Their no nonsense introduction to the group on their page shows how committed they are to changing the society they live in.

Founded in 2012, Murtads Association of Singapore is a non-profit human rights organization existing to provide support, resources, legal aid, refuge, and outreach especially for former Muslims, Muslims who are leaving Islam, and non-Muslims struggling with situations that pertain with Islamic laws and culture in Singapore.

We at the Malaysian Atheists Organisation wish them all the best in their pursuit of justice and freedom, and will not hesitate to provide as much aid as we can to a much unjustifiably oppressed and maligned group.

This is a mirror of the original post on malaysianatheists.org.

That said, Johann Hari is back to his succinct but thorough analysis of the important issues that affect us at present — and it’s Ayn Rand’s turn this time.

If like me, you have no desire to read a series of books on morality that is now well-known in pop culture as promoting selfishness, but would still like the gist of the arguments without wasting further time, this is the podcast for you. Ayn Rand’s life and works given as thorough an overview as possible in about 17 minutes.

That said, I have never seen a form of unintentional physical comedy as funny as a group of senile army veterans doing buttock glorifying exercises in front of Ambiga’s home.

They are quite literally, displaying their arseholes and being arseholes at the same time.

Unfortunately for them, their protests may have had the opposite effect instead. After finding out that the last protest in front of Ambiga’s home involved people making it convenient to buy food, and the latest one with comedy worthy of Stephen Colbert — I feel envious of Ambiga and would invite such individuals to come set up shop in front of my house as soon as possible.

Preferably protesters who are selling vegan burgers and Japanese tea, because if you are selling conventional non-vegan food, you are unlikely to make any money from me for the rest of your life..

In terms everyone can understand, this means I have not seen nor am I planning to watch The Avengers despite the frequent good reviews. Nor shall I be watching the last instalment of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Night Knight or Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit.

Someone made a very short film that humorously combined geek fantasy, copyright policy, and advertising. No reason to skip this film, as it probably takes longer to brew tea that to watch the film.

Perhaps now you are further enlightened by my position.

In this case, the opening to a parody / tribute animé about Lovecraft affectionately named Haiyore! Nyaruko.

Read our report at the following link.

Kok Sen Wai has a personal write-up too on his blog.

And music to celebrate the chaotic optimism of it all.

Highlights include a 48 node 192 core server designed to run efficiently enough to allow you to run it in your house as opposed to your garage, the future of the HUD and the way it will change the way we interact with computers, and an excellent introduction of the current Ubuntu philosophical view of precision and reliability, such that all rolling releases should be usable.

If you are a geek, you owe it to yourself to watch this video.

This is merely a simple dictionary program, so I expected everything to proceed without issue if I were to build the program myself from source. Although I am no developer, I was pretty confident in my abilities to build from source seeing as I regularly build and install mplayer2, smplayer2, and ffmpeg on a regular weekly basis.

That confidence has been shattered by my inability to install a usable version of gWaei from source. My heart felt like it had been transmuted into a black hole of despair, sucking all substance of hope and joy into a bottomless pit of damnation; when I saw this message pop up in the Terminal after successfully running “sudo make install”:

gwaei: symbol lookup error: gwaei: undefined symbol: lw_dictinfolist_load_order

I have no idea what that means, and attempts to decipher it had only proven to me the shallowness of my grasp of the art of building packages in Linux.

So instead, here is my newbie-proof method of running a working version of gWaei which I finally cobbled together after 10 hours spent working on the problem (interrupted by sleep, breakfast, and a few videos). I assume the reader has a basic working knowledge of installing and removing packages. Basically, I replaced the gWaei that came in the Precise Pangolin repository with the older but functional version in the Oneiric Ocelot repository. Comment below if further clarification is required.

(Un)Install Packages from Precise Pangolin Repository

1. Install Synaptic Package Manager if you have yet to install it.
2. Find edict in Synaptic and install.
3. Install kanjipad.
4. Uninstall gWaei 3.2.0b1-1 (if you had previously installed it).

Install Packages from Oneiric Ocelot Repository

1. Install the libwaei1 package.
2. Install  the 3.0.2–1 gWaei package.
3. Ignore warnings of obsoleteness.
4. Install kanjipad.

Downloading and Installing Dictionaries

Don’t bother downloading the dictionaries via the gWaei interface if you have crappy bandwidth. It will most probably time out. Instead download them separately. The easiest way to do it is to run wget from the terminal.

wget ftp://ftp.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/edict.gz
wget ftp://ftp.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/enamdict.gz
wget http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/examples.gz

I got those paths from the “Select Dictionaries…” screen in gWaei. Don’t bother getting the Kanji Dictionary separately. It won’t be correctly installed by gWaei, which is why I installed edict before proceeding.

What you really need is the English Dictionary, which will give the all important English-Japanese-English translation. After selecting “English Dictionary” point the source to edict.gz, which you downloaded separately right?

To install the dictionary for “Kanji Dictionary”, the simple way is to copy the necessary files from edict over to the gWaei configuration folder, because the simple way provided was not functioning.

Copy kanjidic (or all the dictionaries if it pleases you) from /usr/share/edict to ~/.config/gwaei/dictionaries/kanji.

Optional

• Replace Source in “Names and Places Dictionary” with the path to enamdict.gz.
• Replace Source in “Examples Dictionary” with the path to examples.gz.

Prevent Update in Synaptic

1. Find gWaei in Synaptic Package Manager and left click.
2. Under Package in the menubar, select Lock Version to ensure gWaei is not upgraded to the latest version in the repository at the next update cycle when using Synaptic to update.

Prevent Update in apt-get

1. Run “sudo touch /etc/apt/preferences.d/pin-gwaei” in the terminal.
2. Run “gksu gedit /etc/apt/preferences.d/pin-gwaei” and enter the following text
   

   Package: gwaei
   Pin: version 3.0.2-1ubuntu1
   Pin-Priority: 1001

3. And save.

What Doesn’t Work

Searching via radicals.

Conclusion

This seems like overkill. Some may just buy a Dead Tree Edition™ of a Japanese-English-Japanese dictionary instead of trying to figure out why a program that previously installed without issue suddenly decides to fight tooth-and-nail against the idea of Just Working™.

It isn’t overkill for me. I love this program, and I hope the package maintainer for Ubuntu manages to fix this issue. It is a shame that such a good program will remain broken in the much awaited Long Term Support version of Ubuntu.

UPDATES

Yes. A nice big heading to highlight what I missed and need to fix.

1. I realised very quickly that locking the version in Synaptic would not prevent upgrades to gWaei using the Update Manager or apt-get variants. The solution is to pin the version, which I have added just below the section on preventing updates.
2. Moved kanjipad to be installed from the Precise repository. No reason to install it from Oneiric.