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I got the idea for this from Ben Hutchings.
A. Copy the list below to your own journal and
Bold the actions you are already taking
Underline the actions you plan to start taking
Italicize the actions that don’t apply to you
B. Add one (or more) suggested action(s) of your own
C. Leave a comment here, so that she can track the meme to your journal, and copy your suggested action(s) back to the master list.
- Replace standard incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs
- Choose energy efficient appliances – I’m documenting the power consumption of my computers
- Wash clothes in cold(er) water – Colder than what? I suspect this is based on American machines that are controlled by mixer valves rather than using a thermostat.
- Turn the thermostat of your hot water tank down to 50°C (125°F) – this is a good safety measure anyway
- Install a programmable thermostat (or turn the heat down over night and when you’re out of the house)
- Register with the [Canadian Marketing Association’s] Do Not Contact Service to reduce the amount of junk mail delivered to your house. – Substitute MPS.
- Eat less meat (particularly feedlot beef) – For practical purposes I’m vegetarian, with occasional exceptions.
- Walk, bike, carpool or take public transit as often as possible – I’m writing this on the tram
- Make sure you know what can be recycled in your area, and try to recycle as much household waste as possible
- Compost using an outdoor compost bin or an indoor vermicomposter
- Clean or replace filters on your furnace and air conditioner
- Buy local, organic or fair trade food where possible
- Reduce air travel – pity that long-distance trains suck in Australia
- Wrap your water heater in an insulation blanket
- Use a clothesline instead of a dryer whenever possible – don’t own a clothes dryer, hanging up clothes inside near a heater works on cold days
- Plant a tree – pity my trees are dying because of the drought / climate change
- Buy fresh foods instead of frozen
- Keep your car tuned up and your tires inflated to their optimal pressure – also minimise driving. I drive about 5000Km per year.
- Use biodegradable dishwashing liquid, laundry soap powder, etc.
- Drink tap water (filtered if necessary) rather than buying bottled water – remember the Benzene incident…
- Turn the tap off while brushing your teeth
- Unplug seldom-used appliances and chargers for phones, cameras, etc., when you’re not using them – the power use is small so I only do this for rarely used chargers.
- Plug air leeks and drafts around doors and windows with weatherstripping
- Switch from disposable to reusable products: food and beverage containers, cups, plates, writing pens, razors, diapers, towels, shopping bags, etc – I’ve done this for most things, could improve though.
- Consider garage sales, Freecycle, eBay, or borrowing from friends/family before buying a new tool or appliance – second-hand and refurbished computers are so powerful and so cheap that you don’t need to care about the environment to do this.
- Reuse bathwater, maybe to flush the loo, water the garden, etc.
- Make sure your roof is well-insulated. – I think it is, but as tenants it’s not really our choice.
- Always wear a jumper/sweater and socks indoors unless it’s warm enough outdoors to go without both.
- Run your vehicle on biofuel/sustainable fuels
- Set up a grey water barrel to use when clean water isn’t necessary – grey water should never be stored. It contains chemicals that are used as food for bacteria.
- Put grey water on your garden immediately without storing it.
- Install tanks to collect rain-water from your roof for watering the garden, washing your car, etc.
Erich Schubert comments on the issues relating to getting big changes into Debian. This is something that I had also noticed. I started work on SE Linux in Debian in 2001 and continued it actively until 2003 when I joined Red Hat. Less than a year after I joined Red Hat there was a Fedora release with SE Linux fully integrated and shortly after that there was a release with SE Linux on by default. The reason for this was that Red Hat management supported the idea of SE Linux and everyone had to accept it. There was no option for a package maintainer to refuse to support SE Linux.
Recently in a discussion on debian-devel one DD (who I won’t name in this blog post) advocated removing SE Linux support from dpkg. I then asked him whether he had the same attitude towards non-executable stack
(Exec-Shield/PaX/OpenWall), Poly-Instantiated directories, and PIE executables. When he expressed interest in having those features I pointed out that one of the enemies of security in Debian is the fact that every person controls their little area and has no requirement to work towards common goals (apart from the most obvious ones of making the system work).
This means that instead of having a little cooperation from other developers anyone who wants to get a significant change included will have to fight hundreds of battles.
SE Linux is a classic example of this. Debian could have had SE Linux support long before Fedora, but instead it gets it long afterwards.
The same battles occur with regard to all the other security measures I mentioned (and some others I didn’t). We could made Debian the most secure Linux distribution, there are many people who have the skills and the interest in doing so.
