This post was written with Andr s Monroy-Hern ndez for the Follow the Crowd Research Blog. The post is a summary of a paper forthcoming in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2013. You read also read the full paper: The Cost of Collaboration for Code and Art: Evidence from Remixing. It is part of a series of papers I have written with Monroy-Hern ndez using data from Scratch. You can find the others on my academic website.

Does collaboration result in higher quality creative works than individuals working alone? Is working in groups better for functional works like code than for creative works like art? Although these questions lie at the heart of conversations about collaborative production on the Internet and peer production, it can be hard to find research settings where you can compare across both individual and group work and across both code and art. We set out to tackle these questions in the context of a very large remixing community. Remixing platforms provide an ideal setting to answer these questions. Most support the sharing, and collaborative rating, of both individually and collaboratively authored creative works. They also frequently combine code with artistic media like sound and graphics. We know that that increased collaboration often leads to higher quality products. For example, studies of Wikipedia have suggested that vandalism is detected and removed within minutes, and that high quality articles in Wikipedia, by several measures, tend to be produced by more collaboration. That said, we also know that collaborative work is not always better for example, that brainstorming results in less good ideas when done in groups. We attempt to answer this broad question, asked many times before, in the context of remixing: Which is the better description, the wisdom of crowds or too many cooks spoil the broth ? That, fundamentally, forms our paper s first research question: Are remixes, on average, higher quality than single-authored works? A number of critics of peer production, and some fans, have suggested that mass collaboration on the Internet might work much better for certain kinds of works. The argument is that free software and Wikipedia can be built by a crowd because they are functional. But more creative works like music, a novel, or a drawing might benefit less, or even be hurt by, participation by a crowd. Our second research question tries to get at this possibility: Are code-intensive remixes, higher quality than media-intensive remixes? We try to answers to these questions using a detailed dataset from Scratch a large online remixing community where young people build, share, and collaborate on interactive animations and video games. The community was built to support users of the Scratch programming environment: a desktop application with functionality similar to Flash created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch is designed to allow users to build projects by integrating images, music, sound and other media with programming code. Scratch is used by more than a million, mostly young, users. Measuring quality is tricky and we acknowledge that there are many ways to do it. In the paper, we rely most heavily a measure of peer ratings in Scratch called loveits very similar to likes on Facebook. We find similar results with several other metrics and we control for the number of views a project receives. In answering our first research question, we find that remixes are, on average, rated as being of lower quality than works of single authorship. This finding was surprising to us but holds up across a number of alternative tests and robustness checks. In answering our second question, we find rough support for the common wisdom that remixing tends to be more effective for functional works than for artistic media. The more code-intensive a project is, on average, the closer the gap is between a remix and a work of single authorship. But the more media-intensive a project is, the bigger the gap. You can see the relationships that our model predicts in the graph below. Both of us are supporters and advocates of remixing. As a result, we were initially a little troubled by our result in this paper. We think the finding suggests an important limit to the broadest claims of the benefit of collaboration in remixing and peer production. That said, we also reject the blind repetition of the mantra that collaboration is always better for every definition of better, and for every type of work. We think it s crucial to learn and understand the limitations and challenges associated with remixing and we re optimistic that this work can influence the design of social media and collaboration systems to help remixing and peer production thrive. For more, see our full paper, The Cost of Collaboration for Code and Art: Evidence from Remixing.

Have you ever heard someone talking extensively about Cloud Computing or generally Clouds? and have you ever noticed the fact many people (even the ones who present themselves as experts) don t really understand what a Cloud is at all? That happened to me multiple times and one of the most common misunderstandings is many see the Cloud as something being on the internet. Many companies add a little logo representing a cloud on their frontpage and without a single change on their infrastructure (but surely with a price increment) they start calling their products as being on the Cloud. Given the lack of knowledge about this specific topic people tend to buy the product presented as being on the Cloud without understanding what they really bought. But what Cloud Computing really means? it took several years and more than fifteen drafts to the National Institute of Standards and Technology s (NIST) to find a definition. The final accepted proposal:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

The above definition requires a few more clarifications specifically when it comes to understand where should we focus on while checking for a Cloud Computing solution. A few key points:

1. On-demand self-service: every consumer will be able to unilaterally provision multiple computing capabilities like server time, storage, bandwidth, dedicated RAM or CPU without requiring any sort of human interaction from their respective Cloud providers.
2. Rapid elasticity and scalability: all the computing capabilities outlined above can be elastically provisioned and released depending on how much demand my company will have in a specific period of time. Suppose the X company is launching a new product today and it expects a very large number of customers. The X company will add more resources to their Cloud for the very first days (where they suppose the load to be very high) and then it ll scale the resources back as they were before. Elasticity and scalability permit the X company to improve and enhance their infrastructure when they need it with an huge saving in monetary terms.
3. Broad network access: capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations).
4. Measured service: Cloud systems allow maximum transparency between the provider and the consumer, the usage of all the resources is monitored, controlled, and reported. The consumer knows how much will spend, when and in how long.
5. Resource pooling: each provider s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers at the same time. The consumer has no control or knownledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or datacenter).
6. Resources price: when buying a Cloud service make sure the cost for two units of RAM, storage, CPU, bandwidth, server time is exactly the double of the price of one unit of the same capability. An example, if a provider offers you one hour of bandwitdh for 1 Euro, the price of two hours will have to be 2 Euros.

The Cloud Computing technology is reasonably the future but can we trust Cloud providers? Are we sure that no one will ever have access to our files except us? and what about governments interested in acquiring a specific customer data hosted on the Cloud? I always suggest to read deeply both the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use of a certain service before signing in especially when it comes to choose a Cloud storage provider. Many providers have the same aspect, they seem to provide the same resources, the same amount of storage for the same price but legally they may present different problems, and that is the case of Spideroak vs Dropbox. Quoting from the Dropbox s Privacy Policy:

Compliance with Laws and Law Enforcement Requests; Protection of DropBox s Rights. We may disclose to parties outside Dropbox files stored in your Dropbox and information about you that we collect when we have a good faith belief that disclosure is reasonably necessary to (a) comply with a law, regulation or compulsory legal request; (b) protect the safety of any person from death or serious bodily injury; (c) prevent fraud or abuse of DropBox or its users; or (d) to protect Dropbox s property rights. If we provide your Dropbox files to a law enforcement agency as set forth above, we will remove Dropbox s encryption from the files before providing them to law enforcement. However, Dropbox will not be able to decrypt any files that you encrypted prior to storing them on Dropbox.

It s evident that Dropbox employees can access your data or be forced by legal process to turn over your data unencrypted. On the other side, Spideroak on its latest update to its Privacy Policy states that data stored on their Cloud is encrypted and inaccessible without user s key, which is stored locally on user s computers. And what about the latest research paper, titled Cloud Computing in Higher Education and Research Institutions and the USA Patriot Act written by the legal experts of the University of Amsterdam s Institute for Information Law stating the anti-terror Patriot Act could be theoretically used by U.S. law enforcement to bypass strict European privacy laws to acquire citizen data within the European Union without their consensus? The only requirement for the data acquisition is the provider being an U.S company or an European company conducting systematic business in the U.S. For example an Italian company storing their documents (protected by the European privacy laws and under the general Italian jurisdiction) on a provider based in Europe but conducting systematic business in the United States, could be forced by U.S. law enforcement to transfer data to the U.S. territory for inspection by law enforcement agencies. Does someone really care about the privacy of companies, consumers and users at all? or better does privacy exists at all for the millions of the people that connect to the internet every day?

