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A few days ago I stayed in an apartment at the Oaks on Market [1] hotel which I booked through www.WotIf.com. The WotIf price was $159 per night – the list price was $376 per night. It was possible to get extra beds for $30 each per night if you wanted to get more people in the room.
All rooms are of the Suite / Apartment [2] style. The room was a basic (twin or queen) room, it was quite large and well equipped. The TV in the room was quite large and TFT, it had a range of inputs which seemed to include everything other than VGA and DVI (if I was running a hotel every TV would have VGA or DVI input for laptops).
All the basic kitchen facilities were there, including a microwave oven, a stove, and a toaster. There was even dish-washing liquid!
The hotel pool (indoor and heated) is 25M long and 1.2M deep, there is a spa and a sauna. The pool isn’t cleaned as well as it might be, there was a band-aid stuck on a wall and sand and other stuff on the floor of the pool (including a hair elastic with a rusty clip – it had apparently been in the pool long enough to rust).
The hotel is a short tram ride from the LCA venue, walking to LCA would be possible too (I walked further than that when at Dunedin). I can’t claim that this hotel is better than others, but it would do. Having a pool is a good thing, I recommend that all delegates bring their bathers for pool parties – the weather will probably demand such things.
At the end of the month we are having linux.conf.au (one of the best Linux conferences in the world) in Melbourne. Here is some quick advice for people who are attending:
If you have not yet booked a hotel then www.wotif.com is a good option to try, it’s a hotel booking web site that is aimed at last-minute bookings and offers significant discounts over the list price. A quick search on WotIf reveals that there are currently 5 hotels that are available for $140 per night or less for the time period of LCA. The rate listed is an approximation as the hotel may offer several rates for different types of rooms (it’s usually one of the cheapest options available from the hotel). I believe that some hotels don’t offer their rooms on WotIf until close to the day in question, so some more rooms may become available between now and the start of the conference. However the Australian Open [1] Tennis tournament ends on the 27th of January, if you plan to attend the LCA mini-confs then you will want to arrive on the 27th, so booking a hotel for that night at the last minute would be a risky strategy.
If you want to stay somewhere that is comfortable but not overly expensive then you might want to read my post about hotel apartments [2].
My post about public transport in Melbourne [3] has some information that can save you some money. One possibility to consider is that if you use 10 * 2 hour tickets and don’t completely use them up then you could sell them to locals. I would be happy to buy some partially used tickets for the full value of the unused part on the last day of the conference to save people wasting the unused value.
Note that my documents blog contains posts that will be updated whenever I have more information and the time to write it down (this blog is generally write-once). I will be updating the post about public transport significantly in future.
Are there any active LUGs in Singapore? A friend in Singapore is about to set up his laptop to dual-boot and would like the possibility of getting some direct help if it ends up not booting Windows…
I looked at the Linux.org page listing LUGs in Singapore [1]. There are two entries, one has a site that has not been updated for over a year, the other has no mention of meetings.
Is visiting a nearby country the best option for someone in Singapore who wants to meet other Linux users?
For anyone in a country without an active LUG, it would be good if you could create one. Even if it’s only a bunch of people having a scheduled meeting every month for food/drink. Once you have the meetings arranged other things can happen, random people who need help can bring in laptops to get advice. Also there was one occasion where I gave a lecture about SE Linux (which went for approximately an hour) in a back room at a bar, if you have an audience and a venue then sometimes guest speakers will just show up.
Military.com reports that the UK government will no longer use the term War On Terror [1]. Sir Ken Macdonald (the UK’s chief prosecutor) said that “terrorists” are criminals and need to be responded to in that way. This of course is the only logical and sensible thing to do. Soldiers who are taken prisoner are released when the war ends, if members of al Quaeda are considered to be soldiers then they would have to be treated in the same manner.
The next logical step is to persue criminals who are members of al Quaeda in the same way that other criminals are persued. As far as I am aware there is no country where the majority of murderers are members of al Quaeda. Other suspected murderers have the right to a fair trial and people accused of al Quaeda membership deserve the same.
Another interesting statement is that “The term “Islamic terrorist” will also no longer be used. Officials believe it is unhelpful because it appears to directly link the religion to terrorist atrocities“. Finally they realise that there is a huge number of Muslims who want nothing to do with terrorism and that such people are the best potential source of leads when it comes to tracking down criminals associated with al Quaeda.
