It's a bit strange. Still. Writing this personal part of my blog, opening some of my most inner thoughts to the wild public. Though, so wild it doesn't seem to be. To be honest I can't remember having received any bad feedback on my personal stuff, only positive, supportive ones. (Or, there was one. Though, it wasn't related to the core of the personal section but someone thinking it would be "cool" to misinterpret some statement therein and try to hurt me with it. It only made me laugh at them, trying to "use" it as an argument.)
No bad feedback might be related to that I don't have comments enabled because I don't want to have a moderation system that would make it look like I filter out bad comments but I also don't want to open it up to SPAM. And people who propably usual leave scathing comments don't consider it convenient to address me directly, via any IM system, including emails. Anyway, opening in that way has quite some benefits: For a start, it helps me myself to keep track of things that happened. Secondly, it hopefully helps others that are in similar situations to see that they aren't alone out there and that one can survive with not hiding it. But last but not least some people address me and provide me with interesting links on the topic. I think they shouldn't be just hidden in my personal mailbox so I am going to offer them to a broader audience here. I won't show the names of who sent them along, I'm not sure if they would like being connected to the topic. But they can be assured of my blessing for offering them to me. First link I like to hand out is an article from advocate.com about a pregnant husband. Yes, this was no typo and the reason why I haven't posted it right the next day because I received that link on March 31st. I can just wish all the best to Thomas, Nancy and their yet unborn girl. Looking forward to see baby photos. :) The second article I got sent lately is When Girls Will Be Boys. It is about the transition story of Ray and acceptance problems. Pretty long but definitely worth reading. Again, thanks to the people who offered me the links to the articles, I truly appreciate them—and I hope some of the people reading my blog will too, or at least that it might change their perception and opinion on "such people".

After starting to write a comment on Buxy r ve tout haut: DPL election: low participation speculating about whether the slow turnout in the DPL voting is caused by the lack of contraversial candidates or the stupid retiming that will make DPL elections clash with Easter holidays more often, I did a quick grep of the past votes. 2008: no contraversial candidates, Easter during voting, turnout high 30s%? 2007: contraversial(s), Easter after voting, turnout 47% 2006: contraversial(s), Easter after voting, turnout 43% 2005: contraversial(s), Easter during voting, turnout 52% 2004: contraversial(s), Easter during voting, turnout 53% 2003: contraversial(s), Easter after voting, turnout 59% 2002: contraversial(s), Easter during voting, turnout 51% 2001: contraversial(s), Easter after voting, turnout unsure (between 33% and 90%!) 2000: dunno about contraversials, Easter after voting, turnout 62% 1999: dunno about contraversials, Easter after voting, turnout 59% Not sure what to make of that. What did I miss?

It's been a long time since I've written on my blog; longer than I'd like. I really want to get back in the swing of it, if only to keep this entire site from bitrotting interminably. My Alexa ranking has dropped to like >1M, which in my Web-addled state means that my personal worth has dropped, too. I know, I know. tags: blog me alexa

Conference of the Americas: Cancelled I was sorry to see that the Wikimedia Conference of the Americas, scheduled for mid-May, has been canceled. There was some controversy when this conference was announced last fall; it partly originated from a bid by the Atlanta Wikimedia community to host Wikimania. I'm kind of sad to see that it's not going to happen. I like Atlanta a lot, and I think there is a really good case to be made for regional (or at least continental) Wikimedia conferences. I hope this isn't a nail in the coffin for such a regional event in North America. On the flip side, it'd be really nice to see a more detailed explanation of what happened; of what future plans for the COTA are; and just generally a little more communication. tags: cota atlanta wikimedia wikimania wiki

Elsewhere in wikidom That all said, things are looking really cool for Wikimania over the next 12 months. I'm really glad to see that my South American home-away-from-home, Buenos Aires, won the chance to host the 2009 Wikimania event. With 2008's event in Alexandria, Egypt, I think we've got some seriously interesting ground to cover Wikimedia-wise. Also of importance: if you haven't received an invite yet, get yourself over to RecentChangesCamp 2008. The wiki unconference will be happening for the first time in the Bay Area (California). We'll be meeting over May 9-11 in the offices of SocialText in Palo Alto. I can't say enough good things about RecentChangesCamp. It has been instrumental in my understanding of wikis and my connection with the worldwide wiki community. If you are at all interested in wikis or related concepts, you should think hard about coming to this conference. tags: wikimania recentchangescamp rcc2008

