Without a Traceroute

For reasons that are beyond me, the Dutch find this comedy sketch absolutely hysterical. I mean, it’s sort of funny, I guess. I’ve seen this comedian Dunham before, and I even have friends who really enjoy his act. Humor is naturally a subjective thing, and far be it from me to criticize your taste in ventriloquist prop-comics. What’s really weird to me is that the Dutch don’t seem to be big Jeff Dunham fans in general, it’s something about this particular character that they find really uproarious.

I was at a birthday party last night, and somebody asked me, “So do you know ‘Achmed the dead terrorist’?” and when I confessed that I was only familiar with Achmed from the TV commercials advertising his ringtone (we’ll get to those), they turned off the music, loaded up youtube and watched the entire 10-minute Achmed bit. I found it kind of funny on the first viewing; the Dutch kids LOVED it on what was surely a repeat viewing for most, if not all, of them.

The worst part is the catchphrase, “SILENCE! I kill you!” which was “heh”-worthy exactly once, but which Dunham repeats about a half-dozen times in the span of a ten-minute set until it’s like nails on a chalkboard.

Now, lest you think I am overgeneralizing from a small, Achmed-loving sample, I need to tell you that I first became aware of the existence of Achmed from a series of TV commercials inviting viewers to download his catchphrase as a (video?) ringtone for their phone. These commercials air seemingly continuously on Dutch TV, and are probably the most annoying adverts since the Jamba/Jamster “Crazy Frog” mysteriously became wildly popular. For added measure, the commercial impressively works in the catchphrase twice in the space of a 15 second spot.

However, Achmed is also a star of the Dutch intarwebs. When browsing with a Dutch ISP, at least every third site you visit will bring you face to face with a banner ad like this one:

If you want to be annoyed, the ads point here.

Why any sane human being would consent to having the Achmed catchphrase repeated endlessly as the ringtone on their mobile phone is beyond me. Evidently, it’s popular enough in the Netherlands that it’s worth not just creating such a ringtone, but spending a lot of money to promote it as a “gratis” (free) download, which presumably ropes the unfortunate downloader into direct marketing or some sort of paid subscription.

Suffice it to say, I don’t get it. The Achmed bit is kind of funny once, and perhaps interesting as a mildly racist cultural relic of the early 21th century, but nothing more than that. Anyone else want to take a crack at this? Tell me why the Achmed bit is really funny? Or why you love Jeff Dunham? Or psychoanalyze an entire nation, why do the Dutch love Achmed so much?

UPDATE: Less than 24 hours after I made this post, I noticed in my server log that I got a hit from somebody searching for “download achmed videoringtone” on google.nl and finding my page. Wow.

Yesterday, August 16th, was the 15-year anniversary of the first release of the Debian Linux distribution. This makes Debian, along with Slackware, one of the oldest Linux distros still being actively developed.

The name Debian is a portmanteau of project-founder Ian Murdock’s name with his then-girlfriend’s (now ex-wife’s) name, Debra. The lesson: don’t use girlfriends’ names for tattoos or software projects. Debian is famous for taking the concept of free software incredibly seriously. They even re-branded the Firefox browser as “Iceweasel”, because the name “Firefox” and attendant logos are trademarked by the Mozilla Corporation and the Debian project felt the terms of their use were incompatible with their policies on free software.

Debian is important for historical reasons, but also because it serves a base for numerous other popular distributions such as Ubuntu, Xandros (which is the default OS on the popular eee PC) and KNOPPIX.

While there are many people who do run Debian as their primary OS, I’ve always thought that it was in this aspect that Debian truly excelled–as a large pool of stable software for other distro developers to draw upon. The Debian project is nothing if not ambitious: it includes over 18,000 software packages and supports eleven different hardware architectures, most of which you’ve probably never heard of. You can run Debian on everything from the ARM chip which likely powers your cell phone, to giant IBM mainframes (your desktop computer is most likely an x86 architecture).

But trying to do so much inevitably leads to shortcomings. Debian has been famously plagued by slow release cycles, almost 3 years passed between woody and sarge (all Debian releases are named for Toy Story characters). As a desktop OS, Debian lacks the polish of desktop-focused distros like Ubuntu or SuSE. Debian has been accused of lacking focus, with resulting conflict and controversy between different developer communities.

But for the most part, Debian does a fantastic job of providing quality code, and it’s even more to the developers’ credit since they labor in relative obscurity on a massive workhorse project, not on the latest flashy project at the top of the DistroWatch list. And hey, any distribution that comes with its own manifesto is alright by me (I’ve always wanted to write a manifesto!).