Links February 2009

February 28, 2009 | etbe

Michael Anissimov writes about the theft of computers from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab [1]. He suggests that this incident (and others like it) pose a great risk to out civilisation. He advocates donating towards The Lifeboat Foundation [2] to try and mitigate risks to humanity. They suggest pledging $1000 per year for 25 years.

It’s interesting to note that people in Pakistan pay $8 per month for net access that better by most objective metrics than that which most people in first world can get [3]. It seems that we need to remove the cartel for the local loop to get good net access, either deregulate it entirely or make it owned by the local government who are more directly responsive to the residents.

Bruce Schneier wrote a post about a proposed US law to force all mobile phones with cameras to make a “click” sound when taking a picture [4]. The law is largely irrelevant, as it’s been law in Japan for a while most phones are already designed in that way. One interesting comment from MarkH was: But if congress REALLY wishes to benefit the public, I suggest that all guns in the U.S. be required, before each discharge, to make loud sounds (with appropriate time sequencing) simulating the flintlock technology that was common at the beginning of U.S. history, including cocking, use of the ramrod, etc. This would give fair warning of an impending discharge, and would limit firing rates to a few per minute. ROFL

Brief review of a Google Android phone vs an iPhone [5]. The Android G1 is now on sale in Australia! [6].

LWN has an article about the panel discussion at the LCA Security Mini-conf [7]. Jonathan Corbet has quoted me quite a bit in the article, thanks Jonathan!

Peter Ward gave an interesting TED talk about Hydrogen Sulphide and mass extinctions [8]. The best available evidence is that one of the worst extinctions was caused by H2S in the atmosphere which was produced by bacteria. The bacteria in question like a large amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It’s yet another reason for reducing the CO2 production.

Michael Anissimov has written a good article summarising some of the dangers of space exploration [9], he suggests colonising the sea, deserts, and Antartica first (all of which are much easier and safer). “Until we gain the ability to create huge (miles wide or larger) air bubbles in space enclosed by rapidly self-healing transparent membranes, it will be cramped and overwhelmingly boring. You’ll spend even more time on the Internet up there than down here, and your connection will be slow“. A confined space and slow net access, that’s like being on a plane.

Links January 2009

January 29, 2009 | etbe

Jennifer 8 Lee gave an interesting TED talk about the spread and evolution of what is called “Chinese food” [1]. In that talk she compares McDonalds to Microsoft and Chinese restaurants to Linux. Her points comparing the different local variations of Chinese food to the variations of Linux make sense.

The CentOS Plus repository has a kernel with support for the XFS filesystem, Postfix with MySQL support, and some other useful things [2].

Mary Gardiner comments about the recent loss of a blog server with all content [3]. One interesting point is that when you start using a service that maintains your data you should consider how to make personal backups in case the server goes away or you decide to stop being a customer.

Val Henson makes some interesting points about the reliability of Solid State Disks (SSD) [4]. Some people are planning to replace RAID arrays of disks with a single SSD with the idea that a SSD will be more reliable, this seems like a bad idea. Also with the risk of corruption it seems that we have a greater need for filesystems that store block checksums.

Lior Kaplan describes how to have multiple Linux bonding devices [5], the comment provides some interesting detail too.

programmableweb.com has a set of links to sites that have APIs which can be used to create mashups [6]. One of the many things I would do if I had a lot more spare time is to play with some of the web APIs that are out there.

Gunnar Wolf has written some insightful comments about the situation in Israel and Palestine [7]. He used to be a Zionist and spent some time living in Israel so he knows more about the topic than most commentators.

Charles Stross has written an informative post about Ubuntu on the EeePC [8]. What is noteworthy about this is not that he’s summarised the issues well, but that he is a well known science-fiction writer and he was responding to a SFWA member. One of his short stories is on my free short stories page [9]. He also wrote Accelerando which is one of the best sci-fi novels I’ve read (and it’s also free) [10].

Don Marti has written about Rent Seeking and proprietary software [11]. It’s an interesting article, nothing really new for anyone who has followed the news about the coal and nuclear industries.

Erik writes about “The Setting Sun” and points out that Scott McNealy had tried to capitalise on the SCO lawsuit but Red Hat has ended up beating them in the market [12].