Brain bits

• I think microrevie.ws is pretty cool. I got the 100th review today! Yay for me.
• Speaking of twitter stuff, I dig twittermap, but I don't always remember to update. IWBNI there was a portal to/from Fire Eagle.

tags: microreviews hreview twitter twittermap fireeagle

My cousin Greg Coker has created an eBay auction for Football cards with the proceeds going to a charity that protects animal welfare (I can’t remember the name - I’ll update this post later). He also has a bunch of other eBay auctions of football cards going which are not for charity. The charity auction is held in association with SEN (Sports Entertainment Network - a sports talk-back AM radio station) [1]. This afternoon Greg was interviewed on SEN about football cards in general. He gave a good talk, he could probably do some professional radio work if he was interested. Greg’s cards are from the VFL (Victorian Football League) before it became the AFL (Australian Football League) [2]. The cards used to be sold in “milk bars” (small stores that sold a variety of junk food and some essential food items including milk - most such stores are closed now as they have been replaced by petrol stations and supermarkets) and each pack of ~5 cards had some crewing gum included (which Greg often discarded because he didn’t like it - he should have given it to me, I was not so fussy). The back side of the cards had a jigsaw picture which I have never seen anyone complete (I expect that Greg has assembled at least one jigsaw as he has some sets). Probably the way the cards were collected, traded, etc is very similar to sports based cards from other countries (such as baseball cards in the US). On the animal front, I’ve had a mother cat and four kittens move into the shed in my back-yard. The mother cat has no collar and is not known by anyone in the area so she appears to have been dumped by her owner when she got pregnant. There are four kittens, one is ginger, one is black, and two are mottled part black and part ginger. They are all healthy and friendly and the kittens are all really cute. The kittens have become used to being patted and handled by humans so it will be easy to make them household pets. If an owner is not found for them then they will probably all end up being put to sleep (unfortunately I can’t keep them so I’ll have to deliver them to the local council). If anyone in Melbourne, Australia wants some free cats then I would be happy to deliver them. I’ll supply as many cats as desired. I can’t give away the mother until the kittens have been given away, so if you want the mother cat (dark coloured) then you may have to wait for a while. Judging by the date that I first noticed them (when they were walking around, had their eyes open, and ate solid food) the kittens would have to be at least 7 weeks old. It’s recommended that kittens not be given away before they are 8 weeks old and given that it will probably take a week to organise anything I expect that anyone who reads I don’t think that there is any risk of giving them away too early. Please let me know by email or a comment if you are in the vicinity of Melbourne, Australia and want a new pet (or several new pets).

• [1] http://www.sen.com.au/


• [2] http://www.afl.com.au/

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So here's the hard part, if you start writing about people and relationships you have to continue, otherwise people who do follow will make assumptions, or not be aware of any potential gaffes they are about to make. I've written in the past about some stuff which I now wish I hadn't because this post is suprisngly hard to compose.

I'm now single, and living alone.

No fiance, no partner, and no kitten. The next time I write about friends I'll make sure it is for local people only. Unless I get carried away, in which case I should be stopped. ObQuote: The Taming of the shrew; via 10 Things I hate about you.

Having recently been through the process, I've managed to come out the other-side with some some advice for anyone taking this on.

• To start out, the link for making appointments at the Australian Consulate is VisaPoint. I found it was remarkably well hidden.
• Upon entering the country, it's quite likely the immigration officer won't be that familiar with the E3 Visa. I'd recommend you watch them and very politely correct anything you think wrong, in my case my Visa was incorrectly entered as E3-Dependent along with my wife (proving that the system doesn't actually keep referential integrity between an E3 and an E3D holders).
• You can not get paid before receiving a social security number. You can not apply for a social security number within about 10 days of entering the country, as there is a lag between immigration and social security systems. Once you apply it will take a few weeks for the card, but you can probably go back to the office with sufficient ID within two days and receive a print-out of the number. You can call the office you filed with first and they can tell you if it's worth coming in to try it. In the absolute worst case, if things screw-up, you could be in for a long wait. Your company may be able to loan you money if things get desperate.

