17 October 2006

I have recently purchased a large quantity of fair trade chocolate. Fair trade means that the people who produce the products will be paid a fair price for their products which will enable them to send their children to school, pay for adequate health-care, etc. Paying a small price premium on products such as coffee and chocolate usually makes no notable difference to the living expenses of someone in a first-world country such as Australia, but can make a huge difference to the standard of living of the people who produce the products. Also fair-trade products are generally of a very high quality, you are paying for the best quality as well as the best conditions of the workers.

I will share this chocolate at the next LUV meeting, hopefully the people who attend will agree that the chocolate is both of a high quality as well as being good in principle and that they will want to buy it too.

The Fair Trade chocolate I bought cost $6.95 per 100g. I went to Safeway (local bulk food store with low prices) to get prices on other chocolate to compare. Lindt (cheaper Swiss chocolate) costs $3.09 per 100g and has a special of $2.54. The Lindt and the Fair Trade chocolate are both 70%, but the Fair Trade chocolate is significantly smoother, has a slightly better aroma, and a better after-taste. So the Fair Trade chocolate costs slightly more than twice as much as Lindt, but I believe that it has a quality to match the price. Then I compared the price of a cheap chocolate, Cadbury Old Gold chocolate is also 70% cocoa and costs $4.29 for 220g, this makes it between 3.5 and 4.4 times cheaper than the Fair Trade chocolate. But if you like chocolate then Cadbury products probably aren't on the shopping list anyway. I believe that the Fair Trade chocolate I bought can be justified on the basis of flavor alone without regard to the ethical issues.

All Linux users know what it's like to have their quality of life restricted by an oppressive monopoly. We are fortunate in that it only affects us in small ways, not in our ability to purchase adequate food and health care. As we oppose software monopolies that hurt us in the computer industry we must also oppose monopolies in the food industry that hurt people in third-world countries. The fair trade programs are the best way I know of doing that. Hopefully after tasting the chocolate many LUV members will want to buy it too.

Dutch police arrested 12 people for acting suspiciously on a flight to India. A passenger said "They were not paying attention to what the flight attendents were saying", I don't pay attention to the flight attendents either. When you fly more than 10 times a year you learn how to do up your seat-belt and when it's appropriate to use your laptop, so once you know where the emergency exits are you can read a book ot talk to other passengers. The 12 people who were arrested were apparently exchanging mobile phones - strange, they have never asked people not to do that.

The 12 people have since been released. The cost of canceling flights due to security scares is significant for the airline companies. The fear that this induces in the public (both of terrorism and of stupid police) causes them to be less likely to fly which hurts the airline industry even more as well as also hurting the tourism industry.

The US is more dependent on air travel than any other country due to a severe lack of public transport. Australia is also very dependent on air travel due to large distances and no land connection to any other country. The UK also seems to have more of a need for air travel than other EU countries.

If exchanging mobile phones can interfere with air travel then people who dislike the US and the other countries in the coalition of the willing/stupid can cause serious economic damage by trivial things such as exchanging phones in-flight or writing BOB on a sick bag without any risk to themselves.

The war on terror is already as good as lost. William S. Lind's blog is a good source of information on some of the ways that the US is losing. It's a pity that the Australian and UK governments are determined to take their countries down with the US.

To get the maximum value out of my writing when I am asked a question that is of general interest in private mail I will (without in any way identifying the person or giving any specifics of their work) blog my reply. I hope that not only will this benefit the general readers, but also the person who originally asked the question may benefit from reading blog comments.

The question is "I wonder whether I can define a domain which is a union of two existing domain, that is, define a new domain X, which has all the privilege domain Y and Z has got".

There is no way to say in one line of policy "let foo_t do everything that bar_t and baz_t can do" (for reasons I will explain later). However you can easily define a domain to have the privileges that two other domains have.

If you have bar.te and baz.te then a start is:
grep ^allow bar.te baz.te sed -e s/bar/foo/ -e s/baz/foo/ >> foo.te
Then you need to just define foo_t in the file foo.te and define an entry-point type and a suitable domain_auto_trans() rule to enter the domain.

There are other macros that allow operations that don't fit easily into a grep command, but they aren't difficult to manage.

