Microsofts view of Linux users, and how to convince them of Windows. I don't like linking to Microsoft stuff, and especially not to Microsoft FUD (the flash presentation of theirs will in turn try to bring you to their "get the facts" wrong site...) However, for Linux evangelists it's a good opportunity to see Microsofts strategy at attacking Linux, and where we should improve to counter their claims (e.g. with respect to mangeability). It's also nice to see that they actually feel oblieged to counter SAMBA and other Linux technology, and that especially in the networking part they have little to claim to be superior. And also for Samba all they claim is "higher value because of better integration and manageability". And I definitely have to agree that management of a larger Linux network isn't easy, and we could do with some better tools. (And especially tools to do tools for network management; we have different requirements, and there are good tools, but they are either hard to roll out and customize - cfengine -, or too primitive to be of use to many - webmin etc.) Still the average Linux administrator does manage a significantly higher number of servers than a Windows admin, so their claim actually is incorrect. And it's totally absurd they claim to be better in security with Exchange. Maybe better than their older crap, but I still would never ever trust a Microsoft system for Email... just remember all those bad email vacation notices etc. Microsoft delivers... So: know your "enemy"s tactics.

Recently I was reading a website (can’t remember which) that listed right brain v. left brain characteristics. Well I never saw a list that I so identified with, ever. The problem was I only could see myself in the “right-brain” side (with a few exception) and I was left wondering if my left brain was non-existent, or if still there, shriveled up like a pea. Now I am looking for exercises to strengthen the left side of my brain and have found a few of them but they all cost money so I am still looking around for some freebies. In the process of searching I also found this list Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better which really has some great, great tips in there for general learning and lots of good links to tool that can help you out.

More feedback on the water heating. Rafael Villar Burke wrote:

"Most regulations already mandate that. This requirement conflicts with how performant are low temperature heating systems, as most solar ones... so, to be safe, they're less efficient."

Joe Buck commented:

"If you have small children, and set your hot water heater at 60C, expect to take them to the hospital with second-degree burns on a regular basis."

Even if it was 60C at a tap, it will still take 6 seconds to burn, according to Burn Safety: Hot Water Temperature, but I was talking about storage tanks, not a water heater. Sorry if that was unclear. After running around the house floors and walls to get to a tap from the storage tanks, it's never going to be at 60C unless your pipes are super-insulated or your water flow is very fast (unlikely, as most tank-fed systems won't have much head).

We're spending the week in Surfside, TX enjoying a bit of post-SXSW de-connectivity before plunging back into the fray. I'm catching up on some software projects for Wikitravel and some other projects as well. It's pretty fun. Surfside is really beautiful -- fine white sand, gentle waves from the Gulf, flocks of brown pelicans passing by our deck in the morning. There's been some damage to the village due to Hurricane Rita and long-term erosion, but it's still really fun. And not particularly over-run, even during Spring Break this weekend. We've got a few hundred yards of beautiful beach in front of our house practically to ourselves. The downside has been that the vacation home we rented doesn't have the WiFi coverage we'd hoped for. We had the Mayor of Surfside (!) over at our house yesterday trying to set up a directional antenna so we could get a bitstream from the volunteer fire department, but no luck. So I'm doing updates at the restobar on the main street, and then editing offline at home. It's been great playing in the sand and waves with Amita June. This is her first time really playing on the beach, and she's having a great time. tags: travel surfside texas amita june wikitravel

Montreal Gazette article A few weeks ago I met with local reporter Steve Faguy about Wikitravel, living in Montreal, and wikis and technology in general. He wrote a great profile of me and Wikitravel, a sidebar about my blog (!), a description of wiki and a list of good wikis. I like the story; it's well-written, and Steve knows enough about technology to write a good article while still making it accessible for non-professionals. I also like the image of me; that's a pretty good shot of me. The one omission I am kicking myself for was failing to note that Montreal will be the location of not one but two Wiki conferences this year. RoCoCoCamp is 18-20 May, and WikiSym is in October. Ray King calls Portland (Oregon) "Wiki City, USA", but I think Montreal is giving it a run for its money on the international scene. tags: montreal gazette steve faguy wikitravel wiki me montreal press

Twitter 2007 == Friendster 2003 So, I'm really concerned about Twitter's performance and stability problems since SXSW. Remember Friendster, the social networking platform of 2003? The site failed to support a surge of traffic in mid-2003, about a year into the service. The deluge of users meant that pages wouldn't serve, images timed out, and edits were impossible. Consequently, the social networking market was fractured as users went to smaller services like Tribe.net, MySpace, Orkut and LinkedIn. The other services might not have all your friends on them, but at least they worked. It was a phenomenal fumble by Friendster that was entirely attributable to failure to scale. Would other social networks have come up anyways? Probably. But there's a network effect to social networking, and people would probably have stuck with Friendster a lot more than they actually did. I think Obvious Corp. has got to get on the ball if they're going to capitalize on the success of Twitter. There's a similar network effect advantage for Twitter-like services, and if they can execute well, they're going to Pwn. But the software and interface are pretty easy to replicate, and there are other services like Twitter out there already. Better keep an eye on your lunch, fellas. tags: twitter obvious corp friendster network effect network effect

