I have just read The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals that Protect Us From Violence by Gavin de Becker.

Like many self-help books it has a concept that can be described in a paragraph and explained in a few pages. The rest of the book shares anecdotes that help the reader understand the concept, but which are also interesting for people who get it from the first chapter. When I read the book I considered the majority of the content to be interesting stuff added to pad it out to book size because the concept seemed easy enough to get from the start, but from reading some of the reviews I get the impression that 375 pages of supporting material aren’t enough to convince some people – maybe this is something that you will either understand from the first few chapters or never understand at all.

Gavin’s writing is captivating, he has written a book about real violent crime in a style that is more readable than many detective novels, from the moment I finished the first chapter I spent all my spare time reading it.

I was a little disappointed at the lack of detailed statistics, but when someone has done all the statistical analysis chooses to provide the results in the form of anecdotes rather than statistics I’m prepared to tolerate that – especially when the anecdotes are so interesting. I spent quite a bit of time reading the Wikipedia pages relating to some of the people and incidents that are mentioned in this book.

The basic concepts of his book are to cease worrying about silly things like airline terrorists (passengers won’t surrender now so that’s not going to work again) and to instead take note of any real fear. For example if you are doing the same things you usually do but suddenly feel afraid then you should carefully consider what you might have subconsciously noticed that makes you feel afraid and what you can do about it. This isn’t going to change my behavior much as I have mostly been doing what the book recommends for a long time.

I think that everyone should read this book.

My parents have just got a mobile phone with a Lebara pre-paid SIM [1]. Lebara advertise free calls to other Lebara phones but have a disclaimer that they charge a 25 cent flagfall and charge 15 cents per minute after the first 10 minutes – which is still cheaper than most mobile calls although not as good as some other mobile telcos such as Three that offer completely free calls to other phones with the same provider.

Lebara’s main selling point seems to be cheap international calls, half a cent per minute to Thailand, 1 cent per minute to Hong Kong, Indonesia and Singapore and 3 cents per minute to Bangladesh and China. Strangely calls to the US are 5 cents per minute and to Japan are 7 cents per minute, I would have expected that calling developed countries would have been cheaper due to better infrastructure and more competition. The trend of more developed countries having less expensive calls seems clear, some very undeveloped countries cost as much as $2 per minute! Note that all these rates are for calls to land-lines (calls to mobiles cost more) and are based on the new prices that apply after the 13th of July (it’s slightly cheaper for the next 8 days).

It seems really strange that calls to land-lines in Australia cost 15 cents per minute which is more than twice as much as calls to the US and Japan. In theory it would be possible to redirect calls to Australian land-lines via the US or Japan to save money. In practice it’s probably possible to do so by setting up a PBX in Thailand, Hong Kong, or Singapore.

But what I think is most noteworthy about Lebara is the fact that the call credit lasts for 90 days (this is in the FAQ). The cheapest top-up is $10 so therefore the minimum cost for mobile phone service is $40 per annum. Given the importance of owning a mobile phone to job seekers I think that with the current state of the economy there are a lot of people who could do with such a phone.

If anyone knows of Australian mobile phones that provide cheaper calls to other countries or a cheaper minimum annual fee then please let me know via the comments section.

For international readers, all prices are in Australian cents – which are worth about 85% as much as US cents.

• [1] http://www.lebara-mobile.com.au/

Linode has just announced a significant increase in the amount of RAM in each of their plans [1].

The last time I compared virtual hosting prices in a serious manner was over two years ago [2], so it seems like a good time to compare the prices again.

Now there are some differences between these providers that make things difficult to compare. Gandi used to not include the OS in the disk allocation – presumably they did de-duplication, I’m not sure if they still do that. OpenVZ/Virtuozzo and Xen can’t be directly compared. OpenVZ is an Operating System Level Virtualisation that allows virtual machines to share resources to some extent which should allow better overall utilisation of the system but may allow someone to hog more resources than they deserve – I prefer virtual machines so tend to avoid that. Virtuozzo is a technology I’m not familiar with so with all things being equal I would choose Xen because I know it better.

Years ago Vpsland deleted one of my DomUs without good notification and without keeping a backup and I’m not about to forgive them. XenEurope and Gandi get good reviews, but I have no personal experience with them so in my personal ranking they are below Linode and Slicehost.

RapidXen offers native IPv6 – a very noteworthy feature. But they are quite expensive.

Note that I have only included providers that advertise in English. I could use Google translation to place an order on a non-English web site but I am not going to risk a situation where Google translation is needed for technical support.