Links December 2008

December 31, 2008 | etbe

A teacher in Arizona steals Linux CDs from a student and then accuses a Linux distributor of being a criminal [1]. Even though she had used Linux in the past she didn’t believe that software was free. Of course that implies that in the past she had performed actions that she believed were criminal.

Neat Little Mac Apps interviews Marshall Kirk McKusick – he describes how the BSD Daemon logo was designed and one of his most significant bugs [2].

OurDelta.org offers MySQL builds with some extra features and support [3]. I was recommended to use their builds by Arjen Lentz of Open Query [4], as one of my clients is going to use the services of Open Query it seems best to use the Our Delta builds if only to get better support from Open Query. The extra features in the Our Delta builds seem interesting, but I’m not sure that my client needs any of them at this time.

The Global Guerilla blog reports on a man who single-handedly invaded the most heavily guarded power station in Britain and shut it down to protest against new coal power stations [5]. The entire blog is worth reading, the author has a lot of interesting ideas.

PhpMyVisites is a free web site analytics system that competes with Google Analytics [6]. I haven’t implemented it yet, but it looks promising. It seems that PhpMyVisites is not being updated any more (not even security updates) and the replacement is Piwik [11].

Andrew Lahde was a fund manager who made significant amounts of money by betting on the inability of US mortgagees to repay their debts, he wrote an interesting goodbye letter (Telegraph.co.uk) [7]. He now has a Wikipedia page which gives some interesting background to his career [8]. An Employee of the Financial Times is famous for flaming Andrew [9], I have submitted a comment pointing out that being famous for flaming someone who is more successful than yourself is nothing to be proud of and suggesting that he advocate his own political views when criticising those of others – I doubt that it will get through moderation. It’s a pity that Andrew doesn’t have a blog, I would like to read more from him.

At CCC a paper by Alexander Sotirov, Marc Stevens, Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, David Molnar, Dag Arne Osvik, and Benne de Weger on how to crack the PKI infrastructure used for SSL signing was presented [10]. The root cause is some CAs still using MD5 even though it was broken a long time ago.

Updated to note that Piwik is the replacement for PhpMyVisites.

Links November 2008

November 28, 2008 | etbe

Netatia has an interesting series of articles about running a computer for two people [1]. It is a bit of a kludge, they have a single X server that covers both displays and then use Xephyr to divide it into two virtual screens. The positive aspecct of this is that it shuld allow a single wide monitor to be used by two sessions as displays are getting wider regardless of the wishes of manufacturers and consumers [2] this should be useful. It’s a pity that no-one has solved the problem of having multiple video cards, sound cards, and input devices to allow a single desktop system to be used for 6 or more people. It seems that the problems that need to be solved are only the support for multiple video cards, mouse-wheel support, and sound support.

Paul Ewald gave an interesting TED talk about changing the conditions for diseases so that they evolve to be benign [3]. The first example is Cholera which if spread by water will benefit from being as toxic as possible (to cause the greatest amount of diorrhea – killing the host not being a problem), but if spread by human contact benefits from leaving it’s host well enough to walk around and meet people. This and the other examples he cites seem like strong reasons for universal health-care provided by the government. If clean water is provided to all the poor people then cholera will evolve to be less harmful, and if a rich person (such as myself) is unlucky enough to catch it then the results won’t be so bad. He also notes that less harmful bacteria will often result in the victim not seeking anti-biotics and therefore less pressure for the disease to evolve resistance to anti-biotics. Therefore the people who really need them (the elderly, the very young, and people who are already sick) will find them to be more effective.

Paul Stamets gave a great TED talk about fungus [4]. One of his discoveries was that fungi can be used for breaking down petro-chemicals (they can eat oil). It would be interesting to see this tested on a large scale with one of the oil spils or with the polluted land around an ooil refinery. Also he has patented a method for using fungus to kill wood-eating ants (such as the ones that briefly infested his home).

Robert Full gave an interesting TED talk on robot feet [5]. I found the bit about leg spikes particularly interesting (I had always wondered why insects have spikey legs).

