Search Results: "dark"

10 February 2013

David Bremner: First Steps with Argyll and ColorHug

In April of 2012 I bought a ColorHug colorimeter. I got a bit discouraged when the first thing I realized was that one of my monitors needed replacing, and put the the colorhug in a drawer until today. With quite a lot of help and encouragment from Pascal de Bruijn, I finally got it going. Pascal has written an informative blog post on color management. That's a good place to look for background. This is more of a "write down the commands so I don't forget" sort of blog post, but it might help somebody else trying to calibrate their monitor using argyll on the command line. I'm not running gnome, so using gnome color manager turns out to be a bit of a hassle. I run Debian Wheezy on this machine, and I'll mention the packages I used, even though I didn't install most of them today.
  1. Find the masking tape, and tear off a long enough strip to hold the ColorHug on the monitor. This is probably the real reason I gave up last time; it takes about 45minutes to run the calibration, and I lack the attention span/upper-arm-strength to hold the sensor up for that long. Apparently new ColorHugs are shipping with some elastic.
  2. Update the firmware on the colorhug. This is a gui-wizard kindof thing. 
     % apt-get install colorhug-client
 % colorhug-flash
  3. Set the monitor to factory defaults. On this ASUS PA238QR, that is brightness 100, contrast 80, R=G=B=100. I adjusted the brightness down to about 70; 100 is kindof eye-burning IMHO.
  4. Figure out which display is which; I have two monitors. 
     % dispwin -\?
    Look under "-d n"
  5. Do the calibration. This is really verbatim from Pascal, except I added the ENABLE_COLORHUG=true and -d 2 bits. 
     % apt-get install argyll
 % ENABLE_COLORHUG=true dispcal -v -d 2 -m -q m -y l -t 6500 -g 2.2 test
 % targen -v -d 3 -G -f 128 test
 % ENABLE_COLORHUG=true dispread -v -d 2 -y l -k test.cal test
 % colprof -v -A "make" -M "model" -D "make model desc" -C   "copyright" -q m -a G test
  6. Load the profile 
     % dispwin -d 2 -I test.icc
    It seems this only loads the x property _ICC_PROFILE_1 instead of _ICC_PROFILE; whether this works for a particular application seems to be not 100% guaranteed. It seems ok for darktable and gimp.

7 February 2013

Craig Sanders: Dead Can Dance

I saw Dead Can Dance at the Palais in St Kilda last night their first tour back in Australia in over 20 years. I ve wanted to see them perform live since I first discovered their music in the dim dark past bought the tickets as soon as the tour was announced last year and have been waiting impatiently ever since. The first act was percussionist David Kuckhermann who played solo and then joined DCD for the main act. He mostly played the handpan, which looks a lot like an upside-down wok with dimples on it. His tambourine solo was oustanding. Overall, a great start to the evening. I hadn t heard of him before, but I think I ll be ordering some of his CDs. Lisa Gerrard s voice was, as always, trance-inducingly sublime and Brendan Perry with a fine voice of his own really shines in a live performance. Definitely not a disappointment around three hours of amazing performance, old favourites and new, and the discovery (for me) of a new performer. If I have one (minor) complaint, it s that the volume was a little too loud, causing occasional distortion and difficulty distinguishing the lyrics on some of Brendan Perry s singing. Lisa Gerrard sings without words glossolalia and much higher than Perry so wasn t affected as much. If you haven t heard DCD or Lisa Gerrard s solo albums before, do so you re in for a treat labelled as world fusion , they re impossible to describe accurately while they started out as Dark Wave or as-goth-as-it-gets in the early 80s, they play across many genres and have strong influences from Middle Eastern, Mediaeval, world music, ambient, and more, they re in a genre of their own. You can t even say they re a bit like so-and-so because they aren t. Dead Can Dance is a post from: Errata

22 January 2013

Steve Kemp: Something, something, dark side.

I want to like LDAP. Every so often I do interesting things with it, and I start to think I like it, then some software that claims to support LDAP fails to do so properly and I remember I hate it again. I guess the problem with LDAP is that most people are scared by it, unless you reach a certain level of scale you don't need it. That makes installing it out of the blue a scary prospect, and that means that lots of toy-software applications don't even consider using it until they're mature and large. When you bolt-on support for LDAP to an existing project you have to make compromises; do you create local entries in your system for these scary-remote-LDAP-users? Do you map group members from LDAP into your own group system? ANd so on. To be fair to the application developers if the requirements for installation were "Install LDAP" they'd probably have a damn smaller userbase, and so we cannot blame OpenLDAP, or the other servers. All the same it is a shame. The very next piece of software I ever write that needs to handle logins will use LDAP and only LDAP. How hard can it be? In happier news I re-deployed http://www.debian-administration.org/ over the weekend. It now uses the Bytemark BigV platform which rocks. The migration was supposed to be a "Christmas Project", but took longer than expected due to the number of changes I need to make to the software, and my deployment plan. Still I'm very happy with the way things are running now, and don't expect I'll need to move or make significant changes for the next nine years. I just hope there is still interest in such things then. ObQuote: "Would you like a treatment? " - Dollhouse