An anonymous commenter wrote about the environment test:

"50C water temperature? Quite a bad idea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionella"

which is confirmed by Legionella at Reliance Worldwide with the advice:

"Keep stored hot water above 60C"

Thanks for the info! If someone has a livejournal account, can you let the original poster know, please? etbe: fluorescent lights and why it's worth saving resources mentions dimmers, but I've written about dimmable flourescents before (summary: only 110V have traditional dimmers, but there are integrated-controller ones in Europe and specialist bulbs ) Lars Wirzenius: Energy meter is a good idea. I've also seen clamp-meters which mean you avoid unplugging, but they're much more expensive.

I saw my first Sun workstation about 15 years ago, in 1992. I was a business student at Purdue University, and a childhood love for computers had just been reawakened. I was spending countless hours in the basement of the Math building, basking in the green phosphorescent glow of a Z29 and happily exploring every nook and cranny of the Sequent Symmetry upstairs. It didn’t take too long to discover, though, just a short walk away in the computer science building, several labs full of Sun workstations. Suddenly, the Z29 didn’t have quite the same allure. A few months later, I walked over to the registrar’s office and changed my major to computer science. (OK, advanced tax accounting had something to do with it too.) Everything I know about computing I learned on those Sun workstations, as did so many other early Linux developers; I even had my own for a while, after I joined the University of Arizona computer science department in 1997. But within a year, the Suns were starting to disappear, replaced by Pentiums running Red Hat Linux. More and more people coming through university computer science programs were cutting their teeth on Linux, much as I had on Sun. Pretty soon, Sun was increasingly seen by this new generation as the vendor who didn’t “get it”, and Sun’s rivals did a masterful job running with that and painting the company literally built on open standards as “closed”. To those of us who knew better, it was a sad thing to watch. The last several years have been hard for Sun, but the corner has been turned. As an outsider, I’ve watched as Sun has successfully embraced x86, pioneered energy efficiency as an essential computing feature, open sourced its software portfolio to maximize the network effects, championed transparency in corporate communications, and so many other great things. Now, I’m going to be a part of it. And, so, I’m excited to announce that, as of today, I’m joining Sun to head up operating system platform strategy. I’m not saying much about what I’ll be doing yet, but you can probably guess from my background and earlier writings that I’ll be advocating that Solaris needs to close the usability gap with Linux to be competitive; that while as I believe Solaris needs to change in some ways, I also believe deeply in the importance of backward compatibility; and that even with Solaris front and center, I’m pretty strongly of the opinion that Linux needs to play a clearer role in the platform strategy. It is with regrets that I leave the Linux Foundation, but if you haven’t figured out already, Sun is a company I’ve always loved, and being a part of it was an opportunity I simply could not pass up. I think the world of the people at the LF, particularly my former FSG colleagues with whom I worked so closely over the past year and a half: Jim Zemlin, Amanda McPherson, Jeff Licquia, and Dan Kohn. And I still very much believe in the core LF mission, to prevent the fragmentation of the Linux platform. Indeed, I’m remaining in my role as chair of the LSB—and Sun, of course, is a member of the Linux Foundation. Anyway. Watch this space. This is going to be fun!

My brother has been playing American Football at the Antwerp Diamonds since about a year now, and he's playing along in the official competition's matches this season. Not that there's much of a season, with only 6 teams in all of Belgium, but okay. This sunday, they played against the Bornem Titans; and since he'd been asking me to come along to take some pictures of their match, and since I hadn't been all that productive on the camera front lately, I decided to come along. They even won, although it was quite close: getting within 5yd of the goal line three times, only scoring once, and then even missing the conversion isn't exactly what they'd call a "perfect match", but it's good enough. Also more pictures in my gallery.

So far, all network monitoring solutions I've tested suck.