If anything really stuffs up you'll have to enter the US immigration services, which is no fun. If this happens to you in the Bay Area go straight to the San Francisco office; the San Jose office doesn't have deferred inspections so you'll probably just have to go there anyway.

Your dependent on the E3D Visa will need to fill out an I-765 work authorisation form. This will take up to 3 months to process; you can find out the approximate queue time here. The form doesn't appear to have been updated for E3D; I would strongly recommend getting a lawyer to file it for you so you don't stuff it up. Budget about $400. After this has been processed, the dependent will then need to file for a SSN before they can be paid.

Tax is a black-art. In California expect to pay something like 20-25% federal, 10% state and up to 7% more for Medicare and social security. Expect another $80/month for health insurance.

You can get a bank account without a SSN easily. A good way to transfer money is OzForex, but watch out for fees on the US side (you may have to do wire-transfers which cost about $10 a go, though some banks have bill-pay). The country still runs on cheques for some reason.

You can rent without a SSN, but it will cost you. Budget for 2 months extra rent as deposits and paying ahead.

A car lease is probably a good way to go. Finance will usually look at your visa and only give you a two-year loan, and with no credit that will be at a very high interest rate. In California you can get a 2 year lease on a base model new car (sticker price ~$17,000) drive-away for a down-payment of about $2500 and then $250/month plus taxes. Insurance will be about $120/month on-top of that. The beauty is you just give it back when you go home. For long holiday trips SUV rental may contribute to global warming, but is a very comfortable way to see the country.

In California you'll need to book in for a driving test to get a license; you can't do this in a rental car but some local driving schools offer a short introduction course and then let you use their car for the test.

If you're living in temporary accommodation without great facilities Dream Dinners is a good way to easily get some meals together.

In the Bay Area, Yelp is an awesome resource.

Comcast make Telstra look like a well-run, efficient and customer focused organisation!

Feel free to drop me a line if you're thinking of taking an opportunity and have any questions.

The lenny l10n NMU campaign is now running for about two months now. The objectives of this campaign are tackling pending po-debconf l10n bugs. The process is the following:

• Each day, pick two new packages from the list, going down and ignoring packages not in unstable
• for each, look over its pending l10n bugs *and* other easily fixable issues (of course RC stuff as well). I fixed many LSB headers bugs this way, helping out to achieve that lenny release goal
• try to build it
• if it builds successfully, send an "Intent to NMU" mail to the package maintainer and debian-i18n
• wait for 15 days (that leaves time to maintainers to react, or to have a discussion about the way to deal with such old bugs, etc)
• without news or in case the maintainer agrees before the deadline, send an announcement of upcoming NMU, again to the package maintainer and debian-i18n. Also notify translators with incomplete translations
• wait for 10 days
• build the package, test it and upload it to DELAYED/2-day
• send the full patch to the maintainer

Of course, when the maintainer wants to upload him herself, I immediately stop any action....but I still watch what happens and I nag her him in case nothing happens. In short, you can escape from my trap once I got you! Status as of now:

• 39 packages NMU'ed or updated by their maintainer
• 31 pakcages under work

A few utterly outdated and obsolete packages have also been removed fro mthe archive. All this helped the statistics for many languages to raise up. However, thanks to the effort of many maintainers who invest a lot of energy in emptying down the bottle we're filling up, the top languages statistics don't really move (new debconf templates, modified ones, etc.) With the lenny release becoming closer, I expect package maintainers to calm down now and leave us the opportunity to completee our l10n work without moving the target away when we reach it. The closer the release, the more aggressive l10n NMUs will be. Even for recent bug reports. Those translation issues are the easiest ones to fix, so please fix them. Please also note that I'll very happily sponsor any non DD upload which just fixes l10n issues.