Russ Allbery: Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2011

Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2011
Editor: Gordon van Gelder
Issue: Volume 120, No. 3 & 4
ISSN: 1095-8258
Pages: 258
Charles de Lint's book review column sticks with the sorts of things he normally reviews: urban and contemporary fantasy and young adult. Predictably, I didn't find that much of interest. But I was happy to see that not all the reviews were positive, and he talked some about how a few books didn't work. I do prefer seeing a mix of positive and negative (or at least critical) reviews. James Sallis's review column focuses entirely on Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore (by way of reviewing a collection). I'm always happy to see this sort of review. But between that and de Lint's normal subject matter, this issue of F&SF was left without any current science fiction reviews, which was disappointing. Lucius Shepard's movie review column features stunning amounts of whining, even by Shepard's standards. The topic du jour is how indie films aren't indie enough, mixed with large amounts of cane-shaking and decrying of all popular art. I find it entertaining that the F&SF film review column regularly contains exactly the sort of analysis that one expects from literary gatekeepers who are reviewing science fiction and fantasy. Perhaps David Langford should consider adding an "As We See Others" feature to Ansible cataloging the things genre fiction fans say about popular movies. "Scatter My Ashes" by Albert E. Cowdrey: The protagonist of this story is an itinerant author who has been contracted to write a family history (for $100K, which I suspect is a bit of tongue-in-cheek wish fulfillment) and has promptly tumbled into bed with his employer. But he is somewhat serious about the writing as well, and is poking around in family archives and asking relatives about past details. There is a murder (maybe) in the family history, not to mention some supernatural connections. Those familiar with Cowdrey's writing will recognize the mix of historical drama, investigation, and the supernatural. Puzzles are, of course, untangled, not without a bit of physical danger. Experienced fantasy readers will probably guess at some of the explanation long before the protagonist does. Like most Cowdrey, it's reliably entertaining, but I found it a bit thin. (6) "A Pocketful of Faces" by Paul Di Filippo: Here's a bit of science fiction, and another mystery, this time following the basic model of a police procedural. The police in this case are enforcing laws around acceptable use of "faces" in a future world where one can clone someone's appearance from their DNA and then mount it on a programmable android. As you might expect from that setup, the possibilities are lurid, occasionally disgusting, and inclined to give the police nightmares. After some scene-setting, the story kicks in with the discovery of the face of a dead woman who, at least on the surface, no one should have any motive to clone. There were a few elements of the story that were a bit too disgusting for me, but the basic mystery plot was satisfying. I thought the ending was a let-down, however. Di Filippo tries to complicate the story and, I thought, went just a little too far, leaving motives and intent more confusing than illuminating. (6) "The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu: Back to fantasy, this time using a small bit of magic to illustrate the emotional conflicts and difficulties of allegiance for second-generation immigrants. Jack is the son of an American farther and a Chinese mother who was a mail-order bride. He's young at the start of the story and struggling with the embarassment and humiliation that he feels at his mother's history and the difficulties he has blending in with other kids, leading to the sort of breathtaking cruelty that comes so easily from teenagers who are too self-focused and haven't yet developed adult empathy. I found this very hard to read. The magic is beautiful, personal, and very badly damaged by the cruelty in ways that can never really be fixed. It's a sharp reminder of the importance of being open-hearted, but it's also a devastating reminder that the lesson is normally learned too late. Not the story to read if you're prone to worrying about how you might have hurt other people. (6) "The Evening and the Morning" by Sheila Finch: This long novella is about a third of the issue and is, for once, straight science fiction, a somewhat rare beast in F&SF these days. It's set in the far future, among humans who are members of the Guild of Xenolinguists and among aliens called the Venatixi, and it's about an expedition back to the long-abandoned planet of Earth. I had a lot of suspension of disbelief problems with the setup here. While Earth has mostly dropped out of memory, there's a startling lack of curiosity about its current condition among the humans. Finch plays some with transportation systems and leaves humanity largely dependent on other races to explain the failure to return to Earth, but I never quite bought it. It was necessary to set up the plot, which is an exploration story with touches of first contact set on an Earth that's become alien to the characters, but it seemed remarkably artificial to me. But, putting that aside, I did get pulled into the story. Its emotional focus is one of decline and senescence, a growing sense of futility, that's halted by exploration, mystery, and analysis. The question of what's happened on Earth is inherently interesting and engaging, and the slow movement of the story provides opportunities to build up to some eerie moments. The problem, continuing a theme for this issue, is the ending. Some of the reader's questions are answered, but most of the answers are old, well-worn paths in science fiction. The emotional arc of the story is decidedly unsatisfying, at least to me. I think I see what Finch was trying to do: there's an attempted undermining of the normal conclusion of this sort of investigation to make a broader point about how to stay engaged in the world. But it lacked triumph and catharsis for me, partly because the revelations that we get are too pedestrian for the build-up they received. It's still an interesting story, but I don't think it entirely worked. (6) "Night Gauntlet" by Walter C. DeBill, Jr., et al.: The full list of authors for this story (Walter C. DeBill, Jr., Richard Gavin, Robert M. Price, W.H. Pugmire, Jeffrey Thomas, and Don Webb) provides one with the first clue that it's gone off the rails. Collaborative storytelling, where each author tries to riff off the work of the previous author while spinning the story in a different direction, is something that I think works much better orally, particularly if you can watch facial expressions while the authors try to stump each other. In written form, it's a recipe for a poorly-told story. That's indeed what we get here. The setup is typical Cthulhu mythos stuff: a strange scientist obsessed with conspiracy theories goes insane, leaving behind an office with a map of linkages between apparently unrelated places. The characters in the story also start going insane for similar reasons, leading up to a typical confrontation with things man was not meant to know, or at least pay attention to. If you like that sort of thing, you may like this story better than I did, but I thought it was shallow and predictable. (3) "Happy Ending 2.0" by James Patrick Kelly: More fantasy, this time of the time travel variety. (I call it fantasy since there's no scientific explanation for the time travel and it plays a pure fantasy role in the story.) That's about as much as I can say without giving away the plot entirely (it's rather short). I can see what Kelly was going for, and I think he was largely successful, but I'm not sure how to react to it. The story felt like it reinforced some rather uncomfortable stereotypes about romantic relationships, and the so-called happy ending struck me as the sort of situation that was going to turn very nasty and very uncomfortable about five or ten pages past where Kelly ended the story. (5) "The Second Kalandar's Tale" by Francis Marion Soty: The main question I have about this story is one that I can't answer without doing more research than I feel like doing right now: how much of this is original to Soty and how much if it is straight from Burton's translation of One Thousand and One Nights. Burton is credited for the story, so I suspect quite a lot of this is from the original. Whether one would be better off just reading the original, or if Soty's retelling adds anything substantial, are good questions that I don't have the background to answer. Taken as a stand-alone story, it's not a bad one. It's a twisting magical adventure involving a djinn, a captive woman, some rather predictable fighting over the woman, and then a subsequent adventure involving physical transformation and a magical battle reminiscent of T.H. White. (Although I have quite likely reversed the order of inspiration if as much of this is straight from Burton as I suspect.) Gender roles, however, are kind of appalling, despite the presence of a stunningly powerful princess, due to the amount of self-sacrifice expected from every woman in the story. Personally, I don't think any of the men in the story are worth anywhere near the amount of loyalty and bravery that the women show. Still, it was reasonably entertaining throughout, in exactly the way that I would expect a One Thousand and One Nights tale to be. Whether there's any point in reading it instead of the original is a question I'll leave to others. (7) "Bodyguard" by Karl Bunker: This is probably the best science fiction of the issue. The first person protagonist is an explorer living with an alien race, partly in order to flee the post-singularity world of uploaded minds and apparent stagnation that Earth has become. It's a personal story that uses his analysis of alien mindsets (and his interaction with his assigned alien bodyguard) to flesh out his own desires, emotional background, and reactions to the world. There are some neat linguistic bits here that I quite enjoyed, although I wish they'd been developed at even more length. (The alien language is more realistic than it might sound; there are some human languages that construct sentences in a vaguely similar way.) It's a sad, elegiac story, but it grew on me. (7) "Botanical Exercises for Curious Girls" by Kali Wallace: One has to count this story as science fiction as well, although for me it had a fantasy tone because the scientific world seems to play by fantasy rules from the perspective of the protagonist. Unpacking that perspective is part of the enjoyment of the story. At the start, she seems to be a disabled girl who is being cared for by a strange succession of nurses who vary by the time of day, but as the story progresses, it becomes clear that something much stranger is going on. There are moments that capture a sense of wonder, reinforced by the persistantly curious and happy narrative voice, but both are undercut by a pervasive sense of danger and dread. This is a light story written about rather dark actions. My biggest complaint with the story is that it doesn't so much end as wander off into the sunset. It set up conflict within a claustrophobic frame, so I can understand the thematic intent of breaking free of that frame, but in the process I felt like the story walked away from all of the questions and structure that it created and ended in a place that felt less alive with potential than formless and oddly pointless. I think I wanted it to stay involved and engaged with the environment it had created. (6) "Ping" by Dixon Wragg: I probably should just skip this, since despite the table of contents billing and the full title introduction, it's not a story. It's a two-line joke. But it's such a bad two-line joke that I had to complain about it. I have no idea why F&SF bothered to reprint it. (1) "The Ifs of Time" by James Stoddard: This certainly fits with the Arabian Nights story in this issue. The timekeeper of a vast and rambling castle (think Gormenghast taken to the extreme) wanders into a story-telling session in a distant part of the castle. The reader gets to listen to four (fairly good) short stories about time, knowledge, and memory, told in four very different genres. All of this does relate to why the timekeeper is there, and the frame story is resolved by the end, but the embedded stories are the best part; each of them is interesting in a different way, and none of them outlast their welcome. This was probably the strongest story of this issue. (7) Rating: 6 out of 10

