After a few years of only buying laptops with Intel hardware, today I bought something totally different. It's not really what I wanted (which was an HP HDX 16t) but I get the feeling that none of these 16" HD 1080 laptops will make it to New Zealand for a while yet, and the NZ dollar has done such a nosedive recently that it's better not to wait any longer. In the places that hold stock there seem to be some good specials around at the moment, and as the owner of a new free, open-source consulting business (i.e: a cheap bastard) I went shopping for the cheapest dual-core I could find with a half-decent screen, and I found the Asus X53K for $999 (USD$589) at Dick Smith, including a 2G ram upgrade to take it to 3G. It's entirely non-intel, with a 2GHz Turion dual-core, ATI Radeon X2300 with 1440x900 panel, Atheros AR2425 wifi and 160G HD. I'd bought a replacement 320G hard drive even before I got the laptop, so now I have a pristine, unbooted 160G hard drive with the install files for some other OS on it - no doubt I'll find a use for the disk, at least! Since AMD got ATI to release all their chip documentation earlier this year I felt able to shell out for this, rather than the extra $100 for the model next to it, and it was nice too to get home and find that Atheros have recently released the HAL for their a/b/g chips. Which presumably means that they haven't done so for their 'n' chipsets, and I should continue to steer clear of that technology for a while yet... I'm running Debian GNU/Linux 'Sid' on the Asus X53K and, everything pretty much just works out of the box. My installation process was to rsync the old laptop onto a new disk, and boot the new laptop from that - after compiling a new kernel more appropriate to the changed hardware. After overcoming my own stupidity in not syncing the /dev/ underneath udev, which I easily googled my way out of, the only problem I've found so far is that the free radeon driver doesn't do 3d for me. Presumably the non-free ones would, but they won't compile against my 2.6.27 kernel so I don't know for sure. Fortunately I don't use 3d for anything so it's not a huge inconvenience to me. With 3G RAM and a fast 320G hard drive the laptop actually is an upgrade for me, too, and it has a webcam too, which I expect I'll look at in much the same way as I did the fingerprint reader on the old laptop. It will be good to finally hand that old one back to Catalyst, too, who have given me the flexibility to take my time on this. Now to try and peel off all these stickers without damaging anything!

Today, as I was riding my bicycle home from work, I noticed that the road maintainer had been by on the dirt and sand roads near our house. Unfortunately for me, he left a few sections of road with deep sand, and I almost wiped out several times. I ride a bike with narrow road tires that doesn't deal well with that.

But I'm not the first one to have a problem with roads.

A hundred years ago, the "brethren to the south" were having trouble getting to the community's main church, Alexanderwohl. Back in the days before paved roads, or heavy road-maintaining machinery, it took time and endurance to travel the distance even on good roads. A group of them started holding weekly Sunday Schools in local schoolhouses. Eventually, after much discussion, they decided to build a church, and it was completed in 1908 -- Tabor Mennonite, more than 4 miles from Alexanderwohl!

Tabor thrived over the years, though not without difficulty. Everything from how to shelter members' horses during services to what do to about the weighty social and political issues of the day were discussed and documented in church minutes. The church sent people out as missionaries, planted new churches, and supported several young pastors just starting out. In 1938, they expanded their building, and in 1965, replaced it entirely.

Tonight our weekend of centennial festivities began. It started with a prelude played on the church's first organ -- now about 90 years old if memory serves. Its current owner was tracked down, it was brought to the church, and still sounds wonderful. Tomorrow we will have music and activities outdoors under a tent, and all our living former pastors will be around, with a drama and meal in the evening. Then on Sunday, the big day with singing choirs (and a work commissioned for this occasion), each former pastor giving a short (we hope) message, a potluck (of course!), and the opening of the cornerstone.

It's been 6 years in the planning. I've spent the last couple of years collecting photos and other material for the archives and for the coffee table-style book we published for the centennial, and others have put in lots of hours too.

Sunday's worship service will conclude with singing the "Mennonite Anthem", also known as "606" from its number in an old hymnal. It will be a capella as is tradition for this piece. (Click for MP3 of a small choir singing it) It will be loud and beautiful, hundreds of voices joining in, a fitting way to mark this occasion.

What a wonderful thing we have been left by those that came before. And still, a responsibility for us as we look to the future. Rural churches are disappearing, and while Tabor is the rare rural church that is growing, still we hope that its location at the corner of two mostly dirt roads 4 miles from the nearest town (population 600) will not get in the way in years to come.

At the end of the events tonight, we were reminded of the favorite Bible verse of Rev. P. H. Richert, first pastor of Tabor, who served as pastor for almost 40 years:

the mountain of the LORD's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it.

(Isaiah 2:2)

Somehow it seems improbable that dirt roads led to all this.

A quick note: I'm going to be in Oslo from the 20th to the 22nd of October. I probably won't have time to meet anyone, unfortunately, but if you are up for it, send me an email with a cell phone number and we'll see what can be arranged. Also, I'm trying out Dopplr. I'm not a frequent traveller, but I really like to meet people when I do go someplace new: http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/davidnwelton

Anand Kumria wrote:

If IBM were to go bankrupt, would the government step in? Unlikely. Investors would lose (money), staff — another word for investors — would lose (jobs), but customers would win (their computers would keep working). Some customers would win more than others (especially those who had the equipment on lease); if no one is collecting, why pay?