The Problem Some of my clients need systems that store reasonable amounts of data. This is enough data that we can expect some data corruption on disk such that traditional RAID doesn t work, that old fashioned filesystems like Ext3/4 will have unreasonable fsck fimes, and that the number of disks in a small server isn t enough. NetApp is a really good option for bulk reliable storage, but their products are very expensive. BTRFS has a lot of potential, but the currently released versions (as supported in distributions such as Debian/Wheezy) lack significant features. One significant lack in current BTRFS releases is something equivalent to the ZFS send/receive functionality for remote backups, this was a major factor when I analysed the options for hard drive based backup [1], and you should always think about backup before deploying a new system. Currently ZFS is the best choice for bulk storage which is reliable if you can t afford NetApp. Any storage system needs a minimum level of reliability if only to protect it s own metadata and a basic RAID array doesn t protect against media corruption with current data volumes. The combination of performance, lack of fsck (which is a performance feature), large storage support, backup, and significant real-world use makes ZFS a really good option. Now I need to get some servers for more than 8.1TiB of storage (the capacity of a RAID-Z array of 4*3TB disks). One of my clients needs significantly more, probably at least 10 disks in a RAID-Z array so none of the cheaper servers will do. Basically the issue that some of my clients are dealing with (and which I have to solve) is how to provide a relatively cheap ZFS system for storing reasonable amounts of data. For some systems I need to start with about 10 disks and be able to scale to 24 disks or more without excessive expense. Also to make things a little easier and cheaper 24*7 operation is not required, so instead of paying for hot-swap disks we can just schedule down-time outside business hours. The Problem with Dell Dell is really good for small systems, the PowerEdge tower servers that support 2*3.5 or 4*3.5 disks and which have space for an SSD or two are really affordable and easy to order. But even in the mid-size Dell tower servers (which are small by server standards) you have problems with just getting a few disks operating outside a RAID array [2]. The Dell online store is really great for small servers, any time I m buying a server for less than $2500 I check the Dell online store first and usually their price is good enough that there is no need to get a quote from another company. Unfortunately all the servers with bigger storage involve disks that are unreasonably expensive (it seems that Dell makes their profit on the parts) and prices are not available online. I gave my email address and phone number to the Dell web site on Wednesday and they haven t cared to get back to me yet. This is the type of service that makes me avoid IBM and HP for any server deployment where the Dell online store sells something suitable! BackBlaze For some time BackBlaze have been getting interest by describing how they store lots of data in a small amount of space by tightly stacking SATA disks. They don t think that ZFS on Linux is ready for production, but their hardware ideas are useful. They have recently described their latest architecture [3]. They describe it as 135TB for $7,384. Of course the 135TB number is based on the idea of getting the full 3TB capacity out of each disk which they can do as they have redundancy over multiple storage pods. But anyone who wants a single fileserver needs some internal redundancy to cover disk failure. One option might be to have three RAID-Z2 arrays of 15 disks which gives a usable capacity of 42*3TB==126TB==113TiB. Note that while the ZFS documentation recommends between 3 and 9 disks per zpool for performance I don t expect performance problems, when you only have a gigabit Ethernet connection there shouldn t be a problem with three ZFS zpools making the network the bottleneck. For this option the way to go would be to start with an array of 15 disks and then buy a second set of 15 disks when the first storage pool becomes full. It seems likely that 4TB disks will become cheap before a 35TiB array is filled so we can get more efficiency by delaying purchases. The BackBlaze pod isn t cheap, they are sold as a complete system without storage disks for $US5,395 by Protocase [4]. That gives a markup of $US3,411 over the BackBlaze cost which isn t too bad given that BackBlaze are quoting the insane bulk discount hardware prices that I could never get. Protocase also offer the case on it s own for anyone who wants to build a system around it. It seems like the better option is to buy the system from Protocase, but that would end up being over $6,000 when Australian import duty is added and probably close to $7,000 when shipping etc is included. Norco Norco offers a case that takes 24 hot-swap SATA/SAS disks and a regular PC motherboard for $US399 [5]. It s similar to the BackBlaze pod but smaller, cheaper, and there s no obvious option to buy a configured and tested system. 24 disks would allow two RAID-Z2 arrays of 12 disks, the first array could provide 27TiB and the second array could provide something bigger when new disks are released. SuperMicro SuperMicro has a range of storage servers that support from 12 to 36 disks [6]. They seem good, but I d have to deal with a reseller to buy them which would involve pain at best and at worst they wouldn t bother getting me a quote because I only want one server at a time. Conclusion Does anyone know of any other options for affordable systems suitable for running ZFS on SATA disks? Preferably ones that don t involve dealing with resellers. At the moment it seems that the best option is to get a Norco case and build my own system as I don t think that any of my clients needs the capacity of a BackBlaze pod at the moment. Supermicro seems good but I d have to deal with a reseller. In my experience the difference between the resellers of such computer systems and used car dealers is that used car dealers are happy to sell one car at a time and that every used car dealer at least knows how to drive. Also if you are an Australian reader of my blog and you want to build such storage servers to sell to my clients in Melbourne then I d be interested to see an offer. But please make sure that any such offer includes a reference to your contributions to the Linux community if you think I won t recognise your name. If you don t contribute then I probably don t want to do business with you. As an aside, I was recently at a camera store helping a client test a new DSLR when one of the store employees started telling me how good ZFS is for storing RAW images. I totally agree that ZFS is the best filesystem for storing large RAW files and this is what I am working on right now. But it s not the sort of advice I expect to receive at a camera store, not even one that caters to professional photographers.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/08/08/hard-drives-backup/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/08/01/cheap-sata-poweredge-t410/
• [3] http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/
• [4] http://protocase.com/products/index.php?e=Backblaze
• [5] http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail.php?categoryid=1&modelno=rpc-4224
• [6] http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/storage.cfm

Related posts:

1. Cheap SATA Disks in a Dell PowerEdge T410 A non-profit organisation I support has just bought a Dell...
2. ZFS vs BTRFS on Cheap Dell Servers I previously wrote about my first experiences with BTRFS [1]....
3. Flash Storage and Servers In the comments on my post about the Dell PowerEdge...

Some of my Romanian readers might know that for the last two years I've got involved in the skeptical movement to such a degree that I am a co-producer of a bi-weekly podcast on science and skepticism (in Romanian) called Skeptics in Romania . Some might even be regular listeners of the show.

(There isn't much to see now visually on the site, but me and the other people behind the project have some ongoing plans to change that.)

In spite of our modest site, up until now we had some successes, one of them being the publication of an article on us in a known Romanian printed publication and another being the invitation to a live show face to face with Oreste Teodorescu, a well known Romanian mysticist and woo promoter.