Thanks to Bruce Schneier for blogging about this [2]. Bruce’s blog post has some interesting comments, one is “you can’t make “War” on “Terrorism”. “Terrorism” is a tactic, not an enemy. To declare war on Terrorism is about as confused as declaring war on Blitzkrieg” by Carlo Graziani. Carlo also writes “It’s stupid to declare a “war” if you have no idea of when and how the war will end, and no clue about how to bring it to an end. If there is no real prospect for declaring “victory”, the “war” will go on for ever. This is tantamount to saying that insofar as we take the rhetoric of war seriously, we are agreeing to live under what is essentially martial law, in perpetuity. We are stipulating that the sort of emergency measures that a nation might consider taking in time of war — suspension of civil rights for certain suspect groups, suspension of laws limiting government surveillance powers, etc. — may be only a decree or a vote away, forever. There can be no more corrosive climate to liberty than war. If we really allow this idiotic rhetoric to be taken seriously, our polity is doomed.“.
A particularly insightful comment from umacf24 is “How did the early 20th century Anarchists stop? Well, one of the attacks precipitated an unprecedentedly bloody and catastrophic war in which both sides used WMD. Military setbacks caused revolutions in the Russian and German empires which led in turn to most of misery of the rest of that century. Not a happy parallel“.
I’ve been thinking about the comment policy for my blogs. I have started deleting comments when people subscribe to comments and use fake email addresses (I get the bounces and it’s annoying).
Also I am deleting comments that don’t make much sense or which don’t address the topic of a post. Some people seem to search for blog posts marginally related to a topic that they want to vent about.
I’ve had someone request that a comment be removed because it was written by someone with the same name as him (see this post if you want to read the details [1]). I’ve written a short document about unique names on the Internet [2] on my documents blog, hopefully it will be useful for other people who become concerned when they discover that they don’t have a unique name.
My general policy about comments is probably going to be not to delete them unless requested by the author of the comment (if there is a good reason), and otherwise to only delete them for technical reasons or for being wildly off-topic.
One thing that seems missing from most blog ethics documents is a section on comments. When I write my own code of blog ethics I’ll have to write a section about this. Suggestions are welcome.
There are some people who’s blogs I read and often comment on or reference in my own blog posts. Some of them regularly make comments on my posts and reference my posts in their own posts. Of these people some of them I have never met or don’t seem to have conversations with when I meet them.
It’s well known that there are different categories of friend including “pen pal”, “drinking buddy”, and friends in the context of sporting groups. Is “blog friend” a new friend category?
Glen Turner writes about how Internet censorship could hurt science [1].
The ABC has an article about what is planned [2] which includes “Senator Conroy says it will be mandatory for all internet service providers to provide clean feeds, or ISP filtering, to houses and schools“. If Senator Conroy sticks to that plan then section two of Glen’s post (concerning high-speed access to research data) will not be a problem. This is no criticism of Glen for mentioning the issue as some idiot might try to change the plan to filter corporate and university access.
Senator Conroy also earns a Godwin point for “If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree“. There is a good discussion paper by Electronic Frontiers Australia about Labour’s plans in this regard before they won the election [3]. One issue they raise is the small number of sites identified as having child-porn. Imposing filters on an entire country to block the 3,236 web pages identified as prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority is not a sensible solution.
Another issue that EFA raises is the variety of reasons for content getting an R18+ rating (if that is to be a filtering criteria). One notable issue is “Adult themes” which includes “issues such as suicide, crime, corruption, marital problems, emotional trauma, drug and alcohol dependency, death and serious illness, racism, religious issues“. I doubt that there is much agreement between parents as to the relative significance of those “Adult themes” and which ones their children should be protected from. I also expect that a significant number of parents would like to have information about safe sex (including safe gay sex) and safe drug use available in case their children are interested in such things. I hope that the number of parents who disapprove of homosexuality and drug use so strongly that they are willing to risk their children’s lives is quite small (although the response to the cervical cancer vaccine indicates that it’s sadly larger than expected). Glen has some good points about this in the first section of his post.
For a while I’ve been reading the Lenovo blog Inside The Box [1], even though I plan to keep my current laptop for a while [2] (and therefore not buy another Thinkpad for a few years) I am interested in the technology for it’s own sake and read the blog.
A recent post concerns a new desktop machine billed as “our greenest desktop ever” [3]. The post has some interesting information on recycling plastic etc, and the fact that the machine in question is physically small (a volume of 4.5L and no PCI expansion slots) means that less petro-chemicals are used in manufacture (and some of the resins used are recycled). However the electricity use is 47W when idle!!!