The only tricky area is if you have the following:
domain_auto_trans(bar_t, shell_exec_t, whatever1_t)
domain_auto_trans(baz_t, shell_exec_t, whatever2_t)

As every domain_auto_trans() needs to have a single target type those two lines conflict so you will need to decide which one you want to merge. This is the reason why you can't just merge two domains. Also the same applies for file_type_auto_trans() rules and for booleans in some situations.

I'm currently working for a company that in the past has not embraced new technology. One of my colleagues recently installed a wiki which did a lot of good in terms of organizing the internal documentation.

The next step is to install some blogging software. What I want is to have every sys-admin run a blog of what they are doing and have an aggregation of all the team's blogs for when anyone wants to see a complete list of what's been done recently. The security does not have to be particularly high as it's an internal service (probably everyone will use the same account). The ability to store draft posts would be really handy, but apart from that none of the advanced features are really needed.

Also it would be handy to be able to tag posts. For example if userA did some work on the mail server they would tag it with SMTP and then at some future time it would be possible to view all posts with the SMTP tag.

I've done a search on google for this topic and there are many pages comparing blog software. But all the comparisons seem based on Internet use, they talk about what versions of RSS are supported etc. But I don't need much of that. An ancient version of RSS will do as long as there is a single syndication program that can support it. Performance doesn't have to be great either, I'm looking at less than a dozen people posting and reading and a fairly big Opteron server with a decent RAID array.

For the minimal requirements I could probably write blog and syndication programs as CGI-BIN scripts in a couple of days. They wouldn't support RSS or XML but that's no big deal. But I expect that if I use some existing software that someone recommends in a blog comment it will be faster to install and have some possibility of future upgrades.

There are many people claiming that nuclear power will solve all the ills of the world. However this does not seem to be possible. Firstly you have to consider the hidden costs of nuclear power such as deaths from the mining industry (ingesting uranium ore is a really bad thing) and the difficulty in disposing of radioactive waste. But rather than concentrating on the bad aspects of nuclear power (which are well documented) I will concentrate on some of the viable alternatives.

Wind power is a really good option, particularly for countries such as Australia that have a low population density and a large land area. The Chinese government is investing heavily in wind power, I think it's safe to assume that it's not because they are great environmentalists but because they simply need more energy than they can get from other sources and that they have strategic reasons for not wanting to rely on Australian coal and uranium or Arabian oil. Most energy sources have some drawbacks, but wind power has no side effects and isn't going to kill birds either (birds have evolved the ability to detect and avoid predatory birds, they can easily avoid large fixed objects such as fans from wind farms).

Two other good options are wave and tidal power. These are better than river based hydro-electricity because there is no need to create dams that remove forests. Wave and tidal power are both very predictable which is an advantage when compared to wind power which is less predictable. One solution to the unpredictability of wind power is to couple it with a river based hydro-electric system which can provide electricity when there is less wind. A hydro-electric system to compensate for days that are less windy would need a much smaller dam than one that is designed to provide the main power source.

The next issue is how to power vehicles (on air, land, and sea). Advocates of nuclear power often talk about hydrogen powered cars. However while hydrogen has a good ratio of energy to weight it is not very dense, so the energy density for volume is much less than petrol. Combining Prius technology with
hydrogen in an internal combustion engine still won't give the distance per tank of fuel as petrol does. Hydrogen with fuel cells in an all electric vehicle might allow you to drive the same distance as a non-hybrid car on petrol, but probably won't compare to the range of a hybrid Diesel vehicle.

Bio-Diesel is a good option for fuelling cars. Diesel engines give greater efficiency than Otto cycle (the most common car engine) or Atkinson cycle (as used in the Prius) engines. Not only is bio-Diesel renewable but it also produces exhaust that is less toxic than that which is produced from fossil fuels. See the VeggieVan site for more details on bio-Diesel. The toxic fossil fuels are linked to health problems in airline hostesses, AFAIK there has been no research on the impact of car exhaust on pedestrians.

One thing to note about bie-Diesel is that you can do it right now. According to a British TV documentary all you have to do is filter oil that was used for frying food (they used oil from a Mexican restaurant) and mix it with a small amount of ethanol and it's ready to use in your car. As restaurants currently have to pay to dispose of old frying oil this should be good for everyone!

Bio-Diesel could work for powering planes, there is already research in progress on this issue, but there are problems related to the viscosity of bio-Diesel at low temperatures. Maybe a blend of bio-Diesel and bio-Ethanol would work. Ethanol freezes at -114.3C and should lower the freeze temperature of bio-Diesel.