During that live show we managed to show a demonstration (video below, in Romanian) of how astrology gives the impression of working, without actually working, and, taking into account we had no prior TV camera experience and that it was a live show, I think we managed an honourable presence.


We also have a series of interviews in English with some really interesting people: Dr. Eugenie Scott, Prof. Christopher French, Prof. Edzard Ernst, Samantha Stein and others. We did these interviews at Denkfest 2011, in Zurich, and we integrated the translated (voice over) interviews in our podcast. The conlusion is that most of our activities revolve around the podcast, so let me tell you more about that.

The podcast has a somewhat fixed structure, it starts with a conversation between ourselves, then we have a segment on the history of science, technology, skepticism and woo, and then we have a segment called The dangers of not being skeptical . In this segment we present cases of people who lost their lives, their health, their money or any combination of the former because they were duped into some scam, science-y sounding non-science, unfounded claim or some other woo.

Having lost recently my brother-in-law to a form of cancer known as Hodgkin lymphoma, I became especially sensitive about miracle-cure claims for cancer, and this section of the show has lately seen its fair share of such cases. Honestly, if there could be a way to prosecute the irresponsible, ignorant and/or cynical people promoting all sorts of quack "therapies", especially for cancer*, I would really like to see it happen. But there isn't, and we're trying the best accessible approach, informing the public.

During my brother-in-law's last two years of his life, he went through lots of chemotherapy and radiotherapy sessions, repeated periods of hospitalisation, and lots of drugs. This is the best of what we currently have for treating and curing most forms of cancer, and too many times this isn't enough. I can't even imagine how stressful and discouraging it must feel when the best of what we have doesn't help.

Here is where the desperation and hopes of patients and their families meet the purely irresponsible cynical or ignorant promoters of woo and quack therapies. Because it takes either an ignorant or a really cynical (I really feel this word isn't enough) person to prey on the suffering of other people to make easy money under the false pretence of offering a cure.

It almost happened to my brother-in-law and his family, because they almost went for some herbal concoction promoted as a cancer cure on some forum, blog or page of a seller of this fake therapy. It was really hard for me to make them understand why using such a product it not advisable, not even in parallel with the medical treatment due its possible counter effect or interactions with the real medical treatment, without them getting the wrong idea that I wasn't trying to help. While trying to be brief and informative not to lose their attention, I told them how "natural" doesn't necessarily mean "good" (uranium, lead and Irukandji's venom are all natural), and how plants are drugs because they all contain chemical substances (and no, "chemical" does not mean "human made" or "artificial") which could interact with the medical treatment.


But most people don't even have the chance of having close by a person with a more science-leaning thought process and a skeptical mind. Those unfortunate people are the most vulnerable people and constitute the biggest chunk of the victims of baseless pseudo-cures or pseudo-treatments.

On our last show, I presented the case of Yvonne Main, a cancer suffering patient who mistook an invasive carcinoma for a cyst, and irdologist Ruth Nelson for a real healthcare giver.

Yvonne Main, died from an invasive carcinoma after seeking help from a iridologist, and delaying real medical treament for 18 months

Yvonne, after seeking medical advice from a person that essentially promotes the dead idea of guessing diseases by looking at the eyes**, used natural treatments for about 18 months and, after all this time, her carcinoma grew to a size of 10 to 11 cm, eating through her skull and causing damage which was later attempted to be countered through bone transplant from her ribs.

Ruth Nelson wasn't prosecuted in any way and continues her practice of quackery unharmed.

This is not the only case, nor even one case from a select few where woo and quackery lead to grave consequences for patients. There are many, many more; they're so many that even after splitting them in categories they seem too many per category, especially when you realise these are only the findings of, essentially, a single man:




This is part of what I have been doing in the last few years, instead of working on Debian. Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Maybe it's good. I want to know what do you think?


* you will, most likely, never hear such a promoter of non-therapies say that there isn't just one cancer, and that, in fact, cancer is a name for a certain family of diseases which are all called cancer - that's a first sign that you might be dealing with quack
** probably in the line of thought that the eyes are the gates to the soul so they must tell something significant about health

Some months ago I have run into a pretty interesting bug while working on a Ubuntu-based remote desktop system. The whole OS was installed on a server somewhere and users could access their desktop remotely. Some call this stuff Desktop-as-a-Service. The operating system we chose was Ubuntu Oneiric (11.10) and the remote access part was implemented with x2go, which uses nxagent to provide NX transport of X sessions. Users could access their Ubuntu machines remotely, with sound, video, youtube, and all you would expect from a desktop machine. The whole thing was working quite well. Now, as I said that was in May. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was available, and the choice of upgrading to it sounded pretty much obvious. So we upgraded our test system to Precise and everything seemed to work smoothly. Till we tried to open a PDF document, actually. It took evince about 50 seconds to display a relatively small document. Same story with images opened with the default image viewer, eog. The fix delivered to our users was simple: we have set shotwell-viewer as the default image viewer, and epdfview as the default PDF viewer. Everybody happy. In the meantime, obviously, I was interested in this issue so I ve tried to run run evince from a terminal, getting the following output:

(evince:15833): GRIP-WARNING **: Failed to initialize gesture manager.

Funny. On another test system running Debian Sid (unstable) everything was working smoothly. The diff between Ubuntu s version of evince and Debian s is a 6MB monster. Among other changes, I noticed that Ubuntu s version build-depends on libgrip-dev, which depends on libutouch-geis. Multitouch stuff. Why should multitouch support break my remote session? So on May the 10th I filed a bug on launchpad. How this issue got handled is in my opinion one of the many fine examples of the inherent superiority of free software, coupled with a we won t hide problems mindset. For an example of how bad is the proprietary approach, just check a random bug in Adobe s bug tracking system. But let s go back to the evince bug. Other users reported that their VNC sessions were also affected by the same problem. After a few days it was clear that the culprit was utouch-geis, and a patch appeared. Unfortunately it did not actually address the issue. Somebody else reported that RDP sessions were broken too. At the beginning of June Precise was still affected. Finally, on August the 6th a working patch was submitted by Bradley M. Froehle and included by Chase Douglas (thank you guys). End of August, fixed version of geis accepted into precise-updates, case closed. Now for some considerations. The problem was clearly of a certain importance. A Long Term Support, stable version of Ubuntu shipped with broken PDF and image viewing functionalities. It got fixed properly, even though 3 good months are quite a long time for such a bug to get solved. However, the issue only affected a pretty limited number of users, also certainly not Ubuntu s main target audience. This bug never affected Debian, simply because utouch-geis has not made its way into the archive yet. It takes longer to make changes like this in Debian, but for some categories of users stability is more important than new, cool features. Choice is a good thing.