30 December 2012

Keith Packard: MicroPeakSerial

MicroPeak Serial Interface Flight Logging for MicroPeak MicroPeak was original designed as a simple peak-recording altimeter. It displays the maximum height of the last flight by blinking out numbers on the LED. Peak recording is fun and easy, but you need a log across apogee to check for unexpected bumps in baro data caused by ejection events. NAR also requires a flight log for altitude records. So, we wondered what could be done with the existing MicroPeak hardware to turn it into a flight logging altimeter. Logging the data The 8-bit ATtiny85 used in MicroPeak has 8kB of flash to store the executable code, but it also has 512B (yes, B as in bytes ) of eeprom storage for configuration data. Unlike the code flash, the little eeprom can be rewritten 100,000 times, so it should last for a lifetime of rocketry. The original MicroPeak firmware already used that to store the average ground pressure and minimum pressure (in Pascals) seen during flight; those are used to compute the maximum height that is shown on the LED. If we store just the two low-order bytes of the pressure data, we d have room left for 251 data points. That means capturing data at least every 32kPa, which is about 3km at sea level. 251 points isn t a whole lot of storage, but we really only need to capture the ascent and arc across apogee, which generally occurs within the first few seconds of flight. MicroPeak samples air pressure once every 96ms, if we record half of those samples, we ll have data every 192ms. 251 samples every 192ms captures 48 seconds of flight. A flight longer than that will just see the first 48 seconds. Of course, if apogee occurs after that limit, MicroPeak will still correctly record that value, it just won t have a continuous log. Downloading the data Having MicroPeak record data to the internal eeprom is pretty easy, but it s not a lot of use if you can t get the data into your computer. However, there aren t a whole lot of interfaces avaialble on MicroPeak. We ve only got: First implementation I changed the MicroPeak firmware to capture data to eeprom and made a test flight using my calibrated barometric chamber (a large syringe). I was able to read out the flight data using the AVR programming pins and got the flight logging code working that way. The plots I created looked great, but using an AVR programmer to read the data looked daunting for most people as it requires: With the hardware running at least $120 retail, and requiring a pile of software installed from various places around the net, this approach didn t seem like a great way to let people easily capture flight data from their tiny altimeter. The Blinking LED The only other interface available is the MicroPeak LED. It s a nice LED, bright and orange and low power. But, it s still just a single LED. However, it seemed like it might be possible to have it blink out the data and create a device to watch the LED and connect that to a USB port. The simplest idea I had was to just blink out the data in asynchronous serial form; a start bit, 8 data bits and a stop bit. On the host side, I could use a regular FTDI FT230 USB to serial converter chip. Those even have a 3.3V regulator and can supply a bit of current to other components on the board, eliminating the need for an external power supply. To see the LED blink, I needed a photo-transistor that actually responds to the LED s wavelength. Most photo-transistors are designed to work with infrared light, which nicely makes the whole setup invisible. There are a few photo-transistors available which do respond in the visible range, and ROHM RPM-075PT actually has its peak sensitivity right in the same range as the LED. In between the photo-transistor and the FT230, I needed a detector circuit which would send a 1 when the light was present and a 0 when it wasn t. To me, that called for a simple comparator made from an op-amp. Set the voltage on the negative input to somewhere between light and dark and then drive the positive input from the photo-transistor; the output would swing from rail to rail. Bit-banging async The ATtiny85 has only a single serial port , which is used on MicroPeak to talk to the barometric sensor in SPI mode. So, sending data out the LED requires that it be bit-banged directly modulated with the CPU. I wanted the data transmission to go reasonably fast, so I picked a rate of 9600 baud as a target. That means sending one bit every 104 S. As the MicroPeak CPU is clocked at only 250kHz, that leaves only about 26 cycles per bit. I need all of the bits to go at exactly the same speed, so I pack the start bit, 8 data bits and stop bit into a single 16 bit value and then start sending. Of course, every pass around the loop would need to take exactly the same number of cycles, so I carefully avoided any conditional code. With that, 14 of the 26 cycles were required to just get the LED set to the right value. I padded the loop with 12 nops to make up the remaining time. At 26 cycles per bit, it s actually sending data at a bit over 9600 baud, but the FT230 doesn t seem to mind. A bit of output structure I was a bit worried about the serial converter seeing other light as random data, so I prefixed the data transmission with MP ; that made it easy to ignore anything before those two characters as probably noise. Next, I decided to checksum the whole transmission. A simple 16-bit CRC would catch most small errors; it s easy enough to re-try the operation if it fails after all. Finally, instead of sending the data in binary, I displayed each byte as two hex digits, and sent some newlines along to keep the line lengths short. This makes it easy to ship flight logs in email or whatever. Here s a sample of the final data format: 
MP
dc880100fec000006800f56d8f63b059
73516447273fa93728301927d91b7712
730bbf0491fe88f7c5ee8ee896e3fadc
9dd9d3d502d1afcea2cbafc6b4c34ec1
bfbfcabf10c03dc05dc070c084c08fc0
9cc0abc0b9c0c1c0ccc0dcc020c152c4
71c9a6cf45d623db7de05ee758edd9f2
b4f9fd00aa074311631a9221c4291330
c035873b2943084bbb52695c0c67eb6b
d26ee5707472fb74a4781f7dee802b84
09860a87e786ad868a866e8659865186
4e8643863e863986368638862e862d86
2f862d86298628862a86268629862686
28862886258625862486
d925
Making the photo-transistor go fast enough The photo-transistor acts as one half of a voltage divider on the positive op-amp terminal, with a resistor making the other half. However, the photo-transistor acts a bit like a capacitor, so when I initially chose a fairly large value for the resistor, it actually took too long to switch between on and off the transistor would spend a bunch of time charging and discharging. I had to reduce the resistor to 1k for the circuit to work. Remaining hardware design I prototyped the circuit on a breadboard using a through-hole op-amp that my daughter designed into her ultrasonic guided robot and a prefabricated FTDI Friend board. I wanted to use the target photo-transistor, so I soldered a couple of short pieces of wire onto the SMT pads and stuck that into the breadboard. Once I had that working, I copied the schematic to gschem, designed a board and had three made at OSHPark for the phenomenal sum of $1.35. Aside from goofing up on the FT230 USB data pins (swapping D+ and D-), the board worked perfectly. The final hardware design includes an LED connected to the output of the comparator that makes it easier to know when things are lined up correctly, otherwise it will be essentially the same. Host software Our AltosUI code has taught us a lot about delivering code that runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, so I m busy developing something based on the same underlying Java bits to support MicroPeak. Here s a sample of the graph results so far: Production plans I ve ordered a couple dozen raw boards from OSH Park, and once those are here, I ll build them and make them available for sale in a couple of weeks. The current plan is to charge $35 for the MicroPeak serial interface board, or sell it bundled with MicroPeak for $75.