Bio-Diesel would of course work really well for ships. Supplying the amount of fuel that current ships need would be difficult. Some analysis shows that the deck area of a ship can collect enough sunlight to supply ~10% of the power needs of the ship. The Orcelle is a design for a totally clean ship that runs on solar, wind, and wave power. However with the proposed design the solar panels will not be angled effectively for collecting sunlight as they will be on sails. I think that there is a lot of potential in having a design based around sails, wave and solar power for generating electricity, and also a Diesel engine running on bio-Diesel fuel for supplying extra power when required (EG when sailing at night in calm weather). Building a ship that uses only wind, solar, and wave power would probably be significantly more expensive than the current Diesel design. Building a ship that uses 10% Diesel and 90% wind, solar, and wave power might be a lot cheaper.

There are lots of ways of producing the energy we need to maintain our current standard of living. If our government was to spend as much money researching them as it does protecting petroleum reserves then the problem would be solved.

I am aware of the problems in displaying my blog in Planet Debian. I have filed a bug report with blogger and informed mako. There's nothing else I can do at the moment, if you use Planet Linux Australia then things work OK. I'm not sure whether Planet Debian or Blogger is at fault.

Sorry for the inconvenience, if you only use Planet Debian then you will have to read my blog directly.

In regard to my post yesterday about Planet Debian I received the following response:
James Purser said I'm betting that your feed is an atom feed. We had the same problem on PLOA with Jeff and Pias feeds when they switched to atom. Planet needs to be upgraded.
Well I am using an atom feed, so this probably explains it. Sorry for the inconvenience to the Planet Debian readers, I guess that things will stay the way they are until it is upgraded.

Also when viewing my blog entry in Planet Debian I realised that much of a spam message had got pasted in to the URL field for the Planet Debian link. Oh the irony that I only found this embarassing error because of a bug in the Planet software.

This brings me to another issue, Security Enhanced X. With SE-X (before you ask, I didn't invent the acronym) you can use SE Linux to control communication between windows on an X desktop. With a modification to the clipboard manager (klipper in the case of KDE) every piece of data that's copied from an application will have a security context assigned to it and this context will be checked against the context of an application that is to be the target of a paste operation. Klipper will also have to support relabeling clipboard data. Therefore if I want to cut text from my email client (Kmail) and paste it into Firefox then I would have to relabel it with the appropriate MCS categories. This would permit me to paste text from an email into a web form with a few extra mouse clicks, but would prevent me from accidentally pasting the wrong text. Keeping in mind the fact that there are many more embarassing things that could be accidentally pasted into a blog entry than the contents of a spam this doesn't seem overly difficult.

PS Before anyone jumps to conclusions. When I receive GPG encrypted email or other material that should be kept confidential I try and avoid cutting it, and if I have to do so I clear the clipboard buffer afterwards. Keeping spam a secret is not really a priority to me so I didn't take adequate precautions in this case.

The music sales website www.ripit.com.au has the advertising campaign ripit - don't rip it off. However the web site displays the below message when viewed on a Linux machine. The "step by step guide on how to enable Firefox" is really a guide on how to get IE code running in a tabbed window in Firefox (so you can get all the security problems that Firefox normally prevents).

Ripit has a big advertising campaign (TV and all the other places) with the slogan "ripit - don't rip it off", but it seems that this has the caveat that people who don't use Windows aren't wanted as customers. Are non-Windows users expected to "rip off" the music?

What are the options of buying music without dealing with the music cartel? I'm sick of all the things that they do, preventing free trade to articially inflate prices in some countries, ripping off the musicians, putting root-kits on CDs. Eventually the recording industry has to be destroyed. Most money from CD sales goes to the recording industry (not the musicians), the products provided to the customers are of low quality and customers are routinely treated like dirt, the recording industry does no good for society.

From now on I will not buy any CDs or DVDs of music from the recording industry cartel. I will only buy music from web sites that support standard Internet protocols. If a music company doesn't want to support Firefox then they don't want my money. For any music industry people who read this, don't get the idea that I'm unable to pay for music. I have a large collection of CDs (thousands of dollars worth) and was just starting to buy music DVDs when you finally offended me too much.