[ once again, I am translating somebody else's material In this case, my good Costa Rican friend Carolina Flores. Please excuse my stylistic mistakes My English is far from native as you well know. But this material is worth sharing, and worth investing some tens of minutes doing a quick translation. If you can read Spanish, go read Caro's original entry ] Have you been to a music record store lately? I did so last Saturday, as a mere excercise. I was not planning on buying anything but I wanted to monitor things and confirm my suspicions. What was I suspicious of? First, that I would only find old records. And so it was: The only recent record I found was ...little broken hearts by Norah Jones. the second, that I would only find music for over 50 year old people. so it was: Were I there to look for a present for my father, I would have walked out with 10 good records. Third, that in the store nothing worth commenting would happen. About that last point, I should point out it was around 10 AM and the store had just opened its doors. Lets concede the benefit of doubt. I don't think many of you will remember, but in Barrio La California (where there is now a beauty parlour, almost in front of AM.PM) there was Auco Disco. In Auco Disco there was a guy specialized in rock (Mauricio Alice) and another one specialized in jazz (I don't remember his name). In that record you could always find rare records, but if they were not there, at least you were sure to find somebody to say: "No, we don't have that, but that's an excellent record, it's the best that [insert group here] have ever recorded because just afterwards they switched their guitar player, they had gone a bit south but with that record they are flying. But no, we don't have it; I can recommend you this record by [insert another group] because it has a guitar solo in track six that is amazing". It would happen more or less like that, which means, one would arrive to Auco Disco at 10 AM and leave around 5 PM with three new records, after having listened to a spectacular music selection. What happened to those stores? Were they killed by The Pirate Bay? That's the simplistic answer from the recording industry! The answer is that those stores never got anything from the industry but an invoice. The industry specially in prescindible markets such as ours was limited to hiring artists, taking care of them recording a sellable product, producing the object called record, and that's it. The more commercial radio stations were paid to program those songs as it cannot be casual that "Mosa, mosa" is the summer hit in all of Latin America, can it? but, record stores? Nothing. Lets carry on with that idea: Radio stations are paid to program said music. This idea should not lead us to believe that recording companies are to blame for bad taste. I won't reveal my sources, but I know the success of the "Locura autom tica" song by La Secta was a real example. Nobody paid for it. That song got to the number one because of its own merits(?) (you don't know the effort it took to find that thing, I cannot recommend it to you). Same thing happens with other stations that don't program reggaet n, that try to save the species, and where they play what we do like. But the thing is, everything we like is not available in any record store in this country. Then, even if we wanted to buy a record or give it as a gift to somebody, it is plain impossible. And don't tell me it's the same to present as a gift a link or a CD full of downloaded MP3 as it is to give a record with cover and booklet, wrapped in gift paper. I might be old-school, but the fetish object record still exists, not only because of its cover, but because of its sound. A 3MB MP3 is akin to drinking coffee dripping from a bag that has been used eight times with the same coffee beans. That format is the worst that has ever happened to music, and if we had any bit dignity we would never purchase digital files in Amazon or iTunes safe for MP3 with an acceptable compression level. That, if we could buy them, because not only that is allowed to us. As the musical industry has no interest in resolving ITS problem (that is not our problem, it is those companies') it has not even been resolved how to charge for a MP3 download that includes import fees (well, if downloading from here a MP3 from a USA-based file server can be considered importing goods into Costa Rica!!!) so we don't have to get dizzy entering into the nineties to Titi Online to discover there is nothing by Muse, Andrew Bird, The Killers, Death Cab for Cutie, Paramore, Bj rk... (believe me, I looked them all up, even Norah jones and La Secta. They also were not there). This all leads me to the question, which I present with all due respect (NOT): What the fuck do they expect us to do??? It is outrageous; above all because in the best case they will sell us a watery coffee download that won't allow us to get all the details a vinyl or less compression would give us. In the worst case, post-MP3 groups will end up recording music with no harmonics or hidden sounds, because, what for? Nobody will hear it. They even admit it: "Some musicians and audio engineers say the MP3 format is changing the way studios mix their recordings. They say the MP3 format "flattens" dynamics differences in tone and volume in a song. As a result, a great deal of new music sounds very much alike, and there is nothing as focusing to create a dynamic listening experience. Why working so hard in creating complex sound if nobody can detect it?" (Rolling Stone, The Death of High fidelity, December 26 2007, taken from here). That's why I am not surprised by Adri n's post regarding the sales of old records. The price has nothing to do with it. The causes are related to the fetish object record and what it means or does not mean for people that have never purchased one. Adri n also asks if somebody here keeps buying records. I answered that I would if the stores sold anything I like. I do it even after the nausea I feel while reading "This phonogram is an intellectual work protected in favor of its producer COPYING IT IN WHOLE OR PARTIALLY IS FORBIDDEN " (like that, uppercased, yelling to whoever is only guilty of having bought a record and defending the producer, not the artist). But I am sure that almost nobody buys records because doing so is no longer a gratifying experience; because if buying a record is clicking to wait 15 days for it to reach the mailbox, we prefer clicking on the download link. But there is another reason for people not to buy records anymore. In one of my talks regarding the dictatorship of the all rights reserved, I asked the 30 twenty-something-year-old students if any of them had ever bought a record. One answered he had, because he is an author and performer (cantautor in Spanish) and understands the effort that producing a record entails. The rest of them had never done so. Is it possible that said young people have never listened to real music? Is it possible that, were it not for concerts, what they consider music is a set of washed-out MP3 that are about to fill up 1TB of their computer? Does people no longer buy records because they cannot differentiate one sound from the other? It is not very clear for me where do I want to get to. The recording industry is despicable. An industry that instead of innovating sets its energy on suing adolescents for downloading songs, trying to pass laws restricting our freedoms in Internet, putting up DRMs making us hostages to our devices* and forcing us to listen just the aroma of music, deserves my whole contempt. If we add ot this that said industry won't allow us to legally download their breadcrumbs because it has not understood that Internet does not need a van crossing borders, besides my contempt they deserve my pity and my heartfelt condolence. But the condolence is also for music, real music, that which is not compressed under the shoe using a terrible format. It is also for independent musicians that have not realized that begging for a bit of space to that industry they just add to themselves the "despicable" tag, given they deserve the fruits of their work to enter their bank account. However, there are good things that have come out of this absurdity. Be it for those that have joined projects such as Aut mata (even if it is in MP3) and for dreams come true such as Musopen (that have achieved that the music that's in theory Public Domain becomes so in practice as well). Good for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the list of lawyers willing to defend people accused of ilegally downloading music in the USA. Good for the Creative Commons licenses that allow free sharing. All those are growing solutions, although none of them allows me to buy the Panamanian Carlos M ndez's record. Thankfully, a friend of mine who knows I will never give a dime to Apple, bought the files for me in iTunes. I thank him deeply, although I would have prefered to go to Auco Disco and have Mauricio tell me that the 2007 EP I have from Carlos is better than the record he did on 2009. * My devices don't have DRM because I use free software. I also use the ogg file format. Image by verbeeldingskr8

Shozo TAKEOKA had described to work RetroBSD on PIC32 1chip micro computer in 14th JNUG BOF. The board is Chipkit MAX32 with SD card socket. He bought it 5,900 JPY. More detail is http://ameblo.jp/takeoka/entry-11308169137.html (Japanese). RetroBSD is based on 2.2 BSD (!), and work without MMU. So it can work only one process in their ram, other processes are in swap space. It was really funny presentation.