• Nagios, the dinosaur of network monitoring is a pain to configure, and somewhat half of it's features feel incomplete to me. It also spawns a lot of processes, which probably isn't very efficient. I find the UI pretty much useless, thats why I rely mostly on "naglite" (a dirty PHP script) to provide a status screen. I don't think it has any "numerical" monitoring for things like e.g. diskspace, you can only configure alerts when it hits a certain trigger value. I have to admit that Nagios is very powerful when it comes to alerting people based on schedules etc. That probably us why it's #1 for monitoring, it can be setup to send an alert to exactly the right person on duty... Another good feature is the scheduling of downtimes.
• Munin, formerly known as LRRD, is a general purpose graphing tool. It's especially useful in combination to nagios, since it provides some features nagios is missing and duplicates little. Nagios is nice for doing e.g. a usage analysis of you VPN or graphing network load etc. However it doesn't do trend or some more complex analysis.
• Zabbix is written in PHP, and suffers apparently from the same problems as most PHP programs: looks like it's great, but lots of stuff isn't working right or correctly. To me it felt like it was developed without a master plan or any kind of software engineering in the background, but by randomly adding and changing features. I found configuring it a pain, I was tempted to write my own configuration tool for it. But maybe they've changed their configuration again, they had been doing that pretty much every version back then (one of the reasons why I felt it was developed without much of a plan). I also had the impression that it's monitoring is quite inefficient and not capable of handling irregularities in scheduling well. So as long as your network is working great, it will probably work as well, but if you have some serious network problems, it will maybe get totally messed up.
• NetMRG can plot you all kinds of graphs you do not need.
• Tons of other monitoring tools I tested which had random problems, from just being able to graph data, but not to assign a meaning to them to being a Java GUI app...

What I'm looking for is a network monitoring solutions, which

• Allows me to setup monitoring with the host, service model I use for my tasks, ideally even allowing me to easily move a service from one host to another. Should be class based, and allow multiple classes per system.
• Understands that some services are important (e.g. firewall), and others are not (paper availability in the printers)
• Doesn't waste my time with millions of configuration settings, network mapping, SNMP digits, listing every single SNMP value...
• Doesn't bother me with all the thousands of values it could collect
• Handles dependencies, and doesn't alert me separately for obvious consequences
• Has a good alerting system, with little to setup
• Has a good monitoring scheduler, that will adjust it's monitoring interval to the current monitoring load (e.g. reduce scheduling density when all services are timing out, do multithreaded pinging / querying of hosts, avoid busy polling, use push instead of poll where possible.
• Has a very minimalistic status screen, as long as everything is okay it should just say so; if something is down, it should show some report on what is wrong, but never ever fill the screen. The main monitoring screen doesn't have a mousewheel or any other input device! (Test: should be useful even without colors!)
• Multi-host monitoring with synchronization, so I can e.g. have a monitoring service in the internal network and one in the DMZ. If they are disconnected, they monitor independenctly and merge data afterwards.
• Does real trend analysis on numeric values, with some prediction model, for e.g. diskspace. Diskspace often follows daily, weekly and monthly patterns. Especially log file partitions. The monitoring tool should alert me if it looks like the disk is going to be full "anytime soon", not just when it's too late!
• Not written in a bad language such as PHP, efficient, not spawning thousands of processes...

Pretty much every monitoring solution I've seen so far is great at collecting tons of data, but doesn't help me with actually handling this amount of data. Anyone has a recommendation for a good network monitoring tool? I'd be really interested in doing the last point - a real statistical analysis for network monitoring. This would be so useful... predicting peaks in network usage, predicting when a system will be overloaded or a disk full... but I'm phasing out of network administration; so my interest here is mostly in being able to give advice to others. [Update: no, you don't need to point me to Cacti. It's just another grapher and data collector that doesn't actually do what I would call 'monitoring'. It also seems to not have a smart scheduler, and is written in PHP (which is bad!) I was also told a non-success story with OpenNMS which just crashed when adding a host to be monitored with a totally unhelpful stack trace. I had a look at their online demo, but it felt very complex and not very useful to me...]

I have set up my first vserver to play with. I am very impressed how easy the process is! The performance on my Dell Inspiron 1300 seems very good as well. I have almost no experience with virtualization techniques, and was stuck to User-Mode Linux until today. According to the Wikipedia article, Linux-Vserver has many advantages compared to other tools due to the fact the virtual servers share the same system call interface and do not have any emulation overhead (I do obviously agree this can also be a drawback). I haven’t yet had the chance to study the security part in depth, this will be my main task this week, I will then be able to make the choice between UML and Linux-Vserver - I’m not yet ready for Xen. (more…)

During the last days I prepared a GNOME 2.16 backport for etch. My primary goal was to provide the gnome-desktop-environment meta-package and all of it's dependencies. The only outstanding problem is that you have to put the packages libeel2-data and libvte-common on hold before upgrading from GNOME 2.14 to GNOME 2.16. Beside the dependencies of the gnome-desktop-environment meta-package I also added up-to-date backports of pam-keyring, seahorse, gossip, xchat-gnome and liferea.