On my documents blog I have a post about the power use of computers I own(ed) [4] which includes my current Thinkpad (idles at 23W) and an IBM P3 desktop system which idles at 38W. Both machines in question were manufactured before Lenovo bought Thinkpad and IBM’s desktop PC business (so they technically aren’t Lenovo machines) and they weren’t manufactured with recycled resins. But the claim that the new machine is the greenest ever is at best misguided and could be regarded as deceptive.
I think that the machine is quite decent, but it’s obvious that they can do a lot better. There’s no reason that a low-power desktop machine (which uses some laptop technology) should take more than twice the power of what was a high-end laptop a few years ago. Also comparing power use with P3 machines (which are still quite useful now, my IBM P3 desktop runs 24*7 as a server) is quite relevant – and we should keep in mind that before the Pentium was released no system which an individual could afford had anything other than a simple heat-sink to cool it’s CPU.
This is largely a failing of Intel and AMD to make power efficient CPUs and chipsets. It’s also unfortunate that asymmetric multi-processing has not been implemented in recent times. A system with a 64bit CPU core of P3 performance as well as some Opteron class cores that could be suspended independently would be very good for power use with correct OS support. For example when reading documents and email my system will spend most of it’s time idling (apart from when I use Firefox which is a CPU hog) and the CPU use will be minimal for scrolling – a P3 performing core would be more than adequate for that task (which comprises a significant portion of my computer use). Then when I launch a CPU intensive task (composing a blog post in WordPress or compiling) the more powerful CPU cores could start.
It would be good if Intel would release a Pentium-M CPU (32bit) with the latest technology (smaller tracks on the silicon means less power use as well as higher clock speeds). A Pentium-M running at 2GHz produced with the latest Intel fabrication technology would probably use significantly less power than the 1.7GHz Pentium-M that is in my Thinkpad. Put that in a desktop machine and you would have all the compute power you need for most tasks other than playing games and running vista and you could get an idle power less than 23W.
The new Lenovo machine in question does sound like a nice machine, I wouldn’t mind having one for testing and running demos. But the claims made about it seem poorly justified if you know the history.
Glen Turner writes about silly people who think that fluorescent lights don’t save energy over their lifetime [1].
A compact fluorescent light (one that is designed for the same socket as an incandescent globe) is not the most efficient light source, the Luminous Efficiency page on Wikipedia [2] lists a CFL as having an efficiency of between 6.6% and 8.8% while fluorescent tubes can be up to 15.2% efficient and low pressure sodium lamps are 27% efficient! But given that low pressure sodium lights are unsuitable for most uses due to being monochromatic and having a long warm-up time and the fact that fluorescent tubes are often not suitable due to design an 8.8% efficiency is pretty good. LEDs can give up to 10.2% (and prototypes offer 22%) but don’t seem to be available in a convenient and reliable manner (they are expensive and the ones I’ve tried have been unreliable).
When comparing fluorescent with incandescent one factor to consider is the power used. While high-temperature incandescent lights are quoted as having 5.1% efficiency and a 100W 110V tungsten incandescent globe is quoted as having 2.6% efficiency a 40W 110V globe will only have 1.9%. If you want to save energy then you probably don’t want to use 100W globes, using less light is the first way of saving energy on lighting! So the efficiency of incandescent lights used for the comparison should probably be closer to 1.9% than 2.6%.
Now the theoretical performance won’t always match what you get when you buy globes. There is some variation of quality between manufacturers and there are at least two distinct “colours” of fluorescent lights (one is about 5800K – similar to our sun, the other is something over 8000K – blue-white), I expect some difference in efficiency between lights of different colour range.
I see CFL lights marketed as being 5 times more efficient than incandescent lights, my observation is that they appear to be about 4 times more efficient (IE I replace a 40W incandescent with a 10W CFL or a 60W incandescent with a 14W CFL). Glen claims that an 8W CFL can replace a 60W incandescent globe, the only possibility of getting a factor of 7 or more efficiency improvement (according to the data on the Wikipedia page) would be to replace some 5W incandescent globes with CFL. In my experience (converting two houses that I lived in to CFL and the conversions of some friends) such an efficiency benefit is not possible on direct electricity use.
However in a hot climate any waste heat needs to be removed with an air-conditioner. So when a 60W incandescent light is replaced by a 14W CFL there is 46W of waste heat removed, with an ideal efficiency of a heat-pump it would take 15W to remove that heat from a building (and possibly more if it’s a large building). So in summer we are not comparing 60W to 14W, it’s more like 75W to 14W.