After LCA [1] there was a discussion about possible locations for future conferences, most of the messages in the discussion were jokes or suggestions that don t seriously apply to LCA. So I ll add my suggestion for conferences other than LCA. I ve previously written generally about the issue of conferences at sea [2]. I don t think that LCA would be suitable for running at sea because delegates have specific expectations for LCA which are quite different to what a cruise ship can offer, so I don t think it makes sense to change LCA which is working well as it is. However there are lots of other possible computer conferences which could suite a cruise ship. Price Price is a major factor in running a conference, so obviously getting a cheap cruise price is very important. Here is a link for Vacations To Go which shows cruises from the Australia/NZ region which are of at least 5 nights and cost no more than $800 [3]. The cheapest entry at this moment is $609 for 5 nights and the cheapest on a per-night basis is an 8 night cruise for $779. The cheapest cruise currently on offer which allows a conference similar to LCA is 7 nights for $699. The prices should be regarded as rough approximations as some cruises have some mandatory extra fees and the prices are quoted in US dollars and subject to currency fluctuations. Note that those prices are for dual-occupancy cabins, this can be a double or a twin configuration. Some cruise ships have cabins for 3 or 4 people that are cheaper, but if you have a cabin for a single person then the rate is almost the same as for having two people. The price for LCA accommodation including breakfast was $78 per night for a single room or $92 for a double room. Then lunch cost a minimum of $10 and for dinner there was $80 for the penguin dinner and probably about $20 for dinner every other night. That gave an overall cost for a 6 night stay (which is probably the minimum for someone who lives further away than Melbourne) in Ballarat of 6*78+6*10+5*20+80==$708. For a double room that would be 6*92+6*10+5*20+2*80==$872. Even if we don t count the fact that the Australian dollar is worth more than the US dollar it is obvious that on the basis of accommodation and food two people sharing a twin cabin on a cruise ship could pay LESS than two people in single rooms at the Ballarat University dorms! Now sharing a cabin isn t so great, but the upside is that cruise ships have excellent food and lots of other entertainment options. I previously reviewed the food on the Dawn Princess and determined that it s better than the food I would expect to get if I spent the cost of the cruise on dinner at land based restaurants [4]. I have been led to believe that the use of ship conference facilities is typically free for any organisation that books a sufficient number of cabins. So there s no reason why the conference admission fees should be any greater than for a land based conference. Advantages A common problem with conferences is finding suitable dining options. Most people want to eat with other delegates but finding restaurants that have sufficient space and which are conveniently located is difficult at best and often impossible. On a cruise ship everything is within a short walk and the restaurants are big, usually be at least one restaurant will hold 500 people. The fact that you have to reserve times for the Main Dining Room makes it more difficult to miss one s colleagues. Everything on a cruise ship is luxurious. There are lots of good locations for BoFs, pools, cafes, restaurants, and bars. Basically the ship is filled with comfortable places for groups of people to sit down. A cruise ship typically has a main theater with more than 700 seats more than large enough for most conferences I ve attended. It s common for the size of a conference to be limited to the size of the main theater that is used, for a cruise ship this will probably be less of a problem than for most other conference venues. Disadvantages The first disadvantage of running a computer conference on a cruise ship is the almost total lack of net access. The costs for net access are more expensive than most delegates will pay. Probably many delegates would check their email but it wouldn t be practical for people to download source code, browse Wikipedia, and use the Internet in other ways related to the conference. It would be practical to have mirrors of Wikipedia, the source of several distributions of Linux, and other big things of common interest. Another possible problem is the fact that you need to book it well in advance to avoid the risk of selling out (there is no option to stay at a different hotel). An established conference with financial backing could just pay to reserve the cabins. But when starting a new conference this could be a problem. Alcohol is rather expensive on cruise ships. But getting really drunk isn t compatible with learning about computer science anyway. Finally the requirement to have at least two people in a cabin for good rates is a serious issue. The upside of this is that people travelling with their SO would find that it works really well (regardless of whether the SO is a delegate or not). But anyone who s not travelling with their SO and doesn t want to share with a friend will have to either pay a lot more or skip the conference. Conclusion I think that there is a good potential for running a computer conference around the Australia/NZ region on a cruise ship. It won t be overly expensive for delegates and the facilities that are provided are good. The trade-off for solitary travelers of having to share a cabin (or pay more) for getting much better food and leisure facilities will be appreciated by many people (and admittedly hated by some). Some people won t appreciate the option of swimming, but even if you consider the cruise ship to be just a floating collection of restaurants and cabins it s still fairly luxurious and beats the heck out of most conferences I ve attended. If you are considering the possibility of running a conference then I think that a cruise ship should be considered. VacationsToGo.com is the best site I ve found for cheap cruise prices, their large group department has experience handling groups of more than 500 people so I think that anyone who wants to run a new conference in/around Australia should give them a call. Also cruise ships travel around the world, so the same thing can be done in other countries but at a different time of year. The economic factors will differ by country though. Cruise ships probably aren t a cheap option for a conference in some other countries.

• [1] http://www.linux.conf.au/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/11/17/cruises/
• [3] http://www.vacationstogo.com/ticker.cfm?r=15&md=5&mp=800
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/01/08/my-first-cruise/