Thank You for visiting the Ripit Music Store

We have detected that the browser you are using is not compatible with the Music Store that you are attempting to access. This site has been designed to work with Internet Explorer Version 6 or above. Please launch the site in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or click here to download Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.
Also, music can only be downloaded via your Windows PC as this store is not compatible with Macintosh.
If you are using Mozilla Firefox, please click here to view the step by step guide on how to enable Firefox to surf the Soundbuzz Music Store

One new technology for saving fuel in cars is the 6 stroke engine. This is an engine that has two power strokes for every intake of fuel. The first power stroke is from the fuel burning, the second is from water being injected into the cylinder and boiling rapidly using steam for power. A significant amount of the weight of a car or truck engine is the cooling system. With water being injected into the cylinder after every burn the engine will require no other cooling, this can mean a weight reduction of up to 500KG for a truck engine! It is claimed that this technique can "improve a typical engine s fuel consumption by 40 percent". Note that this technique could be combined with the technology in a Prius for even greater efficiency.

Simon Richter wrote an interesting response to my blog about clean energy. I'm guessing that the part of Germany he's from is similar in some ways to Amsterdam (where I used to live).

In Amsterdam tiny cars are used a lot more than they have been in most places. There is the Smart Car but there is also a tiny car that can only seat one person (I'll update this entry with a link if someone provides me one). The tiny car appears to weigh ~200Kg, has a maximum speed of 30Km/h, and is narrow enough to fit in bike lanes. Such cars will take little petrol and can be used for shopping. The short-distance car idea is being used by many people already in northern Europe.

Simon suggests having a standard baggage container that fits in all cars. I don't think that would work as there are many different design factors (parking space, cargo capacity, and aerodynamics) which force designers to choose different shapes.

I think that a better idea would be a standard baggage trailer that could be towed by any small car. It should not be difficult to design a trailer that can be safely towed at 30KM/h behind a tiny car. The supermarkets could rent such trailers to shoppers for a nominal fee. Then most shopping trips could use the cargo capacity of the tiny car, but when buying supplies for a party you could rent a trailer from the supermarket.

Another option is having shops deliver goods to you. I have observed an increasing number of people doing this at my local supermarket. Of course you would still need to take ice-cream home yourself and maybe milk and meat too.

Electric scooters are also a good option for travel. Unfortunately in Australia there are few good options for securing them at the moment. As an electric scooter is light enough to be carried it needs to be chained to something secure. In the Netherlands this wouldn't be a problem as the bicycle infrastructure includes plenty of bike racks to which you can chain your bike, scooter, etc. Of course the Netherlands is entirely flat so there's no need for an electric scooter. Melbourne has a lot more hills and most people aren't fit enough to ride a bike so scooters are needed to replace cars.

Regarding depersonalised cars. That would require a significant social change as currently cars are extremely personalised. One thing that I had been thinking about is the idea of sharing cars with neighbors. For example if you have an apartment building and there are a few people you trust then you could share a tiny car for going shopping. Sharing a car used for driving to work or for entertainment would not work well as the car would spend most of it's time in use (or at least parked somewhere away from home). Sharing a car that's used for small journeys would be much easier as such a vehicle would spend most of it's time at home.

In Australia most families have two cars. One is used a lot (spends maybe 70 hours a week away from home) and the other is used much less (maybe 10 hours a week). Instead of owning two cars it would be possible for families to own one car and share another.

Regarding the Pebble Bed Reactor, could the people who advocate it please read the Wikipedia article. The limiting factor is not thermal expansion (solids do not expand nearly enough) but the Doppler effect (fast neutrons are not as effective at triggering fission). But in spite of that issue, let's not consider an untested new reactor design to be the savior of nuclear energy. I think that most people who read my blog have a science or engineering background and know from experience that new technologies often don't work too well in the first version. When a new CPU has a bug it's usually not a big deal. When a new OS or application has many bugs it's often expected (expecially when the OS or application comes from a monopolist). But if a new design for a nuclear reactor turns out to have a bug then it will be a more serious issue.

Here's an interesting blog entry comparing SE Linux and AppArmor. It has some amusing comments, one of which I used for the title of this entry.

There are two things I don't like about AppArmor. One is that it doesn't label Inodes but instead bases it's access control on file names. This means that renaming a file may change the access granted to it, and a file with multiple hard links may have different sets of access granted to each name. The hard link problem is a killer, imagine that name A grants execute access to the file and name B grants write access, therefore you have the ability to create an executable file.

