Russell Coker: I m Skeptical about Robotic Nanotech
There has been a lot of fear-mongering about nanotech. The idea is that little robots will eat people (or maybe eat things that we depend on such as essential food crops). It’s unfortunate that fear-mongering has replaced thought and there seems to have been little serious discussion about the issues.
If (as some people believe) nanotech has the potential to be more destructive than nuclear weapons then it’s an issue that needs to be discussed in debates before elections and government actions to alleviate the threat need to be reported on the news - as suggested in the Accelerating Future blog [0].
I predict that there will be three things which could be called nanotech in the future:
The more commonly discussed robotic nanotech, self-replicating and which can run around to do things (EG work inside a human body). I doubt that tiny robots can ever be as effective at adapting to their environment as animals, I also doubt that they can self-replicate in the wild. Currently we create CPU cores (the most intricate devices created by humans) from very pure materials in “clean rooms”. Making tiny machines in clean-rooms is not easy, making them in dirty environments is going to be almost impossible. Robots as we know them are based around environments that are artificially clean not natural environments. Robots that can self-replicate in a clean-room when provided with pure supplies of the necessary raw materials is a solvable problem. I predict that this will remain in science-fiction.
Tiny robots manufactured in factories to work as parts of larger machines. This is something that we are getting to today. It’s not going to cause any harm as long as the nano-bots can’t be manufactured on their own and can’t survive in the wild.
In summary, I think that the main area that we should be concerned about in regard to nano-bot technology is as a new development on the biological warfare theme. This seems to be a serious threat which deserves the attention of major governments.
- Artifical life forms as described by Craig Venter in his talk for ted.com [1]. I believe that these should be considered along with nanotech because the boundary between creatures and machines can get fuzzy when you talk about self-replicating things devised by humans which are based on biological processes.
I believe that artificial life forms and tweaked versions of current life forms have significant potential for harm. The BBC has an interesting article on health risks of GM food which suggests that such foods should be given the same level of testing as pharmaceuticals [2]. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg, the potential use of Terminator Gene technology [3] in biological warfare seems obvious.
In summary, I think that the main area that we should be concerned about in regard to nano-bot technology is as a new development on the biological warfare theme. This seems to be a serious threat which deserves the attention of major governments.
I've been experimenting with 
In a perfect world, when we design some aspect of our infrastructure,
we'd get it right the first time, and would never have to change our design
once it had been deployed.
Back in this world, however, we regularly have to change things as we
expand our infrastructure. Sometimes we made a mistake originally, other
times new requirements pop up. In either case we will end up doing things
differently in the future than how it was done in the past.
The danger here is that if you only create your new machines or services
differently, you've got effectively two separate and different systems to
maintain. This may not sound like much, until it happens again... and
again... and again... and then suddenly you've got 18 different ways of
setting up backups, depending on how long ago you set it up and (if you're
really unlucky) who did it and what the phase of the moon was at the time.
If you've been here before, you probably remember the pain of having some
disaster happen and needing to fix it NOW NOW NOW, only to wade into the
setup and realise that it's been done in a way that (you thought) died out
six months ago -- and so you don't really remember how it works, and yeah,
the documentation's been updated so many times since then that it doesn't
mention the old way of doing things, and here comes your boss to ask how
long it's going to be until it's all working again...
If you haven't had this experience (yet?), you'll have to trust me when I
say that it's no fun to hit an older, out-of-date system. It's especially
painful because the most common reason you change things is because the
old way sucked. So you turn up at a critical moment to fix something in
a poorly documented and sub-optimally configured system.
Fun, fun, funnity fun.
There are only two ways to avoid this problem: never change the way you do
anything, or else plan your changes so that retrofitting is part
of the plan every time you're modifying an existing service.
Assuming that never changing anything isn't an option, you need to plan to
retrofit. When you're putting together the design for your system change
(you do design your changes, right?) you need to audit what's out
there, determine what's needed to bring it all up to date, and put
together a plan to make that happen. It's like documentation and testing
-- if you don't make an explicit effort to make it happen, it'll never get
done.
That sounds like a lot of work, and it is. Luckily, if you're already
working in a well-maintained infrastructure you should only really have one
existing config to upgrade, which shouldn't be too painful. However, if
you've got a lot of machines to change there's no way around the fact that
they've all got to be changed, and that can take time.
If you accept that you don't want configuration skew, you can start to
think about how to engineer your systems and processes to make it less of
a hassle to keep everything up to date. Putting some extra thought into
how you set things up in the first place so that it's easier to update is
at the heart of this. Automating deployment is an easy way to take some
of the pain away from rolling out new configs, but there's also plenty of
smaller decisions that help with updating configs: putting everything in
revision control, making extensive use of templating and pulling out
common config fragments, and making sure that you've got good notes and
records of what has been done where.