I’m wondering here where Anand got the idea that once a company went bankrupt, that you don’t need to pay to that company anymore. When a company goes bankrupt, at least in Germany the following happens: A trustee/liquidator is selected. This liquidator is then collecting the information who owes money to the company and who still needs to get (how much) money from it. The liquidator also has to check the option of selling company assets (which might include the contracts of customers that still have to pay) to fulfill the debts of the bankrupt company. After he turned all assets into money, the money is distributed among those who still have to get money from the bankrupt company. Anyway, regarding his main argument that the (average) customer of a company (bank in this case) should never have to pay for the failed speculations of that company, I somehow have to agree with him. Someone putting money into a regular bank account or papers with fixed interest rate should never lose his money. But there are also customers buying bank shares with a chance of higher revenue than with fixed interest rate papers. These should suffer from failure of the bank management, as they more or less explicitly wanted to be tied to the success (or failure) of the bank. However, this is mostly irrelevant, since the failure of so many “investment banks” has side affects that might cost the average inhabitant of the affected countries even more than the discussed rescue plans. One of these effects is that the banks are now much more conservative regarding lease and mortgage plans, effectively leaving many home owners with no option to fulfill previous obligations (remaining debt after a previous mortgage expired can’t be refinanced by a new mortgage), causing them to have to sell their homes to pay the first mortgage. This is in some way stupid because this causes people who were perfectly paying their mortgage rates to loose their house, while the bank which would be giving them a new mortgage could get a new and good customer, improving their income. On the other hand, if the other side effects of the current crisis cause those “good” mortgage customers to loose their jobs, they might turn into bad customers who are unable to pay their rates. All in all, this is a spiral that could cause the whole economy to break down (a small example: The bank is not giving out mortgages, so no one will build new houses so the builders loose their jobs so they don’t pay their mortgage rates anymore,…. - over simplified, but still shows what I mean). Unless the spiral is terminated in time, before too drastic things happen. All in all, I do understand why the politicians try to rescue those banks (or at least the customers of those banks), though I think that in an economy with slightly higher regulation, there wouldn’t be the need for such a rescue plan. I know there are some german banks affected by the crisis as well (among them Hypo Real Estate and others), but the average private customer of such banks shouldn’t loose money due to the regulations we have in place. In general, there should be some security fund which makes sure that private customers never loose money put into regular bank accounts or fixed interest papers, vice-versa, banks should calculate mortgages so that they can be pretty sure their customers are actually able to pay off their rates - it doesn’t make sense if someone starts off having to pay 500$/month for their mortgage and has to pay over 1000$ a few years (as in 2-3 years) later, because the bank raised the interest that much. I have no problem with people loosing money from shares of banks or other companies directly or indirectly through investment funds.

It’s the 20th anniversary of the Nestle Boycott this week. The theme is “Change Nestl , Change the World”. This is one of few boycotts that I wholeheartedly support and participate in. While reading a report from the NI cooperative, I learnt of a new outrage by Nestle. Over in Canada, Wellington Water Watchers document a Nestle plant that is (as I understand it), taking drinking water for free, bottling it as “Aqua Fina”, trucking it to cities and selling it. (Thanks to whoever it was gave me the WWW link - I didn’t find the email, so please claim it in a comment if you want it.) You may remember that when Coca-Cola tried to do the same by selling contaminated Kent tap water as “Dasani”, it was widely ridiculed as Peckham Spring. Finally, “Dasani” was withdrawn from sale. It’s disappointing that Nestle’s Peckham Spring seems to be on sale in Canada, at a lower “manufacturing” cost than Coke’s UK one. Do we really want multinationals selling us our tap water in an inefficient way? No. Boycott Nestle.

With all the effort being poured into Javascript lately, it's pretty evident that that's the way forward. However, there are still some neat things you can do with applets that you can't do with Javascript. For instance, I use the microemulator applet to let people play with a simulated phone on the Hecl web site. Unfortunately, the user experience hasn't that good. While playing around with the code for that site, Firefox crashed a number of times, and I've heard other browsers have trouble as well. No fun. So it is with some satisfaction that I found this: https://jdk6.dev.java.net/plugin2/ It's an updated Java plugin that seems to work much, much better than the old one. Unfortunately it doesn't appear as if it will be in the new Ubuntu, as it was released recently, but I'm quite happy to have something a bit more stable to develop with. You can download that version of the Java SDK or JRE here: http://download.java.net/jdk6/ It's good to see this effort, even if it may be a bit late.

Matthew Yglesias demonstrates innumeracy in action:

We got an interesting experiment this weekend as Bill Maher’s anti-religious screed Religulous and David Zucker’s right-wing satire An American Carol both opened. The two films were about tied in terms of total revenue but Carol was on three times as many screens, so basically Religulous was far more successful. I think this mostly reflects something I wrote about a couple of years ago — the moviegoing audience is very demographically similar to the Democratic Party voting audience. It’s disproportionately young, disproportionately childless, and tilted toward residents of big cities and away from residents of rural communities. Conversely, the audience for television news is demographically very conservative (older, white, and a bit more prosperous than average) which is one major reason TV news coverage tilts right. The big screen audience for what looks like a witless screed against God is just a lot bigger than the big screen audience for what looks like a witless screed against Michael Moore.

Actually, since total revenue for both movies was about the same, it would appear that the “big screen audience” for crappy polemical Bill Maher movies is about the same as the “big screen audience” for crappy polemical David Zucker movies. Further, since I’d guess Carol probably played in theaters with lower ticket prices on average than Religulous, the former probably did a little better in terms of the total audience. Yglesias also makes the rather faulty assumption that the per-screen average revenue would remain flat as screens increased. This result only obtains if moviegoers don’t select theaters based on what movies are playing at them or if screens are very distant from each other geographically; while surely there are some people who just go to the movies to see something without deciding beforehand which movie to see, I doubt there are enough of these people to ensure Maher’s movie would gain a substantially larger audience, except in the relatively uncommon cases where the film just isn’t on at any theater in a metropolitan area and there is a substantial number of people who want to see it. Besides, all the discerning moviegoers were at Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist this weekend anyway.

I received some feedback on my previous BeID post, where I explained how to log in to a remote system by use of your digital ID card. Philip and Guy both claim it possible or likely that the crypto keys on eID cards are stored on a system of the government somewhere and that you therefore should not be using them. I find this to be jumping the gun a little. Security is always a trade-off; indeed, if you want to hide stuff from the government, then using eID-based authentication might not be a very good idea. However, there are other cases where eID-based authentication really is the correct option; and it is nice to know that this kind of thing is possible. Security always is a trade-off; and if you make an informed choice, there's nothing wrong about giving someone else access to your server. The fun bit is that Philip actually advocates carrying a clear-text printout of a list of still-valid passwords. Now that, I feel, is unacceptable, security-wise. Personally, I'd rather use a smartcard that only some secret government agency might be keeping copies of rather than a list that any random thief might make use of. The question really boils down to this, I think: how likely do you think it is that someone else will be able to get at your password by guessing or stealing it?