The other thing I don't like about AppArmor is that it's goals are low. The current implementation of AppArmor can be compared to the SE Linux targeted policy. The difference is that AppArmor is currently achieving everything that it was designed to do while the targeted policy is intentionally providing less security features to give greater ease of use. There is a well defined transition path from targeted to strict, and from strict to MLS. There is no transition path from the current AppArmor implementation to something better.

Rumor has it that Suse have bought the rights to a MLS system and that they want to get LSPP certification. LSPP certification requires that access control be based on Inodes not file names (IE renaming a file may not change the access that is granted to it). It will be interesting to see how they integrate AppArmor and a MLS system.

I'm getting sick of blogger. The main thing is that I'm simply not a user. Taking what someone else gives me and just putting up with any failings doesn't suit me at all. I can deal with bugs in things I control (such as Linux distributions) because I can fix the bugs I consider important at any time.

So now I'm looking for a serious blogging program. Wordpress was strongly recommended to me after my previous post on the topic of blogs, but that was in regard to a simple blog program for Intranet use. I am now after a blog program that is designed for Internet use, it must have good security, support multiple users (some of my friends will probably want to use my blog server machine), and not be overly difficult to customise (I am resigned to the fact that I will have to learn another programming language - probably re-learning PHP or Java as that is where web programming is at nowadays).

One thing that I want to do is to have the main web page that displays all recent posts display each post in a frame with a separate Adsense section. The topics of my posts vary a lot so I want to have adverts that match.

Another feature I want is to have multiple RSS feeds with different settings. One use for this is to have tags for each post to specify which channel(s) the post will end up on, another is for Adsense for feeds functionality which I want on for some feeds but off for others. I also want to generate multiple feeds for different syndication services. Ideally a syndication service such as Planet Debian or Planet Linux Australia would use a unique feed for sucking it's own data and also have a unique feed address advertised on it's site for the users (if this isn't supported or desired at the syndication level then I can do tricks in the web server to serve different content for different IP addresses). That way I can track use by the different services, work around bugs in syndication services that matter to me, and change settings for post summaries, etc to suit the syndication service.

In terms of HTML editing I only need the most basic functionality. I would be entirely happy to write blog entries in raw HTML, my friends would probably desire line breaks to be converted to paragraph or break tags and basic linking functionality, but they could probably deal with entering bold and italic tags themselves (the few of my friends who couldn't manage this would probably only want to write plain-text in paragraphs).

I also want to run my own syndication software. I guess I have to consider blog server and syndication server at the same time as there may be some dependencies (EG having them both written in the same language might be handy - I don't want to re-learn BOTH Java and PHP). The syndication software would ideally automatically collect the feeds from other syndication services that I specify (although I'm sure I could write a simple Perl script to scrape them from the Planet web sites). Then I want to provide an RSS feed of that content for anyone who wants it.

Please let me know via email or comments if you have any suggestions about which software to use.

Previously I asked for advice about running an Intranet blog, and running an Internet blog with hosting for friends.

In response to the question about running a small Intranet blog the recommendations were strongly for Wordpress, with a mention of Ikiwiki as well. One of the features that I consider desirable is for software to be reasonably popular which means that support is often easier to obtain. So Wordpress is my main candidate at this time for Intranet use. I'll install Wordpress and probably won't try anything else unless Wordpress fails in some significant way (which seems unlikely).

In response to my question about a blog server for serious blogging again Wordpress was well recommended. There is also a version of Wordpress in beta called Wordpress MU that supports blog server operations such as wordpress.com. Although I didn't mention it before I have had some ideas of starting my own server along such lines so Wordpress again does well.

Over the next few weeks I will start playing with Wordpress and Wordpress MU. If things go well I'll move my blog away from blogspot and to a domain I own in the near future.

Greenpeace has an interesting article about how IT companies rank in toxic waste problems.

Dell rates quite well, I feel happier about my recent purchase of a large Dell TFT monitor now. HP does reasonably well, that's fortunate as the Green party in Victoria has recently purchased a HP server. But next time we discuss such things I will suggest that more consideration be given to Dell servers because of this issue.