As I recently bought a NSLU2 ("slug") for 24/7 server usage and random ARM-based development (more on that later), I'm looking for a suitable storage device to use as the root filesystem for a complete Debian system. The requirements are:

• Large enough (>= 1 GB).
• Silent. Hard disks are not an option (no IDE, no SATA, no USB, neither 2.5" nor 3.5")
• As fast as possible.
• USB-attached (the slug only has 2 USB connectors).
• Should live as long as possible.

The last item is the most important. The obvious choice is a USB memory stick, but unfortunately those are flash-based and only survive a certain number of write cycles. Thus I'm looking for something which at least survives enough write cycles to make it usable for a few years... I do know several ways to reduce the number of writes via software, that's not what I'm currently interested in. I'd like to know which storage types will survive the longest amount of time (because of their hardware properties). Some options:

• USB memory stick, obviously. Usually quite slow, but there are quite fast ones (read 33 MB/s, write 22 MB/s), too. Some seem to survive 100.000 or even 1.000.000 write cycles, but that may not be enough. Are there any sticks with more possible write cycles?
• Any other USB-attached (via external USB card-reader if necessary) silent storage type: SD, MMC, Transflash, Memory Stick, Compact Flash, whatever. Does any of those survive more write cycles?
• Any other viable option?

Has somebody else done something like this before and can share some experiences as to which storage type is best suited for such a scenario? I suspect my slug will be mostly idle, but there might also be phases where it runs on 100% CPU and heavy disk I/O for multiple days in a row...

In response to my last post about using laptops for presentations it has been suggested to me that using white (or a very bright color) as the background color can help some displays synchronise with the signal. I haven't had an opportunity to test this but it seems likely that as most computers are configured with a white background nowadays the display hardware is optimised for this case.

Another benefit of a light background is that it provides more ambient lighting to the room where the presentation is held. If all the lights are turned off (sometimes there is no dimmer switch) then the radiant light from the screen is the only form of illumination for the room.

Finally with the way the current generation of beamers work there is less heat trapped in the beamer if there is mostly white on the screen. This will hopefully decrease the incidence of hardware failures during lectures (which unfortunately are not uncommon in my observation).

Update:

Based on a comment on this blog entry I did a quick survey of the color scemes, black on white, yellow on blue, and white on green. Black on white got the most votes with some people saying that yellow on blue was most aesthetic while black on white was easiest to read ("clear and boring" was one comment).

One person pointed out that the light diverges slightly so black on white makes the letters look smaller while white on black makes them look bigger. My response to this is to use a slightly larger font.

A common criticism of fluorescent lights is the inability to use dimmers, as mentioned in Julien Goodwin's blog.

However with some thought at the time the lights are installed this problem can be solved. The first thing to keep in mind is that an infinite number of levels of illumination (analogue scale) is not really required. In most cases two or three levels should do.

If you have two compact fluorescent lights that use 5W and 10W then you have the options of 5W, 10W, and 15W. If you have a large room to light (such as a lounge room) which needs 30W of fluorescent lighting for full illumination then you could have six 5W globes dispersed and have anything from one to six of them turned on to give different levels of illumination.

Of course if you don't plan electrical work then it's easiest to just use incandescent lights in those areas. As long as the areas that use the most light for the longest time have fluorescent lighting it shouldn't make too much difference.

In response to a post on Planete Beranger, saving energy DOES matter. Sure you saving a few KWh isn't going to make much difference on it's own, but when a million other people do the same it all adds up.

The lack of public transport in the US causes more problems for the country than just environmental damage. It hurts the economy by making it more difficult for people to get to work. It will hurt the defence forces in the (unlikely) event of an invasion (trains are the best way of moving large numbers of troops, heavy weapons, and military supplies. It also hurts the national interest in decreasing the ability to react to civil emergencies. For example the entire population of New Orleans could have been evacuated in time using a single platform of a European station. If every city had multiple stations that had a reasonable number of platforms and multiple redundant train lines then evacuating civilians and bringing in emergency equipment and workers would be very easy. In the Netherlands train lines often run on top of dikes, this means that the dikes are very strong (if they can sustain the weight of a freight train then they aren't going to be washed away by a wave) and that trains can still operate while flood waters are rising. If New Orleans is to be rebuilt to it's former glory then the Americans should consider a similar design.

Large cars are a temporary issue. As fuel prices rise people will choose smaller cars. Also hopefully people will start to realise that 4WD and SUV vehicles are actually less safe than cars and stop buying them for perceived safety.

The Chinese government doesn't worry about the same environmental issues, however they have more agressive targets for renewable energy use than most countries. It's not a matter of being nice (they aren't), but of looking out for their own self interest. It's a pity that the governments of the US, Australia, and EU countries have not yet done the same - but it will happen eventually.

