Scott Lamb commented:

"Measuring police on the absence of crime is even easier to game, with horrible consequences."

In more detail, Baruch wrote:

"The result of measuring absence of crime will be that reports of crime will be rejected if the cops will think that they won't be able to catch the criminals. You will have to seperate the group that takes the reports and the group that handles them to make it work and even then I'm not sure someone won't find a way to go around that with another trick."

Well, if you read any cycling online forum, you'll have seen some reports of police rejecting reports of 'too hard' crimes like harassing cyclists. I think I've had one report accepted in the last year, about a moped user riding along a cycle track near a playground where I had noted the number plate, and two pretty certainly discarded. So, police discarding or discouraging reports of no-obvious-solution crimes seems to be happening already. andy r wrote:

"Hi there, Don't talk to me about tragedy of targets... As a teacher the word 'target' fills me with both fear and laughter. Last year my year 6 class and I worked our butts off and achieved the highest set of grades for any school in North Somerset, thereby rescuing the school from a very sticky situation with Ofsted. Within days of these results being known the senior LEA advisor suggested to me that the targets had, perhaps, in hindsight been too low. My reply was curt and Anglo-Saxon. Hindsight! Looking out of her hind? The LEA love targets. If you hit them you have not pushed the kids enough. If you exceed them you should have pitched them higher. Woe betide anyone who fails to meet their targets (I will this year, different cohort and those % from last year have been INCREASED!)... My kids have targets (though they have so many that they actually fail to remember them all). Teachers have targets for the numbers of children who are 'supposed' to achieve certain grades but the idiots who set them frequently have only a rudimentary grasp of mathematics. In my current school there are 45 children in a year group, so each one represents a little over 2%. In schools with small classes (perhaps 10 per year in some rural schools) 1 child can equate to 10%. If he's sick on exam day or is just not bright enough, that's 10% gone. And with the government expecting 75-80% of children to achieve a level 4 in their KS2 SATS, it's all too easy to drop blow your 'targets' through illness alone. But here's an even worse tragedy of targets in primary schools... a couple of years ago I had to disapply 2 children from SATS, simply because they have profound special needs and could not take the tests. In addition, the school had an Autistim Unit (now called something PC, but I forget what) which that year had 4 children in year 6. Therefore we had 6 children who could not take the exams. We filled in the paper work but were horrified when the results came in to discover that these children (who all had official exemption on disability grounds) were counted as having taken the test, even though they couldn't. For 'statistical' purposes these kids were classified as having scored zero! Out of a cohort of 36 children, 6 were classified as not having done a thing! The department of education acknowledged that this didn't help our statistics, but stated that it was their policy. In a school with a lot of very deprived kids this 16% scoring zero, added to a significant quanitity of under-achievers was enough to push us down to the bottom 100 primary schools nationally. You can only imagine how damaging that was for the school's reputation - parents took kids out, we were slated in the local press and had to fight like mad to justify our continued existence... Targets... bah! Hey, talking of which. The Health Trust has recently done a survey of local primary school children's weights and heights. In our day this sort of thing was compulsory. Not any more. Parents had to 'opt in' to the survey... And guess what? The parents of the largest kids refused to take part - as did the ignorant b*strds, but that's another story. So the WAHT will now be collating a totally skewed data set. I'm just waiting for the press release highlighting our slim North Somerset children... And of course, someone will be complemented on achieving targets for reducing childhood obesity, whilst infact the problem has probably - as it were- grown. I used to like the way that 'on time targets' were displayed in Didcot railway station. There was a board in foyer which highilighed punctuality. The impressive looking bar chart had these words written on it: "% of trains on time, compared to last month." And the brightly coloured chart was always up around 95%, ish. I was always suprised that nobody commented on that. 0.95*0.95*0.95...... month on month those trains were getting less and less punctual! But nobody bothered to point this out because 95% looks impressive! On many occasions I took the time to read, and re-read, the wording of those graphs so I know with 100% confidence that this was what they quoted. We never had a month with more than 100% punctuality compared to the previous month. Shame. That's enough. I'm off to the dog house."

Short version:

$ sudo aptitude install desktop-base splashy splashy-themes
$ sudo splashy_config --set-theme debian-moreblue
$ sudo vim /boot/grub/menu.lst


[...]
timeout 3
hiddenmenu
[...]
# defoptions=quiet splash
[...]

