A year ago the Internets were littered by Ron Paul news stories, it was painful to read Digg with all the gaming his advocates were doing to get Paul’s word out to the population. But as I knew he wasn’t going to get the Republican chrism to run for President, I avoided reading more about him.

Since last night’s charge of the presidential election, I gave him a chance though. I never read the biographies of politicians, as I am not interested in their past, marriage, religion, or their lives in general. I am interested only in their political positions and the day forward. And so I sat down and read Ron Paul’s.

Reading about his foreign policy, it became very clear to me that the guy is a xenophobe. Sure, as a non-US citizen it’s nice to hear that he wanted to withdraw troops from around the world, bring them home and stop messing around with third world countries, but when reading that he also wanted to withdraw USA from the UN/NATO/etc, and instead secure the borders adamantly and create harsh laws for immigrants, it became very clear to me that the reason for his non-imperialistic position was not pacifism, but xenophobia. He seems to be the kind of guy who longs for the idealistic, growing America of the late ’40s, early ’50s. Problem is, this is 2008.

Some of his internal policies were ok (smaller government, no surveillance), some were very Republican-ish and unfair (e.g. gay, capital punishment, abortion issues). But it’s that xenophobia vibe I get that would make me to never have rooted for him. In fact, McCain and all his shortcomings, seems 10 times better to me that Ron Paul as a candidate.

Ultimately, apart from my favorite Mike Gravel (read the link for his liberal positions) who opted out early in the race, the best guy won, and that’s Obama.

I have a b43-based broadcom BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01) chipset for wifi on my 1.5 years old DELL laptop (almost the same model as the one DELL originally sold Ubuntu with), but the b43 module is very unstable: it drops the connection after a few minutes. So I have to use ndiswrapper. I installed the firmware just fine, and blacklisted ssb, and b43 in order to force ndiswrapper to load.

Unfortunately, even after having blacklisted ssb, it still loads and takes control of the wireless chipset and simply does not let ndiswrapper to do its thing. It loads the “b43-pic-bridge” driver instead of letting ndiswrapper to use its “wl” one.

The reason for ssb loading EVEN if it’s blacklisted, it’s because of the b44 ethernet driver which is loaded automatically, that also needs ssb. You see, this DELL laptop has both a b43 and a b44 chipset in there, and so even if I have b43 and ssb blacklisted, b44 keeps loading ssb back before ndiswrapper is. And so ssb takes control of the wifi chipset (with the b43 driver blacklisted, so it doesn’t load any driver, it just keeps the control tight), and poor ndiswrapper fails.

This is a chicken and the egg problem btw, but I didn’t have these problems with the older Ubuntu, because it didn’t use the b44/b43/ssb modules back then for these chipsets. Now that it does, this needs to be fixed somehow. Either they need to fix the b43 module to be rock solid so I don’t need to use ndiswrapper, or fix the ssb problem to allow ndiswrapper take control over the wifi chipset.

I filed a bug report. The way to go around it is to also blacklist b44, and then manually load it on startup after the ndiswrapper line on the /etc/modules file (so it loads ssb after ndiswrapper has already taken control of the chipset). But obviously this needs fixing.

I am not an American citizen, so I couldn’t vote yesterday. But I am very happy that Obama won the presidency, as I believe that this president is destined to change America, and the world. This was the first time in my life that I cried for a political reason. Obama’s speech was inspirational, as it wasn’t a triumphed speech, but a “this is when the work starts” one. He even mentioned “the world” in several occasions in his speech, while McCain only mentioned “America”. Obama even mentioned how the world would be in 100 years from now, which is a big thing for an American president to say, given that in the past most wouldn’t mention things passed 4 or 5 years. That’s the big difference between the two candidates, and why Obama is important.

However, I can’t say that when I look at the election’s results from a 10,000 ft view I am happy with them. When taking the popular vote into account, there was only 5% of overall difference between the two candidates (5.7 million votes of difference out of 130 million votes). To my liberal mind, Obama just made sense and McCain didn’t. So having only 52% of the US agreeing with common sense, is still troublesome to me.

The only major city-counties that came close to my ideal election result (ideal as in, how it makes sense to my mind) are the cities I always loved: San Francisco and Boston. Both cities, voted ~80% for Obama each! These are progressive cities, liberal, and full of techies. My own kind of people. I feel blessed to be living in the Silicon Valley, near SF.

Washington DC also voted for Obama: an astonishing 93%. While there is a big african american population living there, it also has some of the youngest population, and people who work in the White House and see how things are running there on a daily basis. The fact that DC voted so highly for “change” it just shows how much change is needed! It’s a testament that something was wrong in the White House in the first place!

The rest of the US (with the exception of Hawaii, and the younger voters) was less impressive. Evidence to this are all the gay-related propositions (I think there were 5 throughout the US). All 5 results were against the gay rights. Even in California, which is considered progressive, the rural Christian fundamentalists voted for Prop8 (at least at 62% of the precincts as I write this, “yes on prop8″ is ahead by 4.5%). Most of the Silicon Valley residents voted against, but they were not enough. Heck, even most of LA voted for Prop8, LA for Christ’s sake.

So there’s more time that America needs to be as progressive and modern as SF and Boston are today. At least 20-25 years. The next generation that is.