Alan Kay gave a very interesting presentation on using computers to teach young children about science [6]. An OLPC is referenced. It makes me want to buy an OLPC for everyone I know who has young children. The start of the talk is a little slow.

Dan Barber gave a very interesting TED talk about organic and humane production of foie gras in Extramuda [7]. Apparently it tastes a lot better too.

Incidentally I don’t list all the TED talks I watch, only the better ones. Less than half the TED talks that I see announced seem interesting enough to download, and of those less than half are good enough that I will recommend them. The ones that I don’t recommend don’t suck in any way, it’s just that I can’t write a paragraph about every talk. Of recent times my video watching has been divided about equally between “The Bill” and TED talks.

Here’s an interesting article about Sarah Palin and “anti-elitism”: The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has “elitism” become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn’t seem too intelligent or well educated.[8]

Sarah will be representing the Republican party in 2012, the desire for leaders of average intelligence (or less) will still be around then. It will be interesting to see how many votes she gets and amusing to see her interviewed.

The proceedings of the “Old Bailey” – London’s Central Criminal Court have been published [9]. It’s interesting to read some of the historical information about the legal system at the time. It made me appreciate how civilised the UK (and other countries that I have visited) are now.

Bruce Schneier writes about the feture of ephemeral communication [10]. He concludes with the point “until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers we aren’t fully an information age society“. Of course as he notes the rules are written by the older people, currently I don’t think that any candidate for high office (cabinet minister or above) anywhere in the world can have a good history on the Internet. During the course of a decade or more on the net it’s impossible not to write something that can be used against you and no reasonable person could avoid changing their views on some issues in such a time period. That’s enough to lose an election with the way things currently work.

Links October 2008

October 26, 2008 | etbe

Here’s a blog post suggesting that anti-depressant drugs such as Prozac may have helped the US mortgage crisis [1]. Apparently such drugs cause poor impulse control, so it wouldn’t be a good idea to attend a house auction while using them.

Here’s an interesting idea about lecturing, give 20 minute talks with something else (practical work or group discussion) in between [2]. Michael Lee wants to “capture the power of that strict time limit, the intensity of a well-crafted 20 minutes”. While I’m not sure that a strict time limit is such a great idea. Having talks broken up into sections sounds like it has the potential to offer some benefits.

A bible from the 4th century has been found and is being digitised [3]. When the digitisation is complete (next year) it will be published on the net so everyone can see how the bible has changed over the years.

Interesting interview with Jim Gray (of MS Research) about storage [4]. It was conducted in 2003 so technology has moved on, but the concepts remain. His ideas for sharing two terabytes of data by using a courier to deliver an NFS or CIFS file server are interesting, the same thing could be done today with five terabytes for a lower cost.

Techtarget has a white paper sponsored by Intel about the price/performance of data centers in low-density and high-density designs [5]. I don’t think I’ll ever be in a position to design a data center, but the background information in the paper is very useful.

Google has an interesting set of pages describing their efforts to save power in their data centers [6]. They claim to have the most efficient server rooms ever built, and describe how it saves them a lot of money. One of the interesting things that they do is to use evaporative cooling as the primary cooling method. They also have a RE<C (Renewable Energy cheaper than Coal) project [7].

Here’s a Youtube video of an interesting presentation by Andy Thomson (a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia) about male-bonded coalitionary violence [8]. He shows the evidence of it in chimpanzees, humans, and evidence for it being in the common ancestry of chimps and humans (5-6 million years ago). He also shows a link to modern suicide bombing.

It’s widely regarded that Cyrus is the fastest IMAP server. Linux-Magazin.de published an article last year comparing Cyrus, UW-IMAP, Dovecot, and Courier and the conclusion is that Courier and Dovecot are the winners [9]. I used Google Translation but the results were not particularly good so I think I missed some of the points that they were trying to make.

Links September 2008

September 30, 2008 | etbe

RAM is the new Disk [1] – interesting post about using a distributed network of servers with RAM for main storage. The concept is that RAM on another machine can be accessed faster than local disk and that disk performance for contiguous IO has been increasing steadily at a greater rate than random seek performance. So disks can be used in a similar manner to tape drives (backing up data) and RAM can be used as main storage (2RU machines with 1TB of RAM are predicted soon). It is interesting to contrast this with the Rubik’s Cube solver which uses disk as RAM [2].