$ sudo update-grub Long version: A few weeks ago I tried to improve the visual appearance of my boot process using usplash and a matching grub splash theme. It took me quite a while to create my first very own usplash theme and it was a rather complicated affair (Thanks to Petter Reinholdtsen for his patch which lead to my first working prototype). Since creating usplash themes is rather tricky and not really suitable for the average user I decided to switch to splashy. Splashy has many advantages above usplash like a very easy way to create themes, support of high resolution images and many themes already available in Debian. So here is my current solution for a nice bootup: First I installed desktop-base in order to get the nice moreblue KDM theme: $ sudo aptitude install desktop-base Then I installed splashy and splashy-themes in order to get a theme matching KDM’s moreblue theme:

$ sudo aptitude install splashy splashy-themes
$ sudo splashy_config --set-theme debian-moreblue

Since grub has only rudimentary support for theming, I decided to remove the boot menu completely. Most of the time I’ll boot the first kernel in the list anyway and you still have $timeout seconds to press Escape in order to bring the menu back. $ sudo vim /boot/grub/menu.lst

[...]
timeout 3
hiddenmenu
[...]
# defoptions=quiet splash
[...]

$ sudo update-grub The result looks quite cool and gives my boot process a polished an clean look. It’s still not perfect since splashy’s theme does not match exactly KDM’s theme and KDM flicks in an other wallpaper before it starts and after the login, but it’s good enough for now.

Yesterday I went to see An Inconvenient Truth with Hieke at LHC: the documentary by Al Gore about global warming. Already a classic, and well worth a visit. Gore is an excellent, erudite speakererudite, has convincing arguments and is surprisingly humourous. The film consists mainly of a recording of a speech he's been giving for about twenty years on the topic of global warming. He supports his views with clear arguments. The film is not at all fatalistic: a good point was his emphasis that we need not "go from denial to despair" but that it's actually quite well possible to solve the problem. If there's policical will. The only downside is the distinctly "American" flavour that the film has: intermezzos about his family and some emotional personal events in his life. And every person that Gore quotes is "my friend". But these points are really minor. A must see.

I gathered that it should be almost spring in Australia, so technically it would be okay to do some bloody spring cleaning. Since this is my blog, I'm not talking about my room, which is beyond all hope, but about software projects. There are a few utility classes in C++ that I have in almost all of my projects, yet never bothered to formally submit to boost, plus a few others where I haven't done anything over some years simply because I don't use them anymore. So over the course of the next days I'm planning to list a few of them on a domain I registered a while ago, ideaharvest.org, and am planning to turn this into a software project swap market at some time. The #1 listing will probably be "software swap market, rudimentary implementation, hosting set up already.".

Airplanes pulling anti-gay marriage banners have been circling my building much of today, apparently in an attempt to sway public (or legislative) opinion during today’s constitutional convention (liveblog here). The banners don’t cast the organizers as the brightest bulbs. Two of the banners are opaque references to the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Margaret Marshall — the messages were “Marshall’s Courts Are A Disaster” and “Marshall Incompetent Says Judge Sosman.” Unless you are already a rabid member of the anti-Goodridge crowd, these aren’t going to mean a whole lot to you. The other one is printed too small to read, although after twelve or thirteen time circling past my window, I could make out that it said something like “let the people vote on marriage,” which at least is a little clearer on the message (if not the font). All three had a URL that was too small to read, at least from my vantage point. I finally pieced together that the banners were referring to massnews.com (I hesitate to link to the site and boost its PageRank, but ultimately I think the contents are so poorly written and reasoned that it probably advances the cause of gay marriage more than anything). The articles on that site really make these guys look like loonies. A great example is this article. Although apparently written by an attorney, the article demonstrates near total ignorance of how legal reasoning and constitutional principles. E.g.:

When Justice Sosman discussed who else could be applying for marriage after May if the decision is allowed to stand, she had to include the “buzz” words that Marshall and other judges and lawyers use to intimidate everyone else — even including most lawyers who know nothing about this arcane language.