25 December 2012

Russ Allbery: Review: A Paradise Built in Hell

Review: A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Penguin
Copyright: 2009
Printing: 2010
ISBN: 0-14-311807-2
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 319
A Paradise Built in Hell is a book with an agenda. Solnit's goal is to convince the reader that nearly everything we're shown in movies and popular culture about human behavior during disasters is wrong. Not only is destructive mass panic unusual verging on nonexistent, spontaneous cooperation and acts of startling courage and resourcefulness are commonplace. The heroes that we hear about afterwards are more the norm than the exception. Disasters are far more likely to bring out the best in people than the worst. They break down barriers and form spontaneous human communities that survivors remember for a lifetime. Rather than natural disasters leading inevitably to an exacerbating human crisis in the absence of strong authority, Solnit argues that they are an amazing human opportunity, and that the most negative and destructive human behavior during crises is not from untrained victims but from the panic of the elites who are supposedly responsible for protecting the public. I think her analysis and presentation is both deeply appealing and deeply flawed. The flaws involve extrapolation and generalization beyond the applicability of her research, and I'll say more about that in a moment. But the appeal is still surprising and satisfying, and I think there's a lot of truth in this book despite its one-sided presentation. I like to tell people, half-jokingly, that I'm an anarchosyndicalist. It's my political alliegance of the heart: the political structure that I know would never work, but that matches the world I want to live in. (I suspect much of the belief in libertarianism is of this form.) Now I have a book to point people at when they ask what the appeal of anarchosyndicalism is. The sense of spontaneous community, of bonding, of reaching out to other people to do something necessary, together, that Solnit describes here in the aftermath of a disaster matches that vision of a world without imposed economic authority, where people spontaneously collaborate to solve problems. A Paradise Built in Hell is structured by disaster, providing a tour of major disasters and their aftermath interspersed with extended musings on what the human reactions mean and how disaster communities functioned. The major disasters discussed are the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Halifax explosion, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. Solnit moves through them in chronological order, closing the book with Katrina, which had (at least for me) the most infuriating and uplifting mixes of community bonding and elite panic. But both of those factors are present from the beginning in the 1906 earthquake: spontaneous human organization that (from multiple first-hand accounts) transformed people's lives mixed with a military reaction and elite panic that possibly did more damage to the city than the earthquake did. Elite panic is the dark side of Solnit's celebration of human altruism and spontaneous community organization. The primary picture she paints is of ordinary people responding with great courage and creativity and finding, in their reaction, a transformative experience and a sense of purpose that often becomes the most powerful and positive experience of their life. But this is at odds with a deeply-entrenched elite belief in mass panic, in the necessity of keeping information from the public to suppress their reaction, and in the need to re-establish "order." And with that, Solnit is absolutely scathing, and with some justification. Along with detailed accounts of these major disasters, Solnit also gives the reader a tour of the research literature on disasters, research that has shown that the panic and chaos that is at the center of practically every disaster movie ever made is essentially a myth. Mass panic in disasters is not only rare, it's close to non-existent. As you might expect, the handling of Katrina by both the government and by neighboring white communities is the subject of the harshest attacks. The material on Katrina presented here is enough to make anyone want to throw out the current playbook on how we react to disasters (and lest one think Solnit is unfair, her research matches very closely with other research and journalism on Katrina that I've seen from a wide variety of sources). But Solnit shows that this is a pattern: the combination of our media-driven belief in how people will react to disasters combined with the elite need to re-establish control plays out in many major disasters, and almost always negatively. Even in 9/11, the official response in some cases hampered and undermined an already-effective unofficial response. This is very interesting and has concrete implications for public policy around disasters. But where Solnit moves onto thinner anarchosyndicalist ice is the story that she tells about disasters as dramatic upheavals of the established social order that could point to a revolution in how we interact with each other. Solnit is deeply inspired by human altruism during disasters, and her enthusiasm is somewhat contageous, but it was useful to read this book shortly after Bruce Schneier's Liars and Outliers. I think Solnit, in her understandable eagerness to find a way to extend disaster behavior to general life, does not understand the relationships between what Schneier terms moral, reputational, and institutional pressures. And that's the core of why we need to both enable spontaneous human response in disasters and have organized first responders and supporting infrastructure, and why disaster communities will break down when extended beyond the disaster. When I first mentioned A Paradise Built in Hell to my mother, her first reaction was dubiousness due to her memory of the 1977 New York City blackout. There was a disaster that resulted in widespread looting and destruction, rather than the positive reaction Solnit describes. Solnit does have a cogent argument for why looting is poorly analyzed (we don't, for example, distinguish between breaking into stores to get desperately needed supplies and doing so for personal gain) and should not be a priority in a life-threatening disaster. But it's not completely convincing; in some disasters, particularly ones like the 1977 power outage that were not particularly life-threatening, the looting has been the most destructive part of the disaster. Schneier provides what I think is the missing piece, both to this and to why the wonderful behavior during disasters doesn't last into everyday life. During a life-threatening disaster, moral pressures are massively increased. Nearly all of us have self-images and moral beliefs that provide very strong incentives to help others and collaborate in the face of life-threatening emergencies, incentives that override other motives and lead to the sort of behavior that Solnit celebrates. But moral pressures have inherent limitations. That moral reaction applies most strongly to small groups (such as bands of survivors), and will start to break down as larger society re-establishes itself. And disasters, like a power outage, that are not immediately life-threatening will not provoke the same intensification of moral pressures: we don't have strong moral beliefs and internal stories about staying quietly at home during power outages the way that we do for saving people from burning buildings or pulling them out of rubble. Once larger communities have reformed and that short-term emergency reaction has dissipated, the need for institutional pressures (police, law, and formal authority structures) will return. I wish Solnit had been able to read Schneier's book before writing hers. I think his analysis structure provides a healthy dose of realism and perspective to her desire for a self-organizing communal world, and might have blunted her enthusiastic but somewhat unrealistic hopes for finding some key to a revolution in human organization in the heart of disasters. But if A Paradise Built in Hell is unlikely to lead to a radical change in how we organize societies, it should at least provoke a radical rethinking of some of our unnecessary pessimism about our fellow humans. The evidence is substantial and compelling: crisis brings out the best in people, not the worst, and the ordinary people who happen to be around are capable of becoming some of the most amazing disaster response teams that we can imagine. This has numerous mundane implications for social policy. We should consider simple training for the general public, for example, to strengthen that reaction, should allow for it in legal structures and training of first responders (around looting, for instance), and should do everything we can to kill the destructive myth that people cannot be trusted in disasters or that mass panic will be as much of a threat as the disaster. But the best part of this book is that it provides a concrete, well-documented, and well-defended reason to let go of some of our cynicism and to extend a bit of trust to our fellow humans. There sadly aren't earth-shaking implications for everyday society, but there is a wealth of evidence that shows that we're better people in the crunch than we believe we are, or that we expect of others. And the more that we can embrace the dissolution of boundaries and social hierarchies in the middle of disasters, the more we are likely to be surprised by deep human connection and a sense of shared, focused purpose. Solnit is a bit long-winded with her agenda, but that bright hope has stuck with me. Recommended. Rating: 8 out of 10

19 November 2012

Jon Dowland: Three Christmas Songs Which Aren't

For some reason each of these three songs feel "Christmassy" to me. They are definitely not Christmas songs. Can you figure out why? Cocteau Twins - Lorelei <iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/3diz8I0AVVk" width="420"></iframe> Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - Sailing On The Seven Seas <iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lMST3H69-Os" width="420"></iframe> Ladytron - White Elephant <iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/7cKEy0BFfQw" width="420"></iframe>