• Using a password that's related to your person or someone near you, or is based on a dictionary: rather likely. There are scripts out there that will guess these passwords. Don't use them.
• Using a printout of a list of one-time passwords: somewhat less likely (they can't be guessed by script), but still not very hard (wallets get stolen by the hundreds every day, and it usually takes a while before one notices)
• Using smartcards with keys generated by someone else: somewhat unlikely (there may be a few people who know my private key, but one can't be sure of that; and, color me naive, but I tend to trust the government to abide by its own laws—for the most part—laws that prevent this kind of behavior)
• Using strong password: rather unlikely, provided you take care of them.

What I mean by that last bit is that you should always generate your passwords with a tool that generates fully-random passwords ('pwgen -s', for example), and never write them down in cleartext anywhere. That of course makes it slightly hardish to memorize them; what I do is to store the password encrypted to my GPG key on my laptop, and I memorize the password by changing it on a remote server that I need to access fairly often (Debian's systems will do), but leaving my GPG passphrase and laptop password as is for the time being. Every time I need to log in to the remote server, I first try to remember the passphrase. If I can't remember it, I look it up in the encrypted file (again taking care not to store the file on disk). Once I start being able to log in to the remote server without having to look it up in the file, I change all my other passwords. This process usually takes a few weeks. Then, the only way someone can get my password is either by coercing me or by killing me and disecting my brain. And then still. Unfortunately, in the real world, I realize that many people do not wish to go through all this trouble just to get a secure login, and instead just choose a weak password. I guess that's why I think the next best thing might be slightly better than using strong passwords...

The Omelette Post by Atul Chitnis provoked a lot of discussion and Christian Perrier's response explains the objections clearly. I disagree with them both in different ways. Hence this post. Atul Chitnis is not known for his politeness (unfortunately, like many in the FLOSS community). In such cases, it is best to try to understand the (positive) intent behind the words written rather than concentrate on the words themselves --- the current kabab mein haddi seems to be "low-hanging fruit". I agree with Christian that finding, analysing and fixing bugs ranks up there along with writing programs; especially since many of today's programmers continue to be ''bug-generators'' in the sense of (and in spite of) Dijkstra's article. My reading of the Omelette Post is that hacking should take precendence over talking at FOSS.in 2008 --- a sentiment that I find quite palatable and even tasty! So let's see if we can have a Debian Workout at FOSS.in 2008.

On my parents' small laptop, Windows would just reboot. Even the repair functions of Windows would just reboot. No error message you could read, just reboot, repeat. Linux still worked fine (and my family is fine with using Linux, fortunately).Linux also allowed us to quickly find out what is wrong with Windows: the hard disk is damaged (I like operating systems that give you useful error messages such as "Unrecoverable Error" on your harddisk). And most likely the laptop is out of warrenty since a month ago, as usual.So I'm now investigating if the Linux partition also contains hardware errors, or if we might get away with just disabling Windows altogether for some time, until I get around to buy a replacement harddisk (and a replacement battery, too). So far, our experiences with Medion/Aldi/Tchibo have been rather bad. The TFT screen for the main computer is often flickering, but they failed to repair it in two attempts now. The MP3-CD-Player had stopped reading and the replacement didn't play MP3 at all. And the laptops batteries were crap (and why did they put in two small batterys instead of a reasonably sized one?), I know of a friend where the CD drive of that same model doesn't work anymore, and now our harddisk is dead with just some 11 days of use total (it was meant to be a portable system, and my parents have better computers for daily use at home).If we buy a replacement, it will most likely be a so called "Netbook" with Linux preinstalled. These tiny systems often come preinstalled with Linux (because a Windows licence would increase the price by like 50%) and would fit our requirements pretty well. Not sure which one, though. Maybe an EEE.

Yesterday I faced problem with VMware server that it can not run 64-bit guest system. I'm using 64-bit SUSE and 64-bit VMware, so it should work, right? I can select 64-bit system in VMware, but the guest is simply 32-bit without any error. In documentation, man can find only "VMware Server supports 64-bit guest operating systems only on host machines with supported processors.". How helpful! After a bit of googling, it turns out that VT needs to be enabled and usually it is not enabled in BIOS (any reason for this?). So let's reboot, go to BIOS, enable VT and it should work. Unfortunately not, after reboot, still same problem. I was almost given up at this point, but I decided to recheck BIOS, whether I really enabled the right thing. Yes I did, but I did not notice small note, that to apply this setting, I need to power off and on the computer. That was the trick! Now it finally works. I just wonder why it has to be so complicated...

A comment on Facebook yesterday got me thinking what American "traditional values" are all about. We hear it a lot, and I suspect it means something different to different people.

Here's what it means to me.

It starts with an ethic fundamentally informed by the central tenets of Christianity -- which are also excellent standards of decency by secular standards. We are called to have a relentless drive to care for the repressed, poor, downtrodden. As Jesus said, "whatever you do to the least of these, so you do to me." It means extending the hand of friendship and compassion to all, in our own neighborhood and around the world. It means taking good care of the resources we have, acting responsibly, and affirming and supporting others so they can do the same. It means that, as our founding fathers emphasized, remembering that all people are created equal, are equally deserving of a good life, and deserve liberty and freedom. Finally, it means a constant realization that we are creating a human institution, and will always have an imperfect answer to these ideals, but that we can -- and must -- recognize our faults and strive to make things better.

How do these apply to our time?