The “arcane” language the article refers to are the standard terms of art in equal protection law: suspect classification, scrict scrutiny, rational basis, etc.. (See this wikipedia article). Any first year law student should be quite familiar with this sort of discourse. (See my class notes from my first year constitutional law course and search for strict scrutiny or suspect classification). “Most lawyers” know nothing about this “arcane” language? Similarly — the following apparently forms the basis of the writer’s claim that Justice Marshall does not have the intelligence necessary to be the Chief Justice of the state’s Supreme Judicial Court:

Justice Marshall was incapable of answering Justice Sosman. She felt it necessary to insert an unusual footnote to say she was unable to understand or to answer Sosman’s erudite critique. “In any event, we fail to understand why the separate opinion [of Justice Sosman] chastises us for adopting the constitutional test (rational basis) …”

“Failing to understand” in a court opinion (or brief) does not mean “we’re just not smart enough to get it.” It is a standard idiom used to criticize another position as lacking support. It is far from unusual to make that sort of statement in a footnote. It is generally a sign that the point being criticized is so weak that it does not merit full treatment in the main text of the decision. In any event, I’m happy to see the anti-gay marriage movement leadership so totally marginalized. In a few years, I expect we will wonder what all the fuss was about.

Another day, another Google product launch, though this one does more than just lay the groundwork for epic battles to come (most recent example: Google Spreadsheets). Google Browser Sync is a Firefox extension that solves an immediate problem that no one to date has adequately solved: It automatically synchronizes browser settings across computers. I’ve been using Foxmarks for a while now to keep my bookmarks synchronized across the various computers I use and have found it incredibly useful. But bookmarks are just a small sliver of the Web 2.0 client problem, and I’ve recently found myself wishing Foxmarks could synchronize saved passwords too, the next maddening bit of client metadata that never seems to be in the right place. Well, I now have my solution, and after using it for a few hours, it seems to work pretty well. My only real complaint is that it only works with one open browser at a time—if you launch a browser on a second computer, it logs you out on the first one. I have multiple computers on my desk with multiple browsers open at any given time, and Foxmarks handled this use case well. Of course, as with all new Google products, this one exposes as many (or more) new holes in the Google platform as it covers, at least for me. For example, why not synchronize my bookmarks with, well, Google Bookmarks? That way, I could get to my browser bookmarks online, add tags (er, labels), etc., with any changes I make online being reflected back on the client side via the browser synchronization. And why isn’t bookmark functionality available in the Google Toolbar? (Actually, it looks like it is available in the IE version, but not the Firefox version, which makes absolutely no sense to me: Shouldn’t the goal be to abstract away the platform underneath, which implies exposing the exact same feature sets in both versions?) And don’t even get me started on Google Notebook, which otherwise looks promising but is completely unintegrated with Google Bookmarks, not to mention the new thing. While I’m at it, why, oh why, doesn’t Google Notebook utilize the very nice word processing functionality acquired with Writely instead of implementing its own rudimentary text editing support? (Ok, that last one’s further afield, but you get where I’m going here.) In summary, I now have three ways to bookmark things using the Google platform—the browser (nicely synchronized across computers via the Google cloud), a star (a la Gmail) next to results in my Search History (but not on plain old Google search), and “Note This” on plain old Google search (but not the Search History). Oh, and they all create bookmarks in different places. The end result? Even though I’m primarily a Google customer these days, none of this mess is usable, and I’m still using del.icio.us to bookmark things. That said, I’m not even using del.icio.us as much as I used to because it’s not as well integrated with the browser as it could be, which is presumably why Google is investing in a saner browser environment. (There, we’ve gone full circle now.) I could go on all day. And, thus far, I’ve only talked about bookmarks. From where I set, this is just an example of a much broader problem for Google: Google has an impressive collection of interesting, but disjoint, features. I’d imagine this is a result of Google’s engineering culture combined with rapid growth. Granted, this approach has served Google pretty well thus far as it pumps new stuff out on a nearly weekly basis while Microsoft struggles to get anything done in less than six years. Of course, Microsoft’s rapidly learning how to be agile, and if there’s one thing Microsoft is good at, it’s assembling disjoint features into platforms. So, heads up, Google: You have a thing or two to learn from Microsoft before that epic battle I referred to earlier begins. They’re certainly learning from you. Technorati Tags: firefox, google, mozilla, platforms, synchronization, web20

