ergo we don’t have to do much to stop it. The same goes for the Desaparecidos in Argentina and Chile. But I digress. If the goal of Remembrance Day is to teach kids that war is a bad thing and must not happen again, it has failed spectacularly. There are more wars on now than at any other point in human history. There are entire legions of military men who grimly measure the efficacy of a war by the number of casualties, and are only somewhat mollified to be on the side with less corpses for cordwood. There is also more slavery now than at any other point in history, but that’s a topic for another day. So, by the metric of reduction in outbreaks in war, Remembrance Day is about as successful as a dope-free Olympic athlete. Let me drive the point home in case you haven’t gotten it yet. If there was a Computers Day tomorrow to celebrate the reduction in ubiquity of computers in our daily lives, how many of you would snicker: “That’s bullshit!”?

Second, the first:

By far the most common argument I hear to my counter-argument is “But they died so we could live well!” or “Their sacrifices enable us to live in freedom” and so on. This claim is quite easily dissectable as well, it just needs a bit of distance. Which war are we talking about here? We can examine each one in a bit of detail:

World War I: By far the most “official” war behind Remembrance Day, we hail these heroes who perished on the blood-soaked fields of Europe for freedom. By now, you should be allergic to propaganda-laden terms such as “heroes” and “freedom”. Whose freedom exactly? In 1918, as Europe fought for “freedom”, it willingly denied this “freedom” to the remaining 9/10ths of the globe, which it brutally subjugated under various pretexts, the most savage of which was racist imperialism. So, these men were dying for whose freedom exactly? The answer is: theirs and theirs ALONE. Lest any of these uppity colonies think that the European theatre of war might in some way give them their freedom, the colonialists were united in their ferocious obliteration of any indigenous freedom struggles in all the areas they controlled. This reduces the people fighting in the War to simple serfs answering the call of Empire. These people fought so that their Empire would stand, so that “the sun would never set on the British Empire”, an empire dedicated in its racist ideology. In effect, these people prolonged the continued existence of one of the most odious institutions of the previous century. If we still insist on remembering them, then why aren’t we commemorating every serf since time immemorial who has died for his king and country? There have been millions, where are the poppies for those poor bastards?
World War II: Essentially the same logic as the previous world war. People fighting and dying for the sake of their Queen/King/Fuhrer to better land claims and deny rights to others. Black and brown people for the Commonwealth, the Jews for Hitler, the Chinese and Southeast Asians for the Japanese. So, is it a noble thing to die fighting for one’s freedom while at the same time denying it to others? You tell me. If you believe it is, the poppies await. How seriously would you take the words of a slave-owner from the plantations of Alabama, circa 1810, if he started talking about freedom? Think about it.
Korea, Vietnam: Cold war proxies between the two superpowers. The real heroes were the draft dodgers who realized they were being played for fools and got out as soon as they could.
Afghanistan, Iraq: Wars used to make oil tycoons even richer. Oh and rape and pillage people in the name of liberation. Very hard to find anything heroic in these wars.

So, commemorate away and attend the services if you still think it’s meaningful. Or examine the reasons behind standing there and let me know if anything strikes you.

Recently, I had to install the Citrix client to access some Windows Terminal Services from home, for work. The instructions for installing Citrix on 32-bit Linux are fairly straightforward, but on 64-bit Kubuntu, the whole thing fell apart. Here’s what you should do to get it going.

Download the client tarball from citrix.com, linuxx86-11.0.140395.tar.gz in this case.

Untar it to a folder of your choice

cd /tmp

mkdir citrix

mv linuxx86-11.0.140395.tar.gz citrix/

cd citrix

tar xvzf linuxx86-11.0.140395.tar.gz

Now you’ll see some subfolders, including the setupwfc script.

When I launched it with

sudo ./setupwfc

I got the errors:

No target setupwfc.msg found under /tmp/citrix/. for en

No target HINST..msg found under /tmp/citrix for en

My locale is set to English and it’s UTF-8 and Canada and all that, so the script was clearly buggy. But we know shell scripts, so armed with a knife between our teeth, we go pearl-diving.

Open setupwfc in a text editor, kwrite for example and change line 400 from

tr_file "$TR_DIR_KEY" "$FIND_TOP_DIR/nls/${Lang}/$TARGET"

to

tr_file "LDN" "/tmp/citrix/nls/en/setupwfc.msg"

This forces the installer to find the setupwfc.msg file, which is just a silly file with setup messages. This fixes the first line of the error. To fix the second line of the error, the one about the HINST.msg not being found, open /tmp/citrix/linuxx86/hinst and replace line 308, which is

tr_file "$TR_DIR_KEY" "$FIND_TOP_DIR/nls/${Lang}/$TARGET"

with

tr_file "LDN" "/mnt/common/Downloads/citrix/nls/en/hinst.msg"

If you must know, the first argument to tr_file is some sort of key generator and the argument previously passed in was “UDN”, which looked for an uppercase-named file. Passing in “LDN” fixes it, and the second argument is just to eliminate that pesky dot that creeps into the file path. That’s my understanding based on a cursory perusal of the setup file. Any gurus, feel free to correct me.

Now, we get the installer and it actually installs the files into /usr/lib/ICAClient.

But our fun is only just beginning. Manually copy over the files that the wretched installer failed to copy.

sudo cp /tmp/citrix/linuxx86/linuxx86.cor/nls/en/wfclient.ini /usr/lib/ICAClient/config/wfclient.ini

sudo cp /tmp/citrix/linuxx86/linuxx86.cor/nls/en/appsrv.ini /usr/lib/ICAClient/config/appsrv.ini

sudo cp /tmp/citrix/linuxx86/linuxx86.cor/nls/en/module.ini /usr/lib/ICAClient/config/module.ini

Also copy the first two to your local folder.

cp /tmp/citrix/linuxx86/linuxx86.cor/nls/en/appsrv.ini ~/.ICAClient/appsrv.ini

cp /tmp/citrix/linuxx86/linuxx86.cor/nls/en/wfclient.ini ~/.ICAClient/wfclient.ini

Now the client is installed, but still won’t run. You need to install the 32-bit libmotif3 binaries, since the Citrix client is strictly 32 bit. To do that, follow these instructions:

cd /tmp
mkdir motif
cd motif
wget http://ftp.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/o/openmotif/libmotif3_2.2.3-2_i386.deb
dpkg -x libmotif3_2.2.3-2_i386.deb .
sudo cp -r usr/lib/* /usr/lib32/
sudo ln -s /usr/lib32/libXm.so.3 /usr/lib32/libXm.so.4

Once you’ve done that, install your trusted certificates in your browser. We’ll assume you use Firefox since that’s what I use. Copy over all your installed certificates:

sudo cp /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/* /usr/lib/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts/

Without this step, you get the dreaded Error 61:

“You have not chosen to trust “XYZ-Trust Authority-TrustCenter-TSL-22”, the issuer of the server’s security certificate (SSL error 61)”

Once all of the above is done, go to the website you can connect to your WTS session from, and in Firefox, set

/usr/lib/ICAClient/wfica

to be the default handler for .ica files.

We’re done, hope this helped someone.