A few days ago, I just screwed the samba packages maintenance. It's been quite some time since we were preparing Samba 3.2.0 packages. Upstream has not published a release version, only pre-releases. The release was planned for next week but will not happen as some last minutes issues have been found in pre-releases. Anyway, we had ready packages for 3.2.0 pre-release 2....which were planed to go to experimental. However, these packages were under preparation for quite a while, so when I finally agreed with Steve Langasek that it's OK to upload, I built and uploaded the packages. Then got a good laugh when discovering that I forgot "UNRELEASED" as target in debian.changelog. It was late, I then "s/UNRELEASED/unstable" as I often do in such case....then uploaded...then forgot about the issue and went to something else. The package went through NEW (it has a new binary package) and 1 or 2 days later quietly entered unstable. ...which I discovered only the next day, when it was way too late to remove from unstable something that was meant for experimental. All this explains why samba packages now use an epoch...:-) Things are back to normal now. Unstable has 1:3.0.28a-2 and experimental will hopefully have 3.2.0~pre2 soon. Next week I go to the Samba annual conference. I'll probably spend some time hunting down some bugs in the package and discuss with upstream about some of the issues we have (old bugs, FHS patch, upstream's .deb packages). And maybe also get better ideas about Samba 3.2.x schedule, to be able to decide with Steve and Noel which release is the target for lenny: 3.0.28* or 3.2.x.

Where, oh, where do I start with this one??

$ parsechangelog   wc

     97     644    4793

97 lines, 644 words just for the changes in this version and some quite important and far-reaching. I have to try and summarise somewhere, so:

1. dpkg-dev (>1.14.17) support


2. New debconf question to identify the targetsuite


3. Drop-in lintian support for cross-built Emdebian packages


4. emchain support for a uClibc toolchain built on a glibc/gcc toolchain


5. Require a genuine Debian environment for building

Some detail from the changelog
emdebian-tools (0.9.4) unstable; urgency=low

• emdebuild: Remove shlibdeps and pkg-config workarounds, due to sane cross building environment implemented by dpkg-dev (>= 1.14.17). Hopefully, this change (fixes for bugs #439979 and #453267) will migrate into testing alongside the more widely noticed trigger support (the base freeze is the main possible problem). These fixes are, if anything, more important than triggers as far as cross building is concerned. The fix means that Lenny is going to have a sane cross building environment where dpkg-buildpackage -a actually works. It means that work can really proceed on autobuilders for toolchains (glibc and uClibc) and for cross built target packages for embedded devices. I'll be watching the dpkg migration closely and if 1.14.18 is not migrated for some reason, I will have revert the changes for this element to restore the old workarounds.


• emdebian-tools.templates: New debconf question for primary mirror selection. Also an important change - stop trying to parse apt-cache policy which is actually quite unreliable with respect to CD/DVD sources and some unofficial sources or mixed testing/unstable configurations.


• emchain: Divide out force, uclibc and a new ignore option into commands; add a warning if a usable toolchain exists and use --ignore to allow to override that check - emchain now supports creating a uClibc toolchain out of an existing glibc toolchain.


• checks/emdebian: New lintian extension to separate the build checks from emdebuild into lintian - the previous build checks have been removed because lintian is just more reliable. The lintian checks are included in emsource and emdebuild and failures logged via embug. emrecent also includes lintian support as well as edos-debcheck to provide some kind of QA assurance prior to uploads, embuildstats also adapted to work with lintian, providing a "check all packages" option.


• emsetup: fail if not actually Debian and advise on using a chroot - Ubuntu users please note. Ubuntu cannot currently cope with sane cross building for Emdebian so I've disabled emdebian-tools to require a genuine Debian environment via debootstrap.


• pbuilder/embootstrap: use primary for MIRROR if set via debconf, otherwise default to a http URL for easier use with proxies

For the full list, see the changelog and emdebian manpages.

As stated yesterday, I have recently worked on some plugins for Ruby on Rails, and I do think they are usable (and useful!) for audiences larger than myself. So, today I'll present here the second such plugin.
acts_as_catalog implements a really simple but really common pattern - Catalog-tables (or should I say catalog-models?) Granted, the amount of code this plugin saves is not very large, but it does add maintainability for our code-base, and includes basic unit tests. Of course, you can also taka a look at its SVN repo. Models A catalog is defined as a table with only a name column of string type, and with a unique index on it (this means, does not allow for duplicate values). Of course, more attributes can be added to a model which acts_as_catalog - they will just be ignored by this plugin. This plugin allows you to specify your model definition as:

  def Mytable < ActiveRecord::Base
    acts_as_catalog
    belongs_to :some_other_table
  end