I've been so busy, I haven't had time to blog. Rather than putting it off any longer, I'll just dump what I can remember. Last Wednesday, Sarah arrived after her holiday in Singapore, and from all accounts, had a great time. Photos as well. Sticking with the whirlwind theme, the next day, we had a "building warming" party at work for the new building we'd moved into the week before Michael and I started. The next night we had the work Christmas party, which blew the socks off any work Christmas party I'd ever been to before, and then on Saturday night we went to a party in San Francisco that we'd been invited to. On a life in general front, I'm still waiting for a Social Security number. The lack of one makes life a bit difficult for a lot of things. It also turns out that Sarah's work permit will take about 90 days to approve, so she's going to be a lady of leisure for the next few months. I've finally been issued with a work mobile phone (or "cell phone" as they call them), and so can stop roaming and paying through the nose for the privilege. We've found somewhere to live. We take possession of a 2 bedroom townhouse (split-level) in a complex in Mountain View that is 3 miles from work on the 18th. The rent is $1725 a month, which is a bit better than we were expecting. The complex we're renting in does have shared laundries, which we'd not too keen on before getting over here, but they're quite modern and secure, and there's a laundry block close to our townhouse, so hopefully it won't be too bad. The whole place had been renovated about 5 years ago, so it's all in good condition. We could have rented a 3 bedroom apartment (single level) in the same complex for about $125 a month more, but we're trying to actually make some money while we're over here... Driving on the other side of the road becomes fairly "normal" after about a week of doing it regularly. Sarah's adapted fine. Lane placement is the hardest thing, because your body's used to being in a certain spot on the road, and it's all different sitting on the other side of the car. We've managed to open a rudimentary bank account, even with my lack of Social Security number. Unfortunately I can't get paid until I have an SSN. Upside of that is that if it doesn't happen until next year, I presumably won't have to worry about income tax for this US financial year. Downside is kind of obvious... By far one of the stranger things of everyday life here is the lighting situation in the average residence. Lamps are all the rage, to the point that light switches don't exist in some rooms (notably bedrooms). Take where we're currently living for example. There's a light switch at the bottom of the stairs, there's one at the top. There's a bank of four in the living room, two of which control lights in the kitchen, and one the hallway. The last one controls a lamp in the corner of the living room, which is connected to a power socket (or power point as we'd call it). The bedroom with the attached bathroom (en suite) has two bedside lamps, and that is the sole source of light. The bathroom attached has light switches, and the walk-in robe has a light switch. It's so weird. So walking into a darkened bedroom involves walking all the way in, and fumbling around with a lamp. It's often easier to turn on the light in the wardrobe so you can see what you're doing first. I can't think of any reason for it, except tradition. It's not like they're avoiding wiring the walls or the ceiling, because it's done partially already. The bedroom has a ceiling fan, but where in Australia, there'd be a knob on the wall near the light switch to control it, it has a little chain you yank on. To add to the strangeness, there are two switches on the wall, one of which seems to allow you to turn off the ceiling fan if it's already been switched on by pulling the chain. The townhouse we're renting has a similar lamp dependency, so we're going to be making a trip to Ikea for some lamps it would seem. That's about everything I can recollect right now... Oh, I should point out that I'm really loving it over here.