As for supermarkets using open fridges, if the vent the heat outside the building then it will be just part of the building air-conditioning system. Every adult dissipates about 100W of heat when at rest, when shopping it would be more than 100W. Get 100 people in a supermarket (not the peak business time) and 10KW would have to be removed by the A/C system without counting heat from lights (fluorescent lights dissipate about half their energy as heat, they are much more efficient than incandescent lights but much less than LEDs),
and heat from other machinery.

Finally, if you want to see changes in government policy then join your local Green party!

[UPDATE: I'm closing comments on this post, because the spammers have discovered it -- dnb]

Lars says:

The uncomfortability of Synaptic may be partly due to the fact that it is
a different model from Windows: you get all your programs from one place,
instead of anywhere on the Internet, partly due to just not using Synaptic
much at all, and partly due to Synaptic not being perhaps as easy to
understand as possible. I personally find Synaptic to be very nice, and
use it regularly, but I am biased by having used Debian package managers
for over a decade.

Now, synaptic is a lot nicer for users than scary console frontends like aptitude. But it's really a tool for "power users". Here's a quick list just of what I see when I start it (bearing in mind that my UI design skills suck):

• The "quick introduction" screen that pops up is way too long. The fact that it needs to be so long is already bad.
  
• There's a huge, and I mean HUGE list of sections down the left. What are these? Which one do I look in? For that matter, what is "gnome", and are "shells" programs for the seashore?
  If I want to find software for processing video, do I look in "graphics" or "multimedia"? (and what are these funny "(contrib)" markers?) Which of the huge number of packages in each section do I want? From the point of view of a new user (especially), this categorization is useless, not to mention often wrong or misleading.
  
• The four buttons in the lower-left, which change the display, are a good idea, but they don't say what they do. A label saying something like "Group By" would go a long way here.
  
• I think the version numbers in the main display probably provide too much information for a novice user. They won't really know what to make of them, and if they need the information it can be provided on demand; as it is, it's just one more distraction to sort through while looking for what they really want. The extra space could, e.g., be used to provide more room for the status column (currently labeled "S").
  

So much for superficial observations. There are a few more things that I see that are worth more discussion.

Mechanics of selecting packages

To change the state of a package, you click on the unlabeled little box to its left, then select the correct option from a list containing "Unmark", "Mark for Installation", "Mark for Upgrade", "Mark for Reinstall"...you get the idea. Even if only one option is valid, the menu still appears with all but one option grayed out, and you have to select the one you want.

This is complicated, cumbersome, and surprising. It also introduces terminological confusion, since "Unmark" isn't really what you think of when you go to cancel an installation or whatever.

The best option I can think of here is a pulldown menu (which I believe the GTK+ list widget (god, I almost wrote "control") supports). The menu should default to the current state, e.g., "not installed", and should have options that describe what will be done with the package, e.g., "install", and so on. Only valid actions should appear on the menu. The Package menu should probably adapt in the same way as you select packages. I don't recall offhand how GTK+ menus work, but if possible commonly used commands like "remove" should be closer to the mouse when the menu appears than uncommon commands like "reinstall".

Another choice I can see, if you want to avoid menus, would be something like this: have two checkboxes, one for "install" and one for "upgrade". "install" would be checked for installed packages and not checked for not-installed packages. Checking or clearing it would mark packages for installation or deletion. "upgrade" would mark or unmark packages that were installed for upgrade. Of course, this introduces a redundant column for not-installed packages, which I don't like. It also seems to me that it would be less obvious what's going on for new users. But it would be more efficient for power users (who should all be using aptitude anyway ;-) ).

Progress bar madness

I haven't extensively used synaptic, but several core misfeatures of apt and our archive pretty much guarantee that if it displays progress bars for key operations like loading the cache or updating the package lists, the progress bars either run multiple times (i.e., don't actually tell you how close to finishing you are) or actually go BACKWARDS -- yes, BACKWARDS.

The great package hunt

Maybe the biggest problem is that unless you know what package you're looking for, basically all our package interfaces are useless. There are lots of fancy searching features you could add, but actually a quick test in synaptic suggests to me that this would be going in the wrong direction. Unlike aptitude, synaptic includes descriptions, and searches for stuff users might actually want (like, say, "burn CD") seem to turn up relevant results (i.e., software that burns CDs).

I'm sure the search algorithm could be improved (with inexact matching, better indexing (a package description suffix tree?), etc), but the big problem I see is that you tend to get back several dozen results, many of which are libraries, development packages, command-line software or software that doesn't work; some of the other software is software that can burn CDs but whose purpose is not to burn CDs (e.g., backup software).

How can we solve this? The first thing that springs to mind for me is to use popularity-contest data to weight the list. I know it's not terribly accurate, and it has some skewing problems (stuff in the default install will be favored), but I suspect it would greatly bias the results in terms of software that's useful to many people (using the "recently used" tallies might especially help here).