A catalog is often accessed to populate i.e. drop-down selection or radio boxes, passing what is called collections in Rails-speak. You will often want collections to be sorted by ID or by name, thus:

  collection = Mytable.collection_by_id
  another_col = Mytable.collection_by_name

Migrations You can specify all the catalogs you need to create for a specific migration with a single instruction from inside your self.up method, by giving a list of catalog table names to create_catalogs:

  def self.up
    create_catalogs :countries, :states
    ...
  end

Likewise, you can destroy the created catalogs in a single command. The
drop_catalogs method will usually be the last thing you call in self.down:

  def self.down
    ...
    drop_catalogs :states, :countries
  end

Tests This plugin provides the base functionality to include in your unit tests ensuring the catalog is properly declared. Just include ‘catalog_test_helper’ and include the CatalogTest mixin in your test classes, declare the model name, and off you go. This is, a complete unit test for you Mytable catalog model could be:

  require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '../test_helper'
  require 'catalog_test_helper'
  class MytableTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
    include CatalogTestHelper
    def setup
      @model = Mytable
    end
  end

One of the loveliest things about Unix is the select() function (or its replacement, poll()), and the way it lets a single thread handle a host of concurrent tasks efficiently by just using file descriptors as work queues. Unfortunately, it can be a nuisance to use – you end up having to structure your program as a state machine around the select() invocation, rather than the actual procedure you want to have happen. You can avoid that by not using select() and instead just having a separate thread/process for every task you want to do – but that creates a bunch of tedious overhead for the OS (and admin) to worry about. But magically making state machines is what Python’s generators are all about; so for my little pet project that involves forking a bunch of subprocesses to do the interesting computational work my python program wants done, I thought I’d see if I could use that to make my code more obvious. What I want to achieve is to have a bunch of subprocesses accepting some setup data, then a bunch of two byte ids, terminated by two bytes of 0xFF, and for each of the two byte inputs to output a line of text giving the calculation result. For the time being at least, I want the IO to be asynchronous: so I’ll give it as many inputs as I can, rather than waiting for the result before sending the next input. So basically, I want to write something like:

def send_inputs(f, s, n):
	f.write(s) # write setup data
	for i in xrange(n):
		f.write(struct.pack("!H", i))
	f.write(struct.pack("!H", 0xFFFF))
def read_output(f):
	for line in f:
		if is_interesting(line):
			print line

Except of course, that doesn’t work directly because writing some data or reading a line can block, and when it does, I want it to be doing something else (reading instead of writing or vice-versa, or paying attention to another process). Generators are the way to do that in Python, with the “yield” keyword passing control flow and some information back somewhere else, so adopting the theory that: (a) I’ll only resume from a “yield” when it’s okay to write some more data, (b) if I “yield None” there’s probably no point coming back to me unless you’ve got some more data for me to read, and (c) I’ll provide a single parameter which is an iterator that will give me input when it’s available and None when it’s not, I can code the above as:

def send_inputs(_):
	# s, n declared in enclosing scope
	yield s
	for i in xrange(n):
		yield struct.pack("!H", i))
	yield struct.pack("!H", 0xFFFF)
def read_output(f):
	for line in f:
		if line is None: yield None; continue
		if is_interesting(line):
			print line

There’s a few complications there. For one, I could be yielding more data than can actually be written, so I might want to buffer there to avoid blocking. (I haven’t bothered; just as I haven’t worried about “print” possibly blocking) Likewise, I might only receive part of a line, or I might receive more than one line at once, and afaics a buffer there is unavoidable. If I were doing fixed size reads (instead of line at a time), that might be different. So far, the above seems pretty pleasant to me – those functions describe what I want to have happen in a nice procedural manner (almost as if they had a thread all to themselves) with the only extra bit the “None, None, continue” line, which I’m willing to accept in order not to use threads. Making that actually function does need a little grunging around, but happily we can hide that away in a module – so my API looks like:

p = subprocess.Popen(["./helper"], stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE, close_fds=True)
comm = communicate.Communication()
comm.add(send_inputs, p.stdin, None)
comm.add(read_output, None, p.stdout, communicate.ByLine())
comm.communicate()