The more you automate your deployment and maintenance, the less pain you
feel when you need to retrofit. With something like 
Yes, Manu Chao was really home yesterday in Paris Bercy. And he was obviously feeling like being home.
The concert began at 21:30 and ended up at 00:30. Yes...that makes 3 full hours concert. All that for 25 euros.
The crowd support, dance, participation was *amazing*. I often go to concerts in the Bercy arena and never saw the crowd in the upper rows being stood up all concert long.
Radio Bemba played their usual tracks first. As usual, the very Manu way to mix songs, themes from all his carreer and mix them up, distord them and make new songs from old ones. This is what always made Mano Negra, then Manu Chao oncerts unique experiences. Just imagine 20,000 people singing Clandestino a capella, most of us not knowing any damn word of Spanish...
After about 2 hours of magic without any stop, the very special moments came in. Manu, Gambit, Majiv (what a guitarist when playing rumbas de Barcelona!), Julio (de Barcelona!)...and all others were just feeling like being home with a few friends. So the encores lasted...and lasted...and lasted. They just didn't want to stop (Manu probably said about 3 or 4 times "c'est fini").
Then, they did something I never ever saw in a big 20,000 people concert since my first one back in....long time ago. Manu asked "do you have 5 more minutes?". So, they stopped for 5 minutes to get the guitars re-accorded(sp?)....the crowd just...waited...and the gig re-started again with songs from "Si Sib rie m' tait cont e", the special book-album he made with friends, inspired by the sad winters he spent in Paris in his early years. Soooooo special and, believe me, that *was* special. Seeing all roadies, crew, friends just dancing backstage and partying clearly showed this was not to always happen (this will probably happen again on today's concert).
He was just feeling like home. And so were we. Not wanting to leave and shut down the light.
Finally, at 00:30, all of us were dead tired and we just hugged around with Manu and left. Just like old friends.
I don't know if that will happen everywhere 
World, here's another one:
We actually got home last Sunday, but I've been too jetlagged, and then too
busy with work to really have a chance to write anything...
We got back in at around 2pm, but our bags fell victim to Heathrow's
Terminal 5, and didn't arrive until around 11pm. I think I lasted until
about 8pm, when I had to crash. Poor Sarah had to stay up until 11pm when
they finally got around to delivering our suitcases.
The week in Zurich was wonderful. The Zurich office is everything the photos
make it out to be, and then some. One weird thing: apparently there's some
Swiss regulation about how much you're allowed to cool a building in
relation to the outdoor ambient temperature, so there's no air conditioning
in the office. Instead, you can open the windows. Unfortunately, there's a
fairly busy set of train tracks right beside the office, so it can get a tad
noisy... It was a pretty warm week, I think around 30°C. I certainly
prefer being colder rather than hotter when indoors, so found the lack of
decent cooling to be a shame, given the rest of the building's features.
That said, it was pretty amazing sweltering away in Zurich, and then looking
up and seeing snow on the mountains. It was surprising how much of a
temperature difference there was.
On the last evening in Zurich, we went on a reconnoitre to try and find the
river that we could hear (and see on the map) behind our apartment. We
eventually found some street access to it, and it was another world back
there. It was fairly thickly wooded, and the sunlight was heavily filtered
through the trees, so it was cool and shady.
The river was fairly fast flowing over some rocks in parts, which is what
was making it so audible. The whole setting was absolutely beautiful. There
were a couple of paths, and the whole thing felt like something out of a
fairy tail. We think we stumbled onto a fox, but we're not sure. It's a
shame we only discovered the place on the last day, as I'd have liked to
have explored it further.
I really liked Zurich. It was nice and flat, and had an excellent tram
service. 
I recently noticed that a very good way to safely read webcomics in
the bath tub is an old laptop with a big screen (e.g. a IBM ThinkPad
A-series like my 15” A31 which has a nice 1400×1050 resolution),
a water proof keyboard, the screen-alike, keyboard only driven (hence
the name) window manager 
The most dynamic segment of the software industry that I'm aware of is web programming. Flamewars rage about frameworks and browsers and standards and whatnot, and the openness of the whole thing feels like some of the things that made me fall in love with computing as a whole and Free Software in particular. The problem with all that openness is that it's rather difficult to navigate. Aside from the obvious issues with browser incompatibilities, there's an enormous amount of software solutions on the server side, spanning languages, libraries, and frameworks. Each one is an ecosystem to itself, often being large and complicated.
Over the past couple months, I gave a couple talks on 
This is the second installment of my article about the Serial Console Server for the Poor. 
The last weeks have been very active. A lot of e-mails from people and magazines, a lot of congratulations and a lot of free beer made me feel like a rock star :) Thanks a lot to everyone. I really appreciated that.