I don't have many other good ideas on the searching problem; I've seen vague suggestions of counting reverse dependencies, but this doesn't seem like a good metric of useful software to me; trying to extract more information from the short and sometimes inaccurate package descriptions seems like a really hard problem to me. (Google can do cool statistical analysis partly because it has so much data to work with AIUI; even a single Web page typically has orders of magnitude more information than a package description)

Another issue is the problem of finding related software once you've installed one piece. We have "suggests" and "enhances", but they aren't exactly displayed in a prominent or easy-to-understand way by any frontend. I think it might be good to display a clickable list of suggested packages somewhere visible (e.g., at the top of the description box) when the user has selected a package for installation. We could even display a little bar, like on (eg) Amazon: "Debian suggests installing these packages..." ;-)

It might also be interesting (if this is considered acceptable; since the data is anonymous I don't see a problem) to analyze the popcon data to find out what packages are being installed in tandem. I don't know if we have enough information to do it, but it could turn out to be really useful to be able to click on a package and see other packages that are popular with users who installed that package. Going back to online stores again, those "other people who bought 'Types and Programming Languages' also bought 'Introduction to Category Theory'" links are amazingly useful, and something similar would probably be a big help in Debian.

... write an email to "area-muc", the list for the Debian Munich user group and propose to do a link exchange for "Toronto Restaurants". May I point out that Munich and Toronto are separated by a larger ocean? And the Debian Munich user group doesn't have a real homepage they could do a link exchange on? (menupalace.com and their chris dickey was that stupid spammer. If I had a myspace account, I'd probably try to write him some comments...) Note: most likely this self-called webmonkey searched for toronto and blindly grabbed all email addresses he could find.

This isn't all housing, but much is: seen via vitavonni A. Copy the list below to your own journal and:
Bold the actions you are already taking
Underline the actions you plan to start taking
Italicise the actions that don't apply to you B. Add one (or more) suggested action(s) of your own C. Leave a comment here, so that she can track the meme to your journal, and copy your suggested action(s) back to the master list. Update: the sodding original is only open for comments from livejournal customers. Silly. Very silly.

1. Replace standard incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs
2. Choose energy efficient appliances
3. Wash clothes in cold(er) water
4. Turn the thermostat of your hot water tank down to 50C (125F) - I've put it to 60C, but it's not possible to go lower at present, thanks to stupid location of the tank meaning the hot water runs at least halfway round the edge of the house before getting to a point it needs to be hot. When I replace the water heating, this should be possible.
5. Install a programmable thermostat (or turn the heat down over night and when you're out of the house)
6. Register with the [Canadian Marketing Association's] Do Not Contact Service to reduce the amount of junk mail delivered to your house. - Substitute MPS. Must do this.
7. Eat less meat (particularly feedlot beef) - but what's a feedlot?
8. Walk, bike, carpool or take public transit as often as possible - I live in the countryside, yet still move large packages on my bike.
9. Make sure you know what can be recycled in your area, and try to recycle as much household waste as possible
10. Compost using an outdoor compost bin or an indoor vermicomposter
11. Clean or replace filters on your furnace and air conditioner - air con would be evil here.
12. Buy local, organic or fair trade food where possible
13. Reduce air travel
14. Wrap your water heater in an insulation blanket - it's got a spray-foam cover and the outside is cold to the touch. Wrapping the loft tanks in insulation jackets made a big difference.
15. Use a clothesline instead of a dryer whenever possible
16. Plant a tree - soon
17. Buy fresh foods instead of frozen
18. Keep your car tuned up and your tyres inflated to their optimal pressure
19. Use biodegradable dishwashing liquid, laundry soap powder, etc.
20. Drink tap water (filtered if necessary) rather than buying bottled water
21. Turn the tap off while brushing your teeth
22. Unplug seldom-used appliances and chargers for phones, cameras, etc., when you're not using them - well, I switch them off at the wall
23. Plug air leaks and draughts around doors and windows with weatherstripping - need to fix a couple of windows, but it's beyond me and local tradesmen seem crap at responding.
24. Switch from disposable to reusable products: food and beverage containers, cups, plates, writing pens, razors, diapers, towels, shopping bags, etc.
25. Consider garage sales, Freecycle, eBay, or borrowing from friends/family before buying a new tool or appliance
26. Reuse bathwater, maybe to flush the loo, water the garden, etc.
27. Make sure your roof is well-insulated.
28. Always wear a jumper/sweater and socks indoors unless it's warm enough outdoors to go without both.
29. Run your vehicle on biofuel/sustainable fuels
30. Set up a grey water barrel to use when clean water isn't necessary
31. Put grey water on your garden immediately without storing it.
32. Install tanks to collect rain-water from your roof for watering the garden, washing your car, etc.
33. Don't keep windows open when your heater is on
34. Turn off lights that you don't need
35. Stop your engine when waiting more than 10 seconds
36. Install a solar panel on your roof for water heating - who fits them in England? I hate roof-work.
37. Ask your bank for an online-only account - I have one, but won't move the rest until they make it secure.
38. Try to make more use of daylight
39. Walk and run more - I'm not walking for the hell of it. Waste of energy.
40. Wrap loft water tanks in insulation jackets where possible
41. Lower the power consumption of your computer with cpudyn, device power managers and similar tools
42. Use non-air-con ways to keep cool whenever possible