Lenovo does really badly, I'm surprised because I would have expected IBM to do reasonably well and I didn't think that Lenovo would make significant changes. From now on I will refrain from purchasing Lenovo products. I will still purchase second-hand IBM products, but nothing under the Lenovo brand until they clean up their act.

Also it's worth noting that computers manufactured with toxic chemicals will outgas some of the chemicals into the local environment (IE your server room, bedroom, or wherever else you have computers). Avoiding the computers manufactured with toxic chemicals is not only good for the environment, but also good for your health!

At the start of the year I suffered a minor injury to my left eye. This brought my vision down to slightly below average for my age. A doctor and an ophthalmologist both thought that my vision was good enough at this level and that I don't need glasses. But the ability to use a small font means that I can have more text on screen and thus do my work more effectively. Since about March I have worn glasses all the time. Regardless of what the experts say I want to have good vision all the time and there is a significant difference between my vision while wearing glasses and that without.

It's often recommended that people get their eyes tested about every 2 years from when they are in their late 20's and also get a test done a few months after any eye injury. I strongly support such recommendations for anyone who works in the computer industry. Even if your vision is slightly less than it could be it will make a difference to your work. I have not found glasses to cause me any inconvenience, I'm sure that it would be bad for children to wear glasses but for adults the only potential issue is when playing sport (which is less demanding on your vision than reading an 8 point font on a typical monitor). I am constantly amazed by TV and radio adverts which say "do you wear glasses, if so then you must have considered LASER eye surgery". Glasses are fine (IMHO) and I will not consider having a LASER or other dangerous object pointed at my eyes unless I am in danger of death or blindness!

The testing apparatus that an optometrist uses is interesting to inspect if you like machines. It is a device with a huge selection of levers for inserting different lenses in front of your eyes until they discover the combination that gives you the best vision. If you get your eyes tested make sure you get the optometrist to explain everything, you can learn many interesting things.

Recently, I have had a further eye problem. Recently my central vision went blurry with a shimmering affect for about 40 minutes, but the peripheral vision was OK. An ophthalmologist diagnosed this as a migraine, apparently I got a very mild one with only a minor visual affect but no headache etc. One thing that is apparently possible when experiencing migraine related vision impairments is the ability to act on visual information without consciously knowing it (EG catch a ball without seeing it).

A migraine is a better diagnosis than I had feared. The movie Super Size Me (the topic of tomorrow's blog entry) contains an interview with a main who describes a diabetic vision problem that sounded similar to mine. Migraines don't cause permanent problems while diabetes can, and diabetes requires lots of unpleasant blood tests and injections.

Apparently migraines are often triggered by physical events or food items. If you suffer one then it's recommended that you write down as much information as possible about the previous 24 hours to help track down the cause. If you experience something similar to what I describe then do not take this blog entry as medical advice, instead rely on a doctor and whichever specialist they refer you to. But do write down everything that happened prior to the medical problem (keeping an accurate diary can't do any harm).

The Wikipedia entry on Migraines has a lot more interesting information, but don't take it as medical advice either. One particularly interesting thing in the Wikipedia article is the note that migraines may be caused by not having suitable glasses, or prevented by wearing special glasses.

When I visit the toyota.com.au web site it does not display any information on the new Camry, instead it displays a message saying "Unfortunately you do not have flash 8".

A well designed web site will display information for all users, including those who don't have flash installed.

The Toyota web site should be aimed at selling Toyota products, however it seems most effective at selling Macromedia products. Anyone who visits the Toyota site is forced to install a product from Macromedia (the Flash viewer) but is not forced to purchase anything from Toyota.

Are your web designers representing Toyota's best interests or the best interests of Macromedia?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=flash+security+cve&btnG=Search

If you visit the above URL you will see information on some of the security problems related to flash. Anyone who has security problems on their computer after being compelled to install Flash by the Toyota web site would have reason to blame Toyota for any damage or loss caused by such security problems.

Flash is often prohibited by corporate security requirements (the instructions on the Toyota web site could get a potential customer sacked - and therefore unable to purchase a car). It is not usable by many visually impaired people (while people with extreme vision problems are not able to drive a Toyota cars they should be able to read information about them). It is also disliked by people who want their computer to run all free software, which includes a large number of people who like the Prius.