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A few weeks ago I went on my first cruise, from Sydney to Melbourne on the Dawn Princess. VacationsToGo.com (a discount cruise/resort web site) has a review of the Dawn Princess [1], they give it 4 stars out of a possible 6. The 6 star ships seem to have discount rates in excess of $500 per day per person, much more than I would pay. The per-person rate is based on two people sharing a cabin, it seems that most cabins can be configured as a double bed or twin singles. If there is only one person in a cabin then they pay almost double the normal rate. It seems that most cruise ships have some support for cabins with more than two people (at a discount rate), but the cabins which support that apparently sell out early and don t seem to be available when booking a cheap last-minute deal over the Internet. So if you want a cheap cruise then you need to have an even number of people in your party. The cruise I took was two nights and cost $238 per person, it was advertised at something like $220 but then there are extra fees when you book (which seems to be the standard practice). The Value of Cruises To book a hotel room that is reasonably comfortable (4 star) in Melbourne or Sydney you need to spend more than $100 per night for a two person room if using Wotif.com. The list price of a 4 star hotel room for two people in a central city area can be well over $300 per night. So the cost for a cruise is in the range of city hotel prices. The Main Dining Room (MDR) has a quality of food and service that compares well with city restaurants. The food and service in the Dawn Princess MDR wasn t quite as good as Walter s Wine Bar (one of my favorite restaurants). But Walter s costs about $90 for a four course meal. The Dawn Princess MDR has a standard 5 course meal (with a small number of options for each course) and for no extra charge you can order extra serves. When you make it a 7 course meal the value increases. I really doubt that I could find any restaurant in Melbourne or Sydney that would serve a comparable meal for $119. You could consider a cruise to be either paying for accommodation and getting everything else for free or to be paying for fine dining in the evening and getting everything else for free. Getting both for the price of one (along with entertainment etc) is a great deal! I can recommend a cruise as a good holiday which is rather cheap if you do it right. That is if you want to spend lots of time swimming and eating quality food. How Cruise Companies Make Money There are economies of scale in running a restaurant, so having the MDR packed every night makes it a much more economic operation than a typical restaurant which has quiet nights. But the expenses in providing the services (which involves a crew that is usually almost half the number of passengers) are considerable. Paying $119 per night might cover half the wages of an average crew member but not much more. The casino is one way that the cruise companies make money. I can understand that someone taking a luxury vacation might feel inclined to play blackjack or something else that seems sophisticated. But playing poker machines on a cruise ship is rather sad not that I m complaining, I m happy for other people to subsidise my holidays! Alcohol is rather expensive on board. Some cruise companies allow each passenger to take one bottle of wine and some passengers try to smuggle liquor on board. On the forums some passengers report that they budget to spend $1000 per week on alcohol! If I wanted a holiday that involved drinking that much I d book a hotel at the beach, mix up a thermos full of a good cocktail in my hotel room, and then take my own deck-chair to the beach. It seems that the cruise companies specialise in extracting extra money from passengers (I don t think that my experience with the Dawn Princess is unusual in any way). Possibly the people who pay $1000 per night or more for a cruise don t get the nickel-and-dime treatment, but for affordable cruises I think it s standard. You have to be in the habit of asking the price whenever something is offered and be aware of social pressure to spend money. When I boarded the Dawn Princess there was a queue, which I joined as everyone did. It turned out that the queue was to get a lanyard for holding the key-card (which opens the cabin door and is used for payment). After giving me the lanyard they then told me that it cost $7.95 so I gave it back. Next time I ll take a lanyard from some computer conference and use it to hold the key-card, it s handy to have a lanyard but I don t want to pay $7.95. Finally some things are free at some times but not at others, fruit juice is free at the breakfast buffet but expensive at the lunch buffet. Coffee at the MDR is expensive but it was being served for free at a cafe on deck. How to have a Cheap Cruise VacationsToGo.com is the best discount cruise site I ve found so far [2]. Unfortunately they don t support searching on price, average daily price, or on a customised number of days (I can search for 7 days but not 7 or less). For one of the cheaper vessels it seems that anything less than $120 per night is a good deal and there are occasional deals as low as $70 per night. Princess cruises allows each passenger to bring one bottle of wine on board. If you drink that in your cabin (to avoid corkage fees) then that can save some money on drinks. RumRunnerFlasks.com sells plastic vessels for smuggling liquor on board cruise ships [3]. I wouldn t use one myself but many travelers recommend them highly. Chocolate and other snack foods are quite expensive on board and there are no restrictions on bringing your own, so the cheap options are to bring your own snack food or to snack from the buffet (which is usually open 24*7). Non-alcoholic drinks can be expensive but you can bring your own and use the fridge in your cabin to store it, but you have to bring cans or pressurised bottles so it doesn t look like you are smuggling liquor on board. Generally try not to pay for anything on board, there s enough free stuff if you make good choices. Princess offers free on-board credit (money for buying various stuff on-board) for any cruise that you book while on a cruise. The OBC starts at $25 per person and goes as high as $150 per person depending on how expensive the cruise is. Generally booking cruises while on-board is a bad idea as you can t do Internet searches. But as Princess apparently doesn t allow people outside the US to book through a travel agent and as they only require a refundable deposit that is not specific to any particular cruise there seems no down-side. In retrospect I should have given them a $200 on the off chance that I ll book another cruise with them some time in the next four years. Princess provide a book of discount vouchers in every cabin, mostly this is a guide to what is most profitable for them and thus what you should avoid if you want a cheap holiday. But there are some things that could be useful such as a free thermos cup with any cup of coffee if you buy coffee then you might as well get the free cup. Also they have some free contests that might be worth entering. Entertainment It s standard practice to have theatrical shows on board, some sort of musical is standard and common options include a magic show and comedy (it really depends on which cruise you take). On the Dawn Princess the second seating for dinner started at 8PM (the time apparently varies depending on the cruise schedule) which was the same time as the first show of the evening. I get the impression that this sort of schedule is common so if you want to see two shows in one night then you need to have the early seating for dinner. The cruise that I took lasted two nights and had two shows (a singing/dancing show and a magic show), so it was possible to have the late seating for dinner and still see all the main entertainment unless you wanted to see one show twice. From reading the CruiseCritic.com forum [4] I get the impression that the first seating for dinner is the most popular. On some cruises it s easy to switch from first to second seating but not always possible to switch from second to first. Therefore the best strategy seems to be to book the first seating. Things to do Before Booking a Cruise Read the CruiseCritic.com forum for information about almost everything. Compare prices for a wide variety of cruises to get a feel for what the best deals are. While $100 per night is a great deal for the type of cruise that interests me and is in my region it may not be a good match for the cruises that interest you. Read overview summaries of cruise lines that operate in your area. Some cruise lines cater for particular age groups and interests and are thus unappealing to some people EG anyone who doesn t have children probably won t be interested in Disney cruises. Read reviews of the ships, there is usually a great variation between different ships run by one line. One factor is when the ships have been upgraded with recently developed luxury features. Determine what things need to be booked in advance. Some entertainment options on board support a limited number of people and get booked out early. For example if you want to use the VR golf simulator on the Dawn Princess you should probably check in early and make a reservation as soon as you are on board. The forums are good for determining what needs to be booked early. Also see my post about booking a cruise and some general discussion of cruise related things [5].

• [1] http://www.vacationstogo.com/cruise_ship/Dawn_Princess.cfm
• [2] http://www.vacationstogo.com/
• [3] http://www.rumrunnerflasks.com/
• [4] http://boards.cruisecritic.com/
• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/11/17/cruises/