Today is the second day in which I find that my laptop does not resume properly from sleep and I start to wonder why. None of he old problems, blank screen, no reponse...

This time it just looses the GNOME session. I saw two segfaults on the console, on resume: one from iceweasel and one from another app. Then gdm comes up.

I think is xorg's fault or gnome-core. Why? Well, it didn't happened 4
days ago and I have these in the dpkg.log (grepped for upgrades only):

2007-03-12 00:19:04 upgrade xorg 1:7.1.0-13 1:7.1.0-15
2007-03-12 00:19:04 upgrade xvnc4viewer 4.1.1+X4.3.0-20 4.1.1+X4.3.0-21
2007-03-13 03:10:34 upgrade libeel2-data 2.14.3-3 2.14.3-4
2007-03-13 03:10:35 upgrade libnautilus-burn3 2.14.3-8 2.14.3-8+b1
2007-03-13 03:10:35 upgrade libnautilus-extension1 2.14.3-9 2.14.3-11+b1
2007-03-13 03:10:36 upgrade nautilus 2.14.3-9 2.14.3-11+b1
2007-03-13 03:10:37 upgrade nautilus-data 2.14.3-9 2.14.3-11
2007-03-13 03:10:51 upgrade nautilus-cd-burner 2.14.3-8 2.14.3-8+b1
2007-03-13 03:11:00 upgrade gnome-mount 0.5-2 0.5-3
2007-03-13 03:11:24 upgrade libxine1 1.1.2+dfsg-2 1.1.2+dfsg-3
2007-03-13 03:11:25 upgrade lintian 1.23.27 1.23.28
2007-03-13 03:11:26 upgrade unionfs-tools 1.4+debian-3 1.4+debian-4
2007-03-14 09:46:32 upgrade foomatic-filters 3.0.2-20061031-1.1 3.0.2-20061031-1.2
2007-03-14 09:46:32 upgrade libntfs-3g0 1:0.0.0+20061031-6 1:0.0.0+20061031-6+b1
2007-03-14 09:46:33 upgrade ntfs-3g 1:0.0.0+20061031-6 1:0.0.0+20061031-6+b1
2007-03-14 09:46:33 upgrade ekiga 2.0.3-4 2.0.3-5
2007-03-14 09:46:48 upgrade gnome-desktop-environment 1:2.14.3.5 1:2.14.3.6
2007-03-14 09:46:48 upgrade gnome-core 1:2.14.3.5 1:2.14.3.6
2007-03-14 09:46:48 upgrade gnomemeeting 2.0.3-4 2.0.3-5
2007-03-14 09:46:48 upgrade libgraphicsmagick1 1.1.7-12 1.1.7-13
2007-03-14 09:46:49 upgrade graphicsmagick 1.1.7-12 1.1.7-13
2007-03-14 09:46:50 upgrade obexfs 0.10-3 0.10-3+b1
2007-03-14 09:46:51 upgrade graphicsmagick-imagemagick-compat 1.1.7-12 1.1.7-13


I'll turn back time with snapshot.debian.net and see if I get back my resume ...


Notes:

• I use Etch, almost no packages from Sid or Experimental...
• no, I didn't submit a bug yet; although this is not RC from Debian's PoV, it sure feels like this kind of regression shouldn't happen...
  

I just read an interesting blog post from December 2005 about the environmental impact of bio-fuels. It makes some really good points that should be studied by everyone who is interested in protecting the environment.

However this doesn't mean that bio-fuels are inherently bad, just that some methods of production are bad.

The blog claims that reusing oil that had been used for frying would cover 1/380 of the fuel used for road transport in the UK. There are some technologies that have been recently invented to process farm and industrial waste into oil, some of which are already in production in the US. The volume of farm waste (and equivalent waste from restaurants) would significantly exceed the frying oil from restaurants and converting waste plastic into fuel would add even more. I'm sure that these sources of fuel from waste would add up to at least 1% of the current transport fuel use.

A better train system has the potential to halve the use of fuel for transport (or better), when living in Europe I never considered owning a car, the trains were so good and the car parking was so bad that it wasn't worth doing. A combination of less cars and the cars being driven less would significantly reduce fuel use.