If you want features such as exec-shield, then you are missing out – largely because the people with the skill and time to work on them are too busy fighting trench-warfare rather than actively coding.
Now while I strongly object to most incarnations of the “you can’t force a volunteer to do anything” meme that infects Debian I do agree that we can’t force developers to write new code. We can however strongly discourate an antagonistic attitude towards new features. If someone proposes a feature
that you don’t plan to use but which doesn’t hurt you then there’s no reason to attack – you can just ignore it. If someone sends in a patch that adds a feature which is requested by many people but you personally don’t use, then if it has little or no down-side (linking against a couple of shared objects as is the case for many SE Linux enabled programs provides no measurable overhead) and the code is good it should be merged!
The real problem is that some DDs are more concerned about what is best for them personally (in the most short-term manner) than about what is best for the users.
This morning when walking through a shopping center car park on my way to work a grannie came fairly close to squashing me. She accellerated her Mazda 323 backwards as hard as possible and hit a purple Magna. The back ends of both cars were seriously damaged, and the Mazda (which received the worst damage) was possibly a write-off (it doesn’t take that much damage to make an old car an insurance write-off). The damage was surprising given that there was only about 4 meters between the cars before the crash, the roar of the engine however did indicate that full accelleration was being used. The area between the vehicles was where I had just walked a few seconds earlier…
I phoned the police and waited until they arrived. They might end up forcing her to have a driving test, but it’s most unlikely that she will lose her license. One of my relatives passed such a test more than 10 years after I refused to ever be a passenger in his car.
What is needed is periodic testing of all drivers with the same standards as used for initially getting a drivers license (currently the standards are much lower). I would probably have to practice my parallel parking before such a test (it’s something I hardly ever do) but I expect that I wouldn’t have any difficulty in passing – as would all good drivers.
Creating a simple SE Linux policy module is not difficult.
audit(1173571340.836:12855): avc: denied { execute } for pid=5678 comm=”spf-policy.pl” name=”hostname” dev=hda ino=1234 scontext=root:system_r:postfix_master_t:s0 tcontext=system_u:object_r:hostname_exec_t:s0 tclass=file
For example I had a server with the above messages in the kernel message log from the spf-policy program (run from Postfix) trying to run the “hostnme” program. So I ran the following command to generate a .te file (SE Linux policy source):
dmesg|grep spf.policy|audit2allow -m local > local.te
The -m option to audit2allow instructs it to create a policy module. The local.te file is below:
module local 1.0;
require {
class file execute;
type hostname_exec_t;
type postfix_master_t;
role system_r;
};
allow postfix_master_t hostname_exec_t:file execute;
Then I used the following commands to create a policy module and package it:
checkmodule -M -m -o local.mod local.te
semodule_package -o local.pp -m local.mod
The result was the object file local.pp and in intermediate file local.mod (which incidentally can be removed once the build is finished).
After creating the module I used the following command to link it with the running policy and load it into the kernel:
semodule -i ./local.pp
Leon Brooks linked to this article claiming that sound not electricity travels through nerves.
When you put a moderate voltage through your body it will cause muscle action (try putting 1000V at low current between fingers of the same hand for safety). The original experiment that suggested that electricity is used involved applying a shock to the legs of a dead frog (see the Wikipedia entry for Luigi Galvani).
For this claim about sound to be valid the electric shocks would have to cause sound in the nervous system. Also sound impulses would have to trigger nerve action (IE the “brown note”). AFAIK neither of these have been proven.
Late this afternoon I had a visual migraine while driving. I was driving west and the glare from the sun was making it difficult to see so I didn’t realise that I was having a migraine until I stopped. When I finished my journey and went inside a reasonably dark room I started seeing flashes of light (which weren’t apparently bright enough to be noticed when outside). After about an hour the visual effects went away but I still felt weird for the rest of the day.
I recently bought a refurbished HP DL385 server at auction. It turns out that it takes SFF (Small Form Factor) disks and has the ability to take 8 hot-swap disks (not bad for a 2U server).
The machine supports SAS disks and S-ATA disks as well. So the next thing to do is to buy a bunch of S-ATA disks for it.
When I got the machine it reported that the battery for the write-back cache on the RAID controller could not be recharged and needed to be replaced. Apparently this is a firmware bug and I can fix it by upgrading the firmware on the machine. Of course I need to buy some disks so I can do an OS install first.