9 November 2012

Gunnar Wolf: Road trip to ECSL 2012 in Guatemala

Map of our overall driving for six days
Road trip to ECSL 2012 in Guatemala
Encuentro Centroamericano de Software Libre! Guatemala! During a national (for us) holiday, so it's easy to go without missing too much work time! How would I miss the opportunity? Several years ago, I started playing with the idea of having a road trip Probably this was first prompted with the UK crew and the Three Intrepid Motorcycle Riders arriving by land to DebConf 9 I don't know. Fact is, I wanted to go to DebConf10 in New York by land, as well as to DebConf12 in Nicaragua. Mostly due to a lack of time, I didn't Although we did start making some longish trips. Of course, my desire to show Regina what Mexico is like also helped! So, up until a week ago, our (according to my standards) long distance driving experience included:
  • M xico Guanajuato Puerto Vallarta Guanajuato M xico, in early November 2011, for Festival de Software Libre and with Regina and our Blender friends Octavio and Claudia. Totalling almost 1900Km, mostly consisting of wide, toll highway.
  • M xico Xilitla San Luis Potos M xico, in April 2012, just for fun and for a nice short vacation, alone with Regina. Totalling almost 1200Km, but through Sierra Gorda de Quer taro, a very tough stretch of about 250Km which we did at about 50Km/h on average. Beautiful route for sure! We didn't originally intend to go through San Luis Potos , and it does not appear to make much sense, as it adds ~350Km to the total, but it was even quicker than going back by the same route and according to those who now, even faster than our planned route, via Tamazunchale and Ixmiquilpan!
  • M xico San Luis Potos Zacatecas Aguascalientes Guanajuato M xico, in May 2012, for Congreso Internacional de Software Libre, again with Octavio and Claudia. Totalling 1250Km, and following very good roads, although most of them were toll-free.
But there is always a certain halo over crossing a border, maybe more so in countries as large as Mexico. We convinced Pooka and Moni, and granted, with some aprehension, as we knew of some important security risks in the more rural areas we wanted to go through we decided to go to Guatemala. And, although we wanted to go with a bit more time, Real Life took its toll: We could not take more time than the intersection of what our respective jobs offered. So, here goes a short(?) recap of our six day long, 3200Km trip. Of course, we have a map detailing this. Mexico Veracruz I came to my office early on Wednesday (31-oct), and left with Regina around 10AM towards Veracruz. We agreed to meet there with Moni and Pooka, who would take the night bus, and continue together. Crossing Mexico City proved to be the longest obstacle We arrived to Veracruz already past 3PM, and spent a nice evening walking down the center and port of the city. Veracruz port can still be seen as part of central Mexico; I knew the road quite well. Veracruz San Andr s Tuxtla Catemaco San Cristobal de las Casas We met with our friends at the iconic Gran Caf de la Parroquia at 6:30AM. Had a nice breakfast with coffee, and by 7:30 we were heading south-west. The reason to have a road trip was to get to know the route, to enjoy the countryside So, given we "only" had to make 650Km this day, we took the non-toll road A narrow path stretching along the coastal plains of Veracruz, until Acayucan. Doing so, we also saved some money, as the equivalent toll road is around MX$300 (~US$25)! Veracruz is a hot state. We ended up all sweaty and tired by 19:00, when we reached San Cristobal. We had agreed not to drive at night, due to security issues, but fortunately there was quite a bit of traffic both ways between Tuxtla Guti rrez (Chiapas State capital, around 1hr from San Cristobal, where darkness got us) and our destination, so we carried on. Now, San Cristobal is a high city, almost as high as Mexico City (2100m), and being more humid, it was quite chilly. We went for a walk, and were convinced that at a later time, we had to stay for several days there. The city is beautiful, the region is breath-taking, there is a lot of great handicrafts as well, and it's overall very cheap. Really lovely place. San Cristobal de las Casas Cd. Cuauht moc La Mesilla Guatemala Once again, this day started early. We woke up ready to leave at 7AM, and not earlier because the hotel's parking didn't open earlier. After a very quick visit to San Cristobal downtown, to take some photos that were not right the night before, we took the road to Comit n, stopping just for some tamales de bola y chipil n for breakfast. Central Chiapas is almost continuously populated, differing from most of my experience in Mexico. It is all humid, and has some very beautiful landscapes. We passed Comit n, which is a much larger city than what we expected, went downhill after La Trinitaria, crossed a plain, and continued until hills started taking over again. We stopped in a very chaotic, dirty place: Just accross the border, where Ciudad Cuauht moc becomes La Mesilla. This border was basically what we expected: There is no half-official place to exchange money, so we had to buy quetzales from somebody who offered them on the street, at MX$2 per Q1 (where the real exchange should be around 1.50 to 1). While on the road, I was half-looking for exchange posts in Comit n and onwards, and found none (and being a festive day, they would probably be closed anyway). But we were expecting this, after all, and exchanged just the basic minimum: MX$600 (US$50, which by magic became Q300, US$40). The tramit consists of:
  • Spraying the car against diseases (which has a cost of Q18)
  • Each of us has to go through migration. Note, in case you cross this border: We didn't expressly cross Mexican migration, so officially there was no record of us going out. Be sure to go through migration to avoid problems at re-entry!
    Migration has no cost.
  • Customs. As we were entering by car, I had to purchase a permit for circulation. I don't remember the exact quote, but it was around Q150, and the permit is valid for 90 days.
  • That's it! Welcome to Guatemala!
La Mesilla is in Guatemala's Huehuetenango Department, and from all of the Departments we crossed until Guatemala city (Huehuetenango, Quetzaltenango, Totonicap n, Solol , Chimaltenango, Sacatep quez and Guatemala), this is the largest one. Huehuetenango is home to the Cuchumatanes mountain ridge. We found beautiful, really steep, really fertile mountains. It is plainly amazing: Mountains over 60 , and quite often full with agricultural use Even at their steepest points! The CA-1 highway is, in general, in very good shape. There are however many (many, many) speed bumps (or topes, in Mexican terminology. Or t mulos in Guatemalan), at least a couple at every village we crossed, not always painted. The road is narrow and quite winding; it follows river streams for most of the way. We feared it would be in much worse shape, from what we have heard, but during the whole way we found only three points where the road was unusable due to landslides and an alternative road was always in place when we needed it. After Totonicap n, the narrow road becomes a wide (four lane) highway. Don't let that fool you! It still goes through the center of every village along the road, so it's really not meant for speeding. Also, even though the pavement is in very good condition, it is really steep quite often. It is not the easiest road to drive, but it's (again) by far not as bad as we expected. We arrived to Guatemala City as dawn was falling, and got promptly lost. Guatemala has a very strange organization scheme: The city is divided in several zones, laid out in a swirl-like fashion. East-west roads are called Calle and North-south roads are called Avenida (except for zona 4, I think, where they are diagonal, and some are Rutas while the others are V as). I won't go into too much detail). Thing is, many people told us it's a foolproof design, and people from different countries understand the system perfectly. We didn't... At least not when we arrived. We got quite lost, and it took us around one hour to arrive to our hotel, at almost 19:00 Almost 12 hours since we left San Cristobal. Went for a quick dinner, and then waited for our friends to arrive after the first day of work of ECSL, which we missed completely. And, of course, we were quite tired, so we didn't stay up much longer. Antigua Guatemala On Saturday, ECSL's activities started after 14:00 so we almost-kidnapped Wences, the local organization lead, and took him to show us around Antigua Guatemala. Antigua was the capital of Guatemala until an earthquake destroyed it in the 1770s; the capital was moved to present-day Guatemala city, but Antigua was never completely abandoned. Today, it is a world heritage site, a beautiful city, where we could/should have stayed for several days. But we were there for the conference, so we were in Antigua just a couple of hours, and headed back to Guatemala. Word of caution: Going from Guatemala to Antigua, we went down via the steepest road I have ever driven. Again, a real four-lane highway... but quite scary! The main focus for this post is to give some roadtrip advice to potential readers... So, this time around, I won't give much detail regarding ECSL. It was quite interesting, we had some very good discussions... but it would take me too much space to talk about it! The road back: Guatemala Tec n Um n; Cd. Hidalgo Arriaga So, about the road back: Yes, we just spent three days getting to Guatemala City. We were there only for ~36 hours. And... We needed to be here by Tuesday morning no matter what. So, Sunday at noon we said goodbye to our good friends in ECSL and started the long way back. To get to know more of Guatemala, we went back by the CA-2 highway, which goes via the coastal plains Not close to the Pacific ocean, which we didn't get to see at all, but not through the mountains. To get to CA-2, we took CA-9 from Guatemala. If I am not mistaken, this is the only toll road in Guatemala (at least, the only we used, and we used some pretty good highways!) It is not expensive; I don't remember right now, but must have been around Q20 (US$3). Went South past Palin and until CA-2, just outside Escuintla city, and headed West. All of Escuintla and Suchitep quez it is again a four lane highway; somewhere in Retalhueu it becomes a two lane highway. We were strongly advised not to take this road at night because, as the population density is significantly lower than in CA-1, it can get lonely at times And there are several reports of robberies. We did feel the place much less populated, but saw nothing suspicious in any way. Something important: There are almost no speedbumps in CA-2! The terrain stayed quite flat and easy as we crossed Quetzaltenango, and only in San Marcos we found some interesting hills and a very strong rain that would intermitetntly accompany us for the rest of the ride. So, we finally arrived to the border city of Tec n Um n at around 16:30 Approximately four hours after leaving the capital. The Tec n Um n Cd. Hidalgo cities and border pass are completely different from the disorderly and dirty Cd. Cuauht moc La Mesilla ones. The city of Tec n Um n could be just a nice town anywhere in the country, it does not feel aggressive as most border cities I have seen in our continent. We stopped to eat at El pollo campero and headed to the border. In the Mexican side, we also saw a very well consolidated, big and ordered migration area. Migration officers were very kind and helpful As we left Cd. Cuauht moc, Regina didn't get a stamp of leaving Mexico, so technically she was ilegally out of the country (as she is not a national... They didn't care about the rest of us). The tramit to fix this was easy, simple, straightforward. We only paid for the fumigation again (MX$60, US$5), and were allowed to leave. Anyway, we crossed the border. There is a ~30Km narrow road between Cd. Hidalgo and Tapachula, but starting in Tapachula we went on Northwards via a very good, four lane and very straight highway. Even though we had agreed not to drive at night... Well, we were quite hurried and still too far from Mexico City, so we decided to push it for three more hours, following the coastline until the city of Arriaga, almost at the border between Chiapas and Oaxaca. Found a little hotel to sleep some hours and collapsed. Word of warning: This road (from Tapachula to Arriaga) is also known for its robberies. We saw only one suspicious thing: Two guys were pushing up their motorcycle, from which they had apparently fallen. We didn't stop, as they looked healthy and not much in need of help, but later on talked about this Even though this was at night, they were not moving as if they had just crashed; nothing was scratched, not the motorcycle and not their clothes. That might have been an attempt to mug us (or whoever stopped by). This highway is very lonely, and the two directions are separated by a wall of vegetation, so nobody would have probably seen us were we to stop for some minutes. Be aware if you use this road! The trip comes to an end: Arriaga Niltepec Istmo C rdoba M xico The next (last, finally!) day, we left at 6:30AM. After driving somewhat over one hour, we arrived to Niltepec, where a group of taxi drivers had the highway closed as a protest against their local government's tolerance of mototaxis. We evaluated going back to Arriaga and continue via the Tuxtla Guti rrez highway, but that would have been too long. We had a nice breakfast of tlayudas (which resulted in Pooka getting an alergic reaction shortly afterwards) and, talking with people here and there, were told about an alternative route by an agricultural road that surrounds the blockade. So, we took this road the best way we could, and after probably 1hr of driving at 20Km/h, finally came back to the main road. We planned on crossing the isthmus using the Acayucan-Juchit n road We were amazed at the La Ventosa ("the windy") area, where we crossed a huge eolic plant for electricity generation, so of course we got our good share of photos. From then onwards, not much more worth mention. Crossed the isthmus via a quite secondary road in not too good shape (although there is a lot of machinery, and the road will much likely improve in the next few months/years), then took the toll freeway along Veracruz until C rdoba. We stopped for a (delilcious and revigorizing!) cup of coffee in Hotel Zeballos, where Agust n de Iturbide signed with Viceroy Juan O'Donoj the treaties that granted Mexico the independence. Traveller, beware: When crossing between Puebla and Veracruz, there is a steep slope of almost 1000m where , you will almost always (except if it's close to noon) find very thick fog; taking the highway from C rdoba, this is in the region known as Cumbres de Maltrata. We had the usual fog, and just as we left it, a thin but constant rain that went on with us up until we got home. Crossed Puebla state with no further eventualities, and arrived to Pooka and Moni's house by 22:00. Less than one hour later, Regina and me arrived home as well. This was four days ago... and I have finally finished writing it all down ;-) Hope you find this useful, or if not, at least entertaining! If you read this post in my blog, you will find many pictures taken along the trip below (Well, if you are reading the right page, not in the general blog index...). If you are reading from a planet or other syndication service... Well, come to the blog! Dreamhost woes Oh, and... Yes, it sometimes happens: My blog is hosted at Dreamhost. This means that usually it works correctly... But sometimes, specially when many people request many nontrivial pages, it just gives an error. If you get an error, reload once or twice... Or until your patience manages ;-)