Interesting Sun Blog post about how ZFS uses flash based SSD (Solid State Disk) for read caching [3].

Yahoo has released a Firefox plugin named Yslow to tell you why your web site is slow [4]. This complements the Yahoo Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site document [5].

Amsterdam now has cargo trams [6]. This reduces pollution and traffic congestion while allowing efficient transport of cargo. The cargo trams tend to follow passenger trams so they don’t provide any additional obstacle to traffic.

Interesting article by Cory Doctorow about how the standard formats limit creative content [7]. He makes the unfortunate mistake of claiming that “no one tries to make sitcoms about stories that take five minutes to tell” and “no one tries to make feature films about subjects that take 30 seconds to elucidate” – I think that the majority of sitcom episodes can be described in considerably less than 5 minutes and a significant number of movies (EG every one that stars Jean-Claude Van Damme [8]) can have their plot described in less than 30 seconds.

Links August 2008

August 31, 2008 | etbe

Michael Janke is writing a series of posts about estimating availability of systems, here is a link to the introduction [1]. He covers lots of things that people often miss (such as cooling). If you aren’t about to implement a system for reliability then it’s an interesting read. If you are about to implement a system where reliability is required and you have control of the system (not paying someone else to run it and hope for the best) then it’s an essential read. It will probably also be good to give this URL to managers who make decisions about such things.

Interesting summary of the connections between the Iraq war and the oil industry in the Reid Report [2]. The suggestion made by one of the sources she cites is that the intention of the war was to reduce the supply of Iraqi oil to increase prices. Sam Varghese has written an essay about this which summarises where the Iraqi oil goes [3]. It seems that half of Iraq’s oil goes to US military use, the other half is used domestically, and some oil is imported as well! So because of the US occupation the country with the second largest known oil reserves is importing petroleum products! If the US military was to cease operations world-wide then the oil price would drop significantly, this doesn’t just mean the occupation of Iraq and the various actions in South America, but also the bases in Germany and Japan.

Interesting paper by Alexander Sotirov and Mark Dowd about Bypassing Browser Memory Protection in Windows [4]. This paper is good for people who are interested in computer security but don’t generally use Windows (such as me), if you want to learn about the latest things happening in Windows land then this is a good place to start.

A well researched article by Rick Moen about the unintended effects of anti-gay-marriage laws [5]. Maybe some of the “conservatives” who advocate such laws should get themselves and their spouses tested. It would be amusing if someone like Rush Limbaugh turned out to be involved in a “gay marriage”.

What Sysadmins should know about exposure to hazardous materials [6]. High-level overview of the issues, probably a good start for some google searches to get the details.

Diamond John McCain is an interesting blog about the 73 year old (who was born in Panama) candidate in the US presidential election [7].

Update: Corrected my statement about Iraq’s oil reserves based on a comment by Sam.

Links July 2008

July 27, 2008 | etbe

Steven Levitt gave an interesting talk for TED about the economics of a crack-dealing gang [1]. He makes some interesting comparisons with the way that corporations work.

Top 10 strangest terrorism patents [2]. Items 1 and 4 have been implemented many years ago, item 5 was probably implemented by the CIA decades ago (they did many similar things), item 7 will probably kill a significant portion of the passengers (bummer if it goes off accidentally), item 8 has the same problem but will only target nervous people (calm terrorists can do what they want), and the creator of item 9 doesn’t seem to have much idea about how much energy is contained by high explosive.

Supporters of Barack Obama are adopting Hussein as their middle-name to support him and oppose some of the unreasonable claims from extremists [3]. I’m not planning to call myself Russell Hussein Coker.

Chris Samuel summarises the latest CSIRO report about droughts caused by climate change [4]. He notes that most simulations are based on lower levels of CO2 than we are expecting…

Interesting article in the Guardian about car use in the US [5]. It suggests that soon suburbs will be slums occupied by the poor an unemployed and inner city areas will experience a revival.

Recently I’ve been putting the papers I’ve presented at conferences online on my documents blog (see this link for the “papers” category) [6]. The papers are almost unchanged from when I published them, I fixed up some broken URLs and made some notes on relevant things that have happened since publication but made no essential changes to the text.