We must start with the poor, the repressed, and habitually think of their situation in everything we do. That means remembering that when we drop a bomb in Afghanistan to kill a terrorist, we also usually kill 50 innocent bystanders, and devastate their families. It means remembering that illegal immigrants from Mexico come here because all they want is refuge from drug wars, food on the table, and a roof over their head. It means showing compassion in deportation proceedings: when illegal immigrant parents have a child born in the United States, the child is an American citizen and can't be deported, but deporting the parents will create an orphan. It means actively helping the repressed people of the world, whether they be in Sudan, Georgia, or AIDS victims in Africa, Muslims in New York. It means reducing taxes on the poor, giving them the skills and tools they need to make their way in life. It means caring for those with alcohol drug addictions, helping them to summon the strength to get past those problems, rather than locking them up or throwing them out on the street. In days past, this might have meant sharing firewood with the family down the road that was at risk of freezing in winter. Today it might mean assistance with winter heating bills.

Remembering that all people are created equal means that we must provide good education for everyone, whether they live in suburban California, inner city Detroit, or rural Appalachia. We owe quality health care to everyone; those without means to pay for health care, or to pay for a car to get to a clinic, should be treated with dignity and respect, and have equal access to medicine.

Remembering that all people are created equal also means that we must provide equal justice under law, and give everyone a fair trail. We must abandon the death penalty, because we have a shocking number of people on death row -- hugely disproportionately black and poor -- that have been shown innocent of their crimes thanks to advances in DNA testing. We must maintain the integrity of checks and balances in government, and support judicial oversight over search and seizure. We must avoid warrantless wiretapping because it subverts judicial oversight and corrupts our justice system by making the exercise of power secret. We must denounce torture, and refuse to employ it, because no human, being created equal, deserves to be treated in such a way -- and we have been applying it to innocent humans.

We owe the opportunity to grow up in a loving family, in a safe community, to every child. We must make sure that gangs no longer have the run of our streets, that drugs aren't displacing hard work as the currency of the community, and that adoption is inexpensive and practical for more families, rather than costing thousands of dollars. Doing so will help every child grow up knowing that they are valued, are important, rather than being unwanted and therefore abused or neglected.

Extending the hand of friendship and compassion to all starts with being a good example -- that shining city on a hill that Reagan talked about. We have to run an open, just, and fair society ourselves. We must not fear those that are different than us, just because they're different. We have to recognize that citizens of Iran, Russia, North Korea, Palestine, and the United States fundamentally are humans, created equal, seeking the same thing: a safe and secure future for themselves and their families. Being able to coexist peacefully means starting from that point, and being willing to talk to them, and yes, even their leaders, regardless of how distasteful they may be.

Acting responsibly with our resources starts at home -- things like not driving up credit card debt, not living outside our means. The same applies to government: massive deficits each year are exceptionally irresponsible and place us at great risk both at the present and in the future. We also have a duty to care for the planet and the environment in which we live, which means actively working to curb the things we do to harm the planet and cause global warming.

What about recognizing our faults? Perhaps the most patriotic duty asked of Americans is dissent. It is never easy, but is essential to keeping our democracy functioning. This country has a long history of successes, and also a long history of failures. We failed so many by keeping slavery legal for so long, and discrimination and lynching legal for even longer. We failed that Native Americans by forcing them from their lands and treating them with brutality. We have, to some extent, risen above these failures thanks to the ability to recognize them and try, to the best of our ability, to fix them. This is what the civil rights movement was about, and why we have a holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr. He spoke out against a society that said some couldn't eat in a restaurant because of the color of their skin, or who were repressed because of their economic status. He recognized that problem in America, and by speaking out against it, helped to change this country for the better.

Today we have to recognize the things we are doing wrong, and try to change them. We are torturing potentially innocent people. We are discriminating against Muslims and homosexuals in our midst. We are giving extraordinary power to big media companies through changes in copyright law, to big communications companies through failure to enact network neutrality laws. And we are labeling people that disagree with war as unpatriotic.

Notice some things I didn't mention, such as abortion. It's not really relevant, and the lines we are fed by both sides present us with this false pro choice vs. pro life debate. In reality, it seems to me that both sides want the best for the children: for every child to grow up in a loving family, where he or she is wanted. We all know from research that laws banning abortion do not actually reduce it. So we ought all to come together and try to make it more rare by providing more support to single parents, by making it easier to adopt children, by trying to make the perceived need for an abortion to go away.

So, in this election, I look at the candidates and it seems pretty clear which one is promoting traditional values and which one isn't. Obama is actively trying to reach across the aisle and find common ground. Even in his convention speech, he suggested ways to work together on abortion like I just mentioned. In the debate, he listened carefully to his opponent and acknowledged when he thought McCain was right. This is a necessary first step in working together to move forward. McCain subsequently released an ad mocking Obama for this.

What about caring for the poor? Again, Obama's tax policies, education policies, and health care policies take care of them far better than McCain's. About responsibility? McCain supported these deficit-busting budgets of the last 6 years, supported the oil-centric energy policies, and has been only lukewarm towards dealing with global warming. McCain and Palin mock Obama for trying to help poor Chicago neighborhoods 20 years ago, for being willing to just talk to our supposed enemies, for actually reaching across the aisle.

So yes, I am a values voter, and that's why I can't possibly do anything but vote for Obama.