4 November 2012

Jaldhar Vyas: A Tale To Strike Terror Into The Hearts Of All Men, Ninjas, and Disney Princesses

Normally around this time of year I would post a picture of one of my children in their Halloween costumes but alas this All-Hallows Eve, Hurricane Sandy has put an end to such frivolity. For, from out of this hell-born wind comes the tale of a creature so horrifying that even puissant warlocks of dark power cower in their Batman pajamas at the sound of his doom-laden moans rending the night as he wanders pitiously through the blackened streets searching for his forbidden love. I speak of the one known only as... THE MAN WHO WENT FOUR DAYS WITHOUT INTERNET Halloween Pic

3 November 2012

Russ Allbery: Welcome, Planet Debian

As part of a discussion about something else on debian-project, it seemed clear that people were interested in more than just Debian-relevant posts on the Planet Debian aggregator. I'd previously only pushed Debian-related posts there, but I asked explicitly and people want the full feed. So this is the first untagged post going there (and something of a test). The difference, for Planet Debian readers, is that you'll get a lot more book reviews (of non-technical books), and a smattering of software announcements. You'll also get posts like the below whenever I buy more books. I got into the habit of making haul posts from enjoying a friend's version of that, and now I use them as a way of keeping track of what I've already bought until I get around to putting stuff into a real book database. (I'm currently leaning towards Tellico, for what it's worth.) I'll try to add at least a bit of commentary so that it won't just be a list of books. If I can get back into the habit, you'll also get regular postings of photographs. I've been out of the habit for about a year, though, so we'll see how that goes. Anyway, a small haul: Kevin Barry Dark Lies the Island (mainstream)
J. Robert Lennon Familiar (mainstream)
Ken & Jo Walton GURPS: Celtic Myth (RPG) This is notable because it's my first Indiespensible shipment. Powell's Books, from which I buy nearly all of my books, has a subscription club called Indiespensible, which sends a new novel, usually from independent presses, every six weeks. I've been eyeing this for a long time and finally decided to go ahead and try it for a while. I mostly read science fiction and fantasy, so this is a good way to try to read more mainstream fiction, and since I know absolutely nothing about what's good in mainstream fiction, something curated is a good idea. I haven't cracked open either of the books yet, but I quite enjoyed the chocolate toffee. GURPS: Celtic Myth was because I discovered that there was a role-playing supplement by one of my favorite authors, so that had to be acquired, even if I'm not a GURPS player.

30 October 2012

Wouter Verhelst: The fastest slug in the world (probably)

How fast do slugs travel? Empirical evidence tells me that's about 1 meter per hour1. But not this slug. IMAG0114 As I was driving home from $CUSTOMER, I noticed something on my car. At first I thought it was bird poop, but then bird poop doesn't move. As the animal crawled higher and higher next to my windshield (while I was driving down the highway), I thought it would soon be blown off; but no, it bravely held on. Since it was crawling against my driving direction, that meant it was hurling down the highway at about 119.999 kph. I'm not sure if slugs have emotions; but if they do, the poor animal must've been terribly scared. Since these weird 120kph winds kept blowing on this weird and not very sticky surface that is the rubber and the metal edge to the side of the winshield, the animal kept going until it found that the glass of the windshield itself is actually a very interesting place for it to settle. By that time I had reached a usable exit, so I went off. As I reduced the car's speed once off the highway, the animal had decided that it was fairly nice outside its house now, and was starting to move horizontally along my windshield. Not exactly what I wanted it to do. So I took the above picture with the wrong camera (I remembered a mere few minutes later that I had my DSLR in the back of my car), took it off, and released it into the nearby bushes. Of course, by that time I'd driven several dozens of kilometers away from wherever it was that I picked it up, so the animal will probably never get home again. But hey, I'm sure it'll love the new bushes. 1 Once, over half a lifetime ago, I noticed a slug sitting by the side of the road. Not having much else to do, I sat down and watched it. By the time it had moved some two meters, it had gotten dark and cold, and I went home. At that point, my parents told me they'd started to worry because I was two hours late from school. I could be slightly wrong about the numbers, though. It's been a long time.

29 October 2012

Matthew Garrett: Ted Ts'o is a rape apologist and why this matters

(This post contains some discussion of rape and sexual assault but does not go into any specifics)

There was a brief controversy at Linux.conf.au back in 2011. The final keynote speaker gave a compelling presentation on online privacy, including some slides containing sexualised imagery. This was against the terms of the conference policies, and resulted in an apology from the conference organisers and the speaker. The situation was unfortunate but well handled, and that should have been the end of it.

Afterwards, there was some pushback on the conference mailing list. Concerns were raised about the policy being overly restrictive and the potential for it to be used to stifle speech that influential groups disagreed with. I don't agree with these arguments, but discussion of why policies have been implemented is completely natural and provides an opportunity for a community to determine what its expected standards are.