The comm.add() function takes a generator function, an output fd (ie, the subprocess’s stdin), an input fd (the subprocess’s output), and an (optional) iterator. The generator gets created when communication starts, with the iterator passed as the argument. The iterator needs to have an “add” function (which gets given the bytes received), a “waiting” function, which returns True or False depending on whether it can provide any more input for the generator, and a “finish” function that gets called once EOF is hit on the input. (Actually, it doesn’t strictly need to be an iterator, though it’s convenient for the generator if it is) The generator functions once “executed” return an object with a next() method that’ll run the function you defined until the next “yield” (in which case next() will return the value yielded), or a “return” is hit (in which case the StopIteration exception is raised). So what we then want to do to have this all work then, is this: (a) do a select() on all the files we’ve been given; (b) for the ones we can read from, read them and add() to the corresponding iterators; (c) for the generators that don’t have an output file, or whose output file we can write to, invoke next() until either: they raise StopIteration, they yield a value for us to output, or they yield None and their iterator reports that it’s waiting. Add in some code to ensure that reads from the file descriptors don’t block, and you get:

def communicate(self):
    readable, writable = [], []
    for g,o,i,iter in self.coroutines:
        if i is not None:
            fcntl.fcntl(i, fcntl.F_SETFL, 
                        fcntl.fcntl(i, fcntl.F_GETFL)   os.O_NONBLOCK)
            readable.append(i)
        if o is not None:
            writable.append(o)
    
    while readable != [] or writable != []:
        read, write, exc = select.select(readable, writable, [])
        for g,o,i,iter in self.coroutines:
            if i in read:
                x = i.read()
                if x == "": # eof
                    iter.finish()
                    readable.remove(i)
                else:
                    iter.add(x)
            if o is None or o in write:
                x = None
                try:
                    while x is None and not iter.waiting():
                        x = g.next()
                    if x is not None:
                        o.write(x)
                except StopIteration:
                    if o is not None:
                        writable.remove(o)
    return

You can break it by: (a) yielding more than you can write without blocking (it’ll block rather than buffer, and you might get a deadlock), (b) yielding a value from a generator that doesn’t have a file associated with it (None.write(x) won’t work), (c) having generators that don’t actually yield, and (d) probably some other ways. And it would’ve been nice if I could have somehow moved the “yield None” into the iterator so that it was implicit in the “for line in f”, rather than explicit. But even so, I quite like it.

A passing thought: Would it be fair to compare Google's App Engine to Ford's assembly line, in a roundabout sort of way? Ford's mass produced cars put cars within reach of many more people, and over time, put paid to the many custom car producers who didn't adapt. Google's App Engine is a way for people to easily scale their web applications in a way that wasn't possible until now. No fiddling with EC2 images, or hosting, or a bunch of other stuff that, for the time being will still drive people to want to control their own infrastructure, but the prospect of very cheap hosting and very easy scaling is potentially something that will change things significantly.

Instructions how to use etchanhalf kernels are available too, please report problems to the mailinglist mentioned there.

I still have oldworld powerpc hardware to give away, if someone wants to have those for testing the new snd-powermac driver or whatever, please contact me. Appearantly my mail didn't make it to the powerpc list when I originally sent it, so I've just resend it.

Today I will switch the second PCs of my parents to Debian etch. They seem to like it and "Gnome is not really different than Windows" ;-)

Today in Oslo, Wednesday April 9th, 12:00 AM, there will be a demo against the adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard. I’ve not got the time at the moment to elaborate on this, but adopting OOXML as an ISO standard is a really, really bad idea, mainly because it will weaken ISOs standing as a serious standards organization. I’ll whine at length about it in another post. http://blogs.freecode.no/isene/2008/04/07/demonstration-outside-iso-conference Be there, or B !