There is a lot of discussion and speculation about The Singularity. The term seems to be defined by Ray Kurzweil’s book “The Singularity Is Near” [1] which focuses on a near-future technological singularity defined by significant increases in medical science (life extension and methods to increase mental capacity) and an accelerating rate of scientific advance. In popular culture the idea that there will only be one singularity seems to be well accepted, so the discussion is based on when it will happen. One of the definitions for a singularity is that it is a set of events that change society in significant ways such that predictions are impossible - based on the concept of the Gravitational Singularity (black hole) [2]. Science fiction abounds with stories about what happens after someone enters a black hole, so the concept of a singularity not being a single event (sic) is not unknown, but it seems to me that based on our knowledge of science no-one considers there to be a black hole with multiple singularities - not even when confusing the event horizon with the singularity. If we consider a singularity to merely consist of a significant technological change (or set of changes) that change society in ways that could not have been predicted (not merely changes that were not predicted) then it seems that there have been several already, here are the ones that seem to be likely candidates: 0) The development of speech was a significant change for our species (and a significant change OF our species). Maybe we should consider that to be singularity 0 as hominids that can’t speak probably can’t be considered human. 1) The adoption of significant tool use and training children in making and using tools (as opposed to just letting them learn by observation) made a significant change to human society. I don’t think that with the knowledge available to bands of humans without tools it would have been possible to imagine that making stone axes and spears would enable them to dominate the environment and immediately become the top of the food chain. In fact as pre-tool hominids were generally not near the top of the food chain they probably would have had difficulty imagining being rulers of the world. I’m sure that it led to an immediate arms race too. 2) The development of agriculture was a significant change to society that seems to have greatly exceeded the expectations that anyone could have had at the time. I’m sure that people started farming as merely a way of ensuring that the next time they migrated to an area there was food available (just sowing seeds along traditional migration routes for a hunter-gatherer existence). They could not have expected that the result would be a significant increase in the ability to support children and a significant increase in the number of people who could be sustained by a given land area, massive population growth, new political structures to deal with greater population density, and then wiping out hunter-gatherer societies in surrounding regions. It seems likely to me that the mental processes needed to predict the actions of a domestic animal (in terms of making it a friend, worker, or docile source of food) differ from those needed to predict the actions of other humans (who’s mental processes are similar) and from those needed to predict the actions of prey that is being hunted (you only need to understand enough to kill it). 3) The invention of writing allowed the creation of larger empires through better administration. All manner of scientific and political development was permitted by writing. 4) The work of Louis Pasteur sparked a significant development in biology which led to much greater medical technology [3]. This permitted much greater population densities (both in cities and in armies) without the the limitation of significant disease problems. It seems that among other things the world-wars depended on developments in preventing disease which were linked to Louis’ work. Large populations densely congregated in urban areas permit larger universities and a better exchange of knowledge which permitted further significant developments in technology. It seems unlikely that a population suffering the health problems that were common in 1850 could have simultaneously supported large-scale industrial warfare and major research projects such as the Manhattan Project. 5) The latest significant change in society has been the development of the Internet and mobile phones. Mobile phones were fairly obvious in concept, but have made structural changes to society. For example I doubt that hand-writing is going to be needed to any great extent in the future [4], the traditional letter has disappeared, and “Dates” are now based on “I’ll call your mobile when I’m in the area” instead of meeting at a precise time - but this is the trivial stuff. Scientific development and education have dramatically increased due to using the Internet and business now moves a lot faster due to mobile phones. It seems that nowadays any young person who doesn’t want to be single and unemployed needs to have either a mobile phone or Internet access - and preferably both. When mobile phones were first released I never expected that almost everyone would feel compelled to have one, and when I first started using the Internet in 1992 I never expected it to have the rich collaborative environment of Wikipedia, blogging, social networking, etc (I didn’t imagine anything much more advanced than file exchange and email). Of these changes the latest (Internet and mobile phones) seems at first glance to be the least significant - but let’s not forget that it’s still an ongoing process. The other changes became standard parts of society long ago. So it seems that we could count as many as six singularities, but it seems that even the most conservative count would have three singularities (tool use, agriculture, and writing). It seems to me that the major factors for a singularity are an increased population density (through couples being able to support more children, through medical technology extending the life expectancy, through greater food supplies permitting more people to live in an area, or through social structures which manage the disputes that arise when there is a great population density) and increased mental abilities (which includes better education and communication). Research into education methods is continuing, so even without genetically modified humans, surgically connecting computers to human brains, or AI we can expect intelligent beings with a significant incremental advance over current humans in the near future. Communications technology is continually being improved, with some significant advances in the user-interfaces. Even if we don’t get surgically attached communications devices giving something similar to “telepathy” (which is not far from current technology), there are possibilities for significant increments in communication ability through 3D video-conferencing, better time management of communication (inappropriate instant communication destroys productivity), and increased communication skills (they really should replace some of the time-filler subjects at high-school with something useful like how to write effective diagrams). It seems to me that going from the current situation of something significantly less than one billion people with current (poor) education and limited communications access (which most people don’t know how to use properly) to six billion people with devices that are more user-friendly and powerful than today’s computers and mobile phones combined with better education as to how to use them has the potential to increase the overall rate of scientific development by more than an order of magnitude. This in itself might comprise a singularity depending on the criteria you use to assess it. Of course that would take at least a generation to implement, a significant advance in medical technology or AI could bring about a singularity much sooner. But I feel safe in predicting that people who expect the world to remain as it is forever will be proven wrong yet again, and I also feel safe in predicting that most of them will still be alive to see it. I believe that we will have a technological singularity (which will be nothing like the “rapture” which was invented by some of the most imaginative interpretations of the bible). I don’t believe that it will be the final singularity unless we happen to make our species extinct (in which case there will most likely be another species to take over the Earth and have it’s own singularities).

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_is_Near


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteur


• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/11/is-hand-writing-necessary/

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Summary: If programs would have useful man pages or error messages, man would not have to look into source code. I just set up Debian sid chroot on my computer and have to sign something inside this chroot (dpgk-buildpackage). Okay, I want it to use gpg-agent in my host system, that should not be hard. Looking at gpg man page, GPGAGENTINFO variable is used to forward information about agent socket, PID and protocol version, so I set this variable according to host system, but it still does not work, giving nothing saying error that agent is not working. So let's debug this beast - strace reveals, that communication with agent works, but it replies "113 Server Resource Problem". Hmm, still not much useful information, but let's google for this problem. Fortunately Google reveals related Seahorse code, where man can find, that not set DISPLAY variable is causing this issue. Could not the error be more friendly, so that it tells me directly what is wrong?