In the price comparison tables I have used $US for price comparisons, where the price was advertised in another currency I put the $US price in brackets. For every provider that doesn’t advertise prices in $US I used XE.com to get a spot price. Note that if you convert between currencies you will not get that rate, I used the spot rate because most of my readers don’t use the $US as their native currency (either due to living in a country that uses it or having business interests based on the $US) – converting from $AU to $US has about the same overhead for me as converting to the Euro or pound.

The bandwidth is listed as either a number of Gigabytes per month that can be transferred or as a number of Megabits per second that the connection may use.

I have tried to roughly order the offerings based on how good they seem to be. But as there are so many factors to consider it’s quite obvious that no provider can be considered to be universally better than the others.

The biggest surprise for me was how well Xen Europe compares to the others. Last time I did the comparison they were not nearly as competitive.

Finally note that I am comparing the options for low-end servers. These are services that are useful for hobbyist use and low-end servers for commercial use. Some providers such as Xen Europe exclude themselves from consideration for serious commercial use by not offering big servers – Xen Europe only supports up to 1GB of RAM.

Prices of Xen virtual servers:

Prices of non-Xen virtualisation systems:

Update: Added RackVM to the listing, and removed the ambiguous part about Gandi disk allocation.

• [1] http://blog.linode.com/2010/06/16/linode-turns-7-big-ram-increase/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/05/28/xen-hosting/

I’m currently running google-chrome-beta version 5.0.375.55-r47796 on Debian/Unstable. It’s the fastest web browser I’ve used in recent times – it’s the first time that I’ve run a browser that feels faster than my recollection of running IBM WebExplorer for OS/2 on a 486-66 system! It has a good feature set, and it’s the only browser I’ve used that in a typical configuration will make proper use of the screen space by not having a permanent status bar at the bottom of the sceen and by having tabs in the title-bar. But it’s not perfect, here is a list of some bugs:

Above are three partial screen captures of Chrome, the first is when maximised and the second is when the window isn’t maximised. Notice the extra vertical space above the tab in the title bar in the second picture. The third picture shows the right side of the titlebar and you can see a space below the three buttons where you can drag the window around – no matter how many tabs you open that space below the three buttons is reserved. If the Chrome developers had removed the extra vertical space in the titlebar and reserved slightly more horizontal space then you would be able to drag the window around. While an anonymous commentator made a good point that the extra vertical space can be used to drag the window around when the maximum number of tabs are open, it seems that there are other ways of achieving that goal without wasting ~18 vertical pixels. Doing so would be a lot less ugly than what they did with finding text in the page.

When I visit a web site that uses cookies from an Incognito Window (which means that cookies etc aren’t stored) there is no option to say “allow all cookies”. This is really annoying when you get to a web site such as the IBM one which stores 5 cookies when you first load the page and then at least one new cookie write for every page you visit. Given that cookie data will be discarded as soon as the window is closed it seems like a good idea to have an option to allow all cookies for Incognito Windows even if all cookies aren’t allowed for regular windows. Blocking all cookies would be OK too, anything but having to click on Block or Allow multiple times for each page load.

The J and K keys don’t work in a view of Venus version 0~bzr95-2+lenny1 (the latest version in Debian/Lenny).

I once had a situation where I entered a ‘.’ at the end of a domain name (which is quite legal – there is always an implied dot) and Chrome then wouldn’t take note of my request to accept all cookies from the domain. I haven’t been able to reproduce that bug, but I have noticed that it stores the settings for whether cookies should be stored separately for domains that end in ‘.’, so “www.cnn.com.” is different from “www.cnn.com” . Iceweasel seems to just quietly strip the trailing dot. Of course this is better than Konqueror which won’t even load a URL with a dot at the end.

Chrome can be relied on to restore all windows rapidly after a crash, unlike Iceweasel which restores them at it’s normal load speed (slow) and Konqueror which doesn’t tend to restore windows. This is good as it does seem to crash regularly. In a response to my post about Chrome and SE Linux [1] Ben Hutchings pointed out that the --no-sandbox option to chrome disables the creation of a PID namespace and therefore makes debugging a lot easier, if I get a lot of spare time I’ll try and track down some of the Chrome SEGVs.

The JavaScript compiler is either buggy or it’s not buggy in situations where people expect IE bugs. When using the Dell Australia web site I can’t always order all options. When trying to order a Dell R300 1RU server with hot-plug disks in a hardware RAID array it seems impossible to get all the necessary jumpers – which is a precondition to completing the order – fortunately I only wanted to blog about how cheap Dell servers are so I don’t actually need to complete an order. Dell’s web site is also difficult in Iceweasel on occasion, so it’s obviously more demanding than most sites. It might be a good test site for people who work on browsers as it’s both demanding and important.