Can you see anything like this in BLR? Originally uploaded by aanjhan
No, I will not see

The latest news related to the Beijing Olympic games is that Kevin Rudd (our Prime Minister) has said “It is absolutely clear that there are human rights abuses in Tibet. That’s clear-cut; we need to be upfront and absolutely straight about what’s going on,” - stating the obvious really. If that was all that happened then it wouldn’t be particularly interesting. The paper version of “The Age” quotes George Bush as seconding Kevin Rudd’s statement. I believe that this is quite significant. Bush is well known for being stupid, the fact that he is now following the example of someone else who is doing good things is a very positive thing for the world. When John Howard was our Prime Minister we had an idiot (Howard) following an even bigger idiot (Bush) and the result was not good. Kevan Gosper (an Australian IOC board member) said “They just take their hate out on whatever the issues are at the time, and that hate against the host country is being taken out on our torch“. People who are totally corrupt sometimes seem confused when other people are motivated by moral principles, maybe we have a culture clash between the corrupt IOC board and the attitudes of most people in the rest of the world (I can’t think of any other way to map Kevan’s statement to reality). Mr Rudd has confirmed that Chinese “security guards” (soldiers) will not be permitted to operate in Australia to protect the Olympic torch from protesters, but the “security guards” have been operating in the UK. I read about this on the web site of The Age, but I won’t link to them because they have a lot of broken links with the following explanation - I am not going to link to sites that are so transient in nature (linking to The Age would lower the quality of my blog). Incidentally does anyone know of a news service in Australia that has reliable pages which stay online? We could not find the page you requested. This is often because older content has been removed from our site. In most cases you can still find the item via our archive service, News Store, where you can buy articles for a small fee. It also has the following text which indicates that the most visible problem is probably transient, but the fact that they deliberately break links is unacceptable to me: If you reached this page from a link on our site, please contact the webmaster (choose Technical faults) and tell us the address of the faulty page and the address shown for this page. The MSN article about the meeting between Bush and Rudd also had an interesting quote from Nancy Pelosi (speaker of the house in the US congress) [1]. She said “As I said in India last week where I met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, if freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China’s oppression in Tibet, we have lost our moral authority to speak out on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world” and that the IOC made a mistake in awarding the games to China. Pelosi is not known for being left-wing (the US Democratic party is centrist/right by the standards of most democracies) so it’s interesting to see her take a stand on this issue. Erich Schubert has written about this, he points out that the Olympics are not about sports [2]. Well of course the Olympics are about money, drugs, and sports-science! I’m not sure that I agree with Schubert and Pelosi, the Chinese Olympics has focussed a lot of international attention on what China is doing - this has to be good for human rights. The Olympic games are a white elephant, running them costs a huge amount of money and there is no evidence that they actually make money for the host country once the opportunity costs are taken into account. Maybe we should give the Olympics to Zimbabwe or the Sudan next?

• [1] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23845275/


• [2] http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/2008040901-boycott-olympia.html

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In my opinion, the protests in London and Paris were great.China wants to use Olympia for promoting itself. All this is just a huge image campaign. This is why we should remind people on how cruel that regime is and how little it cares for human rights.Human rights are more important than the olympic torch.Turning a chinese PR campaign into a PR disaster is good.This is not about sports. Sports is what you do at home, not what is on TV. When I go dancing with my friends, that is sports. When I sit in front of the TV, it is not. I will not be watching the Olympics. When IOC representatives talk about it all being "only about sports" they lie - it's all about money.This is not out of disrespect for the athletes, but I cannot tolerate China using the Olympics as image campaign for being an equal member of the international community. All the new stadiums and so on - they're trying really hard to give the impression of a new china - when they actually have not changed at all.We need to signal China that if they want to be treated equally, they need to adhere to the same standards as all others - respecting human rights is the bare minimum, free elections and democracy are the next important step then.P.S. Please also do not buy Olympia swag. It's reported to be manufactured at less than half of the minimum wage even in China! It's pure exploitation!Note that I'm talking about a consumers' boycott, not an athletes' boycott. I do think that the athletes go there for the competitions.P.P.S. I don't think the Olympic games are fair anyway - I believe that many athletes are using doping (just the detection methods are insufficient). Otherwise we would not see new world records each year. And I believe the IOC is corrupt and maybe actually criminal; all they actually care about are their revenue streams, not the sports either.P.P.P.S. This blog is representing my own opinion only. Therefore it does not have or need a comment function. Use your own blog if your opinion differs.