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Ron has written an interesting blog post about the US as a lottery economy [1]. Most people won t win the lottery (literally or metaphorically) so they remain destined for poverty. Tim Connors wrote an informative summary of the issues relating to traffic light timing and pedestrians/cyclists [2]. I have walked between Southgate and the Crown Casino area many times and have experienced the problem he describes many times. Scientific American has an interesting article about a new global marketplace for scientific research [3]. The concept is that instead of buying a wide range of research equipment (and hiring people to run it) you can outsource non-core research for a lower cost. Svante P bo gave an interesting TED talk about his work analysing human DNA to determine prehistoric human migration patterns [4]. Among other things he determined that 2.5% of the DNA from modern people outside Africa came from the Neandertals. Lisa wrote an informative article about Emotional Support Animals (as opposed to Service Animals such as guide dogs) for disabled people [5]. It seems that the US law is quite similar to Australian law in that reasonable accommodations have to be made for disabled people which includes allowing pets in rental properties even if such pets aren t officially ESAs. Beyond Zero Emissions has an interesting article about electricity prices which explains how wind power forces prices down [6]. This should offset the new carbon tax . Problogger has an article listing some of the ways that infographics can be used on the web [7]. This can be for blog posts or just for your personal understanding. Petter Reinholdtsen wrote a handy post about ripping DVDs which also explains how to do it when the DVD has errors [8], I haven t yet ripped a DVD but this one is worth noting for when I do. Miriam has written about the Fantastic Park ICT training for 8-12yo kids [9]. It s run in Spain (and all the links are in Spanish but Google Translation works well) and is a camp to teach children about computers and robotics using Lego Wedo among other things. We need to have more of these things in other countries. The Atlantic Cities has an interesting article comparing grid and cul-de-sac based urban designs [10]. Apparently the cul-de-sac design forces an increase in car use and therefore an increase in fatal accidents while also decreasing the health benefits of walking. Having lived in both grid and cul-de-sac based urban areas I have personally experienced the benefits of the grid based layout. Sarah Chayes wrote an interesting LA Times article about governments being taken over by corruption [11]. She argues that arbitrary criminal government leads to an increase in religious fundamentelism. Michael Lewis has an insightful article in Vanity Fair about the bankruptcy of US states and cities [12]. Ben Goldacre gave an interesting TED talk about bad medical science [13]. He starts with the quackery that is published in tabloid newspapers and then moves on to deliberate scientific fraud by medical companies. Geoff Mulgan gave an interesting TED talk about the Studio Schools in the UK which are based around group project work [14]. The main thing I took from this is that the best method of teaching varies by subject and by student. So instead of having a monolithic education department controlling everything we should have schools aimed at particular career paths and learning methods. Sophos has an interesting article about the motion sensors of smart phones being used to transcribe keyboard input based on vibration [15]. This attack could be launched by convincing a target to install a trojan application on their phone. It s probably best to regard your phone with suspicion nowadays. Simon Josefsson wrote a good article explaining how to use a GPG smart-card to authenticate ssh sessions with particular reference to running backups over ssh [16]. C ran wrote a good article explaining how to use all the screen space when playing DVDs on a wide screen display with mplayer [17]. Charles Stross has an informative blog post about Wall St Journal circulation fraud [18]. Apparently the WSJ was faking readership numbers to get more money from advertisers, this should lead to law suits and more problems for Rupert Murdoch. Is everything associated with Wall St corrupt?

• [1] http://rondam.blogspot.com/2011/08/lottery-economy.html
• [2] http://tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com/172226.html
• [3] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=an-ebay-for-science
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/svante_paeaebo_dna_clues_to_our_inner_neanderthal.html
• [5] http://chaoticidealism.livejournal.com/99347.html
• [6] http://beyondzeroemissions.org/blog/merit-wind-energy-110913
• [7] http://www.problogger.net/archives/2011/09/16/blogosphere-trends-using-infographics/
• [8] http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html
• [9] http://www.miriamruiz.es/weblog/?p=654
• [10] http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2011/09/street-grids/124/
• [11] http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-chayes-corruption-20110925,0,517490.story
• [12] http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/11/michael-lewis-201111
• [13] http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science.html
• [14] http://www.ted.com/talks/geoff_mulgan_a_short_intro_to_the_studio_school.html
• [15] http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/10/20/iphone-spyware-snoop-desktop-typing/
• [16] http://blog.josefsson.org/2011/10/11/unattended-ssh-with-smartcard/
• [17] http://www.carbon-project.org/MPlayer__and_no_black_bars.html
• [18] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/10/going-down-hard.html

I've been wanting to sponsor a child in Africa for many, many years. I remember seeing a photo of a sponsored child on a couple of sets of friends' mantelpieces in Canberra, and saying to myself how I should really do that too. Of course, for no really good reason, fast-forwarding to 6+ years later, I still hadn't gotten around to it. Until last month. I was walking out of the Apple Store in Palo Alto. I was accosted by one of those people on the street, with the clipboard and all that. I usually manage to brush these sorts of people off. I really hate solicited donations. I'd rather consciously make a donation to a charity, than do it because someone on the street was paid to ask me to, or knocked on my door, or whatever. But I was distracted, or in a good mood, or something, and so I missed the initial opportunity to deflect her. I'm really glad I did, because as I said, this is something that I've wanted to do for years, so I barely hesitated, and signed up on the spot. I received the welcome kit in the mail a couple of days ago. I've been allocated a 6 year old boy named Armando, from Mozambique. I'm looking forward to corresponding with him. Our friends, and former neighbours, the Harvetts have moved back to South Africa, and I hope one day to be able to visit them. Since we'll be in the vicinity, I hope one day to be able to visit Armando as well. I'm pleased to see that Save the Children gets a good rap in Charity Navigator. I was worried that I'd get home and find out I'd signed up with one of those charities that blows half their money on overhead, but that's not the case.

Thanks to Bruce Schneier security blog, I come across an interesting article about liability and software. The problem is well known

• if you impose liability on any software producer, then it's a dead sentence for free software
• but the current situation enable software dealer to sell faulty software with I can't audit, with liability for them if their software fail on a large scale.

Of course for better security, the solution could be to not use proprietary software, still a law as proposed on ACM could be useful to protect madam Michu.

The main release party in Finland was held at Tampere, Finland and organized by Ixonos Plc and COSS. It was a great success, as proven by the almost 200 participants and great speakers.

The first sessions were mostly about the basics of Ubuntu and its roots in Debian and elsewhere. Then Tuure Vartiainen from Tampere University of Technology shared with us the release from the official Finnish mirror perspective (fi.archive.ubuntu.com, fi.releases.ubuntu.com, ...). 10.04 LTS release date was very hectic and the transfer speeds were not constantly optimal, but quite good anyway. For 10.10 they hope to up the network connectivity to 10G. I also took the opportunity to thank him later personally for the Ubuntu Finnish Remix mirroring which was arranged right before the release as well.

The next-to-final session was about Ubuntu for senior people with brief demoing of how Ubuntu UI can be customized. To give a little different perspective to usage of Ubuntu, the final speaker was a theater director and dramatist Jotaarkka Pennanen from Interactive Film Productions. Blender among else was praised.

In addition to speakers, we had 300 Ubuntu Finnish Remix CD:s, Ubuntu posters, Free Software Foundation Europe flyers, COSS flyers et cetera. After the main program there was a dinner and some wine offered to participants, which was a great social ending to the event.

Now a few photos follow. Unfortunately they are from before the event actually began, so others have probably more crowded photos and photos of the speakers themselves.

I just received a strange call. Basically, someone phoned me up and tried to convince me to change my computer s settings. They called my direct line (not the co-op switchboard), so I think they might be calling other numbers in the Weston-super-Mare area. Watch out for this attack. I d heard about these calls from Box Bush Farm a year or so ago, but this is the first one I ve had. They introduced themselves as calling from Kilman IT Services (if I heard it correctly I didn t find it in a web search, so hopefully they re not defaming a real company) and say they re calling about the critical error that I reported from my computer (I guess they mean the dialogue that some applications pop up when they crash). I said something non-commital like riiight and they continued. Apparently, that error has been registered in my computer s files and could cause damage at any time! So, they need me to edit my computer s registers to remove the error. Then they started trying to talk me through the process of running regedit. I m guessing the changes would have allowed them to control a Windows computer somehow. At this point, I introduced myself and hung up the phone. Of course, there was no caller ID shown. If only I d picked up the call from a phone with a record button, I would post a recording! It sounded like a call centre and the caller spoke English with a far-eastern accent, but of course it could be from anywhere. This is a crude social engineering attack. Don t fall for it. As it says on Get Safe Online: How to spot social engineering: You get an unexpected call, email or visit from a technical support person . Better yet, make sure you know the names of your tech support providers and refer any unsolicited repair calls to them. I think real IT services would talk to your lead support provider. This sort of obnoxiousness is part of the reason why our co-op doesn t publish our client list. I m posting this mainly so if anyone searches for Kilman IT Services they ll find details of the call.