When I select a URL to be opened in a new window (or when JavaScript does this) then the new tab is opened with about:blank listed as the URL. If the URL is for a PDF file (or something else that is to be downloaded) then the URL entry field is never updated to give the real URL. I believe that this is wrong, either the new tab shouldn’t be opened or it should have the correct URL on display – there is no benefit with a tab open to show nothing but about:blank in the URL entry field. Also if a URL takes some time to load then it may keep about:blank in the URL entry field for some time. This means that if you use the middle mouse button to rapidly open a few new tabs you won’t be able to see what is to be loaded in each one. Sometimes I have several tabs loading and I’m happy to close some unimportant ones if they are slow but some are worth waiting for.

Overall that’s not too bad. I can use Dell’s site in Iceweasel, so the only critical bug is the cookies issue in Incognito Windows which makes the Incognito feature almost unusable for some sites.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/05/19/google-chrome-and-se-linux/

I have just bought a Brother MFC-9120CN Multi-Function Color LED LASER Printer for a relative. It was a replacement for the Lexmark printer which turned out not to support Linux properly [1].

This printer cost about $545. I bought it from OfficeWorks [2] under their price-matching deal. If you find a better price anywhere else they will beat it by 5%. I went to StaticIce.com.au and found the cheapest online store in Australia that sold the printer and then took the URL of the online store to OfficeWorks on a USB stick. After they verified the price they sold me the printer for 5% less than the online cost plus the delivery cost, which saved my relative a little more than $50.

Craig Sanders had convinced me to choose a LASER printer because the toner doesn’t have a short shelf-life unlike the ink for ink-jet printers. My parents have been using a LASER printer for more than 12 years and each toner cartridge lasts at least 4 years which is a much better result than all the ink-jet printers I’ve supported which tend to regularly need more expensive ink. I guess I’ll find out over the next few years whether this printer lives up to the general reputation of LASER printers in this regard.

The LED printers use LEDs for the LASER light, this apparently makes them more reliable and efficient but means that they tend to have a lower resolution, and often the horizontal and vertical resolutions are not equal. The printer I got is listed as 600*2400dpi resolution but that might end up giving much the same result as a 600*600dpi printer. But 600*600dpi should be good enough for a long time anyway. A4 paper (the standard size for office paper in Australia) is 210*297mm, that is about 8.27*11.69 inches or 4961*7015 pixels at 600dpi. Even if we assume that 10% of the width and height is wasted on margins that would take a 28 megapixel camera to produce a picture that can actually use 600dpi for the most common case where high quality is needed for home use – printing a single photo on an A4 sheet.

The printer ships with 64M of RAM which was not enough to print some pictures that I sent it, it has a slot for a 144pin SO-DIMM (laptop RAM) for memory expansion, it can take one SO-DIMM of up to 512M capacity that is at least PC-100. I’ve got a spare 256M PC-133 memory module that I will install in it, hopefully that will be enough to print pictures. Buying PC-100/PC-133 RAM nowadays probably isn’t going to be easy, particularly not 512M modules as many of the laptops which used PC-100/PC-133 RAM didn’t support that capacity (I believe that my ancient Thinkpads which used such memory didn’t support 512M modules).

The requirement was for a printer that could print photos in reasonable quality, could make photo-copies, and ideally work as a scanner. I got CUPS to talk to it without much effort, I just installed a PPD file from the Brother Solutions Center web site [3] and it just worked. It occurred to me later that I should have tried configuring it before installing the PPD file – maybe the version of CUPS in Debian/Squeeze supports the Brother printer natively.

So the current state of the printer is that it prints documents very well, it doesn’t print photos but that should be solved when I add more RAM, and I just have to try and get scanning to work. Everyone is happy!

The only down-side is that the printer is huge. It takes a lot of desk space to run it (they will need a new desk in their computer room), and when it’s in it’s box it’s much larger than most things that you will normally transport by car.

Update: I’ve installed a 256M PC-133 SO-DIMM and can now print full color pictures. Thanks for Rodney Brown for giving me some Thinkpad parts which included RAM.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/05/02/lexmark-linux/
• [2] http://www.officeworks.com.au/
• [3] http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/BSC/public/eu/eu_ot/en/model_top/colorlasermfc/mfc9120cn_all.html?reg=eu&c=eu_ot&lang=en&prod=mfc9120cn_all