The issue of economics that Glen raises is more complex than it seems because governments often give companies significant discounts on electricity costs, EG in Australia aluminium refineries are subsidies heavily so they pay much less than home users. So hypothetically it could be possible to manufacture a device made entirely of aluminium which saves electricity (and therefore money for the user) but not enough to cover the electricity used in aluminium refining. However when we consider the margins of the various middle-men it seems quite unlikely that such a hypothetical situation could actually happen.
As for the issue of mercury in fluorescent lights there are two things to consider. One is that it is possible to recycle mercury (in Australia at least), the other is that coal fired power plants have a lot of mercury in their smoke…
I’ve just read an interesting article in the New Yorker titled “Twilight of the Books” [1].
It started with some depressing statistics about literacy. One comment that I couldn’t figure out concerned “the panic that takes hold of humanists when the decline of reading is discussed“. The decline in literacy concerns me because I want to live in a society where everyone can contribute as equals and where all voters have the possibility of becoming well informed about the issues that affect their vote. If literacy declines far enough then fascism seems to be the inevitable result. I’m not sure whether that makes me a humanist according to the author. Below in the second part of this post (not included in the feed) I include my dictionary definition of the word, #4 is the definition most commonly used today (which is a reasonable match for my beliefs).
There is some interesting information regarding basic research on the mental abilities of literate and illiterate people which suggests that people who an read are better at handling abstract concepts and hypothetical situations.
The article notes that spending time on the net increases academic scores for children. It also makes the interesting claim that visiting pr0n sites increases grades, I find that difficult to believe.
I wonder whether there is a difference between readers and writers in this regard. Does the typical serious net user who averages writing more than 3650 messages a year for fun (in addition to whatever email may need to be written for work) plus some blog posts and writing other web pages have different mental abilities to someone who just reads what others write? Does blogging (and other writing on your choice of topic) change your brain?
What about programmers, does spending 8 hours a day writing formal rules for hypothetical mathematical situations (which is essentially what programming is about) change your brain? Are programmers going to have greater abilities for managing abstract concepts and hypothetical situations than people who have not had such experience? NB It will be difficult to determine this as people who have such skills will find programming easier and more fun so therefore a career in programming computers is self-selecting for people with such abilities.
Another interesting fact is the results of research into the comprehension of a PowerPoint presentation. People who read it without an audio-visual accompanying it learned more and rated it as more interesting. Based on this my plan is that in future when attending conferences I will try and read papers which are presented BEFORE attending the lectures. Unfortunately most conferences which have papers presented seem based on the idea that you give a lecture about a topic as a teaser for your paper and assume that the audience knows nothing about it (conferences which don’t have papers outnumber the ones that do). Most Linux conferences seem based on the idea that almost no-one reads papers at all, they attend lectures and visit web sites and IRC channels afterwards. NB this comment is based on talking to people who attend conferences and my observations on attending conferences – it is not a criticism of any conferences merely an observation on cultural attitudes.
Based on this information it seems reasonable to provide copies of lecture notes to the audience before the lecture. For example for a typical talk that I give to a LUG I could blog the lecture notes before the meeting and email the LUG mailing-list with the URL, people who really want to learn would hear me talk AFTER reading the notes and hopefully get the best of both forms of learning.
I had been considering producing some YouTube [2] videos with instructions on how to use SE Linux. But it seems that might not be such a good idea (at least not a good enough idea to justify the amount of effort I would have to spend).
The author seems to misunderstand YouTube, it is NOT about making the Internet resemble TV (where millions of mindless drones watch content created for the lowest common denominator in the audience). The AtGoogleTalks on YouTube [3] and www.ted.com are examples of high-quality free content (comparable to the best TV documentaries – the type of content which is cited as increasing the academic results of children) and the culture of creation and discussion must be a good thing. Most TV is bad because it’s one-way communication and the quality of the content is low. YouTube videos are widely discussed in email, blogs, and other written forums. The creation of the best (and often most viewed) videos would surely involve some writing.
I wonder whether the benefits attributed to reading can be obtained without reading fiction. The nature of work is changing to require an increasing amount of reading and writing. The most menial work requires reading instruction manuals. Most of the best paid jobs involve a lot of reading and writing. If reading fiction isn’t required then it seems that there is little risk in the immediate future.
Continue reading Twilight of the Books?
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