And then Ted Ts'o effectively called rape victims liars[1]. At first I assumed that this was just some sort of horrific failure to understand the implications of what he was saying, so I emailed him to check. The reply I got drew a pretty clear distinction between the case of a drunk college student raping another drunk college student in their room and the case of knifepoint rape in a dark park. You know, the difference between accidental rape and rape rape. The difference between the one any of us might have done and the one that only bad people do. Legitimate rape and the "rape" that those feminists talk about. The distinction that lets rapists convince themselves that they didn't really rape anyone because they weren't holding a knife at the time.

Ted Ts'o argues that only a small percentage of rape really counts as what people think of as rape. Ted Ts'o is a rape apologist.

There's an ongoing scandal in the UK at the moment. A well known DJ, Jimmy Savile, died last year. He grew up in a working class family, but through hard work and natural talent was one of the most significant figures in promoting pop music in the UK in the 50s and 60s, and worked in various parts of the BBC for the best part of 30 years. He spent significant amounts of time raising money for charity, and it's estimated that he raised over 40 million for various causes. Since his death, around 300 people have accused him of sexually abusing them. The BBC is desperately trying to explain why it cancelled an expose shortly before it aired. Multiple people who worked there at the time claim that everyone knew he was involved in indecent activities, but saying anything would risk both their career and the charities that depended on his fundraising. Nobody said anything, and he was allegedly free to continue his abuse.

Ted Ts'o is a significant figure in the Linux kernel community. He has expressed abhorrent beliefs that damage that community. Condemnation was limited to a mailing list with limited readership, meaning, effectively, that nobody said anything. Last week the Ada Initiative published a blog post pointing out the damage that did, and I realised that my effective silence was not only helping to alienate 50% of the population from involving themselves with Linux, it was also implicitly supporting my community leadership. I was giving the impression that I was basically fine with our community leaders telling people that it wasn't really rape if you were both drunk enough. I was increasing the chances of members of our community being sexually assaulted. Silence is endorsement. Saying nothing is not ok.

In the absence of an apology and explanation from Ted, I'll be interacting with him to the bare minimum that I'm compelled to as a result of my job. I won't be attending any Linux Foundation events he's involved in organising. If I'm running any events, I won't be inviting him. At a time when we're finally making progress in making our community more open and supportive, we don't need leaders who undermine that work. Support organisations who encourage that progress, not the people who help drag us back.

Footnotes

[1]The original archive has vanished. I've put up a copy of the relevant thread here. Throughout, Ted states that he's actually arguing against the idea that women need to be frightened of sexual assault, and not against the definition of rape. Except saying things like This one does a pretty good job of taking apart the Koss / Ms. Magazine study, which is the source for the "1 in 4" number. For example, it points out that over half of those cases were ones where undergraduates were plied with alcohol, and did not otherwise involve using physical force or other forms of coercion is difficult to read in any way other than "Half of the people you're counting as having been raped haven't really been raped", and favourably referring to an article that asserts that the rate of false rape reports is probably close to 50% is pretty strong support for the idea that many rape victims are liars.

(Update 2012/10/30: Adam Williamson suggests in this comment that this mail is a better example of Ted's behaviour - there's some explicit victim blaming and a lot of "Is that rape" questioning with the obvious implication that the answer should be "no". Ted Ts'o is a victim blaming rape apologist.)

(Update 2012/11/05: It's been suggested that I haven't been sufficiently clear about which of Ted's statements justify my claims. So, here we go.

In this mail, Ted links to and endorses this article. He explicitly links to it because of its treatment of rape statistics. Quoting directly from that article:
the rate of false reports is at least 9 percent and probably closer to 50 percent
Ted explicitly endorses an article that claims that a significant percentage of reported rapes are false. The study that generated that figure is held in poor regard by other researchers in the field - Australian police figures indicate that 2.1% of rape accusations were classified as false. Ted asserts that he was trying to argue against poor use of statistics, so it's a fair assumption that he agrees with the alternative statistics that he's citing. Ted believes that many rape victims are making false accusations. Ted believes that many rape victims are liars.

Again in this mail, Ted argues against a claimed figure that 1 in 4 women have been sexually assaulted. One of his arguments is that Also found in the Koss study, although not widely reported, was the statistic that of the women whom she classified as being raped (although 73% refused to self-classify the event as rape), 46% of them had subsequent sex with the reported assailant. Ted disagrees with a statistic because some rape victims subsequently have sex with the reported assailant. This means that Ted believes that this indicates that they were not really raped. Ted is a rape apologist.)

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17 October 2012

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: New phpMyAdmin theme

Today, I've finally found time to process new themes for phpMyAdmin. Result of this are two theme releases. First one was just a minor update to older theme (Darkblue/orange 2.11), which fixed behavior in Internet Exporer. Second one was completely new theme for phpMyAdmin 3.5 - blueorange (I admit the name is not too creative). This is actually first contributed theme compatible with 3.5 series. Of course you can find all of these on our themes page.

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14 October 2012

Diego Escalante Urrelo: Enabling SATA AHCI on a Linux Macbook3,1

I have a Macbook3,1 with the following SATA controller: 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 03) This chip can work either in AHCI or IDE mode. Even though (in numbers) AHCI and IDE should have similar performance, I have found that AHCI mode is much better. Specially when the disk is under heavy siege by more than one application. The catch is that Macbooks turn off AHCI when booting in BIOS mode, which is the mode I use for GNU/Linux. I understand this also affects Windows.

Pictured: a girl after enabling AHCI on her Linux Macbook After some googling I found this post that explains how to activate AHCI mode using GRUB2. The fix is to just add a setpci call on your GRUB configuration. To be safe you can test it by going into command line mode in GRUB, and doing something like this: > lspci
(check for the ID for IDE mode, in my case 8086:2828)
> setpci -d 8086:2828 90.b=40
> lspci
(The 2828 ID is now gone, replaced by 8086:2829, AHCI/SATA mode)
 You can add this to your GRUB configuration, and avoid losing it on upgrades, by adding a script like this to /etc/grub.d/:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
## Enable SATA (AHCI) mode on macbook 3,1
echo "setpci -d 8086:2828 90.b=40"
 I understand this is also relevant for newer Macbooks and standard PC hardware, so you might want to do some googling. The easy way to know if you are on the right mode is to run lspci -nn on a regular terminal (not GRUB) and see if you have a SATA controller that is in the wrong mode.

6 October 2012

Christian Perrier: [life] Running update

It's been some time since I didn't write in this blog about my running activities. So let's make an update for my international friends. If you don't care about running, you can move to the next post in your feed reader..:-) After a quite busy running activity during DebConf 12 in Nicaragua, as well as during the touristic trip we did afterwards, I went back to my "regular" schedule. Main objectives in September-December are roughly the following: During August, I broke my monthly distance record by running nearly 300km in one month, even achieving 100km in only 5 days, around 24th. That was one of my goals: improve my overall resistance to run repetitions, which is one of the keys for ultra-running. These were achieved with many runs to/back work, with up to 13km in the morning and the same in the evening. Yes, running 26km at about 11km/h (and with some ups and downs in the woods to make it even worse) on a day where one has a normal work activity is quite a challenge. September has been more focused on marathon preparation. This time, no complicated plan with interval running as the month was also a very busy work month, where fitting training sessions during the day would be hard. So, I made an easy plan : run a half-marathon every Sunday and run part of my work-home commute every day (So, 3km run to the train station, 30mn train ride, then 4km run to my work place, then shower....and the same back after work). Out of the 5 half-marathons I ran during these 5 Sundays, two of them were official ones. On the first one, I finally managed to break my personal best on half, with 1h37'14". Only a 14 seconds improvement, but that one is certainly one of my best among personal bests....even better than 3h38'45" on marathon.. All other half-marathons were run at marathon speed, so targeting 5'06"/km, which will be my planned pace on October 21st. The one I ran on Sept. 16th, which was the other official race I ran was finally done quite significantly faster than this. First of all, because I had hard times to run "only" at 5'06"/km because of other runners emulation. And also, because I ran the last 3 kilometers up to nearly 14km/h (so, down to 4'15"/km), just for fun, because I could do it..:-) With all this preparation, I think that I now manage to very well manage my marathon speed. I'll probably do a final test tomorrow by trying to keep running at this speed for 3 rounds of my favourite "Maurepas Marathon" circuit, which is just exactly 1/4 of a marathon. More "funnily", I also did something I never did before during this really crazy month : simply said, I came back from work by running. All the way long. Through woods, forests, along some lakes and finally in the country. 42 kilometers (yes, a marathon). After a work day. Starting at 5:45pm and arriving home after 4h50 minutes. With 2 hours of heavy rain. With 2.5 hours running in the dark (with my headlamp of course). All alone. That was a crazy bet to do....but really great fun achieving this : the GPS trace is here. Really something I have to do again..:-) So, well, now I'm more or less prepared and having fun is just a matter for time..:-). I'll keep you guys posted with those and, guess what? I'm already picking my target races for next year..:-)