It seems that Toyota isn't alone in having non-functional web sites. In fact it's better than some, the basic information on the cars is available and it is possible to get contact information for car dealers, also they have a feed-back form on their web site (to which I submitted my previous blog post). Incidentally the Lexus site had much the same problem as the Toyota site (hardly surprising as Lexus is the luxury marque from Toyota). But I expect that if I phoned Lexus to ask about their vehicles I would get a better call-center experience which would make me less inclined to blog about them.

Daihatsu vehicles are sold by Toyota. Their web site doesn't use Flash, but it has so little content that it doesn't count.

I decided to quickly review the web sites of car manufacturers that sell in Australia for a fair comparison. I found three sites worse than Toyota, two sites that were equal (counting Lexus), and six that were better than it.

Holden has the worst site, they don't display any information if you don't have flash, they don't even display a phone number! I wonder how much Adobe pays web programmers to pull this sort of stunt. I can't imagine Holden management saying "if a customer comes to our web site and doesn't have Flash then don't display our phone number or any other contact information, they can use Flash or buy a Ford instead". Obviously some web monkey has run amok and done their own thing without following directions. Probably some people need to be sacked in the Holden web development group.

Volvo Cars has a very bad site. Most of the content is involved with Flash in some way and refuses to load. There is a mailto reference that is broken, and the overview page for the S60 seems to have a JavaScript loop (I aborted the load after it loaded 245 pictures and was still going). The Volvo page for their other business is quite functional although minimal.

Hyundai has a bad site. The front page works OK, but some of the sub-sites to display information on vehicles redirect to sites such as evolveddriving.com.au which are "optimised for 1024x768" and require Flash and Quicktime while others do strange things like changing the size of the browser window. Overall it's a very bad site, but at least I could find the contact details for my nearest dealer, and it has a feedback form.

Subaru has an OK site. The only thing I couldn't access without Flash is information on their AWD (All Wheel Drive) technology. Unfortunately they provide no email address and no form for sending feedback.

The main Ford web page claims that Flash is required, but their site just works without it. In a quick test I was unable to find any functionality on the Ford site that is missing because of not having Flash. Ford have a well designed site.

The Volkswagen site makes no mention of the fact that I don't use Flash, it does however have some strange unused spaces in the middle of the screen. I guess that it recognised that I don't have Flash and made a semi-successful attempt to work around it. I could get all information I wanted including dealer contact details.

The main Mazda web page displays a message about Flash not being installed and offers a link to a non-Flash version of the site. The Flash section is at the center and the buttons at the sides work if you don't have Flash. This seems to be a well implemented site.

Citroen has an OK site, no flash that I noticed (although there were large blank areas on the screen at times indicating that something was missing), the information was all available and browsing was reasonably easy. One thing that annoyed me was that there were movies available but only through some sort of JavaScript that tried to play them in my browser. I have never bothered setting up my web browsing machine for playing movies (among other things it has no speakers) so this is a problem for me.

Peugeot has a good site. No apparent flash and it's reasonably easy to use. It has more pictures than Kia but the JavaScript navigation stuff is fancy. One nice feature is a single page with pricing summaries for all models. If you have $X to spend on a Peugeot you will easily discover which ones you can afford.

Kia has the best site I saw! Not only is there no flash, but it's well designed, easy to navigate and it loads quite quickly. Please review the Kia site as an example of how to do it properly!

Let me know if I've missed any makes and I'll post an update.

In response to my previous post someone pointed out that MX records have an obvious benefit of offering multiple servers at different priority levels.

I don't believe that this is a benefit for many machines on the modern Internet. Most systems that have secondary MX records implement them poorly, they have less SPAM checks on the secondary MX server, and it often doesn't even have a canonical user-list! This is a really serious problem, spammers apparently often target the secondary MX server (I don't have evidence for this but many people assert it to be true and it would obviously work so is likely to be true) and it's well known that spammers often guess account names (a quick scan of the logs of any mail server will prove this). These factors combine to make a secondary MX server without a canonical list of user-names a serious spam problem, it will receive mail and then bounce it to innocent third parties (the vast majority of spam has a forged sender nowadays).

If you have the ability to run a well configured secondary MX server with a canonical list of valid account names (which must be maintained independently of the master mail server for obvious reasons) then there is the issue of why you would want to do so. What problem does it solve? In the early days of the Internet mail storage machines were often end-nodes on the network, many hops away from the central well-connected machines. This meant that sometimes connections would time-out or the hop count (which was smaller then than it is now) would be exceeded. Having a well connected server being a secondary MX server was a significant advantage for a small mail server in those times (by todays servers almost all the mail servers of 1993 are small and the biggest servers of 1993 were medium sized by today's standards).