Hybrid vehicles and vehicles with smaller and more efficient engines could halve the use of fuel again (or better). Diesel hybrid cars that are currently being tested use as little as 1/4 the fuel of current petrol cars. Add further technological improvements such as the six-stroke engine and we could be looking at something better than four times the current fuel economy of cars.

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that a combination of a good public transport infrastructure, fuel efficient vehicles, and government incentives for using both could reduce the transport use of fuel by a factor of 8. This would mean that fuel produced from restaurant, farm, and plastic waste (which I conservatively estimate at four times the volume of used frying oil) could account for more than 8% of the fuel supplies. The EU wants to have 5.75% of fuel oil to come from renewable sources, it seems to me that this is possible without importing any bio-Diesel from developing countries!

Electric cars could of course significantly decrease the use of fuel oil too. A Prius+ (Prius modified to take mains power) would be an ideal vehicle for me. I rarely make long journeys and rarely make multiple journeys in one day so I could use mains power most of the time. I estimate that with a Prius+ I would use no more than two tanks of petrol a year.

Then of course there's the issue of market protection. It seems that every first-world country has a farming lobby that convinces the government to pay them to produce more crops than they can sell at market rate. Instead of subsidising food that is sold to other countries such government money could go towards subsidising development of bio-fuels. The US subsidy of corn production is a classic example of this, corn syrup can be easily fermented and distilled to make fuel - much better than eating the nasty stuff!

I got the idea for this from Ben Hutchings.A. Copy the list below to your own journal and

Bold the actions you are already taking
Underline the actions you plan to start taking
Italicize the actions that don't apply to youB. Add one (or more) suggested action(s) of your ownC. Leave a comment here, so that she can track the meme to your journal, and copy your suggested action(s) back to my master list.

1. Replace standard incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs
2. Choose energy efficient appliances - I'm documenting the power consumption of my computers
3. Wash clothes in cold(er) water - Colder than what? I suspect this is based on American machines that are controlled by mixer valves rather than using a thermostat.
4. Turn the thermostat of your hot water tank down to 50 C (125 F) - this is a good safety measure anyway
5. Install a programmable thermostat (or turn the heat down over night and when you're out of the house)
6. Register with the [Canadian Marketing Association's] Do Not Contact Service to reduce the amount of junk mail delivered to your house. - Substitute MPS.
7. Eat less meat (particularly feedlot beef) - For practical purposes I'm vegetarian, with occasional exceptions.
8. Walk, bike, carpool or take public transit as often as possible - I'm writing this on the tram
9. Make sure you know what can be recycled in your area, and try to recycle as much household waste as possible
10. Compost using an outdoor compost bin or an indoor vermicomposter
11. Clean or replace filters on your furnace and air conditioner
12. Buy local, organic or fair trade food where possible
13. Reduce air travel - pity that long-distance trains suck in Australia
14. Wrap your water heater in an insulation blanket
15. Use a clothesline instead of a dryer whenever possible - don't own a clothes dryer, hanging up clothes inside near a heater works on cold days
16. Plant a tree - pity my trees are dying because of the drought / climate change
17. Buy fresh foods instead of frozen
18. Keep your car tuned up and your tires inflated to their optimal pressure - also minimise driving. I drive about 5000Km per year.
19. Use biodegradable dishwashing liquid, laundry soap powder, etc.
    
20. Drink tap water (filtered if necessary) rather than buying bottled water - remember the Benzene incident...
21. Turn the tap off while brushing your teeth
22. Unplug seldom-used appliances and chargers for phones, cameras, etc., when you're not using them - the power use is small so I only do this for rarely used chargers.
23. Plug air leeks and drafts around doors and windows with weatherstripping
24. Switch from disposable to reusable products: food and beverage containers, cups, plates, writing pens, razors, diapers, towels, shopping bags, etc - I've done this for most things, could improve though.
25. Consider garage sales, Freecycle, eBay, or borrowing from friends/family before buying a new tool or appliance - second-hand and refurbished computers are so powerful and so cheap that you don't need to care about the environment to do this.
26. Reuse bathwater, maybe to flush the loo, water the garden, etc.
27. Make sure your roof is well-insulated. - I think it is, but as tenants it's not really our choice.
28. Always wear a jumper/sweater and socks indoors unless it's warm enough outdoors to go without both.
29. Run your vehicle on biofuel/sustainable fuels
30. Set up a grey water barrel to use when clean water isn't necessary - grey water should never be stored. It contains chemicals that are used as food for bacteria.
31. Put grey water on your garden immediately without storing it.
32. Install tanks to collect rain-water from your roof for watering the garden, washing your car, etc.