A case of a former friend impersonating someone on facebook was decided during the summer: Applause Store Productions Ltd. & Anor v Raphael [2008] EWHC 1781 (QB) (24 July 2008) . The victim was awarded thousands of pounds in damages. As I write this, there’s still no response on facebook’s news page, but I wonder whether Firsht will be to UK social networking what Godfrey was to UK Usenet. A bit of a wake-up - a reminder that the internet isn’t a consequence-free playpen. I know that more than most - my youthful indiscretions are plastered across the web, if you know where to look. Fortunately, cooperative associates seem to understand that people learn over time and don’t hold decade-old mistakes against me. Talking of not holding old mistakes against people, LinkedIn is profitting from an influx of bankers since the banks started going bust. That’s going to change the society behind their network - for better or worse? All of the big name networks seem to be having some growing pains, like the breakdown of the Facebook metaphor and I think the “walled gardens” are ripe for replacement. I’m still listed there at present, but I’m using my account on the cooperativemagazine NoseRub server to monitor it and most of the stuff posted to facebook is taken from my websites. I’d like to make NoseRub import and export more things in more formats, but will anyone pay for that work? Otherwise, it keeps falling down my priorities because it’s in PHP and I don’t find that much fun. Maybe I’ll replace it with something more amusing in Scheme or Perl. Aside: is there a good bot that produces an RSS feed of jabber/XMPP presence messages?

Ever since my former desktop machine gsa died and I started using only laptops at home, I noticed a need for a home server for storing all my MP3s, holiday pictures, games, and backups of my other machines. And I also want a filtering web proxy at home again. Current situation Currently my Norhtec MicroClient Jr. “c2” with it’s 120 GB 2.5" harddisk does some of these jobs (mostly storage and backup), but it neither has the disk space nor the performance to do all the things I want. For storage I once bought a TheCus N4100, the big brother of the popular and officially Debian supported N2100. Unfortunately there are a few things different than in the N2100 (NIC without MAC) which makes it much more difficult to get Debian on it and the original firmware doesn’t support NFS at all. *grmpf* I had hints from others who managed to get Debian on this NAS, but I didn’t find the time and leisure to really dig into cross-compiling kernels. (Although with the new 1.3.06 firmware, so called modules became possible also for the N4100 and a SSH module has been posted with which a Debian chroot could be installed and the required kernel build on the machine itself.) I though wasn’t very angry when the N4100+ came out shortly after I bought the N4100, because the N4100+ was no more an ARM based device but had a Celeron processor inside instead. And a NAS which is built on average PC hardware wasn’t as appealing as some device based on some more exotic architecture mainly used in embedded devices. :-) The Mini-ITX Appeal This view changed rapidly, when Raffzahn showed me a few Mini-ITX boards and cases. I surfed around on Mini-ITX.com store and stumbled upon the NAS-like ES34069 case from Chenbro featuring four S-ATA hotswap 3.5" slots, a slim-line CD-ROM drive slot, a SD card reader, and enough space for an additional 2.5" hard disk and a low profile Mini-ITX board. Additionally, the VIA EPIA SN series of Mini-ITX boards sports 4 S-ATA ports and either a passively cooled 1 GHz C7 processor or an actively cooled 1.8 GHz C7 processor. That should be enough power for a small multi-purpose home server while still keep the power consumption low. And I’m not the only one having this idea, Mini-ITX.com suggests this combination and Chenbro officially supports the VIA EPIA SN boards. Additionally, Debian 5.0 Lenny seems to run fine on the SN series, only lm-sensors seems to have problems with SN18000G and SN10000EG (but not SN18000 and SN10000E). So when the Chenbro ES34069 case showed up in digitec’s online shop, I ordered one there and a VIA EPIA SN18000G board at Brack. I didn’t order any disks since for data storage I plan to use the four Samsung 400 GB 3.5" S-ATA disks I bought for the N4100, and for the system I plant to use the 2.5" disk I initially bought for my MicroClient JrSX “c1”, but then continued to use it only with the CF card. Not yet sure, if I’ll also equip the slim-line optical drive slot, too. The case took several weeks to deliver and the mainboard hasn’t arrived yet. Instead I got an e-mail from Brack that VIA products are currently very difficult to get in Switzerland. Reason is said to be that VIA tries to channel the distribution of their products to a single distributor. (Sounds somehow similar to what Apple tried with the iPhone and failed.) Mini-ITX boards and power consumption So I now have a nice case without a board. There aren’t that many Mini-ITX boards out there sporting 4 S-ATA ports. One which cleary stood out was the new Intel DG45FC Mini-ITX board with LGA775 socket. (In Switzerland neither available at Brack nor at digitec, but e.g. at PCP.) But reading the specs of this board it was also clear that it wasn’t thought for NAS systems but high-performance HTPCs — the focus seems to be on multimedia performance which a NAS doesn’t need. Its newer sister, the Intel DQ45EK Mini-ITX board is focussed more on office and business PCs than on multimedia. But Intels remote adminstration is not really a plus for me (don’t need it, I’ve got SSH ;-) and it’ neither cheaper than the DG45FC nor has it significantly lower power-consuption. Despite the 120W power-supply there are people who already combined the Chenbro ES34069 with the Intel DG45FC or DQ45EK board, e.g. one of the administrators of the German NAS-Portal forums built such a machine and this German guy who wants to build a Windows Home Server based on such a combination. At least the NAS-Portal administrator found out that the board consumes so much power that together with the 4 S-ATA disks the included 120W power supply doesn’t suffice and the system is not stable in this configuration. Trusted Reviews review of the DG45FC explains why: It’s one of the first Mini-ITX board not following the MoDT idea, has a desktop chipset instead a mobile chipset and therefore hasn’t all of the power-saving features of those mobile chipsets. But it’s easy to see anyway: Most of the CPUs supported by the DG45FC and DQ45EK boards have a TDP of 65W. Offically the processor cooler delivered with the case supports processors with up to 65W, but 65W is already more than the half of what the power supply delivers and according to the Trusted Reviews review, the board itself consumes another 35W itself. So for the four 3.5" S-ATA disks — which are usually not as economical as notebook disks — about 20W are left. This can’t work! The guy from NAS-Portal.org plans to solve the problem by using a universal 180W notebook power supply instead of the original one. In comparison to the 100W of the both Intel boards, VIA’s SN18000G consumes only 26W (the fanless SN10000EG even only 22W) and that’s board and processor! That’s about ¼ of what the Intel board consumes. Imagine the difference between having a 100W light bulb (suffices for a whole small room) shining 365 days a year compared to a 25W light bulb (often used in bedside lamps) in a year. Other Mini-ITX mainboards with 4x S-ATA include the following ones:

• Jetway JNC62K: According to Mini-ITX.com it fits into the Chenbro ES34069 case, but requires at least a 120W power supply which again questions its power consumption and its usage together with four 3.5" harddisks, although it is recommended for the ES34069 by Mini-ITX.com. But I haven’t made that good experiences with NVidia chipsets yet, so this board seems currently no option for me anyway. OTOH there’s German speaking guy who build a ES34069 based server using this board and only three SATA harddisks and runs the OpenSolaris based and commercial NexentaStor on it, so the hardware can’t be too exotic. (Review at Bit-Tech; Review at MiniITX.biz)
• Albatron KI690-AM2: Already over one year old and Silent PC Review says it has an extremely restrictive BIOS and poor fan control. (Another Review at TweakTown)
• iEi KINO-9454-R20: Seems to support only Pentium 4 and Pentium D.
• Several Commell mainboards: LV-66A (VIA C7 1.5 GHz), LV-672 (Pentium 4), LV-674 (Pentium D).
• Gigabyte GA-6KIEH-RH (not yet available)
• Kontron 986LCD-M/mITX: Socket mPGA478 and mPGA479, supports Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile beyond others; 3x GBit network interfaces, but also quite multimedia focussed — the review at EPIACenter.de (German written) says using it for NAS or a network-focussed machine is casting pearls before swine. :-) But the same counts for the DG45FC surely, too. ;-) Importer for Switzerland seems to be fabrimexSystems and end customers can buy it e.g. at ichbinleise.ch (which seem to sell only Kontron mainboards), but it’s way more expensive than the Intel DG45FC and even more expensive than the VIA SN18000G.
• J&W MINIX™ 780G-SP128MB: Another new multimedia focussed mainboard, but unless ATI drivers are way less usable than the NVidia drivers, I prefer not to use ATI graphics cards. (Review at MiniITX.biz)
• Advantech AIMB-221, AMD/ATI based and said to have a power-consumption less than 100W and a low TCO. But 100W are still too much for the 120W PSU. (German review at MiniTechNet)

Conclusion For now, I decided to wait a little bit more for my VIA EPIA SN18000G board which still seems to be the best board for the Chenbro ES34069 case although not really cheap. But if I once in a not that distant future decide to have a desktop at home again, I’m quite sure it’ll sport a cute Mini-ITX case (perhaps a nice black-orange HFX micro M1 case by mCubed — unfortunately the M2 is no more available in a color combination including orange ;-) with an Intel DG45FC or Kontron 986LCD-M/mITX and a decent Core 2 Duo processor. Software Plans Of course my home server will run Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny on it, with software RAID-5 and LVM2 over the 1.6 TB of S-ATA disks resulting in 1.2 TB available disk space which will be offered using at least NFS, SMB and SSH (think sshfs). Planned software includes BackupPC (a very fine pulling backup system for machines which are not online 24/7) and Privoxy. I’ll perhaps also install Tor and a caching proxy like Squid or Polipo. Another idea is to run Mediatomb on that machine. :-)

RAM is the new Disk [1] - interesting post about using a distributed network of servers with RAM for main storage. The concept is that RAM on another machine can be accessed faster than local disk and that disk performance for contiguous IO has been increasing steadily at a greater rate than random seek performance. So disks can be used in a similar manner to tape drives (backing up data) and RAM can be used as main storage (2RU machines with 1TB of RAM are predicted soon). It is interesting to contrast this with the Rubik’s Cube solver which uses disk as RAM [2]. Interesting Sun Blog post about how ZFS uses flash based SSD (Solid State Disk) for read caching [3]. Yahoo has released a Firefox plugin named Yslow to tell you why your web site is slow [4]. This complements the Yahoo Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site document [5]. Amsterdam now has cargo trams [6]. This reduces pollution and traffic congestion while allowing efficient transport of cargo. The cargo trams tend to follow passenger trams so they don’t provide any additional obstacle to traffic. Interesting article by Cory Doctorow about how the standard formats limit creative content [7]. He makes the unfortunate mistake of claiming that “no one tries to make sitcoms about stories that take five minutes to tell” and “no one tries to make feature films about subjects that take 30 seconds to elucidate” - I think that the majority of sitcom episodes can be described in considerably less than 5 minutes and a significant number of movies (EG every one that stars Jean-Claude Van Damme [8]) can have their plot described in less than 30 seconds.

• [1] http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/ram-is-disk


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/06/24/rubiks-cube-io-bandwidth/


• [3] http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test


• [4] http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/


• [5] http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html


• [6] http://www.citycargo.nl/faq_eng.htm


• [7] http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=479&doc_id=164252&


• [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_damme

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I ve previously ranted about the Lufthansa website. Trying to help out a blind friend obtain some assistance from Miles & More, the Lufthansa frequent flyer programme, I can confidently say that the two companies have a common origin and probably read the same customer service guidelines, which must be somewhat along the following lines:

• require your customers to fill out a web form by not providing any alternate contact information;
• make your website inaccessible to screen readers, so that visually disabled people cannot get in touch with you;
• require full contact data to be filled in before the contact form can be submitted, even if the customer is logged in and the system thus has access to all the data;
• auto-reply to ever form submitted with a mail that assigns a case number to your request, but provide no information on how to use that number: no link where I can inquire about the status of a case, and no means to post follow-up information;
• send this email from do-not-reply@miles-and-more.com to emphasise how customer-oriented your company is and how well you have understood the potential of email;
• when (if) you eventually send a real reply, send it from service@miles-and-more.com, which gives the impression of a real email address, and quote the case number in the subject, along with the first line of the customer s original request, like this: Re: To Whom It May Concern (#17 (#1729700) / (#M1449889) . For extra bonus points, use non-matching parentheses;
• try to ensure not to take into account any of the data provided with the original request and prefer stock replies to useful content;
• do not give the name of a person, but sign the email with something like Miles & More Service Team ;
• refuse all mails sent to service@miles-and-more.com with a note telling people to use the web form to provide feedback (with a cryptic link) and that your email is not being forwarded or read;
• when the customer uses the cryptic link to provide follow-up to the open case, possibly under the impression that the reply will be associated with the original case, assign a new case number and ensure that another team member answers the email with pretty much exactly the same information as the last reply you sent. Under no circumstances assume that the customer has already asked a given question before and couldn t make sense of or wasn t satisfied with the answer provided in the last round.
• should a customer enquire about alternative means of contact, tell them they can send regular mail via the post office, and that you are sorry that at the moment , you cannot reach the company by email.

