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Incredible, "summer" continues for yet another week.
The news is filled with reports on the ghastly situation in East Timor. As
correctly pointed out by some commentators, the whole mess will very likely
burn UN credibility very badly in the developing countries and (re-)emerging
ethnical regions, even though it is the Indonesian government that must bear
the blame for now not keeping the militia forces in line.
It seemed headstrong, not to say incredibly naive, for the UN to go into
such a volatile region and guarantee a referendum on independence,
with no backing or apparent contingency plans, however well-meant. Predictably,
a decisive majority voted for full independence, not surprisingly triggering
a backlash.
There was never any clear indication of to what extent the central government
was prepared to go against its own military (whose feelings on the issue
were well-known) in case of an independence vote -- events prove that it
was not. Apparently, it is content to make public shows of mild distress,
while letting the chaos on the ground destroy any "risk" of the results being
implemented any time soon.
The only question is whether the military forces in the region are just remaining
passive, or are in fact actively encouraging the pro-Indonesian militia to
mayhem. I expect we will soon see imposition of martial law to guarantee
"public safety", which will allow a final clean-up of oppositionals.
Recent history of well-meaning interventions into regional conflicts, whether
by the UN or by Western military forces, is decidedly nothing that would
today inspire any great comfort for a people who are looking for help against
acts of aggression. In fact, a good case could be made that the "cure" has
often turned out worse than the original struggle.
I finally got around to unpacking and installing the new version of
NoteTab (Light) that I had downloaded the other day
www.notetab.com . For simple text editing, and
sometimes not-so-simple tasks, the older SuperNoteTab (version 2.63e)
has been something of a mainstay on my system. I especially appreciated the
"strip html" and "convert characters to html". Well, now with version 4.6,
I was to say the least curious about what has happened to the program over
a couple of years. It is perhaps an indication of the problem-free utility
of the old version that I had felt no great urge to check for a later version
during all this time.
The preliminary verdict on the new version is that the upgrade is worthwhile.
This is still a no-nonsense text editor, and the added features are non-obtrusive
yet easily accessed. Perhaps the single most useful addition for me was the
"convert document to html" -- a one-step creation of a clean-html document
from any text. So, it is minimal, but sometimes that is the point, and there
was an interesting twist to it, because NoteTab has an "outline" format (very
simple to create) which when html'ed automatically creates the header-link
into, then the respective sections with link back to top at the end of each.
This seems perfect for converting the translation text I have been working
on to the webpages this will eventually be.
Jerry Pournelle
reported
(last week's view and mail) that when he downloaded NoteTab Pro
the download settings in his system (registry entries) were replaced with
some kind of vendor "download wizard", causing considerable grief since it
had installed itself permanently. This must be specific to IE5 downloading,
because I experienced no problems of any kind downloading the ZIP file.
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The
update-link (above) points to where I last added
some text, which should simplify your keeping up to speed. Of course, this
assumes I remember to move it, and you may still have to scroll back a bit
and see if I've updated more than once since you last visited, but that is
easily done.