As an aside it’s amazing how cheap some of the Opteron servers are at auction nowadays.
I was reading the brochure about the BMW 530i Touring (which seems to be the BMW name for what is known as a “Station Wagon” in Australia or an “Estate” in Europe). I looked at the brochure on the “Touring” because I am interested in a Station-Wagon – the Sedan version of the 5 series is almost the same in every way other than size and shape.
Here are some of the interesting features:
Adaptive headlights, they turn in to a corner when the car is cornering (showing where you are about to go instead of showing you the scenery off the road) and the high-beam switches off when an oncoming vehicle is detected.
Head-up display for speed, navigation, and other driver-relevant information.
Park distance control (PDC). Gives audio and visual alerts when you are about to hit something at low speed.
Eight air-bags of which only the necessary ones will inflate in a collision, and the inflation power will be determined by the severity of the collision.
Dynamic stability control (DSC), traction control, corner brake control, and more. Described as “all of the known features of DSC”.
Seat-belt pre-tensioners in the rear and pyro-technic tensioners for front seat belts.
Rain sensor that turns on headlights, and optional head-light washers.
According to it’s brochure the 7 series has bumpers that regenerate their original shape in collisions of speeds up to 6Km/h and a tire defect indicator. Apart from that there doesn’t appear to be much benefit over the 5 series apart from more luxury features.
To get the PDF files from BMW Australia (without following my links which BMW will probably break soon) you have to fill in a form with “contact details”. To enter that form you need a browser that works with their javascript (which means not Konqueror) so that you can enter your postcode and be prompted with a list of suburbs that match the post-code. The second-last page of that process allows you to download PDF files and it seems to indicate that your data will not be stored if you don’t continue past the stage where you download the PDF files. It would be good if BMW could get smart and make their PDF files as easy to download as Mercedes does.
In terms of safety features it seems that the 7 series offers little over the 5 series. By comparing the brochures it seems to me that the Mercedes S series (as described in my previous blog post) has many more safety features than any BMW. Assuming that the BMW documents are accurate they don’t seem to compare well with the Mercedes S class. From a quick search on drive.com.au (the best web site for buying used cars in Australia) it seems that the Mercedes keeps it’s value better than the BMW – other people apparently share my opinion of the relative merits of the cars.
In future posts I’ll summarise the features of some other cars that I consider interesting.
This morning there were two or three classes from a local primary school on board my tram taking up all the seats (mostly three children to a seat).
So to answer some email and write blog entries I had to sit in a stair-well. Melbourne trams are symmetrical so that they can just change direction at the end of the line (unlike some other trams – the Amsterdam tram line 10 that I used to catch has a circle at each end of the line for the tram to turn). Being symmetrical means that the doors on the left side of the tram are used for passengers to get on and off, and the doors on the right are locked – so the right stairwell is a place you can sit to use a laptop if all the seats are taken.
While I was sitting on the floor some women started talking about me, I heard comments such as “he’s answering his email”, “it must save a lot of time, he could do half an hour of email on the way to work”, and “he must work for an Internet company – look at his shirt” (I was wearing an Intel shirt given out at LCA 2007). At that point I decided to briefly explain the work I do, there’s a limit to the amount of time I can refrain from joining the conversation when people are standing around me and talking about me.
They didn’t seem to understand enough to enable me to explain anything about Linux.
In response to my last post about using laptops for presentations it has been suggested to me that using white (or a very bright color) as the background color can help some displays synchronise with the signal. I haven’t had an opportunity to test this but it seems likely that as most computers are configured with a white background nowadays the display hardware is optimised for this case.
Another benefit of a light background is that it provides more ambient lighting to the room where the presentation is held. If all the lights are turned off (sometimes there is no dimmer switch) then the radiant light from the screen is the only form of illumination for the room.
Finally with the way the current generation of beamers work there is less heat trapped in the beamer if there is mostly white on the screen. This will hopefully decrease the incidence of hardware failures during lectures (which unfortunately are not uncommon in my observation).
Update:
Based on a comment on this blog entry I did a quick survey of the color scemes, black on white, yellow on blue, and white on green. Black on white got the most votes with some people saying that yellow on blue was most aesthetic while black on white was easiest to read (“clear and boring” was one comment).
One person pointed out that the light diverges slightly so black on white makes the letters look smaller while white on black makes them look bigger. My response to this is to use a slightly larger font.
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