Linux.com article about Bonnie++ [7]. It’s well written and covers most of the features quite well. An unfortunate omission is the fact that if you want to run Bonnie++ from the root account you can specify “-u user” on the command-line to run the test as a different user, or you can use “-u root” if you REALLY want to run it as root.

A Linux.com article with the source code for a Perl script to create charts from Bonnie++ results [8]. I had always planned that other people would write programs like this, I’m glad to see someone finally publish the source to one!

Links June 2008

June 25, 2008 | etbe

Paul Graham has recently published an essay titled How To Disagree [1]. One form that he didn’t mention is to claim that a disagreement is a matter of opinion. Describing a disagreement about an issue which can be proved as a matter of opinion is a commonly used method of avoiding the need to offer any facts or analysis.

Sam Varghese published an article about the Debian OpenSSL issue and quoted me [2].

The Basic AI Drives [3] is an interesting papar about what might motivate an AI and how AIs might modify themselves to better achieve their goals. It also has some insights into addiction and other vulnerabilities in human motivation.

It seems that BeOS [4] is not entirely dead. The Haiku OS project aims to develop an open source OS for desktop computing based on BeOS [5]. It’s not nearly usable for end-users yet, but they have vmware snapshots that can be used for development.

On my Document Blog I have described how to debug POP problems with the telnet command [6]. Some users might read this and help me fix their email problems faster. I know that most users won’t be able to read this, but the number of people who can use it will surely be a lot greater than the number of people who can read the RFCs…

Singularity tales is an amusing collection of short stories [7] about the Technological Singularity [8].

A summary of the banana situation [9]. Briefly describes how “banana republics” work and the fact that a new variety of the Panama disease is spreading through banana producing countries. Given the links between despotic regimes and banana production it’s surprising that no-one is trying to spread the disease faster. Maybe Panama disease could do for South America what the Boll weevil did for the south of the US [10].

Jeff Dean gives an interesting talk about the Google server architecture [11]. One thing I wonder about is whether they have experimented with increasing the chunk size over the years. It seems that the contiguous IO performance of disks has been steadily increasing while the seek performance has stayed much the same, and the dramatic increases in the amount of RAM you can get for any given amount of money over the last few years have been amazing. So it seems that now it’s possible to read larger chunks of data in the same amount of time and more easily store such large chunks in memory.

Links May 2008

May 31, 2008 | etbe

The Daily WTF has published an interesting essay on why retaining staff is not always a good thing [1]. The main point is that good people get bored and want to move on while mediocre people want to stay, but there are other points and it’s worth reading.

Following the links from that article led me to an article comparing managing IT departments to managing professional sports teams [2]. They chose US football (a sport I know little about and have no interest in) so I probably missed some of the content. But they have some good points.

John Goerzen gave a good presentation to the idea of increasing petrol taxes and decreasing other taxes to have a revenue neutral result while also discouraging petrol use [3]. I credit him with presenting the idea not inventing it because I have heard similar ideas several times before (but not nearly as well written and not written from a right-wing perspective). Hopefully some people who read his presentation will be more receptive than they were to the other versions of the same idea.

Craig Venter spoke at TED about his work in creating artificial life [4]. He spent some time talking about the possibilities of creating artificial organisms to produce fuels directly from CO2 and sunlight.

Nick Bostrom published a paper explaining why he hopes that the SETI projects find nothing [5]. His theory is that the fact that our solar system has not been colonised and that we have seen no immediate evidence of extra-terrestrial life indicates that there is a “Great Filter” which is a stage of evolution for which it is most unlikely that any species will pass. If the Great Filter is in our past (he cites the evolution of multi-celled life as one of the possibilities, and the evolution of prokaryotes into eukaryotes as another) then it means that our future might be more successful than if the Great Filter was something that tended to happen to advanced societies.

Jared Diamond (the author of Collapse), has written an interesting article about vengeance [6]. He focuses on an example in New Guinea and uses it to explain why personal vendettas tend to run wildly out of control and how society is best served by having the state punish criminals.

etbe – Russell Coker

Linux, politics, and other interesting things

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