I just did a quick search for machines with secondary MX records (IE multiple MX records at different priorities). The only significant mail service with such configuration that I could find was gmail. Hotmail.com, ibm.com, microsoft.com, aol.com, and zonnet.nl all have multiple MX records at the same priority - this is a cluster of primary mail servers not a primary/secondary configuration. The evidence suggests that mail servers such as hotmail.com do not benefit from a secondary MX record, so I doubt that any other domain needs it either.

In response to a comment on my previous post, I have previously mentioned in mailing lists the issue of spammers attacking secondary MX servers, but I couldn't see it when reviewing my blog archives.

Above is day 10 of the beard.

I've written a bunch of software. I like coding, I like debugging. I like getting e-mail from people that have used my software and are happy.

I don't like actually having to make a release.

To do a good and proper release of a program, I'd be doing approximately these tasks:

• Upload to Debian


• Push to my darcs repo


• Upload a tar.gz to my server


• Update a webpage with the latest tar.gz


• Announce the release to freshmeat


• Announce the release to a mailing list


• Update/post screenshots, if things have changed

So I have two wishes. First, I want a tool that maintains a website with software listings. Each program should have its own page, with a description, links to mailing lists, download links, links to the darcs repo, screenshots, etc. It should be simple but I'm too lazy to write it.

Secondly, there should be a tool that will do all of the above tasks (except the screenshots) for me. It should infer the name of the project and the version from the data in my working directory. It should be able to automate this while process without me having to lift a finger.

Sadly, no such thing seems to exist.

And, to date, I've been too lazy to write one. Does anyone know of such a thing?

This weekend I was finally able to finish (after 7 days of full-time labour) the assignment of my last pending bachelor course: Hypermedia Structures and Systems. The assignment of this purely on-line course consisted of the conversion of a linear document to a hypertext one. This meant splitting the document in dozens of nodes and then going through each of them (iteratively) and linking them together using several techniques while keeping useful guidelines in mind. While discussing this assignment with Bas we decided it would be nice to build the site using Webgen. Webgen is good at transforming nodes that just contain text (with a bit of Textile markup) to nice XHTML 1.1 valid pages. We also extended Webgen with a few plug-ins: one to create links to nodes without having to mention the paths but just using unique identifiers. That way we were sure the links were also always pointing to the right page. The other plug-in we wrote was to be able to do bibliography stuff a la LaTeX. I am quite satisfied with the result, which will be graded this week. ;)

I'm excited because we're pretty well along the way to getting cabal-install and friends working nicely. We've got almost 30 packages in the database. Let's imagine something that would be awesome for the Haskell community. A set of Haskell packages which are all known to work together with a particular version of cabal (the one that GHC comes with), and a particular version of GHC. GHC version 6.6 was just released, and I think we should try to make this happen. Currently, we have a set of 27 "unstable" packages. They may or may not work with each-other. I just created an empty directory "testing". I propose that we start testing packages, starting with the Cabal release that'll went into GHC 6.6, and make sure they work nicely together. Once they're known to work, we can migrate them from the "unstable" directory to the "testing" directory. Once we have a sufficient collection of packages, and once ghc 6.6 is released, we can make a snapshot of this directory, call it "stable-6.6" or something. Then if you have ghc 6.6 and cabal-install, you should be able to "cabal-install p" for any package, and it'll definitely work. So what will we need for this to happen?

An installed version of ghc 6.6 on the hackage/darcs server. Maybe in a chroot or something. Maybe from the nightly build tree or the previous snapshot?

Some initial set of packages (maybe just cabal-install) to start off.

Some script that goes through and builds all of the "unstable" packages in dependency order. I think cabal-install can do this already. In fact, it would be ideal if we used cabal-install for this.

The script should also run ./setup haddock and ./setup test. If the packages seem to work w/ 6.6 and the other packages in "testing", it should get migrated from "unstable" to "testing".

A web interface (lemmih is working on it)

A script to upload packages to "unstable" (Paolo is working on it).

Someone to spearhead all of this! We need volunteers. Please email me if you think you can head this up.