I've been so busy, I haven't had time to blog. Rather than putting it off any longer, I'll just dump what I can remember. Last Wednesday, Sarah arrived after her holiday in Singapore, and from all accounts, had a great time. Photos as well. Sticking with the whirlwind theme, the next day, we had a "building warming" party at work for the new building we'd moved into the week before Michael and I started. The next night we had the work Christmas party, which blew the socks off any work Christmas party I'd ever been to before, and then on Saturday night we went to a party in San Francisco that we'd been invited to. On a life in general front, I'm still waiting for a Social Security number. The lack of one makes life a bit difficult for a lot of things. It also turns out that Sarah's work permit will take about 90 days to approve, so she's going to be a lady of leisure for the next few months. I've finally been issued with a work mobile phone (or "cell phone" as they call them), and so can stop roaming and paying through the nose for the privilege. We've found somewhere to live. We take possession of a 2 bedroom townhouse (split-level) in a complex in Mountain View that is 3 miles from work on the 18th. The rent is $1725 a month, which is a bit better than we were expecting. The complex we're renting in does have shared laundries, which we'd not too keen on before getting over here, but they're quite modern and secure, and there's a laundry block close to our townhouse, so hopefully it won't be too bad. The whole place had been renovated about 5 years ago, so it's all in good condition. We could have rented a 3 bedroom apartment (single level) in the same complex for about $125 a month more, but we're trying to actually make some money while we're over here... Driving on the other side of the road becomes fairly "normal" after about a week of doing it regularly. Sarah's adapted fine. Lane placement is the hardest thing, because your body's used to being in a certain spot on the road, and it's all different sitting on the other side of the car. We've managed to open a rudimentary bank account, even with my lack of Social Security number. Unfortunately I can't get paid until I have an SSN. Upside of that is that if it doesn't happen until next year, I presumably won't have to worry about income tax for this US financial year. Downside is kind of obvious... By far one of the stranger things of everyday life here is the lighting situation in the average residence. Lamps are all the rage, to the point that light switches don't exist in some rooms (notably bedrooms). Take where we're currently living for example. There's a light switch at the bottom of the stairs, there's one at the top. There's a bank of four in the living room, two of which control lights in the kitchen, and one the hallway. The last one controls a lamp in the corner of the living room, which is connected to a power socket (or power point as we'd call it). The bedroom with the attached bathroom (en suite) has two bedside lamps, and that is the sole source of light. The bathroom attached has light switches, and the walk-in robe has a light switch. It's so weird. So walking into a darkened bedroom involves walking all the way in, and fumbling around with a lamp. It's often easier to turn on the light in the wardrobe so you can see what you're doing first. I can't think of any reason for it, except tradition. It's not like they're avoiding wiring the walls or the ceiling, because it's done partially already. The bedroom has a ceiling fan, but where in Australia, there'd be a knob on the wall near the light switch to control it, it has a little chain you yank on. To add to the strangeness, there are two switches on the wall, one of which seems to allow you to turn off the ceiling fan if it's already been switched on by pulling the chain. The townhouse we're renting has a similar lamp dependency, so we're going to be making a trip to Ikea for some lamps it would seem. That's about everything I can recollect right now... Oh, I should point out that I'm really loving it over here.

<p> First post. I too have decided to get into the whole blogging scene. </p> <p> I looked around at various pieces of software and only <a href="http://www.blosxom.com/">blosxom</a> and <a href="http://pyblosxom.sf.net/">pyblosxom</a> fitted my criteria. </p> <p> My criteria was pretty simple: <ul> <li>Plenty of features (comments, calendar, categories)</li> <li>No database (even though I prefer <a href="http://www.postgresql.org/">Postgresql</a>, I didn't want to have to learn a schema if I decided to migrate or it all went cactus</li> <li>Vibrant community</li> </ul> Both blosxom and pyblosxom have those but I found it easier to get blosxom setup and running. Eventually I'll write up a colophon about what I have and how it is configured. However, please excuse the very rudimentary setup I have &mdash; it'll get better in time. </p>

Being almost friday and having a little bit of time and all i decided to create a new blog. Since my debian account was created recently i though 'why not' and added it to Planet Debian, among the best of the best.

Reading today the slashdot article about Nokia and opensource i remember about a project i did this summer. Following a question i posted about handling private keys on debian-security sometime in june someone emailed with this reply, which i found very interesting. And i actually wrote that, even though it's pretty rudimentary (authentication using mobile devices and assymetric keys).

Basically when you enter a username at the login prompt, the PAM modules looks up information about that user from a configuration file which contains the hwaddress of his assigned device and a path to a public key (either GPG or SSL). The PAM module then generates a temporary password, encrypts it with the users public key and sends it via bluetooth to the mobile device.

The Symbian part was a little tricky, and my first encounter with java. I implemented only SSL decryption capabilities because it's a faster decryption time (~4 sec on my 6630) , and because BouncyCastle's cryptography support for pgp is impossible to port to j2me with my java knowledge. Anyway i haven't seen assymetric key cryptography (oss) on mobile devices until this. Being in java it doesn't really use anything fancy, and it _should_ work on any mobile device supporting FileConnection API (jsr-75).

If you feel adventurous, you can find the source code here.