I ve recently got a new Xperia X10 Android phone for my with with Virgin mobile, it s generally been working OK although I am having some issues [1], I ll write another blog post soon about other problems I ve discovered with the phone and how I ve solved some of the previous ones.I upgraded my wife s phone first because I can t be without Nagios SMS messages if things don t work. So now that things are generally working I want to get myself an Xperia through Virgin (and have my wife s phone get the Nagios SMS in the mean-time). But since last Friday the entire Virgin sales infrastructure has apparently been down. It started with just declining my attempts to purchase a new phone on a separate account, but when I decided to add a second phone to my wife s account the web site told me that they are upgrading their CRM system and it should be fixed on the 22nd of Feb (yesterday). The web site is now saying that I should check back in 2 hours for an update , it s been saying that for a couple of days now.So for most of a week potential Virgin customers have been turned away. It could be that Virgin stores are processing sales on paper, but they offer some significant discounts for web sales the plan I want is a $39 per month plan and I ll get 3 months free for buying on the web. I m not about to visit a store and lose $117! I m sure that many people are losing confidence in Virgin and taking their business elsewhere. I have only just installed the 3G Watchdog free Android app that monitors bandwidth use and automatically turns off 3G when the quota is reached. For the first few days of using the phone which were more data intensive than usual I had no monitoring and no way of using the Virgin web site to discover how much was used. If Virgin bill me extra for data use I ll complain and demand that they alter the bill.This is even worse for pre-paid customers who can t add credit to their account while this happens!Virgin state that they are upgrading the hardware, operating system and database our platform uses to ensure that we can service our Members even better for years to come [2]. I wonder how people get themselves into such a mess. I guess they didn t have a decent test environment to allow testing the upgrade process before doing it on the live data, I can understand a routine small upgrade going wrong and corrupting data in a way that takes some time to resolve. But when everything is upgraded then everything should be tested, and tested before going live! One thing that Virgin could do to regain some credibility is to publish what went wrong and what they learned from it. I would be much more happy to trust my personal data and my business critical phone to a company that learns from it s mistakes and publishes plans on how they do better than one that just does PR.According to Whirlpool they did the same thing on the 25th of January, so they have had two outages of their billing/CRM system in two months! [3]. The Whirlpool thread has discussion about last month s down-time and this month s down-time.On the up-side, Whirlpool user Kevin JD is a Virgin representative who advised customers to send email to telesales@virginmobile.com.au with a contact phone number if they have any issues. It s good to see a company engaging with it s customers.Update: An hour after emailing the URL to this post to Virgin I got a call from a service representative. It wasn t a very productive call as I already knew that their servers are down and they can t do anything. But it s good to know that they are very enthusiastic about making things better. One useful thing that I learned is that my wife s service is probably on a pro-rated bandwidth quota. As she got the phone in the middle of the month we can only do 100M of data transfer not 200M before the end of the month, by my rough calculations I ve downloaded well over 50M of data (maybe as much as 100M) from the Android marketplace. So it might be necessary to negotiate about the bill as soon as their CRM system works.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/18/xperia-x10i-first-experience/
• [2] http://www.virginmobile.com.au/upgrade
• [3] http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1626553

On the drive back home from BelHac I thought about the configuration problem in Haskell: The issue is finding a convenient way to work with values that are initialized once and used in many places all over the code. Assume you have a large module of pure code that, using many custom functions and combinators, parses some data structure. Later you noticed that somewhere far down in the parser, you need to react differently depending on some user preferences say, his preferred language. The usual solution is to add a new parameter to that function and, in consequence, to each and every function that calls or might call directly or indirectly this function. This is often very inconvenient. Other solutions include:

• Using mutable references and some hacking with unsafePerformIO, which always gives the programmer a bad conscience.
• Using a Reader monad, requiring a rewrite of the whole program in monadic style.
• Using implicit parameters which is ok if you did not write type signatures, but if you did, you still have to modify them a lot.
• Some advanced type hackery.

The solution I thought of and implemented uses Template Haskell, the Haskell library to modify code at compile time, to turn the style you prefer to write in (pure code that uses configuration values as if they were global constants) into the style that is semantically correct (pure code with configuration values as an additional parameter). I uploaded the resulting code as seal-module to hackage and added plenty of comments and examples to the SealModule module ( are comments according to ohcount). I refrain from copying that into this blog post, so if you are curious, please continue reading there.

So I got a SuperMicro A+ Server 1012G-MTF today (seems to be a very nice unit for a decent price) and am preparing it for taking over fortytwo.ch and related services. Now this thing has got IPMI / BMC with remote management and KVM (both serial console and full graphical console with virtual CD-ROM etc.); works very nice. Basically the only thing I miss is the ability to disable services I don't need and/or restrict access to certain IP addresses. (No, I don't have the BMC on a public IP, but still...) So the question is: has anybody worked out how to hack / what kind of file system the IPMI Firmware for the H8SGL-F mainboard is? Or how one could drop from the BMC commandline to a /bin/sh prompt on the urnning system? A blog entry at Serverfault suggests it's been done but doesn't say how. (Running strings on the firmware binary shows the string Photoshop ICC profile near the end. I'm not sure if I want to know the story ... ;-)

So the exoplanet Gliese-581-g has a name: Zarmina!. Steve Vogt, who led the discovery team, named it after his wife. Good move. About time we named these things. Although personally I think GL 581 d, its neighbour, has a better chance of being habitable. Everyone is assuming Zarmina is tidally-locked: that is, it has one side facing the star at all times. This would mean that while one side of the star is scorching hot, the other freezing cold, all you have to do is go to the "Terminator", the part of the planet in continuous dusk (or dawn) to find a nice climate. Not necessarily so: it can be in orbital resonance like Mercury, which rotates in a 3:2 ratio. A better idea is to look below any oceans, if it has them, for life. Either way, this Gliese 581 is the direction to point a TPF at. Tags names, exoplanets

I'm back in town. After approximatly 4 full days of use, the first battery bank dropped to 9 volts, my cutoff point for safe use. Which turned out to be below the safe use point of my laptop power adapter, which burnt out while I was busy listening to music and adding power-saving caching stuff to my mpd setup. Irony not appreciated, world. I decided to come back while the other bank is still relatively full.

my modest PV array

Hurrying downtown to grab lunch in between work on Branchable, I noticed it was a beautiful sunny day, and I realized that this makes such days even better, because besides enjoying them, I know I'll be enjoying the yield on chilly nights sometime later. Well, in theory. Actually, the very antique charge controller in the house was dead and bypassed, so I removed it. I called its manufacturer wondering if it could be refurbished, but they suggested it belonged in a museum. So I've ordered a new controller, a Xantrex C-35. Until that comes, pretty days like today will charge, or possibly over-charge the batteries, which will then drain back out at night.