If you follow the above guidelines carefully and possibly add a twist here or there, you can rest assured that you ll fit in quite perfectly with most of your competitors and companies in many other fields. You ll understand that the customer is evil and you have to protect your company and your customer service staff from them, by making it extraordinarily difficult and inconvenient to reach them, and ensuring that they won t get any further than the computerised guard at the front door. It s not like they are your most important asset. Interestingly, neither Swiss, SAS, nor Thai have read these guidelines. I hope they will never find them. NP: Porcupine Tree: The Sky Moves Sideways

OpenSSH can be compiled against OpenSC. Since the latter has support for the Belgian electronic ID card, that means you can use your eID card to log on to a remote server using OpenSSH. To do this is fairly simple, once you know how it works. First, obviously, you need to have ssh compiled against opensc. Unfortunately, the Debian package comes with that option disabled, but it's easy to enable that:

sudo apt-get build-dep openssh
sudo apt-get source openssh
cd openssh-*
$EDITOR debian/rules

Find the "Common build options", and add another line:

confflags += --with-opensc=/usr

Now add another changelog entry, so that your next apt-get upgrade won't overwrite your locally-modified SSH package:

dch -i

Next, build and install the package:

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b -uc -us
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i openssh-client*

You now have an OpenSSH that can access smartcards. So, how do you use it to log on to a remote system? Simple:

pkcs15-tool -c
ssh-keygen -D 0

The first command will tell you the order of the certificates on the card. In my case, the Authentication certificate is first, while the Signature certificate is second. You do not want the Signature certificate; you only want the Authentication certificate. The second command will output the RSA public keys that are on the smartcard in both SSH1 and SSH2 format, in the same order as in the pkcs15-tool output. You only want the SSH2 version, and you only want to get the Authentication key. That key needs to be added to your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the remote host. Note that the '0' assumes that your smartcard is in slot 0; if that doesn't work, 'pkcs11-tool -L' should tell you which slot you need. After we've done this, we're ready to start using the smartcard to log in. While ssh-add has an option to load keys from a smartcard, this only works with smartcards that allow one to download the private key from the smartcard into the computer's RAM. This is not possible with the eID (and for good reason), so you can't use ssh-agent with your eID card. However, you don't really need it.

beid-pkcs11-tool -l -t

This will log in to the Authentication key on the smartcard (note that while it is possible to log in to the Authentication key, it is not possible to do the same with the Signature key). You will get the familiar belpic login window now, and the smartcard will now allow use of the private key. In order to actually use this key, you need to specify one extra option to ssh:

ssh -I 0

The -I option instructs SSH to use a smartcard key as a private key. Since we're already logged in to the smartcard, we do not need to enter a PIN code (and regardless, SSH does not know how to do that). You will now be logged on to the server. Note that there is no way to 'log out' of a smartcard; the proper way to do that is to remove your card from the cardreader...

Looking at KDE4 and related technologies, a few things about data storage hit me. Not that I know anything about it, but that does usually not prevent me from trying to be clever about it. Several parts needs to either index, cache or store data. Apps

• Strigi indexes your harddisk, just a index. No real data
• Akonadi caches your data, especially email/contacts/calendar items, but also in the future probably instant messaging logs, notes and others
• Nepomuk handles and stores tags on files and other data
• Amarok indexes your music collection and stores related info, including statistics

Among these, there is probably many other, but these I just noticed. How do these apps store their things As the smart reader has guessed, all these uses different storage methods. Strigi Indexes your data and store it in a clucene on disk format. If you remove your strigi indexes, all you lose is the cpu time used to generate it.
Strigi is not a KDE thing, but the KDE libraries depends on it. Akonadi Caches your PIM data and make it available easily for applications. Akonadi does not itself keep the data. Akonadi people has evaluated SQLite, but found it insufficient. Akonadi people also evaluated MySQL/Embedded, but did also have issues with that, so they ended up using a full MySQL server.
Akonadi is not a KDE thing, but it originates from KDE and is used by the KDE Pim libraries. Nepomuk Handles and stores metadata and tags on files, emails and other data. The nepomuk data is all in RDF format. Nepomuk uses Soprano for storage and soprano has pluggable backends.
One Soprano backend, probably the most used, is a Redland backend, which too slow for effective nepomuk usage, but is a C++ thing. Redland internally can use Berkeley DB or MySQL. The usage in Soprano is Berkeley DB format.
The other Soprano backend is using Sesame2, a java rdf storage. Quite some people are against this because it is java. Internally, it seems that it is using its own ondisk format, but is much more effective than the Redland/BDB backend, and the recommended one to use. Amarok Indexes and plays your music and does statistics over it. The amarok people have evaluated SQLite and found it not good enough for the job. The amarok people are going for MySQL/Embedded for now. Overview All in all, we have a clucene index, a full MySQL server, a BerkelyDB or custom format and a MySQL/Embedded used. I wonder how much communication between these projects there have been regarding the choice of storages. Wacky ideas Now that I already in the beginning said that I didn’t know enough about what I was talking about, I also feel well suited to make suggestions for the future. What if …

• Amarok hooked into the Akonadi MySQL database process
• Amarok skipped the concept of databases and let Strigi index the music and stored the metadata and statistics in Nepomuk
• Soprano Redland backend hooked into the Akonadi MySQL database instead of a BerkeleyDB file

That’s it for now, next up, maybe, interesting places to use plasma.