11 September 2012

Jon Dowland: Archiving

Last year, via jwz, I watched the video "Archive Team: A distributed Preservation of Service Attack" from Defcon 19. I learned about the Archive Team and the work of Jason Scott. More recently I learned about the archive.org Shareware CD Archive. In the fledgling days of the Internet, shareware (and cover-mount) CD-ROMs were a popular way for files to be distributed. They therefore archive an interesting age in the history of modern Internet culture. Inspired by the above, I dug out some of my old shareware Doom CDs, ripped them, scanned their covers (where I had them) and uploaded them to archive.org. Here they are: They are all part of the growing Doom Level CD Collection. In most cases, the CDs are a super set of files that exist in the /idgames archive. I'm fairly sure there is some stuff on these CDs that never made out of BBSes or the AOL and CompuServe walled gardens onto the wider Internet, with the exception of these shovelware collections. A follow-on project would be to cross-reference their indexes with the /idgames archive and upload whats missing (that can be done so, legally.) Finally, I also had a single, solitary PC ZONE covermount CD that I held on to because it was a Quake (and Duke Nukem 3D) add-on special: From an archive-perspective, Quake has not fared as well as Doom did. The Internet was young when Doom was popular, the World Wide Web was not the all-encompassing thing it has become and by accident rather than design nearly all Doom add-ons ended up being uploaded to a single FTP server: The Walnut Creek CDROM FTP Server, to a sub-folder /idgames. This single archive was mirrored wide and has lived on past the death of Walnut Creek. Today, it is small enough for casual enthusiasts to mirror, and has been kept alive by volunteer admins. The most popular front-end is now http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/. The WWW had grown up by the time Quake came along. There is an /idgames2, but it was never as popular as /idgames was for Doom. The Quake modding community was centered around a series of commercial websites such as Planet Quake, later part of the Gamespy network. Sadly the vast majority of web pages on the old Planet Quake site and similar sites have died completely from bit-rot. Large chunks of the history of the Quake community are therefore lost to a sort-of technological dark age.

29 August 2012

Olivier Berger: Debian Package Tracking System now produces RDF description of source packages

Here s a second post on the subject of RDF descriptions for Debian source packages (see the previous post for some context). From now on, the Debian Package Tracking System (PTS) will produce, alongside HTML pages meant for humans, RDF pages meant for Linked Data / Semantic Web aware applications. Every Debian source package, which used to have an HTML page like http://packages.qa.debian.org/packagename now has a corresponding RDF/XML document available provided that the application/rdf+xml content-type is required (the HTTP client being redirected to the proper HTML or RDF document).

The main objective is to try and produce (closest as possible from the source, at debian.org) an authoritative description of Debian s packages in an interoperable format (RDF using the ADMS.SW 1.0 ontology). Thus, each package in Debian can be identified on the Semantic Web with a unique URI like http://packages.qa.debian.org/apache2, which is dereferenceable as RDF. Here s a graph representing the resources included in http://packages.qa.debian.org/apache2 (click on the image to load it) :
You can see an example of such an RDF representation for the apache2 source package in trying (with the raptor2-utils package installed):

$ rapper -o turtle http://packages.qa.debian.org/apache2
 If you prefer more visual/navigatable versions, use one of the Linked Data browsers referenced in wikipedia or see the output of the W3C RDF validator. For more details about the underlying format see a raw RDF/XML dump :

$ curl -L -v -H 'Accept: application/rdf+xml' http://packages.qa.debian.org/apache2
 Any Semantic Web application can then reference that resource, which becomes part of the Linked Open Data cloud. There are probably lots of uses that could emerge from this, but the immediate I can think of is the matching of Debian packages with other packages/projects (upstream, downstream, other dists) in an interoperable way (see other projects like distromatch, etc.). At the moment, the doap:homepage of the upstream SoftwareProject resources generated by the PTS can be such a simple matching key (it s actually much more complex than that, but will be the topic of further efforts). AFAICT, this is the first large deployment of an ADMS.SW 1.0 implementation. On my machine, I ve counted almost 1.5 million triples generated. Stay tuned for more installments on similar topics.

15 August 2012

Jon Dowland: Backup Data Mining

What if you have a mis-behaving electronic device, which might corrupt files you store on it? I'm interested in tools to inspect incremental backups, look at file changes and alert me if they are suspicious. For example, if an MP3 changes, did the MPEG data change, or the ID3 tag, or something else? An ID3 change is likely to be on purpose, MPEG data less so. Similar for JPEGs and EXIF metadata. I decided to poke around in my backups of my music player. I discovered some pretty weird stuff. Firstly, quite a few MP3s seem to have changed on my player over time. I found 788 instances of MP3s changing a very small amount: an 11 byte rdiff-format patch. This seemed particularly strange, so I investigated a little: 
...
01 Fool's Day.mp3.2012-05-31T22:40:09+01:00.diff
00000000  72 73 02 36 47 00 00 59  01 ad 00                  rs.6G..Y... 
0000000b
dark_entries.mp3.2012-05-31T22:40:09+01:00.diff
00000000  72 73 02 36 47 00 00 54  0f 58 00                  rs.6G..T.X. 
0000000b
...
In a nutshell, the patches appear to do nothing, or at least copy the input file verbatim into the output. (my rdifffs source is a useful document for the rdiff file format, or failing that, the rdiff source itself.) This is probably just a behavioural nuance of my backup software. That leaves 156 changed MP3s with rdiff patches ranging in size from 21 bytes to 26k. The smallest are almost certainly no-ops, just less efficiently stored ones. The largest looks like embedded album art in the ID3 tag being added, and I'm guessing the mid-size ones are ID3 textual changes (spelling corrections etc.), but ID3 changes are very hard to inspect by eye in the raw bytestream. For this reason I think a tool that could sort through file changes and pick out things which might need human investigation might be useful. Such tools could be run automatically after backups complete, or at scheduled times. I'll probably start writing some over the next few weeks, but if you know of any that already exist or might form part of a solution, please let me know!

8 August 2012

Aigars Mahinovs: Fun with the new camera

Triple hit! So, I finally received my Canon 650D and Canon EF 40mm STM lens. I am very happy with the purchase. The STM lens is very, very compact, it is barely bigger than the lens cap that comes with the camera. The focusing is fast enough and it is very smooth and silent enough not to be audible in video mode. The largest bonus of the 650D compared to my old 550D is the articulated display. It has come in handy many times already. It is especially useful with the STM lens, live view and touch to focus function. Very useful to focus on something even when the camera is at an weird angle. And a couple days ago I got to really use the new camera capturing the shot above (an others in that set). It turns out capturing cool lightning shots is quite easy: It is basically the same as shooting photos of a fireworks display, with the exception that lightning is not so bright sometimes and that there is a high chance of rain in a thunderstorm ;) P.S. Got over 5k photos in Flickr now with this set, and closing in for 500k views. That feels cool :)

31 July 2012

John Goerzen: Proof Humans Are Capable of Working Magic

What an astonishing thing a book is. It s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Carl Sagan, The Persistence of Memory

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